Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, an annual anthology of exceptional short fiction rooted in the western United States, debuted in 1988 and continued publication until 1992. Recognizing that the West remains rewarding territory for literary explorations, James Thomas and D. Seth Horton revived the series in 2009.

Best of the West 2010 brings together established and emerging writers who reinterpret this most vital of literary regions and create, as Kent Meyers puts it in his foreword, "gift s] the nation needs right now."...