We launch into our third decade by welcoming a guest editor—to select and introduce each year's collection—and who better to inaugurate the change than Allan Gurganus. He has combed through hundreds of short stories written in 2005 to assemble a muscular array of talent, twenty stories ranging from low-down, high-octane farce to dark, erotic suspense.<br><br> This year's volume combines seasoned writers like Tony Earley, Wendell Berry, and George Singleton with gifted newcomers, including Keith Lee Morris, Erin Brooks Worley and J. D. Chapman. Their stories range from a communal love poem for a hunting dog, to a tale of a newly rich retiree trying to micromanage a Hollywood movie and losing his trophy wife to each new young screenwriter, to a harrowing work about a Virginia slave-woman burned alive for witchcraft.<br><br> As Gurganus writes in his introduction, “The only region of the U.S. ever to declare war on every other region of the nation won—if not that great gray fib of secession, then most of the recuperating country's truest stories.&#8221