Introduction [excerpt] The Best American Short Stories is a consecutive anthology published yearly containing what the editors promise are the twenty best short stories published in America. Considering the series is an edition with a basis in contemporary popular fiction raises signifcant questions. For example, what about these stories makes them the best? Does the literature in the series contain trends or patterns consistent with questions that are important to their...

Introduction [excerpt]

Zora Neale Hurston is a renowned author, folklorist, anthropologist, and a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston infused Southern vernacular and poetic expression to produce an unprecedented narrative voice.... I argue that Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is a modern folktale intended to expose and reconstruct the repetitive paradigms of racial and gender ... inequality while creating a new consciousness of egalitarianism.