The Best American Series   "If the novel is our culture's favored literary form, upon which we heap all our desiccated literary laurels, if the novel is, say our Jaime Lannister, then the short story is our very own Tyrion: the disdained little brother, the perennial underdog. But what an underdog," writes Junot Daz in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2016 .  From a Nigerian boy's friendship with his family's former houseboy to a sweatshop girl's experience as a sister wife, from love and murder on the frontier to a meltdown in the academe, these stories, for Daz, have the economy and power to "break hearts bones vanities and cages."   The Best American Short Stories 2016 includes CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, MOHAMMED NASEEHU ALI, ANDREA BARRETT, SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM, TED CHIANG, LOUISE ERDRICH, LAUREN GROFF, KAREN RUSSELL, JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN and others   Junot Daz, editor, is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown ; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and T his Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award.   Heidi Pitlor, series editor, is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage .

 .