On October 6, 2015, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor. And, of course, Updike was included.

This is the best of the best, really, as it’s culled from The Best American Short Stories Series. This is the centennial celebration of the series.

The editors were careful to distribute their picks so that a wide range of American authors could be represented, and no author got more than one story in this collection—though, of course, many writers deserved more than one.

Their are some surprises, but for the classic American authors the classic stories seem to have been chosen. Ernest Hemingway’s “My Old Man” was included, as was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” Updike’s “Pigeon Feathers” made the cut, as did Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews,” along with frequent anthology standards like John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio” and Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing.”

Raymond Carver fans might be surprised that “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” was selected over “Cathedral” or “So Much Water So Close to Home,” as might Donald Barthelme fans that “The School” (a great short story) was chosen over some of his more popular ones. The editors clearly put some thought into this, and the fact that a Pennsylvania story was chosen from Updike reinforces how much his home state meant to his fiction . . . and poetry, and creative non-fiction and criticism.