Here are the guest editors (and covers!) for the Best American Series 2023.
Do you like the Best American series? Of course you do! Each book in the annual series showcases of best short fiction and nonfiction in a given year, from short stories to essays, science and nature writing, to food writing. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites, and a special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best pieces for the anthology.
We’re excited to announce the guest editors and the brand new covers for the Best American 2023 series, which will be published by Mariner on October 17, 2023:
The Best American Short Stories 2023
Guest Editor: Min Jin Lee
Series Editor: Heidi Pitlor
Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2022, Lee received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She is a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College and serves as a trustee of PEN America and a director of the Authors Guild. She is at work on her third novel, American Hagwon and a nonfiction work, Name Recognition.
The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023
Guest Editor: Lisa Unger
Series Editor: Steph Cha
Lisa Unger is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of twenty novels, including her latest Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six. With books published in thirty-three languages and millions of copies sold worldwide, she is regarded as a master of suspense Unger’s critically acclaimed novels have been featured on “Best Book” lists from the Today Show, Good Morning America, Entertainment Weekly, People, Amazon, Goodre
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023
Guest Editor: R.F. Kuang
Series Editor: John Joseph Adams
R. F. Kuang is the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy and Babel: An Arcane History, as well as the just released Yellowface. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.
The Best American Essays 2023
Guest Editor: Vivian Gornick
Series Editor: Robert Atwan
Vivian Gornick is a writer and critic whose work has received two National Book Critics Circle Award nominations. Growing up in the Bronx among communists and socialists, Gornick became a legendary writer for Village Voice, chronicling the emergence of the feminist movement in the 1970s, and a respected literary critic. Her works include the memoirs Fierce Attachments—ranked the best memoir of the last fifty years by the New York Times—The Odd Woman and the City, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, as well as the classic text on writing, The Situation and the Story.
The Best American Food Writing 2023
Guest Editor: Mark Bittman
Series Editor: Silvia Killingsworth
Mark Bittman, a leading voice in global food culture and policy for more than three decades, is the author of the How to Cook Everything series, and Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food from Sustainable to Suicidal, which The New York Times called “epic and engrossing.” Bittman spent three decades at the Times, where he created “The Minimalist,” was the Sunday Magazine’s lead food writer, and became the country’s first weekly opinion writer at a major publication to concentrate on food. Bittman is currently the editor-in-chief of The Bittman Project, which sponsors a newsletter, website, and the podcast “Food, with Mark Bittman.” He is a on the faculty of Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, and lives in Philipstown, New York, with his partner Kathleen Finlay.
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023
Guest Editor: Carl Zimmer
Series Editor: Jaime Green
Carl Zimmer writes the Matter column for The New York Times. He is the author of fourteen books, including Life’s Edge and She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, both of which were finalists for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Zimmer has written for magazines including The Atlantic, National Geographic, Time, and Scientific American. He has won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Science Journalism Award three times and is a two-time winner of the National Academies Communication Award. Zimmer is professor adjunct at Yale University.
And you can watch the book trailer here.
