Claudia Lin is used to disregarding her fractious family's model-minority expectations: she has no interest in finding either a conventional career or a nice Chinese boy. She's also used to keeping secrets from them, such as that she prefers girls - and that she's just been stealth-recruited by Veracity, a referrals-only online-dating detective agency. A lifelong mystery reader who wrote her senior thesis on Jane Austen, Claudia believes she's landed...

"'To read their stories felt to me the way I suspect other people feel hearing jazz for the first time,' recalls Curtis Sittenfeld of her initial encounter with the Best American Short Stories series. 'They were windows into emotions I had and hadn't had, into other settings and circumstances and observations and relationships.' Sittenfeld was met by the same feeling selecting the stories for this year's edition. The result is a striking and nuanced...