cover image Best of Tin House Stories

Best of Tin House Stories

. Tin House Books, $18.95 (445pp) ISBN 978-0-9773127-1-9

Named after the Portland, Oregon Victorian house in which its main office is located, Tin House magazine was founded in 1999 by Oregon publishing mogul and activist Win McCormack. Over the last seven years, the magazine has gone on to publish some of the biggest names in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. This cream-of-the-crop anthology consists of 27 short stories culled over the last four years, and follows up the magazine's previous anthology, Bestial Noise. It includes pieces from Aimee Bender, Deborah Eisenberg, Denis Johnson, Martha McPhee, Steven Millhauser, James Salter, Julia Slavin and many others. As the foreword from Dorothy Allison puts it: ""Here you will find complicated, deep portraits of the human that sing of worth and hope and endurance."" The cover design is fairly generic compared with the competition (i.e., McSweeney's), but what's inside is anything but.