"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. ♦

"Wakefield"

" Wakefield "
by E.L. Doctorow

Rating: 8.2


Short story told in first person about a man, Howard Wakefield, who leaves his home and family to live in the attic above his garage. A re-telling of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield.” A lawyer, Howard Wakefield, describes the odd circumstances under which he left his wife of fourteen years, Diana…

Every light in the house was on. I could hear them in the dining room; they were decorating the Christmas tree.
Hello? I shouted. I’m home! ♦

"Outage"

On the Edge
"Outage"
by John Updike

Rating: 7.7


Short story about Brad Morris, an older married man, in New England, during a power outage. The weatherperson on television had predicted a fierce autumn storm for New England. Brad Morris, who worked at home while his wife, Jane, managed a boutique in Boston, glanced out his windows.

“I think I do. He,” he said, “might call. Even she might, if the outage has made the news in Boston. You’ll be fine now. Listen. Lynne. The alarm has stopped beeping. It’s saying, ‘All is well. All is normal.’ It’s saying, ‘Get that man out of my house.’ ”
“No,” she weakly protested.
“It’s saying, ‘I’m in charge now.’ ” Brad turned his eyes from her nakedness, his wispy blonde’s. “It’s saying,” he told her, “ ‘This is how it is. This is reality.’ ”♦