This one was edited by Edward P. Jones, and while there’s not quite the same tonal shifts that you see with different editors of Best American Stories, Jones’s picks tend to be longer and bit grimmer than usual (for instance, two stories with dead dogs, one story with a parrot run over by a lawn mower, and at least one rape). While some of it was even more brutal than I care for, there were quite a few highlights:

• James Lee Burke, “A Season of Regret” — this is just a great suspense story set in Montana, about an old guy in conflict with some bikers
• Joshua Ferris, “Ghost Town Choir” — about a country music singer’s breakup with a single mother; the child, in need of some kind of male role model, keeps visiting the singer. What’s neat is the shift in POV — two first-person narrators (the singer and the kid) with nothing but a space break to signify the shift. Ferris pulls it off well.
• Tim Gautreaux, “The Safe” — a locked safe is delivered to a junkyard, and the story is the mystery of what’s inside.
• Cary Holladay, “Hollyhocks” — she had a story in the 2009 anthology, which was interesting enough, but this story is about some of the same characters. What I like about novels is that you get more than just a glimpse, and Holladay seems to be working on a series of stories about the Fenton family, in rural Virginia in the 1920s, and I love the way the two stories are linked.
• Daniel Wallace, “A Terrible Thing” — a man has a history of dating disfigured women (one missing a hand, one with burn scars, etc.); his wife, who is not disfigured, finds out, and begins obsessing over what could be wrong with herself.