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Two ballerinas carpool to their next lesson together and uncover some surprising information on the way. Motor neurone disease left her mind as sharp as ever, but it gradually destroyed her muscles, making it hard for her to communicate with her family. It left her in a wheelchair, catheterised and fed through a tube. Diane fought against the disease for the last 2 years of her life and had every possible medical treatment. Toward the end of the novel, Belly’s attraction to Cam wanes, and after Jeremiah reveals his interest in her, she can no longer deny her crush on Conrad. Unwilling to let her affection remain unspoken, Belly confronts Conrad and tells him that she loves him. He rejects her, which leads to a physical altercation between the Fisher brothers. After Laurel breaks up the fight, Belly discovers the secret behind underlying tension in the house; Susannah’s cancer has returned, and she does not have long to live. Belly switches her attention from romance to supporting the Fisher family through their painful time. She comforts Jeremiah, promises Susannah that she’ll look after Conrad when she’s gone, and listens to Conrad express his devastation. Belly and Conrad share a kiss, but Conrad explains he is too distraught about his mother to start a relationship now. A brother and sister uncover an old letter from their parents that makes them question everything about their family history.
A character participates in a march for a cause they believe in when violence breaks out against the people. Miscommunication, antic disposition, voyeurism, glee – this translation of one of Aichinger’s most famous stories provides windows upon windows upon windows. Simply expressed and made to linger long in the mind, it was my first experience of the prizewinning Austrian writer and her dark, precise prose styling, and the start of an ongoing pursuit on my part to read more of her work. Eley Williams “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe (1843) Cheever is known as a chronicler of the suburbs, but in this story the leafy neighbourhood of Shady Hill, a recurring location in his fiction, blends the domestic with something much stranger, almost magical. The story is comic (its title mirrors William Wycherley’s 1675 comedy of manners The Country-Wife), but darker currents work beneath its surface and it builds to a stunning finale that is one of the most rapturous passages Cheever ever wrote. “An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad (1897) The ambassador of a small country spends his final moments of life in conversation with his assassin. Two characters swear never to fall in love or date. One of them becomes disappointed the other kept their oath.After their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, a group of women spend the rest of their road trip waiting for help. The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa Lahiri, will be published on 7 March. “A Simple Heart” by Gustave Flaubert (1877) The reality of apartheid, and later the effects of its aftermath, dominates Gordimer’s fiction. Here her narrator, who has escaped the tension of Johannesburg to play at farming in a rural suburb, becomes enraged when, following the death and autopsy of one of his workers’ brothers, the authorities return the wrong body for burial. Despite his efforts to achieve justice, the story’s final, bitterly ironic lines reveal that he is blind to his own racism. “Big Two-Hearted River” by Ernest Hemingway (1925) This great and underrated masterpiece is a meditation on good and evil and especially about the way that people’s expectations and assumptions about us may wear us down and eventually force us into compliance with their view. But it is a much deeper and more biblical story than that and, like any great work of art, resists reduction. Berriault, who died in 1999, is known as a San Francisco writer. A wonderful sampling of her stories is available in Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories. George Saunders “The Love of a Good Woman” by Alice Munro (1998)
As a public school superintendent, you must build and get funding to achieve the status of greatest public school district in the world.
Do you have a story to tell?
A character finishes creating the first time travel machine, only to discover it can only move in two-minute increments. A pregnant teen faces the reality that her life is going to be much different from her high school peers. A small community puts aside their differences to resist a corporation looking to make some changes to their town.
A character hosts an auction for the items of a beloved neighbor who has recently passed, to most of the neighborhood's dismay.A dramedy about a separated couple raising their kids under the same rough, waiting for the day they'll all go to college. When described in summary, there is a danger of reducing Borges to a collection of tropes: labyrinths, mirrors, invented books (he avoided “the madness of composing vast books” by pretending they exist and writing commentaries on them). But with these elements he explored some of the most thrilling ideas in fiction. Labyrinths and strange books are both present here, as is a theory of existence that anticipates the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Extraordinarily, all these elements are enfolded within an account of a wartime espionage mission. “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” by Tadeusz Borowski (1946) A door-to-door salesperson struggles to make ends meet and acts out in a moment of desperation with the next person they talk to. A character is sold the "Best Year of Their Life" by an illustrious company, with the caveat that they must die afterward. A game in which you confront the reality of death and its closeness to your life and the life of those you love.
As a ghost haunting a house, you must figure out ways to scare the families living there enough to make them move out. Alice Munro once said: “I want the story to exist somewhere so that in a way it’s still happening … I don’t want it to be shut up in the book and put away – oh well, that’s what happened.” Atwood articulates the same position in this fun, thought-provoking story that begins with a man meeting a woman, then offers variants of what happens next. Any ending that isn’t death, she concludes, is false, and the interesting part of stories isn’t what happens, but how and why. “Going to Meet the Man” by James Baldwin (1965) She was fully aware of what the future held and decided to refuse artificial ventilation. Rather than the fear of dying by choking or suffocation, she wanted a doctor to help her die when she was no longer able to communicate with her family and friends. She discussed this with her husband of 25 years, Brian, who had to come to terms with what she wanted and to respect her decision. Diane had to go through the one thing she had foreseen and was afraid of – and there was nothing I could do to help. After a series of grizzly murders on full moon nights, a small medieval village must figure out which among them is a werewolf.A man finds out the tape worm in his body is beginning to take control of his mind; the other problem- he is too afraid of surgery to remove it. Machado takes a grisly campfire tale (“The Green Ribbon”), combines it with the purported medical practice of suturing a woman’s perineum with an extra stitch or two after childbirth to increase her husband’s pleasure, and creates a powerful modern fable about misogyny and motherhood. Before her wedding day, as Machado expertly builds the atmosphere of foreboding, the narrator notes that, “Brides never fare well in stories. Stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle”. “Madame Tellier’s House” by Guy de Maupassant (1881) Visions of an alternative Britain … Kazuo Ishiguro. Photograph: Alastair Grant/AP “A Village After Dark” by Kazuo Ishiguro (2001)
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