A review by kawai
The Best American Short Stories 2009 by Heidi Pitlor, Alice Sebold

3.0

It feels a bit more rangy than some of the previous collections, and many of the stories were more memorable, which isn't always the case with these anthologies, at least for me. But you're always going to get a mixed bag with the 'Best American', so a reader's mileage will vary. Every year some subset of famously anthologized authors are included in this collection, and more often than not I'm left scratching my head at the reasons behind their selection; the 2009 edition seemed more free of that, at least for me as a reader.

Thus I found it better than many other years of this series, although I'm not sure I'd mark it among the best (just for comparison purposes for people familiar with this series, the 2007 edition remains one of my favorite).