Now you can enjoy the Best Short Stories from the Great American Fiction Contest anywhere you go, year after year on your favorite platform. Build your collection of the very best fiction from today’s up-and-coming authors. (Click here to enter the Great American Fiction Contest.)
For more than 200 years, The Saturday Evening Post has been publishing a who’s who of American authors — Ray Bradbury, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Louis L’Amour, Jack London, Joyce Carol Oates, Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Tyler, Kurt Vonnegut, Sinclair Lewis, among so many others — and continues to support the legacy of the storyteller.
Volumes are available at the App Store or at Amazon for Kindle.
2024 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology
Life already isn’t perfect for two sisters and their mother, but then their grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, moves in, and the friction really heats up. Sophie Newman’s “Shanda” — winner of the 2024 Great American Fiction Contest — explores difficult themes of liberty, identity, and what it means to be Jewish. And that’s just the first of 19 engaging stories from the 12th annual short story competition by The Saturday Evening Post.
2023 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology
2022 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology
After sneaking into a horse track in the dead of night, two rivals for the love of one man try to come to terms with his death — and dispose of his remains — in “Dust” by Dana Fitz Gale, the winner of The Saturday Evening Post’s 2022 Great American Fiction Contest. Enjoy this short story along with 17 runners-up and honorable mentions in this anthology that continues the Post’s legacy of searching out and publishing America’s best short fiction.
2021 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology
Struggling with shame, emptiness, and grief after losing the family-owned hardware store that his grandfather built, Alan Watson impulsively begins writing his story in indelible black ink on the clapboard of his house — and doesn’t stop. Lynn K. Sheridan’s prize-winning story “The House on Willow Street” is just one of the great short stories illustrating the pain and pleasure, struggle and triumph of being human that you’ll read in this annual anthology that continues the Post’s legacy of searching out and publishing America’s best short fiction.
2020 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology
They say that you can’t go home again, but for some, you can’t go back because you never escaped the place you were born. “Thornhope, Indiana” by Jon Gingerich, winner of the 2020 Great American Fiction Contest, explores the intersection of grief, responsibility, and expectation in the small-town Midwest. His and the 19 others in this anthology continue the Post’s legacy of finding and publishing America’s best short fiction.
2019 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology
A man watches his 15-year-old neighbor — with equal parts curiosity and concern — approach a breaking point with her mother while her father is gone on the rodeo circuit. Michael Caleb Tasker’s 2018 winning story, “Mount to the Sky,” was inspired by the poem “‘Twas the Night before Christmas,”and the story’s title is a direct quote from the classic poem. This story and the others in this anthology continue The Saturday Evening Post’s legacy of searching out and publishing America’s best short fiction.
2018 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology
Temperatures rise at Café Rumba as spicy rhythms heat up the atmosphere in the fast-paced tale about Nancy, a middle-aged divorcée embarking on a salsa adventure. The 2018 winning story, “Open Season at the Café Rumba,” was in part inspired by author Julia Rocchi’s own experience signing up solo for dance classes after college. This definitive collection of the best short stories from the sixth annual Great American Fiction Contest continues The Saturday Evening Post’s mission to support the legacy of the storyteller.
2017 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology
A chance encounter in Maryland unveils the painful scars that two men — a chiropractor recently emigrated from Baghdad and a U.S. veteran who fought in the Iraq War — continue to endure. The 2017 winning story, “Crack” by first-time author Myles McDonough, makes it clear that you have to reopen some wounds to heal. In other stories from the fifth annual Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest, haunting and humorous voices of past relationships, musicians, office misfits, civil rights activists, and a forgetful man clad in a bunny costume attempt to make sense of the world and find their places in it.
2016 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology
Set course with a salty cyclist in Alexandria, Virginia, or join the jeering crowd as a man plays for his life in a game show with Death. From humor to mystery to coming-of-age tales, the Best Short Stories 2016 is geared for fiction lovers. Past contest winner N. West Moss (“Omeer’s Mangoes,” Best Short Stories 2015) introduces this collection of 31 thrilling new stories, including Celeste McMaster’s beautiful, dizzying portrayal of Zelda Fitzgerald in the 2016 winner, “Zelda, Burning.”
2015 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology
More than 25 must-read new stories from today’s talented writers, many making their national publishing debut. From a sideshow on Coney Island to a coast-to-coast road trip set in 1939, from a small-town courthouse after WWII to a cocktail party among academics in contemporary Chicago, the Best Short Stories 2015 presents a diversity of style and subject matter guaranteed to engage and entertain. Award-winning author Michael Knight returns to introduce the third volume in the series, showcasing the winning story by emerging writer N. West Moss.
2014 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology
The intricacies of love and family, power and powerlessness, anticipation and disappointment, forces beyond our ken and forces, no less potent, much closer to home abound in this quiet and strong collection, featuring the richly complex portrait of a single mother and her two children, an 11-year-old daughter brimming with teenage attitude and a son with cerebral palsy in 2014’s winning story, “The War at Home” by Linda Davis.
2013 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology
Travel into the world of Taco Charlie and The Pewhasset Pie Palace; solve the mystery of “The Wolf Boy of Forest Lawn”; offer salvation to a womanizing beekeeper; and discover yourself in the wilderness of Yellowstone Park.
The 2013 collection hosts our very first of fiction contest winner, “Wolf” by Lucy Jane Bledsoe. At its heart you’ll find a wholly believable relationship built on genuine love and affection, rare anymore in stories about contemporary marriage — so rare it feels almost subversive.
Print Edition: 2013 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology
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