The Best American Short Stories 2013, 

In Miss Lora, Junot D az masterfully puts us in the mind of a teenage boy who throws aside his better sense and pursues an intimate affair with a high school teacher. Sheila Kohler tackles innocence and abuse as a child wanders away from her mother, in thrall to a stranger she believes is the Magic Man. Kirstin Valdez Quades Nemecia depicts the after-effects of a secret, violent family trauma. Joan Wickershams The Tunnel is a tragic love story about a mothers declining health and her daughters helplessness as she struggles to balance her responsibility to her mother and her own desires. New author Callan Winks Breatharians unsettles the reader as a farm boy shoulders a grim chore in the wake of his parents estrangement.
Elizabeth Strout was a wonderful reader, an author who knows well that the sound of ones writing is just as important as and indivisible from the content, writes series editor Heidi Pitlor. Here are twenty compellingly told, powerfully felt stories about urgent matters with profound consequences.