A Review of Coolest American Stories 2025

“It’s Just Whatever,” the title of the opening story of Coolest American Stories 2025, could in some contexts sound like a healthy release valve for over-complicating thoughts or situations. Unfortunately, in the case of Robbie, a mid-twenties small-time drug dealer living in his childhood bedroom, the phrase seems to function as a rejection of life per se beyond his insulated world of drugs and video games. His fear of judgment and failure is painfully mirrored in his mother’s ruminations:

There was a precious window of time, she suspected, when a mother had the power to engineer her child correctly, to seize its uninfected hard drive and upload the kind of programming that led to curious, capable, productive adulthood. She wasn’t sure when that window was, exactly; she only knew she’d failed to capitalize on it.

Such experiences of internalized social judgment ensnare the psyches of various characters in this anthology—whereas others find seeds of power in rebelling against them. Between these polarities, we meet many characters continually skirting, bumping into, and confronting self-knowledge, and one considerable gift of this book is its arrangement of such an array of psyches seeking, on different levels of consciousness, to meet themselves, and the many external plots they interweave with their internal processes. 

Whether we attribute it to the social upheavals of the pandemic and culture wars, increasingly volatile geo-political confrontations, economic instability, or the increasingly divided and uncompromising nature of public discourse, many of us can relate to experiences of social anxiety, fears about the future, and uncertainty about ways of balancing personal identity and belongingness needs in the worlds that present themselves to us. Without staging an overt response to any of the many triggers that litter potential conversations like landmines left as inheritance by generations of fighting, this collection offers subtle medicine, evoking common human situations of psychological blockage, misapprehension, working through, and opening. Perhaps we can agree on experiences shared across apparent boundaries of community and affinity, and the movements and seizures of the soul underlying many of our external conflagrations—of which these stories hold up valuable reflections.

Characters in several of these stories follow intuitive embraces of their shadow qualities in attempts to regain equilibrium of the sort we each desire, consciously or otherwise. In “Good Shoes,” the narrator reflects on a past beginning with “cocktail waitressing” and “doing other activities on your knees besides praying.” However, as she moves away from thinking of herself as “Stupid, stupid,” a deprecation that recurs like a personal refrain, her self-concept transforms in an ironically positive way as she ascends to more empowered criminal activities: “I was stupid, but I was learning.” The reader might recognize a mirror of a divide many of us face in confronting chaotic and indecipherable circumstances, part of us wanting to belong and feeling stupid when this leads to feeling taken advantage of, another part wanting the power to protect and provide for ourselves. The fact that this mirror takes the form of a criminal who is both relatable on a human level and also clearly not to be trifled with is cause for further reflection on our own mechanisms for judging others—maybe sizing up is a more fitting term.

The experience of reading through each of these pieces in sequence is one of continual interplay between tension and opening, suspense and discovery.

This story evokes an intuitive need to create a meta-narrative relationship with one’s own life story that pervades this collection, supporting and challenging readers to do the same with increased depth and breadth of consciousness. Indeed, we are invited to see into our continual need to find self-connection in both cooperation and confrontation with our external worlds from so many different perspectives and within so many social contexts in these pages: an addict struggling to maintain his sobriety while attempting to pull his brother off the streets, the epistolary connections and disconnections between a musician and a death row inmate who wishes to meet his son before execution, young people on a drug-reveling quest to an unexpected manifestation of “the source,” an animal control worker seeking her footing within a web of social prejudices around race, class, and sexual orientation while mourning her murdered sister, a cancelled comedian reckoning with his trespasses and their unconscious promptings, a young white woman’s scandalous exploration of attraction to a married Black man in the 1950s, a mother coping with the loss of a young child, a middle-aged man quietly realizing he has already left behind a once painful betrayal. In the process of these readings, we might even arrive at the conclusion that human beings are fundamentally bonded by similar needs, similar struggles to meet them, meet themselves—that this might even serve as a ground, albeit an ever-shifting one, for meeting others with something approaching compassion. 

For all of the moral value that can be derived from perceptiveness, however, these stories do not veer into moralism. I’m attempting to give an overview for the purposes of a review, but the experience of reading through each of these pieces in sequence is one of continual interplay between tension and opening, suspense and discovery. These stories are moving, but they also move in both plot and tone. The reader is engaged by insight and empathy—and the complexities that arise between them.

The narrator’s humor in “You Know, You Can Die from That” offers one mirror of a strength common to many of the stories. Amidst her worries that her plot with a co-worker to “kill”—or inflict diarrhea upon—a detested, lactose intolerant supervisor by pouring whole milk into his milk substitute in the break room refrigerator, she reflects:

Back at the office, I’m confused. People, including me, think they want to kill people, but then they don’t really want to kill people. And if you’re some people, knowing someone wants to kill you turns you on? Not to mention people at work aren’t supposed to sleep with other people at work, yet they do far more often than they let on—and on top of it all, a person needs to eat to live, but the more you really think about it, there really is something in just about everything you eat that could, over time, put you six feet under. 

The comic self-awareness here allows the narrator’s insight into the blind spots and gray areas in others’ lives to be delivered to us—and herself—in a way that also mirrors her own apprehensiveness and anxiety. The humorous tone, pervasive and effective in this particular story, provides a softer mirror of an interplay between individual psychology and sociology that the stories in the volume each deliver. 

Moreover, the effect of reading progressively through the collection is, in this way, similar to exploring the internal dynamism of each piece. Several tensions central to the individual’s life in community and culture recur across multiple stories: the need to think of oneself as good and the demands we place on others in order to do so, the need for cultural orientation and touchstones of meaning amidst a society of hollow celebration and premeditated garbage, the need for personal empowerment and the various shadows we tap into in order to achieve it, never mind healthy aspects of human synergy such as love, understanding, openness—which easily become enmeshed with prejudices and social pressures and often turn against themselves. Walking through these thoughtfully arranged, unique, well-crafted stories, we are presented with insight into these common human needs from multiple perspectives, each wrought with texture, qualification, and subtlety. It is a testament to considered editorial work in concert with the authorial talent gathered here. This is a truly collective project, all the more remarkable for the fact that each contribution offers a distinct world of its own nevertheless connected to the whole, as if each of our individual worlds were actually part of a shared one in which new connections remain possible if we can only turn a page.