The Best American Short Stories 2019

by Anthony Doerr (Editor), Heidi Pitlor (Editor)

Overview

#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.

“As soon as you complete a description of what a good story must be, a new example flutters through an open window, lands on your sleeve, and proves your description wrong,” writes Anthony Doerr about the task of selecting The Best American Short Stories 2019. The year’s best stories are a diverse, addictive group exploring everything from America’s rich rural culture to its online teen culture to the fragile nature of the therapist-client relationship. This astonishing collection brings together the realistic and dystopic, humor and terror. For Doerr, “with every new artist, we simultaneously refine and expand our understanding of what the form can be.”
 
The Best American Short Stories 2019 includes Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Jamel Brinkley, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ursula K. Le Guin, Manuel Muñoz, Sigrid Nunez, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Jim Shepherd, Weike Wang, and others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781328484246
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Series:	Best American Short Stories Series
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	188,733
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

ANTHONY DOERR is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel All the Light We Cannot See. He is also the author of the two story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won four O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.

HEIDI PITLOR is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has been the series editor for The Best American Short Stories since 2007. She is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage.

Hometown:

Boise, Idaho

Date of Birth:

October 27, 1973

Place of Birth:

Cleveland, Ohio

Education:

B.A., Bowdoin College, 1995; M.F.A., Bowling Green State University, 1999

Table of Contents

ANTHONY DOERR. Introdution
NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH. The Era
KATHLEEN ALCOTT. Natural Light
WENDELL BERRY. The Great Interruption: The Story of a Famous Story of Old Port William and How It Ceased To Be Told (1935–1978)
JAMEL BRINKLEY. No More Than a Bubble
DEBORAH EISENBERG. The Third Tower
JULIA ELLIOTT. Hellion
JEFFREY EUGENIDES. Bronze
ELLA MARTINSEN GORHAM. Protozoa
NICOLE KRAUSS. Seeing Ershadi
URSULA K. LE GUIN. Pity and Shame
MANUEL MUÑOZ. Anyone Can Do It
SIGRID NUNEZ. The Plan
MARIA REVA. Letter of Apology
KAREN RUSSELL. Black Corfu
SAÏD SAYRAFIEZADEH. Audition
ALEXIS SCHAITKIN. Natural Disasters
JIM SHEPARD. Our Day of Grace
MONA SIMPSON. Wrong Object
JENN ALANDY TRAHAN. They Told Us Not to Say This
WEIKE WANG. Omakase

Editorial Reviews

"Every year the Best American Short Stories make for a vibrant collection, and hearing these stories on audio with perfectly paired narrators is a delight." — AudioFile Magazine —

From the Publisher

2019-07-28
Latest installment of the long-running (since 1915, in fact) story anthology.

Helmed by a different editor each year (in 2018, it was Roxane Gay, and in 2017, Meg Wolitzer), the series now falls to fiction/memoir writer Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See, 2014, etc.) along with series editor Pitlor. A highlight is the opener, an assured work of post-apocalyptic fiction by young writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that's full of surprises for something in such a convention-governed genre: The apocalypse in question is rather vaguely environmental, and it makes Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go seem light and cheerful by contrast: "Jimmy was a shoelooker who cooked his head in a food zapper," writes Adjei-Brenyah, each word carrying meaning in the mind of the 15-year-old narrator, who's pretty clearly doomed. In Kathleen Alcott's "Natural Light," which follows, a young woman discovers a photograph of her mother in a "museum crowded with tourists." Just what her mother is doing is something for the reader to wonder at, even as Alcott calmly goes on to reveal the fact that the mother is five years dead and the narrator lonely in the wake of a collapsed marriage, suggesting along the way that no one can ever really know another's struggles; as the narrator's father says of a secret enshrined in the image, "She never told you about that time in her life, and I believed that was her choice and her right." In Nicole Krauss' "Seeing Ershadi," an Iranian movie actor means very different things to different dreamers, while Maria Reva's lyrical "Letter of Apology" is a flawless distillation of life under totalitarianism that packs all the punch of a Kundera novel in the space of just a dozen-odd pages. If the collection has a theme, it might be mutual incomprehension, a theme ably worked by Weike Wang in her standout closing story, "Omakase," centering on "one out of a billion or so Asian girl-white guy couples walking around on this earth."

A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.

Kirkus Reviews