PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019 celebrates twelve outstanding stories by today's most promising new fiction writers and the literary magazines that discovered them. 

As with last year's inaugural edition, selections for the second volume of PEN America Best Debut Short Stories will be made by three award-winning writers, themselves champions and innovators of the short story form: Danielle Evans, Alice Sola Kim, and Carmen Maria Machado. Each story comes with an introduction by the editor of the literary magazine who originally published it. These commentaries provide valuable insight — not only for students of writing particularly but also for readers generally — about what editors look for and how they read, and celebrate the vital work literary magazines do to nurture contemporary literature's newest voices. 

The stories collected here represent the most recent winners of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, which recognizes twelve writers who have made outstanding debuts in literary magazines in the previous year. Chosen by a panel of distinguished judges, themselves innovators of the short story form, they take us from the hutongs of Beijing to the highways of Saskatchewan, from the letters of a poet devoted to God in seventeenth-century France to a chorus of poets devoted to revolution in the "last days of empire." They describe consuming, joyful, tragic, complex, ever-changing relationships between four friends...