Anthony Doerr - The Best American Short Stories 2019

Copyright 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright 2019 by Anthony Doerr

All Rights Reserved

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ISSN 0067-6233 (print)

ISSN 2573-4784 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-328-46582-5 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-328-48424-6 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-328-46712-6 (ebook)

ISBN 978-0-358-17210-9 (audio)

Jacket design by Christopher Moisan

Doerr photograph Ulf Andersen

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The Era by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. First published in Guernica, April 2, 2018. Copyright 2018 by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Reprinted from Friday Black by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Natural Light by Kathleen Alcott. First published in Zoetrope: All-Story, vol. 22, no. 1. Copyright 2018 by Kathleen Alcott. Reprinted by permission of Kathleen Alcott.

The Great Interruption: The Story of a Famous Story of Old Port William and How It Ceased To Be Told (19351978) by Wendell Berry. First published in Threepenny Review, 155. Copyright 2018 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission of Threepenny Review and Wendell Berry.

No More Than a Bubble from A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley. First published in LitMag no. 2. Copyright 2018 by Jamel Brinkley. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

The Third Tower by Deborah Eisenberg. First published in Ploughshares, vol. 44,no. 1. From Your Duck Is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg. Copyright 2018 by Deborah Eisenberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Hellion by Julia Elliott. First published in The Georgia Review, 72.2. Copyright 2018 by Julia Elliott. Reprinted by permission of Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc.

Bronze by Jeffrey Eugenides. First published in The New Yorker, February 5, 2018. Copyright 2018 by Jeffrey Eugenides. Reprinted by permission of Jeffrey Eugenides.

Protozoa by Ella Martinsen Gorham. First published in New England Review, vol. 39, no. 4. Copyright 2018 by Ella Martinsen Gorham. Reprinted by permission of Ella Martinsen Gorham.

Seeing Ershadi by Nicole Krauss. First published in The New Yorker, March 5, 2018. From a short-story collection by Nicole Krauss to be published by HarperCollins in 2020. Copyright 2018, 2020 by Nicole Krauss. By permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Pity and Shame by Ursula K. Le Guin. First published in Tin House, vol. 19, no. 4. Copyright 2018 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Reprinted by permission of Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust.

Anyone Can Do It by Manuel Muoz. First published in Zyzzyva , no. 113. Copyright 2018 by Manuel Muoz. Reprinted by permission of Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists. All rights reserved.

The Plan by Sigrid Nunez. First published in LitMag, Issue 2. Copyright 2018 by Sigrid Nunez. Reprinted by permission of Sigrid Nunez.

Letter of Apology by Maria Reva. First published in Granta, 145. Copyright 2018 by Maria Reva. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Black Corfu, copyright 2019 by Karen Russell. Originally appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, vol. 22, no. 2; from Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Audition by Sad Sayrafiezadeh. First published in The New Yorker, September 10, 2018. Copyright 2018 by Sad Sayrafiezadeh. Reprinted by permission of Sad Sayrafiezadeh c/o The Zo Pagnamenta Agency.

Natural Disasters by Alexis Schaitkin. First published in Ecotone, no. 24. Copyright 2018 by Alexis Schaitkin. Reprinted by permission of Alexis Schaitkin.

Our Day of Grace by Jim Shepard. First published in Zoetrope: All-Story, vol. 22, no. 1. Copyright 2018 by Jim Shepard. Reprinted by permission of Jim Shepard.

Wrong Object by Mona Simpson. First published in Harpers, November 2018. Copyright 2018 by Mona Simpson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

They Told Us Not to Say This by Jenn Alandy Trahan. First published in Harpers, September 2018. Copyright 2018 by Jenn Alandy Trahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Omakase by Weike Wang. First published in The New Yorker, June 18, 2018. Copyright 2018 by Weike Wang. Reprinted by permission of Weike Wang.

My kids, twelve-year-old twins , both love books. At least they do for now. I say this not with immodesty but awe. They also love YouTube, as well as my phone (we are holding out as long as possible before getting them their own phones), certain movies that are streaming, and TV shows and video games. But they prefer their fiction and other long-form reading between covers and on pages made of paper. The fact that they choose to read anything long-form that is not required for school gives me hope. According to a Pew Research poll, in 2000, 48 percent of Americans did not use the internet; in 2018, only 11 percent were nonusers. This is my thirteenth foreword to The Best American Short Stories, and I wonder if there has ever been a more change-filled thirteen years in the way that we spend our day-to-day lives. Our phones can alert us to upcoming traffic, accidents, and even roadkill. Amazon Alexa can order your refrigerator to turn on its icemaker. I dont need to recount all of the methods by which we now stay in touch, fall in love, champion causes, shame others. And read.

Early on in his reading for this book, guest editor Anthony Doerr described to me his challenge in reorienting to each new short story sent to him120 distinct voices, plots, sets of charactersand frankly, I was relieved to hear that I was not alone. I confess that in the past few years, I have found my own attention span fractured. We are now, many of us, moving so quickly from task to task, from texting to life to work to social media, that it has grown a little difficult to engage in something that requires our minds to slow down for an extended period of time.

In my house, we do impose screen limits and constantly urge our children to be more in the world, to have physical experiences, but also to get comfortable with being bored. Its OK to just sit still and be blank, I tell my kids. Look out the window sometimes. Think, imagine, let your minds wanderand see where your mind lands. Of course, moments of stillness and blankness have become rarer for most of us. I too am not all that comfortable with boredom anymore. And so I find my childrens engagement with books these days almost miraculous. I will not lie: given the choice between a book and a computer, they will usually choose a computer. But I have seen them fall into certain booksand it does look like they have in fact landed somewhere they want to be. During a quiet afternoon or before bed, I have watched them turn pages, oblivious to me and the dog and everything else, and I am reminded of what a story can do. A good narrative can slow a mind thats moving too quickly. A great story is its own kind of meditation, and at the risk of sounding even more woo-woo, its own kind of out-of-body experience. A ceding of ones heartbeat and focus to another place and time. What a gift this is, especially now.