The Pulitzer-winning novelist, a two-time Cal graduate, guest-edits a 2026 anthology of stories about love and longing.
Viet Thanh Nguyen has spent much of his public life writing about war, memory and the refugee experience. For his turn as guest editor of one of American publishing’s oldest annual anthologies, he went looking for something else: love.
The Best American Short Stories 2026, released Tuesday, Oct. 20, by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, gathers 20 stories Nguyen chose from thousands published over the past year. The publisher’s description says that love “lies at the heart of the stories that guest editor Viet Thanh Nguyen calls ‘so good that they may be bad for you,’” and promises characters “who feel so heartbreakingly true” that readers lose themselves in their yearning.
For readers in the Bay Area, the book is also a homecoming of sorts. Nguyen, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer,” earned both his undergraduate degree and his doctorate in English at the University of California, Berkeley, according to a profile published by the university’s Arts & Humanities division, which identifies him as a member of the English classes of 1992 and 1997. He grew up in San Jose, where his parents ran a Vietnamese grocery store after the family arrived in the United States as refugees.
A lineup of masters and newcomers
The Best American series dates to 1915, and each year a guest editor reads a long list of stories assembled by the series editor and picks the final selections. This year’s series editor is Nicole A. Lamy.
The table of contents posted on Nguyen’s website leans on the magazines that have long dominated the series, with five stories from The New Yorker, three from Ploughshares and three from The Yale Review. Among the established names are Louise Erdrich (“Love of My Days,” The New Yorker), George Saunders (“The Moron Factory,” The Atlantic), Joyce Carol Oates (“The Frenzy,” The New Yorker), Sigrid Nunez (“The Rabbit’s Foot,” The Yale Review), Nathan Englander (“What Are We Doing, What Have We Done,” The Yale Review), Akhil Sharma (“Ritu,” The New Yorker), Jim Shepard (“The Devil’s Broom,” Zoetrope) and Aimee Bender (“The Tailor and the King,” Fairy Tale Review).
The book also reaches beyond the usual addresses. Calvin Gimpelevich’s “High School” first appeared in Joyland; Josie Tolin’s story, whose title is not printable here, ran in The Rumpus; and Ava Tomasula y Garcia’s “The World” and Vu Tran’s “Like Evening” both come from McSweeney’s, the San Francisco literary quarterly. Paul Yoon (“The New Coast”), Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (“Nocturnal Creatures”), Samantha Hunt (“Hangman”), Carolyn Ferrell (“The Horror”), Tiphanie Yanique (“Looking House”), Ayşe Papatya Bucak (“The Writer Writes from Prison”), Eliot Fox (“The Women’s Hospital”) and Nathan Blum (“Here Now”) round out the list.
The publisher’s summary offers a taste of the range: a 16-year-old who moves to a new town and falls for a classmate he knows he must leave behind; a grandmother who “stitches together the hurts of her past” through a connection with her granddaughter; a young lesbian whose attempts to “launch her sexuality” go, in the publisher’s words, with “comically mixed results.”
The editor as reader
Nguyen’s choice of theme may surprise readers who know him mainly through “The Sympathizer,” the 2015 spy novel about a communist double agent that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was adapted into an HBO series, or through his nonfiction on how nations remember war. But his work has always been preoccupied with intimacy under pressure: families split by exile, friendships tested by ideology, the tenderness and cruelty of people who share a history.
He has also spent a career as a critic and teacher of fiction. Nguyen is a University Professor at the University of Southern California, where he has taught English, American studies and comparative literature, and he delivered Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton lectures in 2023, published as “To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other.” He received a MacArthur fellowship and a Guggenheim fellowship in 2017 and was the first Asian American to serve on the Pulitzer Prize board.
The anthology arrived with a public reading. On Oct. 21, the night after publication, Symphony Space in New York devoted an evening of its long-running “Selected Shorts” reading series to the book, with Nguyen as host.
The Berkeley years
Nguyen has been unusually candid about what Berkeley meant to him. In May, he returned to campus to give the commencement address for the English department’s Class of 2026, calling the university “a place that changed my life.”
The speech, which the department and Nguyen’s website both published, was by turns funny and pointed. He recalled his first creative writing seminar at Berkeley, taught by Maxine Hong Kingston, the author of “The Woman Warrior.” “Every day I entered her seminar of fourteen students, sat a few feet away from her, and every day — I fell asleep,” he said. “Professor Kingston gave me a B+, otherwise known as … an Asian F.”
He told the graduates that he finished with “two majors, three degrees, and four misdemeanors,” the last from campus protests that included “taking over the chancellor’s office.” Kingston, he said, later wrote him a long letter recommending the university’s counseling services. “Obviously, I did not. I became a writer instead.” He said that he fell in love with English literature “as a boy roaming the public library of San Jose,” and that Kingston’s class and others taught him that “English was more than what came from England.” In a post on his website, he noted that there were only three Vietnamese Americans in his English graduating class, and “probably at least three times as many” in this year’s.
The address also made the case he has made throughout his career, that literature is bound up with public life. “Literature demands something greater, a more capacious empathy, a more generous soul, and a more daring imagination,” he told the graduates. Much of the address dealt with politics, including immigration and refugees, the war in Gaza and what he called “a narrow-minded nationalism.” Nguyen acknowledged in the speech that his views on those subjects are “controversial opinions.”
Why it matters here
The Best American Short Stories is often the first place a general reader meets a writer who will matter a decade later, and a guest editor’s taste can shape which voices get that introduction. Nguyen’s selections give space to established names and to stories from small and independent magazines, including one from a San Francisco quarterly, alongside the New Yorker regulars.
For Cal, the book is another entry in a long record of alumni shaping American letters. Nguyen’s former teacher, Kingston, is herself a Berkeley graduate. The volume is available in print and as an e-book.
Nguyen’s literary agency, Sobel Weber Associates, replied to The Inquirer’s questions on Saturday, forwarding a response from the author that The Inquirer had not reviewed as of publication. Grove Atlantic, which publishes Nguyen’s novels, did not respond to a request for comment.
Imogen Saltzman covers UC Berkeley alumni in the arts, letters, culture and public life, including the controversies and courtroom fights that put them in the headlines, for the Inquirer’s Berkeley Alumni desk. More from Imogen Saltzman
