Best American Short Stories in Titles

The Benevolent Order of Mustachioed Men blog created a neat word map of all 639 short story titles that have appeared in the Best American Short Stories anthology since 1978.  They used data compiled by The Millions in a Google document.

The Millions dug through the data when they first posted it. They found a pretty even gender balance (53% male to 47% female) and that 48% of writers appeared only once. Alice Munro appeared the most with 18 stories.

In B.O.M.M.’s title map, the word that appears the most (small words like “the” and “a” excluded) is “Life”. “Love”, “Man”, “Story”, “Winter”, “Heart” and “Good” all make strong showings as well.

Interestingly, the titles are not nearly as repetitive as I would have thought. Although “life” got the most uses, it only appears nine times. I would have guessed that some word like “Good” or “Love” would have appeared at least two dozen times out of a list of 639 story titles. It seems most titles used words that only appeared once or twice. Although none of the words used the most seem surprising at all, apparently “Basil,” “Turner” and “Elvis” each got two or three uses.