The Best American Short Stories 1997
# The Best American Short Stories 1997

The Best American Short Stories 1997, a volume in The Best American Short Stories series, was edited by Katrina Kennison and by guest editor E. Annie Proulx. This was the first and only year that the stories were formally grouped by category, rather than alphabetically.

## Short stories included

### Category: Manners and Right Behavior

| Author | Story | Source |
| - | - | - |
| Ha Jin | "Saboteur" | The Antioch Review |
| Robert Stone | "Under the Pitons" | Esquire |
| Carolyn Cooke | "Bob Darling" | The Paris Review |
| Jonathan Franzen | "Chez Lambert" | The Paris Review |

### Category: Identifying the Stranger

| Michelle Cliff | "Transactions" | TriQuarterly |
| - | - | - |
| Richard Bausch | "Nobody in Hollywood" | The New Yorker |
| Cynthia Ozick | "Save My Child!" | The New Yorker |
| Karen E. Bender | "Eternal Love" | Granta |
| Leonard Michaels | "A Girl with a Monkey" | Partisan Review |
| Lydia Davis | "St. Martin" | Grand Street |

### Category: Perceived Social Values

| Junot Diaz | "Fiesta, 1980" | Story |
| - | - | - |
| Donald Hall | "From Willow Temple" | The Atlantic Monthly |
| T. Coraghessan Boyle | "Killing Babies" | The New Yorker |
| Clyde Edgerton | "Send Me to the Electric Chair" | The Oxford American |
| June Spence | "Missing Women" | The Southern Review |
| Jeffrey Eugenides | "Air Mail" | The Yale Review |
| Pam Durban | "Soon" | The Southern Review |

### Category: Rites of Passage

| Michael Byers | "Shipmates Down Under" | American Short Fiction |
| - | - | - |
| Tobias Wolff | "Powder" | Fish Stories |
| Alyson Hagy | "Search Bay" | Ploughshares |
| Tim Gautreaux | "Little Frogs in a Ditch" | Gentlemen's Quarterly |
