Recommended Reading

I may have mentioned it here before, but I recently realized that I don't have any "Best Of" collections in my personal library. For a person who loves short fiction, this seems like a fairly glaring error. I'm kind of science fiction nut, so I was pleased to find that the local Barnes & Noble had the last couple editions of Gardner Dozois' "The Year's Best Science Fiction". 

2009 was a good year for me, and I read quite a bit of short science fiction, so I had already read some of the stories featured in that year's edition, so I opted for 2008. It's full of stories from great authors like Jay Lake and Ian McDonald, and though I've just scratched the surface, one story has truly stuck out to me. 

"N-Words" by Ted Kosmatka is a brilliant short told from the perspective of a newly-widowed woman in a time where racial prejudice is arguably at an all-time high. The title is deliciously misleading...but I won't give it away. Here's a link to an excerpt.