"The Best British Short Stories 2020" by Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2020)

Apparently there were doubts about whether this series would continue, which is a shame. There's a wide spread of sources - Ambit, Litro. Ellipsis, The New Yorker, MsLexia, etc. My impression is that though Royle's sympathetic to many genres (including meta-fiction), he likes characterisation to remain foregrounded.

• "Energy Thieves: Five Dialogues" (Richard Lawrence Bennett) - the listener of these 5 monolgues becomes steadily less silent, the dialogues sometimes examples of the principles they express.
• "Beyond Criticism" (Luke Brown) - Claire, an intelligent, socially-savvy 38 year old, meets an old right-wing friend before meeting her ex for a meal. He's beginning to go with a under-30 Muslim Labour activist. She snaps, saying 'Exhaust yourself on porn, then you can redeem yourself with a member of the historically oppressed, someone who can prove your credentials, cast my apathy into the starkest light', and so does he. I like how the tone is managed, how they seem to shift subjects until they find something to argue about.
• "The Phone Call" (David Constantine)- An old couple bicker about the significance of being phoned by someone one of them met years before - "Don't look at me like that, Jack, she said. I'm not looking at you like that, he replied. I just don't know what you could find to talk about with a complete stranger for so long. Perhaps you've been on his mind for twenty years. Perhaps he's been writing you poems for twenty years. I very much doubt it, she answered, beginning to feel tired". It's a situation similar to those that Constantine's written about before. This time the behaviour of the caller (who's soon to die) is questioned.
• "Maxine" (Tim Etchells) - "In the year of Asbestos, country of England (sic), Maxime gets a job to read words to a blind man called Casper, what lives alone outside the peripheral ring-road, in a district beyond all forces of yuppification". Maxine reads for people in a lawless alt-future. It's rather brilliant in parts, and I like it overall.
• "Halloween" (Nicola Freeman) - the narrator's husband is dying. Too subtle for me.
• "In the mountains" (Amanthi Harris) - I wasn't convinced at first, though I was moreso by the end. Efficient.
• "The girl with the horizontal walk" (Andrew Hook) - Ellen and Nick are a couple. Ellen's an actress. Her role (as Marilyn Monroe blackmailing president Kennedy) is confused with her own life. Roles/plots get confused too. Not convinced.
• "Belly" (Sonia Hope) - about a page long. I'm puzzled by its inclusion.
• "She said he said" (Hanif Kureishi) - Reported speech. Mateo (an artist) asks Sushila to sleep with him. She's known him 18 years and says no. She tells her husband Len who works with Mateo. Len talks to Mateo and Mateo's long-suffering and ill ex, Marcie. Len learns that Mateo's explicitly propositioned many women and feels it's his duty to warn people. Mateo thinks this is unfair. Len's known to be excessively inhibited. I don't get it. It was in The New Yorker.
• "Weaning" (Helen Mort) - anxious about weening her child, and about forgetting place-names, a woman looks in the mirror - "Her body was Sheffield. She would have to learn it again". The ending is successfully lyrical. She takes a riverside walk - "There were shopping trolleys and tyres, lengths of orange rope. Life was everywhere around them, endless and derelict and broken. It did not matter, she thought, what any of this was called. It was all pure river."
• "The further dark" (Jeff Noon and Bridget Penny) - e-mail issues rather than sunsets, but in the end just another mood piece.
• "Nudibranch" (Irenosen Okojie) - A shape changer meets various men with various reasons for not having had sex. "Her third hand drops soft-bodied, lightning coloured seeds in the space between their heartbeats"
• "Backbone" (KJ Orr) - a women goes into hospital for a backbone op (to get one?). Verging on surreal.
• "Whale Watching" (Diana Powell) - a woman recalls as a child seeing a whale with a man tied to its side, and a film-crew. Old and confused she mixes up Moby Dick and memories. I like it.
• "Greetings from the far man in postcards" (David Rose) - a man tells about his (imagined?) wives. I like it.
• "Safely gathered in" (Sarah Schofield) - lists of contents of self-storage units interleaved with text that starts sounding like ads then becomes more lyrical, dealing with my people preserve memories. A fire breaks out. We go back through the units seeing what the fire does. At the end the owners come and look. Their children "will pester their parents for erasers and pencils and snow globes decorated with the SelfStore4U logo". I like it.
• "Dreams are Contagious" (Adrian Slatcher) - the kind of story I'd like to write: a man who interprets dreams meets a woman writing an app to to the same thing. Jehovah's witnesses. Crypocurrencies.
• "The white cat" (NJ Stallard) - I think I must have missed the point of this.
• "Purity" (Robert Stone) - On an Orkney island Edward is continuing an old experiment with Orang-utans. They roam wild, though a few are domesticated. He thinks that they copy the humans. His wife Marcia is pregnant, though he's unlikely to be the father because of his sterility. She's the only woman on the island. Jack and his slow son Denny help out. It's a little like "The Birds". Edward's worried about the male apes. At the end they may have killed Denny. He has feelings for an old female. The story didn't quite fulfill its promise.
• "The same but different" (Stephen Thompson) - a rather long Granta-style travel piece, with some plot though nothing exceptional.
• "Vashti" (Zakia Uddin) - a dancing teacher is interested in one of her young pupils' father. Good at the end, rather slow until then.