In the 2019 installment of this annual anthology, author Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See) and series editor Heidi Pitlor have parsed thousands of stories to select 20 standouts from the last year. The stories are penned by both up-and-coming authors, such as Ella Martinsen and Julia Hellion, and well-established literary masters like Jeffery Eugenides and Deborah Eisenberg. A few particularly memorable tales in The Best American Short Stories 2019 include Nicole Krauss's "Seeing Ershadi," a retrospective meditation on female disillusionment and isolation; Karen Russell's "Black Corfu," a darkly vibrant tale of a doctor charged with disabling the undead, who loses his family in the face of medical controversy; and Wendell Berry's "The Great Interruption: The Story of a Famous Story of Old Port William and How It Ceased to Be Told," a bittersweet folk tale about the loss of small communities.
Reflecting Doerr's own literary interests, these pieces often delight in the description of everyday minutiae and time/space-specific settings and atmospheres. Whether mildly futuristic and disconcerting (like Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's "The Era") or casually nostalgic (as Eugenides's "Bronze" is in its depiction of 1978 New York, "dying. But that was OK"), these stories have deep, physical roots. Berry's "The Great Interruption" displays this theme perhaps most entertainingly, as a narrator, nameless until the last line, unfolds a comical story within a story in order to mourn quotidian pleasures of yesteryear. While these thematic ties weave through the collection, ultimately this anthology rejoices in its range of subject matter, its emotional complexity and its depiction of quietly powerful moments. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor