The Best American Short Stories 2019

by Anthony Doerr

  What was that? the man said once they were outside. It had got colder. It would take them fifteen minutes to walk home.

  I’m not mad at him, the woman said.

  And you shouldn’t be. He was just telling a story.

  Again, I’m not mad at him.

  The man understood. They walked in silence for a while before he said, Look, I wasn’t the one who told the story and you have to learn not to take everything so personally. You take everything so personally.

  Do I?

  Also, you have to be a little more self-aware.

  Aware of what?

  The man sighed.

  Aware of what?

  The man said, Never mind. Then he put a hand on her head and told her to stop overthinking it.

  Contributors’ Notes

  NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH is from Spring Valley, New York. He graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University. He was the 2016–17 Olive B. O’Connor fellow in fiction at Colgate University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Guernica, Esquire, The Paris Review, Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing, Printer’s Row, Gravel, and others. Friday Black is his first book.

  ▪ In writing “The Era” I found a new way to arrive at a story. I discovered that sometimes just a voice could be the spark. I had what would become Ben’s voice rattling in my brain for a while. It was a postapocalyptic-sad-boy chorus that was strange and funny and alive to me. An idea of a world emerged from this voice, a world that was brutal in the name of “honesty,” a world that had learned to forsake kindness as a virtue. And once these general ideas were in place, I let the voice take me where it would.

  Born in Northern California in 1988, KATHLEEN ALCOTT is the author of the novels America Was Hard to Find, Infinite Home, and The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times Magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, Tin House, and ZYZZYVA; her short story “Reputation Management” was short-listed for the 2017 Sunday Times Short Story Award. A fellow of the MacDowell Colony, she has taught fiction and literature at Columbia University and Bennington College.

  ▪ Having lost my parents by my early twenties, I often considered how I might maintain a relationship with each—which stories of theirs might take on different meaning as my life changed, which objects left behind might alter in emotional valence. But at the center of these thoughts was a certain dynamic: myself as protean, my parents’ lives as fixed where they left them—never, as the story begins, providing any new information.

  As my parents’ lives grew further away, I found that they were not the statuary I expected, and that certain truths I had took to be calcified were not; I learned, for instance, that a turquoise ring of my mother’s, something she’d worn my entire life and whose sentimental value I believed to be significant, was actually a gift from a college boyfriend she nurtured no fond feeling for—she just couldn’t, reported a mutual acquaintance of theirs to me, ever get it off. My experience of my father, after his death in my adolescence, was not dissimilar; once I was twenty, a well-meaning friend of his typed up some old correspondence of theirs, revising a narrative I’d built of his adventurous, politically driven early years as an itinerant journalist into something else: a portrait of a very troubled, potentially bipolar young man who seemed motivated mostly by the blankness of any new place.

  I must have felt afraid of some other fact that lurked for me, regarding either of them, particularly in the wake of a very painful separation that left me, at the end of my twenties, without much of a plan for my future; it is always when I fear what’s ahead that I begin to doubt and revisit what, or who, is behind. I spent the year after the relationship ended in a string of houses that did not belong to me, renting sublets in increasingly remote parts of the country, and wrote “Natural Light” during my stay in the last, in a ramshackle farmhouse in Maine, writing all morning and swimming all afternoon.

  WENDELL BERRY is native to the community of Port Royal, Kentucky, to which both sides of his family have belonged for more than two hundred years. Since 1965, he and Tanya Amy Berry have lived on and from a marginal farm in the Kentucky River valley. He has written fiction, poetry, and essays. For most of his life he has maintained an interest in issues of land use, and he has tried to promote the good care and good health of the land and the people.

  ▪ I have always known more stories, and have told more, than I could write. Now and again, because of increasing age and experience or the accumulation of work, I have more or less suddenly become capable of writing so as to be read by strangers a story that, until then, had been only spoken and heard in my own neighborhood. Behind this now-written story is a lived one that, for a while, could be passed about among people who knew the setting and, so to speak, the original cast. Writing such a story calls for the characters and the situation to be newly imagined, in order to give it the plausibility previously supplied by local tellers and hearers. This can be accomplished by moving the lived story into a fictional community already prepared, as has been done here.

  JAMEL BRINKLEY is from the Bronx and Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories, a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, A Public Space, Gulf Coast, LitMag, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, and Tin House, and other publications. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was also a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.

  ▪ If my files are accurate, the opening line of the very first draft of this story was this: “The first time I heard ‘Brooklyn Zoo’ by Ol’ Dirty Bastard, I was at a house party in Flatbush with my friend, a guy who called himself Claudius Van Clyde.” For a while, “Brooklyn Zoo” was my working title, and I wanted to draw upon the energy, aggression, and arrogance that characterize that song in order to counter the passivity, inwardness, and timidity of the narrators I often find myself using in first-person stories. But then, in order to counter all that male intensity and assuredness, the story demanded that Ben and his friend be out of their depth, in terms of their age and maturity, and in terms of their understanding of their environment, of the women they pursue, and of their problematic, exoticizing desires.

  It is a cliché in fiction to have a scene in which a dog barks mysteriously in the distance, but what happens when a barking dog actually shows up? When it occurs here and the young women respond, Claudius, who has acted as the catalyst for much of the story, decides he’s had enough, but then Ben, driven by his lust and his preoccupation with his father, takes the baton. I was excited to see what would occur after that, and while I was surprised by the specifics of what ensued, it made total sense to me to discover that neither of the two guys were ever really in control of what was happening.

  DEBORAH EISENBERG’s most recent collection of stories is Your Duck Is My Duck. She lives in New York City, teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and has received many awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship.

  ▪ I’d say that none of the stories I’ve written are what you’d call characteristic of my stories, but this one is possibly the least characteristic, as well as the most recently written. It began—uncharacteristically—with the title, which popped into my head one day. I thought, Somebody should write something called “The Third Tower,” and after a time during which nobody seemed to do that, I thought, Oh, well, I guess I will.

  I really didn’t know what snagged me on that title, but it was always in my mind as I worked, and eventually, after many trials, I finished the story. So then there I was, with a story set in a sort of near future or a parallel present, about a girl—a young laborer—whose imagination, curiosity, vitality, and quality of experience are being purposefully reduced.
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  Maybe it’s asking a lot of the reader to explore the dynamic space between those two elements, but that’s how it worked for me; the character and her plight arose from the title. The title obviously implies a relationship between an image of two towers—almost inevitably in this era the image of the two annihilated World Trade Center Towers—and a third tower. That third tower might suggest, for example, the Freedom Tower, a triumphalist tourist magnet erected ostensibly as a monument to those murdered on September 11, 2001, or the first of horrifyingly proliferating skyscrapers (this tower, that tower) signifying, above all, money, or just an abstract tower representing surveillance or domination.

  So it turned out that what had interested me about that phrase, the third tower, were matters concerning the systemic opportunism of power and money: catastrophe as a rationale for increasing economic inequities, as a rationale for invasions and resource appropriations and wars and oppression that benefit only the powerful; catastrophe utilized as an instrument to make a population compliant or inadvertently complicit—incapable of significant dissent or incapable even of comprehending what is happening to it. Naturally, plenty of writers have investigated these processes in different ways, but unfortunately, there’s always room for more investigation.

  JULIA ELLIOTT’s writing has appeared in Tin House, The Georgia Review, Conjunctions, the New York Times, and other publications. She has won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and her stories have been anthologized in Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses and a previous edition of Best American Short Stories. Her debut story collection, The Wilds, chosen by Kirkus, BuzzFeed, Book Riot, and Electric Literature as one of the Best Books of 2014, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her first novel, The New and Improved Romie Futch, arrived in 2015.

  ▪ In a bloated early draft of my novel, The New and Improved Romie Futch, I got sidetracked by a digression about Romie’s first erotic experience, a blissful romp with a rural third cousin during which the two prepubescent kids smear molten tar all over each other, a transcendent moment followed by a brutal reckoning. In the original flashback, Romie’s grandmother catches them and cleans them up with gasoline and a hard-bristled brush, nearly flaying them, leaving them humiliated in sodden transparent clothes. Recalling badass girl cousins from my own youth, so-called tomboys who could hold their own among hellion boys, the kind of girls who could drive go-carts one-handed while taking cool puffs from stolen cigarette butts, I realized that Butter’s perspective on this incident would be far more interesting than Romie’s. When I took the cutting from my novel and switched the point of view, my story “Hellion” bloomed from the corpse of that killed darling.

  JEFFREY EUGENIDES is the author of three novels: The Virgin Suicides, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of which appeared in 2018; Middlesex, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize; and The Marriage Plot, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named as the best novel of 2011 by independent booksellers in the United States. Fresh Complaint, a collection of short stories, appeared in 2017. Eugenides is the Lewis and Loretta Glucksman Professor in American Letters at New York University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  ▪ According to a file on my computer, the first impulse of the story that became “Bronze” was written on July 23, 2013. That was nine months after my novel The Marriage Plot had come out, at a time when I was working on a book of short stories. Clearly, I had intended for “Bronze” to be part of that collection.

  It didn’t work out that way. The working title of that fragment was called “Boy on Train.” I knew that it involved an encounter between a college freshman and a professional actor who are forced to sit together on a crowded Amtrak train, during a trip from New York to Providence, in 1978. I knew that the point of view should shift back and forth between these two characters and that their meeting should be dramatized moment by moment. The idea was to give the story a feeling of immediacy, as if its events were happening in real time.

  I made decent progress at first. The language of the story, highly inflected by the characters’ personalities, felt freeing, allowing me to reproduce the way the world, or at least my world, had sounded back in ’78. I worked on the story off and on. Sometimes I put it away for a few months to write another story, or to play around with an idea for a novel. There was a moment, early in 2017, when I felt optimistic enough about finishing the story that I told my publisher that it would be included in my forthcoming collection. In fact, a German journalist recently reminded me that an early notice for what later became Fresh Complaint had claimed that the collection’s title would be “Bronze” and that it would contain a story about a college freshman on a train. He asked me what had happened.

  I couldn’t finish “Bronze,” was what. I kept getting hung up by the opening. So much information had to be established that it was difficult to get it all in while keeping the story moving. Whenever I tried to simplify things by removing some aspect of the story, the story lost some of its verve and eventual payoff. So, I would put that stuff back in and quickly get tangled up again. The first page of “Bronze” still seems to me its weakest part; after that, the story gets rolling. But it’s possible that I can’t read the opening without remembering how much trouble it caused me.

  It was only after Fresh Complaint had gone off to the printers that I marshaled the courage to face down “Bronze” yet again, released from any expectation that it would be included in the collection. During that final showdown, I managed to get the opening to work, and to polish the rest.

  All this chaos turned out for the best, however. The New Yorker published “Bronze” in early 2018. In the months afterward, I began writing other stories featuring Eugene, its young hero. And so, rather than being orphaned from my previous collection, “Bronze” has begun to grow into a book of its own, the difficulty I had with the story’s beginning now the beginning of something bigger.

  ELLA MARTINSEN GORHAM lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children. Her writing has appeared in ZYZZYVA and New England Review. She is at work on a collection of stories, and also a novel.

  ▪ I saw that my children and their friends documented much of their lives on the screens of phones and laptops. I began to think of them as inhabiting two worlds: the touchable, physical world and the digital world. They slipped back and forth between them. This notion gave rise to the story “Protozoa.”

  I was interested in a girl of thirteen navigating the two worlds. I wanted to capture the moment she decides to shed her childhood self and become more provocative. The girl, Noa, transforms herself by building a new, darker online profile. She grabs the attention of an older girl, Aurora Waters, and the two fall into an intense friendship though they never meet in person. I had the idea that the physical distance between them could enable a kind of intimacy.

  Noa and Aurora develop a ritual of sharing tears. I was inspired by accounts of the Japanese practice rui-katsu, in which groups of people convene to cry together as a therapeutic release. I wanted to know what that would look like among girls in search of an outlet for their emotions. As it turns out, the girls’ motives for sharing tears in the story are mixed. The true feelings, sadness and anger, are shaded with a sense of intrigue in the act of crying for an audience.

  Noa also pushes herself to hook up with a boy named Paddy, who then dubs her “Protozoa” in an online roast. While both Aurora and Paddy play a part in Noa’s reinvention, I didn’t know in early drafts whose influence was the more powerful. As I revised the story, it became clear that Noa’s stronger drive was to impress Aurora. This led to the final scene, in which Noa posts a video of herself weeping and waits for a reaction.

  NICOLE KRAUSS has been hailed by the New York Times as “one of America’s most important novelists.” She is the author of the international bestsellers Forest Dark, Great House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orange Prize, a
nd The History of Love, which won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes. Her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. In 2007 she was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and in 2010 she was chosen by The New Yorker for their “Twenty Under Forty” list. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages.

  ▪ Like Romi in the story, I first saw Taste of Cherry in London in 1998, the year it was released. I was living in student housing near Russell Square, and the film was playing nearby at the Renoir, whose marquee advertising foreign films was dwarfed by the giant concrete Brutalist building in whose underground the cinema was housed. I went alone, which was the way I usually saw films at that time. I was already a fan of Abbas Kiarostami’s films, but when Ershadi’s face appeared on the screen “it did something to me,” as the narrator of the story says, and what it did to me, and continued doing to me for the next twenty years, is what I tried to work out in this story. I don’t have a good memory for most films: what I remember is usually atmospheric rather than details of plots or dialogue. But Ershadi’s face, and scenes from Taste of Cherry, continued to return to me, often without having been evoked by any obvious reminder. The memory of Ershadi’s face as Mr. Badii, and those dusty hills outside Tehran, seemed to have become involuntary, lodged at some mysterious juncture of synapses in my brain that was sometimes tripped, and over time he became a kind of landmark in my thoughts, one that only gained feeling the more I passed through it, or it through me.

  Six years later I traveled to Japan for the first time and visited the temples of Kyoto. Did I really think that I saw Ershadi in the Zen garden of Nanzen-ji? I remember believing that I had seen him. But now I can’t say for sure if what I am remembering is a scene I invented for this story, or something that actually happened to me. I really can’t.