“Life,” “Man,” “Love,” and “Winter”

A recent post at The Millions, Best American Short Stories: By the Numbers, inspired a writer at B.O.M.M. to create a word cloud (using Wordle) mapping the most common words in the titles of stories that have appeared in the anthology from 1978 to 2008.

The word cloud does not include “articles and such,” and shows a few of the big winners to be “life,” “man,” “love,” and “winter.” Not so much for the word “woman,” which, the author of the post points out, has appeared in the title of a Best American Short Story (since 1978) as many times as the word “Elvis”: twice.

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Isaac Fitzgerald has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, and was once given a sword by a king, thereby accomplishing three out of five of his childhood goals. Formerly of The Rumpus and McSweeney’s and most recently the founding editor of BuzzFeed Books, Isaac is now the co-host of BuzzFeed News’ Twitter Morning Show, #AMtoDM. He also appears frequently on The Today Show to talk books, and is co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them and Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (with Recipes) (winner of an IACP award), and the author of a YA novel and picture book forthcoming from Bloomsbury. He uses Twitter.

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