The essential yearly guide to the newest voices in short fiction, selected by Jodi Angel, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Alexandra Kleeman

PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018 celebrates twelve outstanding stories by today's most promising new fiction writers and the literary magazines that discovered them. The characters within these pages include a college dropout dressed up as Hercules at Disney World; a college graduate playing a whore in a ghost town in Montana; a father from Trinidad leading a double life on a temporary visa; and a housewife in Taipei perfectly performing her familial and marital duties while harboring secret desires.

This year's selections were made by three award-winning writers, themselves innovators of the short story form: Jodi Angel, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Alexandra Kleeman. Each work comes with commentary by the editors who first published it, explaining what made them pick it out of the submission pile, and why they were moved to share it with readers.