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The Best American Short Stories 2019

Anthony Doerr (Goodreads Author) (Editor),

Heidi Pitlor (Goodreads Author) (Editor)

3.64 · Rating details · 245 ratings · 39 reviews

#1 New York Times best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr brings his“stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) to selecting The Best American Short Stories 2019.
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Hardcover, 400 pages

Published October 1st 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Jan 09, 2020 Ann rated it liked it · review of another edition

Stories liked:

The Era by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Bronze by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Plan by Sigrid Nunez
Audition by Said Sayrafiezadeh
Natural Disasters by Alexis Schaitkin
Wrong Object by Mona Simpson

The rest of them, I read the first page or so and decided not to finish.

I didn't check thoroughly, but I only noticed one animal being harmed (in one of the stories I skimmed, not one of the ones listed above). I would prefer zero, but this is much better than the O. Henry Prize Stories of 2019, in ...more

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Dec 01, 2019 Andy Miller rated it really liked it · review of another edition

There are many reasons I look forward to the annual collection of Best American Short Stories; it helps keep me out of reading ruts of reading the same type of fiction, it introduces me to new writers causing me to order their books(but never on Amazon), updates me on favorite writers. It also reminds me of my dislike certain types of writing; dystopian stories have greatly improved by skimming skills.
Some of my favorites from this year's collection:
Wendell Berry's "The Great Interruption" There are many reasons I look forward to the annual collection of Best American Short Stories; it helps keep me out of reading ruts of reading the same type of fiction, it introduces me to new writers causing me to order their books(but never on Amazon), updates me on favorite writers. It also reminds me of my dislike certain types of writing; dystopian stories have greatly improved by skimming skills.
Some of my favorites from this year's collection:
Wendell Berry's "The Great Interruption" recalls a time when spare time, story telling, carefree adventures had a bigger place in our lives, the nostalgia for those times is enhanced by the narrator telling the story years after the fact after he has moved from his small town.
"No More than a Bubble" by James Brinkley takes place in 1990s New York with two Black college students crashing a party of young professionals. As the narrator progresses through the night he routinely reflects about his dad and his advice "to be aware of crazy women, angry women, passionate women. He told me they would ruin me.'But they are also the best women' he said 'The best lovers, with a jungle between their legs and such wildness in bed that every man should experience." The narrator does end up with such a women that night, in describing how they picked the women "We both preferred girls with a certain plumpness, with curves--in part, I think, because that's what black guy are supposed to like, because liking it felt like a confirmation of possessing black blood, a way to stamp ourselves with authenticity."
"Protoza" by Ellen Martinsen Gorham with the story by Wendell Berry exemplifies the collection's diversity; contrasted by Berry's tale of old fashioned gossip and spare time, Gorham's story features 8th graders in Los Angeles where life, even passionate teenage petting, seems only an excuse to take to social media to describe, to bully, to defend.
Ursula Le Guin's "Pity and Shame" tells of a different time, a young woman in a Gold Rush town, is paid to care for a victim of a mining accident. As the story progresses we learn what brought her to the isolated town, the future of the town, and the unlikely friendship between the caring doctor and well educated accident victim.
"Anyone Can Do it" by Manuel Munoz will stay with me the longest of any of these stories. The description of a migrant worker's wife's life when she learns that her husband and others don't return from work, with hopes steadily giving way to the harshness of an immigration raid. As reality sets in she makes plans for her two young children in a place far away from her home.
"Letter of Apology" by Maria Reva seems at times Orwellian in its story of a post Stalinist time when dissent was to be handled differently than the prior methods of sending dissenters to camps. Here a KGB agent is assigned to getting a letter of apology from a poet for his politically unacceptable joke made during one of his popular readings.
"Natural Disasters" by Alexis Schaitkin tells of a young professional couple moving from New York City to the middle of Oklahoma where the husband works for oil company and the writer/wife looking to adjust. The wife's experience with a coming tornado with an escape into a storm cellar cements the contrast with her prior life.
Mona Simpson's "Wrong Object" about a psychologist's counseling of a successful and married man who eventually reveals his underlying issue, attraction to young girls, provoked me enough to reach out to an expert in the field, because the story was so real, so nuanced.
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Nov 01, 2019 Michael rated it liked it · review of another edition

Curated by Anthony Doerr (ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE), 2019's shorts were selected with an eye towards breaking the rules of form: multiple protagonists, pages of exposition, ambling subplots, unlikable narrators. In theory it's an exciting approach, yet while none are outright failures many read like style in search of substance. Or where there is substance, the style is less remarkable. My favorites fell into the latter camp, particularly this top five:

"Anyone Can Do It," Manual Munoz -- a ...more

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Nov 19, 2019 Susan Emmet rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Overall a strong collection.
My favorites:
Maria Reva - "Letter of Apology" - sometimes the inquisitor learns from the targeted
Jeffrey Eugenides - "Bronze" - beauty comes in many guises and may not be so beautiful
Jamel Brinkley - "No More Than A Bubble" - the young fool grows up
Said Sayrafiezadeh - "Audition" - again, the fool grows up, this time with a reduced balance in his account.
Jim Shepard - "Our Day of Grace" - beautiful interlocking stories told in letters from Civil War soldiers and their ...more

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Dec 30, 2019 James rated it really liked it · review of another edition

One of the better incarnations of this series. I found the stories by Nicole Krauss and Maria Reva particularly exceptional.

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Jan 01, 2020 Daryl rated it liked it

I very much liked several of the early stories in this collection, but then it sort of flat-lined for me, and I had to make myself push through the rest of it.

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Oct 26, 2019 Amanda rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019-october

I only enjoyed a couple of the short stories out of twenty. I have no idea how these are ranked the best. Clearly the curator has a different reading preference than myself. I know someone has to enjoy this but it was not me.

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Oct 03, 2019 Karen Carlson rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: story-anthologies-multi-authors

When I wrote my opening post for this year’s volume (the tenth time I've blogged BASS), I admitted I was worried since the bar was set so high by last year’s edition, and the couple of years before. And yes, this year felt like a bit of a letdown. In terms of expectations, maybe it was something like a stock market correction. Still, there’s something to find in all these stories, even though none of them blew my socks off.

What’s interesting is that, while I was a bit meh about many of them ...more

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Jan 12, 2020 Jillwilson rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Such a delight to have 20 interesting stories nestling side by side – all of which were published in the last year in either an American or Canadian magazine. Despite this provenance, this year’s selection features a wide range of locales and writers of wildly varying backgrounds. If I had to try to find a theme, I’d say that the focus is on the mildly to disturbingly dystopian, though not all stories fit this description at all. The Kirkus reviewer said he/she thought the theme could be “mutual ...more

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Dec 26, 2019 Amy Armstrong rated it liked it · review of another edition

As a professional writer, I do my best to keep up with short stories in literary magazines and The New Yorker (which is impossible since it's almost weekly.) That said, I like to read the books in this series because these stories are considered the best of the best. Each volume has a guest editor who reviews stories chosen by the series editor. (No, the guest editor doesn't actually read *every* short story published in the U.S./Canadian market before making selections. You can read about this As a professional writer, I do my best to keep up with short stories in literary magazines and The New Yorker (which is impossible since it's almost weekly.) That said, I like to read the books in this series because these stories are considered the best of the best. Each volume has a guest editor who reviews stories chosen by the series editor. (No, the guest editor doesn't actually read *every* short story published in the U.S./Canadian market before making selections. You can read about this in the book, if you don't believe me.) Given all of this, my appraisal of this installment doesn't affect whether or not I will read or buy the next one, but if you have the option, I would pass, if I were you. Short a few highlights, this isn't a stellar collection.

This collection includes one story by Ursula K. Le Guin, who is no longer with us. I have mixed feelings about talking about dead authors because some people have a complex about that. You can criticize anyone as long as they're still around to have suicidal thoughts about it, but once they're dead, everything is sacred. I actually thought her story was decent, and completely confusing. It was also set in the mining country in Colorado, for the most part, and that was interesting and pedestrian at the same time because I live in Colorado. A lot of people in Colorado find the place infinitely fascinating when many other fascinating places exist. However, if you're writing about a mining accident, as she was, it does make sense, so I can't fault her on that. All I can say is, hey, try reading it and tell me just how entertaining you thought it was.

Julia Elliott's Hellion from The Georgia Review appears in here, and it is an excellent example of strong story, character, and voice. She also deftly makes the ordinary occurrences of every day life that so many of us take for granted extraordinary, and she does so without pretense. That story is truly something that belongs on anyone's list of Best American Short Stories.

The rest of the stories had some highs and lows for me. Mostly, I found some snippets of brilliant writing hidden within a lump of pretension and no plot. As a reader who never was interested in getting published, I would just stop reading and go about my life with most of those. The frustrating part is that I have to get work critiqued and take the feedback seriously, and I have to hear all the stupid theories people have about why something will never be published---yet, here we have plenty of examples of things that should not be published, and they're the best of the best.

In my opinion, a piece that is clearly set in the 90s should be historical, at this point. At least one story, but I believe it's actually two, is (are) clearly set in the 90s and the story isn't qualified in any way as historical. You may be thinking, "Oh you're just being petty now." People probably are just being petty picking at things like this, but I know that if I submitted a story that included references to The Wherehouse or a Walkman, I would get feedback along the lines of, "This is SO dated. Nobody is going to read this."

Maybe the reality is that if you're a writer, if whatever you're writing is what you believe to be your best work, ignore the silly things your critique partners say that bring you down. Trust your instincts on setting and style because someone out there will probably think it's amazing.

Of course, you may be wondering, why didn't I say those stories were amazing. Honestly, I didn't think they were that amazing, but not because of anything being dated. My issue is I can't even remember the titles or authors of those other stories because they didn't leave much of an impression on me beyond thinking, "Wow. Fellow critiques would have jumped all over me for this." If I'd actually enjoyed them, I would have remembered more than that. Lots of, "Yes, I'm a cool writer because I can write about attending a party where someone came home with me based on actual experience" posturing. Most of us can get drunk, take drugs, and get laid. If you can't, I'm sorry, but for the most part, it's not a challenge to do any of those things. Why am I supposed to think that's interesting? I get that Hemingway did it a lot, but he's dead. Jack Kerouac did too and he's also dead. Most people don't read either of them for fun, so maybe the public is trying to tell us something with that.

Anyway, as far as this book goes, some editions are great. This one is meh, much like the year it represents. Maybe it's a good commentary in that sense. ...more

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Nov 22, 2019 David Curry rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

When I saw that Anthony Doerr was the guest editor for this year’s edition of The Best American Short Stories, I was heartened and said to myself that if Doerr’s performance as an editor could come anywhere near the level of his performance as a creator of fiction, I was in for a damned good read.

Well, I have to say that the book includes some unaccountable selections, and since the stories are arranged alphabetically by author, the collection opens unfortunately with one of its weakest When I saw that Anthony Doerr was the guest editor for this year’s edition of The Best American Short Stories, I was heartened and said to myself that if Doerr’s performance as an editor could come anywhere near the level of his performance as a creator of fiction, I was in for a damned good read.

Well, I have to say that the book includes some unaccountable selections, and since the stories are arranged alphabetically by author, the collection opens unfortunately with one of its weakest offerings, Nana Kuame Adjei-Brenyan’s “The Era.” (I know we’re currently encouraged to be above all other considerations representative and inclusive, but do we also have to be alphabetical?)

But a reader need go no farther than page 36 to come across a definite plum, Wendell Berry’s “The Great Interruption: The Story of a Famous Story of Old Port William and How It Ceased to be Told (1935-1978).” Berry’s narrative voice is as rich and rooted as Mark Twain or the Stephen Crane of “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” A sample: “Grover faced things by preference with a grin or a laugh that was honest enough, for he had faithfully observed and relished the funniness of the world. But he could give you a straight look sometimes that would make you shiver.”

Berry has been a favorite of mine for half a century. New to me was Julia Elliott, whose “Hellion” has its own engaging voice: “Miss Edna, postmistress of Davis Station and widowed a decade, didn’t take crap.” Heard.

Bless series editor Heidi Pitlor and guest editor Doerr for selecting what is for this reader the star of the collection, the late Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Pity and Shame.” I ‘m wiling to read through any number of disappointing stories if I can come to something so fine. Not the least of LeGuin’s triumphs in this story is her remarkably ranging empathy for disparate characters. Here’s a housebound, severely injured engineer and mine inspector hearing a nearby church congregation singing on a Sunday morning:

“The congregation sounded pretty thin on the ground from the way they wailed out a hymn he didn’t know, or maybe he couldn’t tell what it was because half of them were out of tune and all of them singing it like a dirge. Why did people drag out hymns like that? A good hymn deserved a good tempo. They went caterwauling on and on, it always sounded like the last verse at last, but it never was.”

That comes just before the memorable ending of the story. I’ve always had a soft spot for resonant endings, and the ending to LeGuin’s story is one of the most deeply affecting in a lifetime of reading. I sat there with goose-pimples, smiling through tears. It isn’t just a strong ending like peroration at the end of a routine political speech. It’s a strong ending that the narrative, with its compassionate attention to characters, has been building toward all along.

It’s for those three and a handful of other stories that I’m giving the collection five stars. Au fond, I ask of an anthology only that its strengths outweigh any shortcomings. The Best American Stories 2019 meets that criterion better than any other volume in this series in recent years.
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Dec 23, 2019 Sarah rated it liked it · review of another edition

I felt like 2019 was sortof mediocre when it came to new fiction, and I was underwhelmed with the year's best short stories too. I'm not sure whether it really was a blah year for fiction, or whether I just don't share Anthony Doerr's taste, although some of these stories really stood out to me as exemplary:

"The Era" by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah was as good as it was the first time I read it in Friday Black; "Natural Light" reminded me that I still love Kathleen Alcott and don't understand why ...more

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Dec 06, 2019 Jim Manis rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories

The tastes of individual readers may change but gradually over the years, but editorial tastes tend to move in occasional leaps. Or so it seems to me. The last three years of this annual anthology have illustrated this to me. The broadening of the editorial scope has opened the sorts of stories up to a wider range of writers, reflecting the diversity in the English speaking world. While I embrace the enlarged scope, I don't always enjoy it quite as much as I'd hoped. But then I'm old, and we ...more

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Nov 26, 2019 Gordon Jack rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I love this collection and look forward to reading it every year. I get to spend time with some of my favorite writers and get introduced to new voices. In this case, it was the unfamiliar writers I was most impressed by. My favorite stories came from Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (probably my favorite in this collection), Jamel Brinkley, Manuel Munoz, Sigrid Nunez, Alexis Schaitkin, and Weike Wang. Of my favorite writers, Jeffrey Eugenides and Mona Simpson's stories are amazing, as usual.

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Dec 15, 2019 Brandon rated it liked it

It was good to enjoy a book of short stories for a change. It reminded me of the books we used to have in reading or English class in school. But, it also suffers the same problem, in that it feels uneven because I am not equally interested in each story. Still, it was a pleasant enough read and a nice reminder that short stories aren’t dead.

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Dec 07, 2019 Steve Portigal rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This was an especially excellent selection of stories. Impressionistically feels like the best one I've read. Good range, all very touching, interesting, moving. beautifully written. Something for everyone?

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Jan 19, 2020 Eric rated it liked it · review of another edition

There is nothing like an engrossing short story such as Anyone Can Do It, Natural Disasters, and and Wrong Object in this volume. Sadly, many of the stories guest editor chose struck me as silly or wildly incoherent. Full disclosure: I did not like Doerr's book All the Light We Cannot See.

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Jan 15, 2020 Forrest rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, short-stories

I really liked the huge number of wildly diverse stories in here, and quite a few were excellent. Not many duds at all, tbh, though not enough consistency for me to give five stars.

Highlights were, "Anyone Can Do It", "Pity and Shame", and "Seeing Ershadi".

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Jan 09, 2020 William rated it liked it · review of another edition

As with any anthology, a mixed bag--a handful of stories I personally loved, 5 stars, a handful I didn't love, and a few I didn't finish. Definitely worth a look, probably something for anyone who enjoys short stories.

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Jan 08, 2020 Chris rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories

Pretty good collection.

Favorites:
Manueal Munoz: Anyone Can Do It
Alexis Schaitkin: Natural Disasters
Jenn Alandy Trahan: They Told Us Not to Say This
Nicole Krauss: Seeing Ershadi
Weike Wang: Omakase

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Jan 01, 2020 Shell rated it liked it · review of another edition

I look forward to this collection every year. It's my annual first-book-of-winter-break read. I'm not crazy about his selection of stories, though. I didn't connect emotionally to too many of them.

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Nov 18, 2019 Kat rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I think I liked about 3/20.

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Dec 29, 2019 Kayla rated it did not like it · review of another edition

One of the toughest collections to get through that I’ve read this year. Way too much speculative and historical fiction :/ The only story I really enjoyed was “Natural Disasters”

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Jan 22, 2020 Rehey rated it liked it · review of another edition

I loved last year’s collection, but I only really loved maybe 3-4 stories and there were a few I disliked a lot. 2.5

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Jan 16, 2020 Noah rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Unsure if this is my least favorite of the series, but boy were there certainly an incredible amount of duds.

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Dec 18, 2019 Sharon Jo rated it really liked it · review of another edition

There are some serious bangers in this anthology. I also enjoyed reading some shorter pieces from fiction authors whose novels I've read and realizing they...have a different side.

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Oct 15, 2019 Ruth Conrad rated it it was ok

These selections disappointed me, and I only enjoyed reading five of them.

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Dec 26, 2019 Catherine Corman rated it liked it · review of another edition

Their problems were immediate, distinct, and resolvable; mine were long-term, existential, and impossible.

-Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, "The Audition"

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Jan 10, 2020 Christina Gagliano rated it it was ok · review of another edition

So disappointing. . .I love Anthony Doerr's short stories and All the Light You Cannot See but he chose some very bizarre, unimpressive short stories as a guest editor for this collection.

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Jan 14, 2020 Sithara Kumar rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Omg YAWN!

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About Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr

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Anthony Doerr is the author of five books, The Shell Collector , About Grace , Memory Wall , Four Seasons in Rome and All the Light We Cannot See . Doerr’s fiction has won four O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won the Barnes & Noble ...more