The Best American Short Stories 2023 | 
pickThis was a fantastic collection of short stories picked by Min Jin Lee. My favorite was The Master Mourner by Benjamin Ehrlich with Ling Ma‘s Peking Duck right behind it. Peking Duck had some of the same early childhood references as Severance which stood out. 10/10 highly recommended
pickStories in strange, liminal spaces. Confusion of time: past present future. Family, friendship, loyalty, generational (mis)understanding, responsibility, guilt, remorse. Immigration, homesickness. Mostly first-person. Foils. Ling Ma‘s “Peking Duck”=killer, perfectly structured, self-referential, inevitable. Whole collection summed in quote from Pearson‘s “Grand Mal”: stories “giving shape to an inchoate thought.” So good & so unsettling. 2023
