"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. ♦

"Great Experiment"

"Great Experiment"
by Jeffrey Eugenides

Rating:7.2



Short story about an editor at a small publishing house in Chicago who conspires with an accountant to embezzle money from his wealthy publisher. “If you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?” It was the city that wanted to know. Chicago.

“Anyway, you did good, kiddo. You boiled Tocqueville down to his essence. I remember when I first read this book. Blew me away.”
In his vibrant, scratchy voice, Jimmy began to recite a passage of “Democracy in America.” It was the passage they were putting on the bookmarks. Out in Montecito, bald, liver-spotted, in a tank top and shorts probably, the old libertine and libertarian crowed out his favorite lines: “In that land the great experiment of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis was to be made by civilized man,” Jimmy read, “and it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past.”
Snow pummelled the glass. The lakefront was obscured, the water too. Kendall was enclosed in a dark space high above a city rising from a coast engulfed in darkness.
“That fucking kills me,” Jimmy said. “Every time.” ♦

"The Region of Unlikeness"

"The Region of Unlikeness"
by Rivka Galchen

Rating: 8.4



Short story, written in the first person, about a female graduate student who becomes involved with two older men who are interested in the science of time travel. Narrator describes meeting the two men, Jacob and Ilan, by chance in a coffee shop on the Upper West Side.

We know that the general theory of relativity is compatible with the existence of space-times in which travel to the past or remote future is possible. The logician Kurt Gödel proved this back in the late nineteen-forties, and it remains essentially undisputed. Whether or not humans (in our very particular space-time) can in fact travel to the past—we still don’t know. Maybe. Surely our world obeys rules still alien to our imaginations. Maybe Jacob is my destiny. Regardless, I continue to avoid him. ♦

"The Bell Ringer"

"The Bell Ringer"
by John Burnside

Rating: 8.2



Short story about a woman who realizes that her marriage is unfulfilling and decides to take up bell ringing. Eva Lowe turns off the main coastal road and takes the back way through Kinaldy woods, a magical route she associates with her childhood and her father’s love of folk tales.

As soon as he was in, the car pulled away, heading out of the village and west, toward the lower woods, where the snow would be thick all night, thick and heavy and, even on the road that ran up to Kinaldy and Lathockar, completely unmarked, except for a line of tire tracks that would soon vanish into whiteness. ♦

"Raj, Bohemian"

"Raj, Bohemian"
by Hari Kunzru

Rating: 8.8



Short story about a hipster who discovers his friends are inserting product placements in their social lives. The narrator’s hip friends are poor but beautiful and have hectic social lives. Sunita, a close friend of the narrator, invites him to one of her themed dinner parties; the invitation says “Eating is Honest" printed in an old-fashioned cursive font.

“You look awful,” Raj said. “Are you feeling O.K.?”
I stared up at him. He was holding out a glass of water.
“Is it good?” I asked.
He shook his head, not understanding.
“Is it better than other brands of water?”
“It’s just water. From the tap.”
I took a sip.
“Are you sick?” he asked gently.
“No.”
“What is it, then?”
I closed my eyes. “I’m not sure. I think I might be bored.”
“Ah.”
“Is there anything going on tonight?”
He smiled and started to tell me about a party, a guest list, a secret venue. I took out my phone to punch in the contact number.. ♦

"Leaving for Kenosha"

"Leaving for Kenosha"
by Richard Ford

Rating: 7.5



Short story, set in New Orleans on the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, in which a father takes his teen-age daughter to the Lower Ninth Ward to say goodbye to a classmate who is moving to Wisconsin. It was the anniversary of the disaster.

And for an instant, then, Walter experienced a sensation of something being about to happen around him. It wasn’t clear what. But a sensation of impendment. Neither good nor bad. Though it also occurred to him that if he could just pause in his thinking now, not follow his thoughts any further, just breathe, then this sensation would in all likelihood develop into nothing bad. So that he went on with driving back toward the center of the city, rising in the steamy distance of the late afternoon. He would make no more efforts to answer Louise’s childish questions about Italy and China. No words were really the right words to answer with. In a day he’d forget all this. This was a smart child—Louise—but not smart beyond her years. She would forget many things, too. ♦

"The Shelter of the World"

"The Shelter of the World"
by Salman Rushdie

Rating: 7.9



Short story about Emperor Akbar the Great and his imaginary wife. Emperor Akbar the Great, of Sikri, had succumbed to fantasy. Queens floated within his palaces like ghosts, yet one of these royal personages didn’t really exist.

As for the Emperor, he never again referred to himself in the singular in the presence of another person. He was plural in the eyes of the world, plural even in the judgment of the woman who loved him, and plural he would remain. He had learned his lesson. ♦

"Free Radicals"

"Free Radicals"
by Alice Munro

Rating: 6.4



Short story about a widow visited by an intruder. Writer describes the widow, Nita, living alone in the weeks after the death of her husband, Rich, a college professor. He’d been eighty-one years old and in fine health.

“Was he hurt?”
“Killed. Instantly. Serves him right.”
There followed a kindly stern lecture. Leaving keys in the car. Woman living alone. These days you never know.
Never know. ♦

"Friendly Fire"

"Friendly Fire"
by Tessa Hadley

Rating: 8.2



Short story about a British woman, Shelley, whose son, Anthony, is fighting in Afghanistan. Shelley was helping out her friend Pam. Pam had her own cleaning business. She’d been hired to clean an industrial warehouse. Shelley had agreed to go along; it was a few weeks before Christmas.

They sat there for a few minutes, too tired to move, giving the car time to recover, talking about their Christmas shopping, who they’d bought for, what they still had to get. More than half the short winter’s day had passed while they were in the warehouse. The sky was a blue so pale that it was almost no color; wooded bluffs loomed above them, beyond the industrial estate, marking the edge of the city. The sun had dropped behind the bluffs already, so that the tops of the bare trees showed up finely spiky, like hair or fur, against a yellow glow of light from somewhere out of sight. While they waited, their breath began to fog up the car windows. ♦

"The Reptile Garden"

"The Reptile Garden"
by Louise Erdrich

Rating: 8.3



Short story about Evelina, a half-Chippewa college student in North Dakota who works in a psychiatric hospital. The narrator describes her parents taking her to the University of North Dakota in 1972, for the start of her freshman year. She spends most of her freshman year reading poetry.

“Hey,” Corwin said after a while, “you don’t have to go anywhere with this thing just yet. Take it easy.”
I didn’t answer, but after a while I felt happier, thinking that he was right.
As we passed onto the reservation, I saw that the ditches were burning. Fires had been set to clear the spring stubble, and a thin glaze of smoke hung over the road in a steady cloud. After Corwin dropped me off, I sat outside with my grandfather Mooshum, drinking cool water from tall galvanized water cans. It occurred to me that I’d be all right. I didn’t have to do anything, not right away. I didn’t even have to record my sensations in a diary. I could just sit with Mooshum, drinking water. As the sun went down, light shot through the smoke and turned the air around us a dark gold that cast an unsettling radiance on the trees and houses. Mooshum and I watched as the light began to recede. It was very cold, but still we sat until the darkness had a brown edge to it, and my mother came to the door, expressing no surprise at seeing me there.
“Come in here, you two,” she said, her voice gentle. ♦

"Ash Monday"

"Ash Monday"
by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Rating: 8.0



Short story about two neighbors in a California canyon, a thirteen-year-old boy, Dill, who lives with his mother, and a Japanese man, Sanjuro, who lives with his wife. A thirteen-year-old boy, Dill, stand outside of his house, smelling gasoline.

She just stood there motionless, as the wind took the flames out of the bamboo and into the yard, rolling on across the hill away from her house and her garden and her tea things and the memory of her mother to set them down in a brilliant sparking burst that was exactly like a fireworks display, cleansing and pure and joyful, on the roof of the house below. ♦