Thomas and Horton, Best of the West 2010, University of Texas Press

Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, an annual anthology of exceptional short fiction rooted in the western United States, debuted in 1988 and continued publication until 1992. Recognizing that the West remains rewarding territory for literary explorations, James Thomas and D. Seth Horton revived the series in 2009.

Best of the West 2010 brings together established and emerging writers who reinterpret this most vital of literary regions and create, as Kent Meyers puts it in his foreword, "gift[s] the nation needs right now." Editors Horton and Thomas have chosen nineteen stories by writers including Sherman Alexie, Rick Bass, Ron Carlson, Julia Glass, William Kittredge, Kent Nelson, and Deb Olin Unferth. Their subjects vary from a Greek community in Wyoming dealing with a suicide, to a re-creation of Christ's crucifixion in New Mexico, to an unlikely friendship that peaks at a burial ground in Alaska. Best of the West 2010 is the latest indication that the West has become one of the most crucial settings for contemporary American fiction.

Contributors:

Sherman Alexie
Rick Bass
John Blanchard
Elea Carey
Ron Carlson
Natalie Diaz
Darren Dillman
Ben Ehrenreich
Julia Glass
Dina Guidubaldi
Ben Kostival
William Kittredge
Paul Mihas
Kent Nelson
Daniel Orozco
Kirstin Valdez Quade
Aurelie Sheehan
Justin St. Germain
Deb Olin Unferth

James Thomas coedited (with Denise Thomas) the first five volumes of Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri. He has taught fiction at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

D. Seth Horton, who holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona, was fiction editor of the Sonora Review. He previously edited the collection New Stories from the Southwest.