It has been a point of honor with me not to republish an English story, nor a translation from a foreign author. I have also made it a rule not to include more than one story by an individual author in the volume. The general and particular results of my study will be found explained and carefully detailed in the supplementary part of the volume. The Yearbook for 1918 contains three new features. I have compiled an index of all short stories published in a selected list of volumes issued during the year; another index is devoted to critical articles on the short story, and noteworthy reviews published in English and American magazines and newspapers this year; and I have added exact volume and page references to the index of short stories published in American magazines. As in past years it has been my pleasure and honor to associate this annual with the names of Benjamin Rosenblatt, Richard Matthews Hallet, and Wilbur Daniel Steele, whose stories, “Zelig,” “Making Port,” and “Ching, Ching, Chinaman,” seemed to me respectively the best short stories of 1915, 1916, and 1917, so it is my wish this year to dedicate the best that I have found in the American magazines as the fruit of my labors to Arthur Johnson, whose stories, “The Little Family,” “His New Mortal Coil,” and “The Visit of the Master” seem to me to be among the finest imaginative contributions to the short story made by an American artist this year. _Edward J. O’Brien._ _Bass River, Massachusetts_, November 6, 1918. THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1918 A SIMPLE ACT OF PIETY _By_ ACHMED ABDULLAH From _The All-Story Weekly_ _Copyright, 1918, by The Frank A. Munsey Co._ _Copyright, 1919, by Achmed Abdullah._ His affair that night was prosy. He was intending the murder of an old Spanish woman around the corner, on the Bowery, whom he had known for years, with whom he had always exchanged courteous greetings, and whom he neither liked nor disliked. He did kill her; and she knew that he was going to the minute he came into her stuffy, smelly shop, looming tall and bland, and yellow, and unearthly Chinese from behind the shapeless bundles of second-hand goods that cluttered the doorway. He wished her good evening in tones that were silvery, but seemed tainted by something unnatural. She was uncertain what it was, and this very uncertainty increased her horror. She felt her hair rise as if drawn by a shivery wind. At the very last she caught a glimmer of the truth in his narrow-lidded, purple-black eyes. But it was too late. The lean, curved knife was in his hand and across her scraggy throat—there was a choked gurgle, a crimson line broadening to a crimson smear, a thudding fall—and that was the end of the affair as far as she was concerned. ――――