Types of fiction - including "otra-fiction" - the Best American Short Stories 2019

Having read roughly the first half of the Anthony Doerr edited The Best American Short Stories - 2019, we can see that AD has, it seems, selected the stories with diversity in mind, both ethnically and stylistically. Among the for 10 or so stories we see historical fiction (Wendell Berry's stoy in his childhood Kentucky town and a surprising Western-genre piece from the late Ursula LeGuin), scifi/futurism (possibly the best story in the first half of the volume, The Three Towers, from Deborah Eisenberg), a few that seem very much like auto-fiction in that they appear to be extremely close to the lived experiences of the authors (stories fro Jamel Brinkley, unknown to me until now, Jeffrey Eugenides, Nicole Krauss), social realism (a story about immigrants and migrant labor from Manuel Munoz), and a few pieces that seem to me the opposite of auto-fiction: stories told from either first or close-third person that try to present the interior life of characters whom we imagine to be as far as possible from the life and experiences of the author. This genre, let's call it "otra-fiction," can be used to explore the mind set of contemporary youth, obsessed with social media and/or video games (see Ella Martensen Gorham's Protozoa in this collection, or for that matter Jamal Jan Kochal's story in current NYer); to depict the lives of people in extreme poverty and with little or know formal education of aspiration - the people least likely to read contemporary fiction (see Julia Elliott's Hellion); or to depict the life of a disturbed and completely unsympathetic character, notably Sigrid Nunez's The Plan, about a man who is planning to commit murder, specifically to murder his wife - it is impossible to imagine this story being published let alone included in a Best-of anthology were it written by a man - the very distance between the author and her material makes the story palatable, at least to some. Doerr's taste does seem to skew toward the conventional - the Eisenberg story is the only one in the first half of the collection that could be considered experimental in form - and hedoes seem to favor longer narratives (he himself is the author of best-selling novel in that tradition), but overall the collection does seem representative of (some of) the best writing being published today in the U.S. and Canada.