31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 27: “Sin” by Cynthia Ozick
The ninety-four-year-old author’s story, about art and failure, is charged with typically graceful and metaphorical language.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 26: “The Fate of the Son of the Man on the Horse” by Rawi Hage
Hage’s story of a doomed, ineffectual man is a layered consideration of religion, history, and the nature of celebrity.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 25: “Ordinary Love Song” by Alex Pugsley
Pugsley resurrects a seldom-used literary form – the epistolary story – and repurposes it for the internet age.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 24: “June Bugs” by Kim Fu
Fu’s three-part story fuses realism with fabulist elements.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 23: “The Journal” by Stanislaw Lem; Antonia Lloyd-Jones, trans.
A story that takes up philosophical questions about the nature of creation and the paradoxes inherent in a divine creator becomes a more straightforward SF tale in its final moments.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 22: “Raw Material” by A.S. Byatt
Byatt’s story, about a creative writing teacher and a promising older student, contains a submerged lesson about how to write worthwhile literature.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 21: “Theft” by Katherine Anne Porter
Porter’s suggestive and imagistic style lends her story an acute psychological insight.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 20: “Glory” by Janice Lynn Mather
This story, about a teenage girl sent to live with her grandmother during the final months of her pregnancy, is about a struggle between conflicting notions contained in the title.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 19: “Happy Birthday” by Clarice Lispector; Katrina Dodson, trans.
From the woman who many consider to be Brazil’s greatest writer, a story about the family party from hell.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 18: “A Man Becomes a Nazi” by Anna Seghers; Margo Bettauer Dembo, trans.
Seghers’s story, about the conditions necessary for an unhappy man to become radicalized, holds pressing lessons for our current historical moment.