"East Wind"

"East Wind"
by Julian Barnes

Rating: 6.9



Short story set in an English seaside town about a divorced man’s love affair with a waitress named Andrea from the former East Germany. Vernon, a divorced man in his late thirties moves to a town on the East Anglian coast. At a restaurant called the Right Plaice, he meets…

Vernon looked out at the concrete strip and the shingle beach, at the gray sea and the gray sky beyond. The view was pretending that it had always been the same, for as long as people had sat at this café window. Except that there used to be a row of beach huts blocking the view. Then someone had burned them down. ♦

"A Man Like Him"

"A Man Like Him"
by Yiyun Li

Rating: 6.8



Short story about a retired teacher in China who takes an interest in the case of a teen-age girl who is suing her father for being unfaithful to her mother. Teacher Fei, a 66-year-old retired art teacher, reads a magazine article about a nineteen-year-old girl…

In the dusk, a thin mist hung in the air. The two men shook hands as they parted. There was little more for them to say to each other, and Teacher Fei watched the man walk down the street, knowing that nothing would be changed by their brief meeting. He thought about his mother, who would be eager to see him return, though she would not show her anxiety to Mrs. Luo. He thought about his girl student: fifty-two she would be now, no doubt a wife and mother herself, and he hoped that he had not been mistaken and she had grown into a woman like his mother. She—the girl student, whom he had never seen again—would outlive him, just as his mother had outlived his father, their beauty and wisdom the saving grace for a man like him, a man like his father. But for the other man, who would be watching the night fall around the orange halo of the street lamps with neither longing nor dread, what did the future offer but the comfort of knowing that he would, when it was time for his daughter to carry out her plan of revenge, cooperate with a gentle willingness? ♦

"Them Old Cowboy Songs"

"Them Old Cowboy Songs"
by Annie Proulx

Rating: 8.9



Short story, set in 1885 near the Wyoming-Colorado border, about a young homesteading couple named Archie and Rose McLaverty.

The following spring, as he rode past the cabin, he saw that the frost heaves had tipped the stone over and that the ridge-pole of the roof had broken under a heavy weight of snow. He rode on, singing, "When the green grass comes, and the wild rose blooms," one of Archie's songs, and wondering if Gold Dust had made it through again. ♦

"Bullfighting"

"Bullfighting"
by Roddy Doyle

Rating: 7.1



Short story about a middle-aged man who takes a vacation to Spain with three male friends. Donal couldn’t really remember life before the children. There’d been four, but three of them were teen-agers, more or less their own men. Except for the youngest, Peter, who still held Donal’s…

—How do you get vomit out of water?
—Don’t worry about it. We’ll throw in a bucket of chlorine. That should fix it. It’ll eat it or something.
Gerry was sitting beside him.
—All right?
—Grand, said Donal. Thanks.
—No bother.
—A great day, said Donal. Wasn’t it?
—Yeah, said Gerry. Brilliant.
—Brilliant.
He lay there for a while longer, his face on his arm. He felt good—clear. He’d get up in a minute. He might finish the bottle. He was fine.
—Fuckin’ brilliant.
This was living, he thought. This was happiness.♦

"The Repatriates"

"The Repatriates"
by Sana Krasikov

Rating: 7.4



Short story about a Russian couple returning to Moscow after living in the United States for many years. The husband is taking them back with the hope of starting an investment business. The last days of Grisha and Lera Arsenyev’s marriage might have been a story fashioned out of commonplace…

After a while, they seemed to have no reaction at all to her story, which was what made her stop telling it.
When she was working again, in a lab at a medical-research park in Eastview, surrounded by test tubes and electrophoresis trays, she had a lot of time to think about Grisha. She imagined failures and disappointments for him in proportion to his smug magnanimous “principles,” in proportion to his pietistic love of his soil, his secret belief that he deserved to be a national hero. She imagined him bankrupt, drinking at eleven in the morning. She imagined him in a coffin surrounded by strangers and none of his old friends. But sometimes this hatred broke like a wave, collapsing under its own weight, and before it would begin to well up again she suddenly felt nothing but pure compassion for him, a kindness and forgiveness that almost broke her heart. ♦

"The Lie"

"The Lie"
by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Rating: 7.5



Short story about a man who plays hooky from work and lies to his boss about his baby dying. The narrator had used up all his sick days, but when the alarm went off and the baby started squalling, he knew he wasn’t going to work.

She wasn’t asking a question, she was making a demand. And I wasn’t about to answer her because the baby was dead and she was dead, too. Radko was dead, Jeannie the secretary whose last name I didn’t even know, and Joel Chinowski, and all the rest of them. Very slowly, button by button, I did up my shirt. Then I set my empty beer bottle down on the counter as carefully as if it were full to the lip and went on out the door and into the night, looking for somebody I could tell all about it. ♦

"The House Behind a Weeping Cherry"

"The House Behind a Weeping Cherry"
by Ha Jin

Rating: 8.4



Short story, told in the first person, about a Chinese immigrant man in Flushing, Queens, who serves as a chauffeur for his fellow tenants, who are prostitutes. The narrator tells about the departure of his roommate. His landlady, Mrs. Chen, offered not to raise his rent if he was willing…

Fortunately, there was no outcall that night. When the other two women had gone to bed, Huong and I slipped out of the house. I carried her suitcase while she lugged my bag. The weeping cherry blurred in the haze, its crown edgeless, like a small hill. A truck was rumbling down Main Street as we strode away, arm in arm, without looking back. ♦