Like jazz, the short story is a truly American art form. While Americans didn’t invent it, we honed it, much like the Italians did so many years ago when they looked at Chinese noodles and said: Throw some tomatoes and cheese on those bad boys and now we’re talking. Take a few blank pages and with some hard work, you’ve planted your flag of creativity and rosy optimism and made something out of nothing. Not to mention, short stories are SHORT, and considering the attention span of our current society being whittled away by video games, cable TV, ipods and high speed Internet, they are the perfect medium for a good ol’ shot of literature. A short story gives a reader the opportunity to, in one fifteen minute sitting, have a complete, complex, artistic experience. How many plays and movies can say the same?

Like many endangered critters, short stories have seen shrinking habitats (no more can they be found in The Atlantic; literary magazines have recently lost a major distributor, and will have trouble getting on to shelves). But there is hope.

Take, for example, the new Best American Short Stories, edited by Stephen King. It’s now in major bookstores all over the country, along with the entire Best American series (essays, science writing, sports writing, comics, etc). Best American Short Stories — which people in the know refer to by the fishy acronym BASS — includes stories by the venerable, funny, postmodern 77-year old John Barth and the 29-year old Lauren Groff, whose first novel is due next year. With that range, there ought to be something to love, right? And it’s a big, shiny turquoise book, hard to miss. Online? Excerpts from a few stories, natch.

That theme, once again: HEADLESS. Horsemen, flat beer, chocolate bunnies, the guy who never gets a blowjob, zombies, animal crackers, classical statues, John Wayne Bobbitt, groups without leaders, blondes, Marie Antoinette and other unfortunate royalty, Medusa post-Perseus, the philosophy of D.E. Harding — any and all of these could fall under the heading of headless. Whatever your interpretation, be sure to stun us. We’ll know it’s good when we feel, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, as if the tops of our heads were taken off.

Full submission details here.