"The Best American Short Stories 2019", Anthony Doerr (ed), (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 2019)

In his introduction, Doerr points out that he picked many stories that break the rules -

• Single point-of-view: Deborah Eisenberg leaps into a doctor's mind in two of her story's 13 sections. Wendell Berry waits until the last seven paragraphs of "The great Interruption" to introduce a first-person narrator - a character you didn't even know was part of the story
• Don't start with backstory: Siaid Sayrafiezadeh opens "Audition" with seven long paragraphs of exposition
• Make the reader identify with the main character: Sigrid Nunez uses an unlikable narrator
• Have one main character: Jeffrey Eugenides and Ursula K. Le Guin both have stories with dual protagonists. Jim Shephard uses 4
• Don't be preachy: Wike Wang's "Omakase" has a strong moral stance

He's picked extensively from some of the shinier magazines - "The New Yorker" (4 stories), "Zoetrope: All-Story" (3 stories), and "Harper's" (2 stories). There are 2 from "LitMag", which started in 2017. In her Foreword, Heidi Pitlor reminds us that "Tin House" and "Glimmer Train" have gone.

Crowd-sourced reviews are quite useful for anthologies like this, so here's my penny's worth.

• "The Era" by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - A first-person schoolkid lives in an age where children are encouraged to tell the truth, and gene-therapy is available for those with money. "I don't have any gene corrections. I wasn't optimised at all", he says. "Leslie is always telling lies about how great things are or how nice everyone looks and how everybody is special". He regularly get an injection of Happy from the school nurse.
• "Natural Light" by Kathleen Alcott - a first-person woman, not separated from her much older husband, sees a photo of her now dead mother in an exhibition. She's doing something we're not told about. The persona contacts the photographer, learning little, then contacts her father, learning that her mother and he used to be (heroin?) addicts. The language often becomes more elevated when observations are made - "There was always one student who hated me. This was a problem I could solve more easily with young men, pretending to lessen my authority while I sharpened my argument. But with girls it was never clear, for their hatred was much more original, multifaceted, and they clung to it even while enjoying whichever dialectic I'd introduced to distract them"
• "The Great Interruption" by Wendell Berry - a boy gets the chance to give birth to an anecdote that by word of mouth goes viral. The method of distribution and the way it comes to be associated with the area are dealt with.
• "No more than a bubble" by Jamel Brinkley - a guy and his mate are at an upmarket student party. His black mother, having walked out on his white father, is soon to remarry. The two guys make out with two exotic black girls. At the end there's a jump to the father's funeral. The mother's there who the narrator's not seen for years. The narrator thinks back to the wild night, his father's advice, and tries to make sense of it all - of fathership and friendship.
• "The third tower" by Deborah Eisenberg - A 17 y.o. girl takes a train ride past ruined towns to The City, for treatment. She suffers from hyperassociativity. "Her teachers said she'd grow out of it, but it's only gotten worse since school - words heating up, expanding, exploding into pictures of things, shooting off in all directions, then flaming out, leaving behind cinders and husks, a litter of tiny, empty, winged corpses, like scorched gnats or angels". There are hints of a 1984-like fist in a velvet glove.
• "Hellion" by Julia Elliot - Alex, a townie, about 13, is staying with Miss Edna while his newly born premature sister is in intensive care. Butter (13) a distant cousin, befriends him, tells him the vulnerabilities of potential bullies. When Alex and Butter mess a shed up, Alex is humiliated in front of the bullies, and Butter's pet alligator is shot by order of her mother. She'd like to stay friends with him - she plans to leave the town and studdy. My favourite piece so far.
• "Bronze" by Jeffrey Eugenides - A high, flamboyant male who's often hit upon by men, wonders about the signals he sends. He gets drunk with a stranger (a gay older man, an actor) and things get a bit physical. He leaves suddenly, drops in on a fellow student, a ballerina with a wheelchaired mother. We're shown the two men's point-of-view.
• "Protozoa" by Ella Martinsen Gorham - About internet bullying. Didn't work for me. Samples are

  They moved to the front door, noses in phones. He typed something and Noa's phone buzzed. He had messaged her: 300 likes for nosebleed von hobo pants If you roast me, better make me look good, she replied. She remembered that he'd made up a rhyme for their music teacher Inez, a 'siren with all guns firin'."

  and

  Smoking gun emoji. She folded her knees to her chest. Can you? Crying-face emoji, blue-face emoji. She took a raggedy breath "Are you going to cry?" a voice said. She shrieked. It was Callan, nestled in a corner "Don't sneak up on me like that," she said. "This is my perch," he said, bugging his eyes.

• "Seeing Ershadi" by Nicole Krauss - Two women friends, the narrator and Romi, share a mysterious attraction to a foreign film, especially the main character, Ershadi. At the end after years apart they get in touch again.

  How much time we wasted, she wrote, believing that things came to us as gifts, through channels of wonder, in the form of signs, in the love of men, in the name of God, rather than seeing them for what they were: strengths that we dragged up from the nothingness of our own depths.

  The ending, which I like, is

  Romi wrote that the last thing that had surprised her was that when Ershadi is lying in the grave he's dug and his eyes finally drift closed and the screen goes black, is isn't really black at all. If you look closely, you can see the rain falling.

  I liked the odd page or so (when Mark appears, etc).
• "Pity and Shame" by Ursula K. Le Guin - A young woman with an unreliable husband is looking after an old man. I lost concentration a few times during this piece. Paragraphs like "Something relaxed between them then. An inner movement, very deep down, definitive, almost imperceptible" don't appeal to me.
• "Anyone Can Do it" by Manuel Munoz - A poor couple, Delfina and her husband, have moved to California from Texas in search of casual work. They have a little son Kiki but no phone. The boy takes a little car from a shop. A neighbour, Lis, invites her to do some peach-picking. Lis steals her car!
• "The Plan" by Sigrid Nunez - Roden Jones plans to murder someone - "In his head he had strangled the assistant principal, several teachers and fellow students, and dozens, if not hundreds, or strangers. And one particular snub-nosed cheerleader many times". When he's about to kill his wife she leaves him so he kills a whore he frequents. I don't see much in the story.
• "Letter of Apology" by Maria Reva - In the USSR an agent is assigned to extract a letter of apology from a poet who had joked about a leader. The agent suspects that the poet's wife is assessing the agent with a view to recommending him for promotion. In fact the wife, whose relatives have been victims of the regime, threatens him with a knife. He leaves, ready to apologise to his boss.
• "Black Corfu" by Karen Russell - It's 1620. A surgeon cuts the hamstrings of the dead (even his own stillborn son) to stop them walking. He's accused of botching an op. They story had lofty passages - "Those few who do meet the doctor's gaze still fail to recognize him. Their paranoia trawls over his skin, and a monster springs into their nets. His timbre shakes, and they presume his guilt"; "In later centuries, new etiologies will evolve. Miasma theory will yield to germ theory, superstition to science. Yet every novel treatment breeds an equally novel genetic resilience, as only the hardiest survivors spawn. And so the cure teaches the disease how to evade it". It seems rather long and pointless it me.
• "Audition" by Said Sayrafiezadeh - The narrator's a 19 year old son of a rich man. He's working on his father's building site to gain experience. He wants to be actor. He smokes crack cocaine twice with a fellow labourer and has insights about Seinfold and his own ambitions. He's still young. Seemed a minor piece to me.
• "Natural Disasters" by Alexis Schaitkin - This involves a 24 year old freshly married couple, Steven and the first-person narrator - "In New York we were broke, but this was OK, even fun, because we assumed that someday soon we would be comfortable, and would look back on these days with a tender longing ... Perhaps our faith in this narrative is what allowed us to delight even in our frequent arguments".
  They move to Oklahoma and a big house - "We had arrived in a place where space was completely unprecious, and this notion was a astonishing to me as if the same thing were to be true of time ... I believed that I could nail this place by triangulating among its details, that this place typifying images converged upon a deeper truth". She's depressed, lonely. She gets a job writing copy for a realtor, visiting many houses. We get flash-forwards and reflections. "a place and its disasters - its fathomless, inscrutable unknowns - are not separable ... The disaster is always there, because it takes up residence inside of you". She visits a gorgeous house, the door opened by a gorgeous man. They have to rush to the storm shelter. She hopes to be seduced. She dreams about being stuck there for life. But it's his dead brother's house, not his. His brother's dreams died in a car accident.
  At the end there's "Maybe you think all of this is easy to interpret ... Maybe it is only my personal stake in the matter that makes me want to believe it was not that simple. All I can say is that when I pulled up to the house on Redtail Road I thought life was one thing, and when I drove away I knew it was another. I knew, quite simply, that life is not a story at all. It is the disasters we carry within us. It is amazing, it is exquisite, it is a stunning charmer, and it is noted in water and jotted in dust and the wind lifts it away". My favourite piece so far.
• "Our day of grace" by Jim Shepard - Exchanges of letters during the American Civil War. Not my type of story.
• "Wrong Object" by Mona Simpson - First-person therapist (female) has a middle-aged male client who eventually admits to liking little girls. We find out about the therapist's partner and her line-manager. There wasn't enough in the story for me.
• "They told us not to say this" by Jenn Alandy Trahan - In the Walkman era, when daughters weren't given the same social liberties as sons, some girls admire a sportsman. They try to impress him by playing sports. "In practice after school we did suicides until we felt like puking. We did them in our driveways at night too". "We were brown like their daddies' secretaries ... brown like may I take your plate, brown like you think I need your charity "
• "Omakase" by Weike Wang - Two years after they met online (dating by watching the same movie in different cities while linked with Skype) a finance analyst (38) and a potter moved in together in New York. Going out for sushi exposes their personality differences (she overthinks), which are analysed and explained.

Other reviews

• Good reads
• Kirkus review (A highlight is the opener, an assured work of post-apocalyptic fiction by young writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ... If the collection has a theme, it might be mutual incomprehension)
• Anjanette Delgado