"Granta 148: Summer fiction" (Granta, 2019)

• The spread (Ben Lerner) - At an interscholastic debating competition, teams use a tactic to "spread" opponents, introducing many issues as fast as they can. It's taken over from standard debating, as it has in the real world. Senator Bob Dole hands out the prizes. The final paragraph begins with "Now I am going to show you a picture and I'd like you to make up a story about it. We call this the Thematic Apperception Test or TAT. A story with a beginning, a middle and an end."
• Innards (Magogodi oaMphela Makhene) - A black South African dies. We get the tribal history - choosing abattoir hearts; rusty bicycles, etc.
• The Line (Amor Towles) - In the last days of the final Tzar, peasant Pushkin and his wife, childless, move to Moscow to join the revolution. She progresses in a factory. He gets sacked and spends hours queuing for food. He's good at it, enlisting help from about a dozen boys. He queues from someone wanting an exit visa and ended up, after 18 days with a pass for him and his wife to New York. His wife looks upon it as a way to spread Communism. When they get there she goes to a factory, leaving him. He queues at a soap kitchen.
• Quantum Displacement (Nuar Alsadir) - 3 pages of left-aligned prose that uses "^" and " " instead of punctuation. There's a margin note too. [No]
• Longshore drift (Julia Armfield) - Alice and Min, both 17, sell ice-creams from a van. Neither have had friendships with boys though they're probably straight. A group of boys flirt with them as they get ice-creams, not paying. They swim together among basking sharks - scary but not dangerous.
• Charles Parker plays Bossa Nova (Haruki Murakami) - The narrator wrote a spoof music review for a student magazine. 15 years later in New York he sees the record. He doesn't buy it because at $35 dollars it's too much. Next day he goes back. The shop assistant says the record was never there. Then the narrator dreams that Parker thanks him. [No]
• Field notes on a marriage (Te-Ping Chen) - In the states, a male lecturer born in China suddenly asks to marry a female lecturer he's become friends with. They visit her parents who still live on an alfalfa farm. He doesn't want to take her to his boring Chinese town. He hasn't been home for years. He's rather detached. He tells tells her that at his school in China, a clever, poor boy died when a prank went wrong. 2 years into their marriage he hasn't made much academic progress. He hangs himself. She visits his parents, who hint that their son was the killer. On the way back to the airport they pass a block of flats due for demolition. The tenants are refusing to leave. Neighbours are bringing them food.
• Providence (Sara Majka) - 3 pages. In New York a single mother (the first-person narrator) becomes friends with a man whose wife has left him, taking their daughter. When the wife returns, the man gives the narrator up. [No]
• Good Progress (Jem Calder) - The narrator's mother's just been told that her breast cancer is terminal. The narrator (who's generally inhibited) hasn't told their friends, not even their flatmate Roos. "For motives that remained predominantly unclear to me, I had ...", "for no reason that I could have explained if called upon to do so ...". They go to a party. They think about telling people
• Visitors Welcome (Thomas Pierce) - A church buys a Jesus AI hologram. It challenges the congregation to be better christians, then somehow walks away.
• Vows (David Means) - The narrator's married to Sharon and has a son Gunner. They've both been unfaithful. They decide, after much discussion, to renew their vows and have a second honeymoon in Dublin. He thinks that much of what he's done is cliché. At the end it's a year since he held Sharon's hand as she died in hospital. [There are many flashbacks and flashforwards - e.g. "On the night of the party, months after the ceremony, Ted's loss of his son in Iraq was five years away, still up in the vapors, and he had no idea that it was ahead of him, and I had no idea that someday I'd look back and see both of us as we'd be years later and filter our relationship through that particular moment"]
• Schenectady (Adam O'Fallon Price) - Allison Blakely, the narrator, is in Schenectady teaching screenwriting to gifted high-schoolers, telling them how characters [i.e. herself] must change. The text is addressed to David, her ex. She's middle-aged, childless, and into drugs. Leonard, 13, invites her to dinner with his nearby gran. She takes the class to a shopping mall to do observation. High, she buys a remote-controlled helicopter. A few days later he shows her his screenplay about a women with an alien insid her. She asks if it's about her. He says yes, a little - his mother has problems too. She takes him on a night walk to a waterfall and shows him how to control the helicopter, which hovers like magic. [I like the symbolism and much of the story. I think there needs to be a stronger reason for buying the helicopter]

I like "Vows" most. "The line" does less than a story that long should. The other stories are mostly interesting enough.