"The Best British Short Stories 2019" by Nicholas Royle (ed), (Salt, 2019)

Many sources - only Ambit, Brittle Star and Mechanics Institute Review supplying more than one story. One of the authors died in 1973. Most of them have already published books. As usual in his introduction the editor, Nicholas Royle, overviews the state of play. He begins with "If I had a pound for every time over the last year someone has remarked to me that the short story is enjoying a notable renaissance, I'd have enough money to submit numerous stories to Ambit and the Fiction Desk."

• "Smack" (Julia Armfield) - Nicola's in a house by the sea. She's never had a job. She married someone rich. The electricity's off and the furniture's dust-sheeted because Daniel, her husband, is emptying the place. He's getting a divorce, though she can't get her ring off. She's running out of food. We discover that she's stolen her sister's car to get there, that she's squatting, that there are plans to evict her. Without leaving the house she watches people's responses to the many stranded jellyfish. She dreams she's a jellyfish. At the end she's abandoned the house, taking with her a few symbolic purchases from QVC - Russian dolls painted to resemble Muppets, an egg-timer containing sand, a coin counter. It's 10pm. She plans to lie on the sand as the next tide of jellyfish come in. Out of the water it takes up to 50 minutes for them to die.
• "Kiss" (Elizabeth Baines) - A young couple kiss on their way out of a tube station. A bomber's in his way in. We flashback a few minutes, a few hours, then have potted stories of their lives (father-molested, anorexic, suicidal girl; racially abused, single-mothered boy; a bomber who parents wanted him to do well at school). Then we return to the present - will the bomb go off?
• "Cluster" (Naomi Booth) - a new mother, her sleep disrupted, becomes attuned to the things of the night and early morning - birds, neighbours, people walking home from the pub. She's passive until she sees a man begin to be physical to his partner. She calls the police (who say that others have called) and goes into the street to tail them. But they've gone.
• "On day 21" (Ruby Cowling) - the narrator's the mother of C, D, and E (the youngest, a female). They have on/off switches. After 19 days of rain, she switches them all off together for the first time. She uses her laptop and phone for a while until her husband B(en) is due home. On day 20, outside a supermarket, she tries switching the kids off but the switches don't work. "I looked around the car park, hoping perhaps to see another person in the same situation. The car park was tidily kept, with good space for each unit of car to sit quietly to itself, sure of its locked doors". When her husband comes home that evening he realises the severity of the situation, leaves C and D with his parents. In the night she tries to kill him. It's stopped raining. They drive to a reservoir where they camped before they have kids. They hug. She can cope with E(vie) crying in the back seat.
• "Sitcom" (Kieran Devaney) - An idea for a sitcom is described. A killer given a 250 year sentence survives to be released. The sitcom idea ends on the day of his release, a van being driven past crowds of protesters, cultists and reporters.
• "On the way to the church" (Vicky Grut) - Sarah (43) and John (50), married for 15 years, have recently had a child. "Some days she felt that 'accident' was the most accurate description of what had happened to them and that everything she'd ever known and valued had been consumed in the wreckage". She's given up her job and John's become undependable. John's driven them for 5 hours through bad weather to his mother in his childhood Welsh town for the christening. On the walk to the church John tells her that he has a brain tumour. I can't see anything especially noteworthy about this story. It was in the Harvard Review though.
• "Beyond dead" (Nigel Humphreys) - The narrator exists in a dark void like Beckett's The Unnameable but using commonplace language and thought. Maybe a Locked-in syndrome patient? Limbo awaiting rebirth? Mention of "Lucille Desmoulins" may be a key allusion, but by then it's too late for me - I've lost interest.
• "The arrangement" (Sally Jubb) - Erin (38, childless, a New Yorker) is with Matthew. He's beginning to collect animals so a taxidermist can stuff them for him. He runs over a vixen - "He squatted beside it, letting his palm rest on its side, feeling it breathe. When the breathing stopped he lifted his hand.". At the end, after sex, she imagines feathers, the smell of recent road-kill, the arrangement of limbs. "She listened to the rhythmic pounding of his heart, lifted her fingers lightly from his chest, and, inching herself away, lay there, incredibly still."
• "Badgerface" (Lucie McKnight Hardy) - The narrator's father's a rough soldier who's away often. The narrator discovers that their 16 y.o. younger brother is gay. Then, melodramatically, the story ends by the brother dying (an accident?) and the father showing some feeling after all.
• "New dawn fades" (Sophie Mackintosh) - 2nd person. Lucy searches an online map using postcodes and names, especially when drunk at night. She has flashbacks of happier moments. Her laptop doesn't seem to stay switched off. She's so obsessed she loses her job and boy friend. She finds a place she wants to go. I liked it.
• "A gift of tongues" (Paul McQuade) - An English women get a job in Berlin. Her boyfriend gives her a tongue to transplant, to help with the language. People think she's from Hamburg. He breaks up with her when he realises that her fluency has made her a different person. She returns to the clinic but can't have her old tongue back. My guess was that her boyfriend would have it transplanted in. She buys the tongue back, but doesn't think she'll see her boyfriend again. She learns that her experience is common. I don't understand the purpose of the key gift, or of the interest in hand-sizes.
• "Reality" (John Lancaster) - Iona wakes thinking she's in the villa of a reality show, calculating the effect of her actions on the audience. One by one others appear. She knew that "you flatter the clever ones for being pretty and the pretty ones for being clever", that "It was vital to think about the viewers all the time. It was also vital not to seem to be thinking about them." "She had a theory ... that this was a new kind of show, one where there was no interaction with the producers or the viewers, no games or tasks or challenges or external organisation, no structure. They wouldn't be told what to do." Though she tries hard to forge appropriate alliances, she fears at the end that the others were all laughing at her. I thought it was going to be "The Truman Show". It's almost the opposite of that. I grew to like it.
• "A hair clasp" (Vesna Main) - Hardly more than a page. A neat ending after too slow a beginning.
• "Curtilage" (Robert Mason) - a man's shown around a house that's for sale. He's cynically observant. We learn that he's carrying a knife. He pick-pockets and sneakily vandalises. The senile wife thinks she recognises him. In fact, he's a stranger who does this for fun. I like it.
• "Nude and seascape" (Ann Quin) - The narrator treats a female corpse on the beach like a still-life prop. Over 24 hours he tries to find a good setting for it, deciding that the body spoils the head. Having cut the head off he hears voices and walks into the sea. Interesting.
• "Cuts" (Stephen Sharp) - the psychotic narrator riffs on the themes of living with his brother, Alastair Campbell, labour MPs, sex, hearing voices, etc. Here's a sample - I did not have any kids. I used to think it didn't matter because I had an immortal soul. But now I wished I had reproduced my genes. Left something behind. Susan Hill left her husband for a woman. Big diesel cars pouring out poison that killed people like me who walked. It was Gordon Brown's fault for encouraging people to stop using petrol. The drivers didn't deserve to live. I wanted to kick a couple of teenagers in the head. They were laughing at me. Sick laughter. Teenagers think about sex 600 times an hour.
• "The heights of sleep" (Sam Thompson) - At 17 the narrator started reading the books of Gaunt. At 32 he meets him for an interview. By then he's written a novel and has a family. We learn much about Gaunt's style. The story interested me at the start, stalled, then puzzled me at the end. Perhaps after Gaunt's death the narrator's life drifted, and he's in danger of becoming detached from his family.
• "The husband and the wife go to the seaside" (Melissa Wan) - A couple spend a weekend in a rented cottage, spending rather independent holidays. Neither minds mind what the other does. The wife (the story's from her PoV) seems less stable than the husband, who controls her more than she controls him. His disappearance for a night without explanation (perhaps he'd pre-warned her and she misunderstood?) or subsequent excuse lacks realism. The female character could have murdered the male construct afterwards - I wouldn't have been surprised. We're not told all that happens to the woman - there are convenient omissions, ones that spare the author having to offer psychological justifications or background - a narrative cop-out?
• "Optics" (Ren Watson) - A mother starts seeing holes in her 3 year old daughter, holes that glow or can be seen through. Her husband laughs it off. She goes to the doctor. She looks in the mirror and she's half disappeared. Doesn't quite work.
• "Toxic" (Adam Welch) - two young men try a perhaps fake drug. I don't get it.

Common themes - seasides; babies causing maternal mental problem or marital issues; altered states.

Typos - p.22 "anyone can write a first a novel"; p.43 I think "I left" shouldn't be italicised; p.98 "cut herself loose and oat to safety"?