It’s time for my annual attempt to persuade people to read the Pushcart Prize, an always stellar mix of short stories, essays, and poems from small presses.  This was an exceptionally good year! Some standouts:

1. Remembering the Alchemists by Richard Hoffman, an essay about guns 
2. Leave No Trace by Daniel Orozco, about memory
3. Housekeeping by Karin Lin-Greenberg, about a Bachelor-like show
4. The Loss of Heaven by Dantiel W. Moniz, from her collection Milk Blood Heat
5. Trezzo by Seth Fried, a coming-of-age story about experiments and integrity
6. Night Cows by Jennifer Bowen Hicks, about COVID isolation
7. Suffer Me to Pass by Debra Gwartney, an essay about domestic violence
8. The God Phone by Leora Smith, an essay about a long-running art installation at Burning Man
And one poem: A Small Needful Fact by Ross Gay 

Another consistently great anthology is the new-ish Best American Food Writing.  Favorites this year were A New Orleans Chef Navigates Disaster, Good Bread, This Is the Dumbest Foodie Battle of Our Time, and Get Fat, Don't Die. I also liked the essays about gout, the food timeline (shout out to librarians), Appalachian food, and water tastings.