skopia
Berlin cleaned houses, worked emergency rooms, raised four sons, and drank. Forty-three stories out of that life, Alaska to Mexico City, written so plainly and fast you miss how much is inside them.
Twelve narrators tell their own Iraq, from a Marine who shot dogs in the street to a diplomat ordered to teach Iraqi children baseball. Klay is sharpest on coming home.
Bertie Wooster's friend Bingo Little falls in love in chapter after chapter, and Bertie's cousins run a betting book on which country vicar preaches longest. Jeeves repairs the damage in a sentence.
In a dead Provencal valley a shepherd pushes acorns into the ground, one at a time. Thirty years and two wars later the forest holds ten thousand people who never learn his name.
An economy that uses up land and people is not efficient but suicidal, Berry argues. He writes from a Kentucky hillside he farms with horses, and insists eating is an agricultural act.
A woman bargains with God to make the telephone ring, and Parker's comedy runs on exactly that much desperation. Her Manhattan drinkers and discarded women are hilarious until suddenly they are not.
A balloon settles over forty-five blocks of Manhattan and New Yorkers read meanings into it. Barthelme's deadpan collages taught two generations of American writers that a story need not make ordinary sense.
Paley wrote as people talk, in the Bronx Yiddish and Greenwich Village argument of women raising children alone, and got more life into three slim collections than most novelists manage in a career.
Sick of Moscow, a young nobleman soldiers in the Caucasus and sets about living like the Cossacks he admires, wanting a girl promised to one of them. Turgenev called it his favorite Tolstoy.
Carter opened the old fairy tales and took out what was always inside: appetite, blood, and women who want things. Her Bluebeard is a French Marquis, and her Beauty walks toward the tiger.
A dumpy Catholic priest with an umbrella solves crimes by imagining himself into the criminal until he could have done it. Chesterton answered Sherlock Holmes with conscience rather than forensics.
A Greenwich Village couple hire a young Black man as gardener and painter's model, and cannot see the person. Fourteen stories in which Hughes strips white kindness down to appetite and cruelty.
Three Palestinian men pay a driver to smuggle them from Iraq into Kuwait inside a water tanker. Kanafani turned those hours in the metal into the defining image of Palestinian exile.
Robots run on three laws: never harm a human, obey orders, survive. Asimov's stories hunt the cracks in those rules, and roboticists still argue about the Three Laws when drafting AI ethics.
Nine stories of Indians and Indian Americans living between two countries, told with a calm that makes the losses land late. A married couple confess things to each other during nightly power cuts.
Pushkin cut Russian storytelling down to speed and clarity. An officer bullies an old countess for the secret of three winning cards, and a young soldier is swept into Pugachev's peasant rebellion.
Raised by wolves and schooled by a bear and a black panther, Mowgli lives hunted by the tiger Shere Khan. Kipling's Law of the Jungle went into English as a phrase everyone uses.
Félicité serves one Norman household for half a century, loses everyone she loves, and fastens her faith to a stuffed parrot. Flaubert grants her a dignity the world never did.
Hari Seldon predicts the Galactic Empire's fall and thirty thousand years of darkness, then founds a colony to cut the wait to one thousand. Paul Krugman went into economics wanting Seldon's job.
Shot by a Gestapo officer in 1942, Schulz left stories that turn a Galician backwater into a world where his father breeds birds in the attic and the calendar grows a thirteenth month.
A merchant drives into a blizzard to close a cheap land deal, dragging the servant he underpays. The stories around it, of angels and pilgrims and soldiers, ask what a life is for.
Turgenev sends a hunter across the provinces with a gun and a dog, and the serfs he meets emerge as individuals. The book did for serfdom what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for slavery.
Twenty-two linked stories about people in an Ohio town who cannot say what they feel, except to the young reporter George Willard. Faulkner called Anderson the father of his generation of American writers.
Twelve cases at 221B Baker Street, from the king undone by Irene Adler to the whistle in the night at Stoke Moran. No human character in fiction has been played by more actors.
Chiang treats theology, linguistics and free will with the rigor of proofs. A linguist learns an alien script written all at once, and it changes how she experiences her whole life.
Riding with Bolshevik Cossacks through Poland in 1920, a Jewish intellectual watches them sack towns and kill prisoners. Babel writes the atrocity in sentences so beautiful that the effect is obscene.
A civil servant wakes to find his nose gone and walking Petersburg in a senior official's uniform. Elsewhere a clerk saves for an overcoat, and Gogol's comedy tips steadily into nightmare.
The morning of a wealthy family's garden party, a carter dies in the cottages below and a young daughter carries the leftovers down to his house. Mansfield catches life where it cracks.
Modern Chinese literature begins here. Ah Q, a village laborer, turns every beating into a spiritual victory, and a madman reads the Confucian classics until the words eat people surface between the lines.
Shalamov spent seventeen years in the Kolyma camps. His stories are short, about frostbite and stolen bread and men too weak to lift a shovel, and he insists that suffering teaches nothing.
Poe invented the detective story and perfected the tale of terror. His narrators wall people up alive, hear a heart beating under the floorboards, and watch a house split apart.
Ten young Florentines flee the plague to a country house and spend ten days telling a hundred stories of seduced wives, crooked friars, and lucky fools. The jokes still land six centuries later.
Scheherazade marries a king who executes each new wife at dawn and stays alive by telling stories that break off before the end. Sinbad, Aladdin, and Ali Baba reached the world through her.
Munro set her stories in Ontario towns where a woman's life can turn on something said at a kitchen table. She fits more into forty pages than most novelists get into a novel.
On a Georgia back road a grandmother who talked her family into a detour meets an escaped killer. O'Connor's stories stay funny until the violence arrives, which is how grace arrives too.
An officer demonstrates his execution machine with love, and a hunger artist starves himself before crowds that have stopped watching. Kafka's imagination runs at full strength in the short forms.
Chaucer's thirty pilgrims ride to Canterbury swapping stories, the knight a courtly romance and the miller a filthy joke, and he wrote them in English when serious poetry meant Latin or French.
At Yalta a married man meets a woman walking a small dog and cannot shake her. Chekhov judges no one and resolves nothing, and the stories come out quietly devastating.
Borges invented a library holding every possible book and a man cursed with perfect memory. The stories run ten pages and leave the world looking like something someone made up.