The Best American Short Stories 2021, edited by renowned writer Jesmyn War, is exactly what it purports to be – a collection of the best stories of the year. You don’t have to subscribe to The New Yorker and dozens of other magazines to find the gems. Someone has done it for you.  I won’t mention the settings or premises of the stories because, as the book jacket says, the collection is a wide array of “profoundly empathetic depictions of the variety of human experience.” Collected for you are twenty stories that create twenty different worlds within the confines of a short story. If you’re a short story fan, and a fortiori if you’re a short story writer, this is a must read.