With clarity and ease, Alice Munro renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.

Who doesn't read their daily horoscope, searching for guidance about what's to come, how to live? Fortune-telling, sex, death, love, ordinary and special days, time passing, humor making it all bearable - these are the repeated gestures running through The Days, a kind of absurdist guidebook made up of ninety-three unconventional, very short stories collected in three tight sections. This is fiction that thinks, stories told with the author's trademark...

In her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2021, guest editor Jesmyn Ward says that the best fiction offers the reader a "sense of repair." The stories in this year's collection accomplish just that, immersing the reader in powerfully imagined worlds and allowing them to bring some of that power into their own lives. From a stirring portrait of Rodney King's final days to a surreal video game set in the Middle East,with real consequences,...