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This enduring celebration of the short story only gets better with age and this year enlists the talents of guest editor Edward P. Jones, "one of the most important writers of his own generation and of the present day" (the Washington Post Book World ).

In 1993, for the first time in his career, Edward P. Jones had a short story selected for an anthology. The story was "Marie." The anthology was the eighth volume of New Stories from the South . Now, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and short story writer returns to guest edit and introduce the twenty-second volume of this distinguished anthology.

Jones brings to the task his artistic vision for the short story and finds its best practitioners, and not just those with well-established names (James Lee Burke, Rick Bass, Tim Gautreaux, George Singleton) but writers just beginning their careers (Holly Goddard Jones, Joshua Ferris, Angela Threat, Philipp Meyer). Jones chooses eighteen stellar stories for the 2007 collection, stories that hold a special resonance for him. As he says in his introduction, "For something to claim me long after the last sentence, I need a sense that the world, for even one character, has shifted, whether to a large or a tiny degree. . . . I have tried to do my best to pick stories that are not, to use some of William Faulkner's words, about the glands, but about the human heart."