31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 9: “An Orchid, Blooming” by Kathy Friedman
In Friedman’s story, family secrets, like orchids, flourish in darkness.
A Blog About Books and Reading
A Blog About Books and Reading
In Friedman’s story, family secrets, like orchids, flourish in darkness.
In a brief and barbed satire, Giller winner Omar El Akkad links our current geopolitical malaise with the capitalist impulse to sell stuff.
The author of Little Women was also an aficionado of “blood and thunder,” a mode represented in this story about grave robbing and its attendant consequences.
Pirandello’s story takes up the writer and dramatist’s great theme: the instability of identity and the untrustworthy nature of physical reality.
Lahiri’s story excavates the emotional toll on a woman who is carrying on an affair with a married man.
This story from the noted Egyptian author interrogates toxic power dynamics within institutions.
Millar’s story, ostensibly a psychological drama, is in fact a trenchant satire on the pernicious attractions of a particular kind of American dream.
Set in a tiny fishing village on Canada’s east coast, the story limns the distance between fact and supposition.
One of the author’s best, this story interrogates the notion of societal visibility through the prism of a middle-aged-woman working as a labourer flooding ice rinks in the middle of the night.
If the novel is a regal lion king, the short story is a cackling hyena.