After searching high and low for the year's outstanding short fiction, Delia Falconer has selected masterful stories from some of the country's best-loved authors and exciting work from the up-and-coming. 'Stories don't have the novel's luxury of great swathes of time, its layerings, its wanderings, its counterpoints,' she observes. 'Instead, they must cut to the bone straightaway ... Sometimes they capture a shift in a whole world; at other times they put into words a mood or tone that we might not have seen, until it appears so beautifully before us.' With their wry humour, quiet intensity and elegant economy, these stories display Australian writing at its diverse, unpredictable best.