Reader’s Choice

The Front Porch

If the Southern short story has a birthplace, it’s surely the front porch. Not any specific porch, mind you, but the great multitude of porches fronting mountain cabins, riverside mansions, and country stores alike, all of them fostering, over time, the ideal conditions for storytelling: comfort, unhurriedness, idleness, breezes worth shooting. “Where else in our huge national store of fictional life,” Reynolds Price once asked in an essay, “can we find a comparable crystallization of human feeling in a single feature of house-and-home?”

So where else, then, to settle in with the season’s best new collections of short fiction?