They're Made Out of Meat by Terry Bisson

Welcome to Earth!

Two aliens are basically sitting around, chatting about humans and trying to decide whether we should even count as a sentient species. That’s the whole story. No action, no world-building dumps and only consisting of dialogue. 

It's absolutely hilarious.

I first read this story over twenty years ago and I still laugh every time I come back to it. There’s something endlessly funny about watching us humans get politely but firmly ridiculed by a pair of baffled extraterrestrials because, well, as the title says, we’re made out of meat.

It’s sci-fi comedy at its finest: quick, clever, and perfectly timed. Do yourself a favor, spend five minutes with this modern classic and enjoy seeing humanity roasted from orbit.

You can read this story HERE.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie

Hi-yo silver, away!

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven  has got to be one of the coolest titles for a short-story, ever. It seems fitting to also be the name of Sherman Alexie's excellent short-story collection. Many of the stories in here are about the struggle of Native/indigenous people to break free from the stereotypes, myths, and roles imposed by American culture. The playful and provocative title also highlights the author's dark humor and irony to expose racism and historical injustice. Similar to other writers that we have come across on this blog that focus on systematic racism or intergenerational trauma, humor becomes an act of resistance. Pay attention to the narrator's dreams in this story, which underline many of these key ideas and crop up again and again throughout the collection. 

There’s a funny and somewhat sad scene at the beginning of the story where the narrator wanders into a 7-Eleven in the middle of the night because he can’t sleep. Bad dreams. On a literal level, the dreams keep him awake, but they also point to something deeper. His restlessness, his loneliness, and the emotional baggage he can’t outrun. He’s drifting, looking for some kind of human connection, which is why his awkward, slightly absurd conversation with the graveyard-shift clerk feels both random and oddly necessary. It’s a moment of humor, but also one of need.

Through his reflections on a messy breakup with his ex-girlfriend, we learn that he left the reservation for Seattle, hoping for something better, only to return after the relationship falls apart. Back home, he’s unemployed, stuck, and weighed down by regret. The dreams become a space where guilt, shame, and longing surface, often accompanied by the historically violent conflict between indigenous people and white settlers. When he starts playing basketball again, it’s one of the few times the story lets him feel briefly whole, grounded in his body and his community. Alexie keeps the plot deceptively simple, but those dreams (both the ones that haunt him at night and the larger, broken dreams of escape and reinvention) carry the emotional core of the story, highlighting just how badly the narrator wants forgiveness, belonging, and some kind of peace.

Desertion by Clifford D. Simak

By Jove!

Clifford D. Simak often gets lumped in with the stereotype of stuffy, old-school science fiction writers, but so far that really hasn’t been my experience with his work. Desertion initially feels like a familiar space-exploration setup: a group of scientists trying and repeatedly failing to land on Jupiter. The planet’s gravity, atmosphere, and brutal climate make it a one-way trip for humans. No one who’s gone down has ever come back to tell the story.

To get around this, humanity develops a fascinating piece of technology that allows people to temporarily transform into “lopers,” a life form better suited to survive on Jupiter’s surface. It’s classic sci-fi in the best sense. It's imaginative without being overly complicated. Fowler, the man overseeing the project, is basically a corporate middle manager: a pencil pusher stuck in the machinery of a terraforming company, signing off on missions that send men to their deaths. Eventually, the guilt catches up with him and he decides it’s his turn to go down to Jupiter rather than hiding behind a desk.

What really gives the story its heart, though, is that Fowler brings his dog named Towser along for the journey. This choice doesn’t feel like a gimmick; rather, it feels deeply human. The relationship between Fowler and his dog adds warmth, humor, and emotional weight to what could have been a cold, technical story. The dog is his companion but also a grounding presence, a reminder of loyalty, trust, and unconditional attachment in the middle of an alien and hostile world. As events unfold, Simak uses that bond to challenge our assumptions about intelligence, communication, and even what it means to be “human.”

I won’t spoil what happens next, but there are a few unexpected turns that give the story a refreshing twist on an otherwise well-worn genre trope. Desertion isn’t trying to blow your mind with grand cosmic ideas or dense world-building. Instead, it’s thoughtful, smoothly written and gently philosophical. The idea of dogs being “man’s best friend” is taken to a surprisingly literal and oddly moving new level here. Clifford D. Simak might not be an author that I'll often turn to when looking to scratch that science-fiction short-story itch, but he's worth reading if you are interested in checking out some solid pre new-wave SF goodness.

Dead Men's Path by Chinua Achebe

Pay attention, now!

There is power in simplicity when it comes to short-stories but that doesn't mean they can't also be impactful. In only a few pages, Chinua Achebe manages to tackle some big themes in Dead Men’s Path: colonization, tradition vs. progress, generational clashes, African spiritual belief and resistance to imposed authority. What really struck me is how gently Achebe sets all of this up to come crashing down during the final scene. The foreshadowing in the opening paragraphs is subtle but effective with a sense early on that this neat, orderly vision of modernity is headed for trouble.

Set in pre-independence Nigeria, the story follows Michael Obi, a young and ambitious headmaster newly appointed to a school built by the colonial authorities. He takes enormous pride in the position and is eager to prove himself worthy of the white administration’s praise. To Obi, progress means clean grounds, strict rules, and total conformity to Western ideas of order and education. Tradition, on the other hand, strikes him as backward, irrational, and in need of being erased.

The central conflict arises when Obi discovers that the school sits directly on a footpath the villagers have used for generations. It is a a sacred path connecting the living to their ancestors and the unborn. To the local priest and the community, this path is spiritually essential. To Obi, it’s nothing more than an eyesore and an obstacle to modern discipline. What makes the conflict so powerful is how easily it could have been avoided. The priest is calm, reasonable, and open to compromise, but Obi’s rigid adherence to colonial ideals leaves no room for understanding or respect.

Achebe makes it clear that this isn’t just a personal disagreement. This conflict is a microcosm of colonialism itself. Obi, though African, has fully internalized the values of the colonial system and ends up enforcing them more harshly than the colonizers might have. In trying to sever the past in the name of progress, he creates chaos rather than order. By the end, the story shows how dangerous it is to dismiss tradition as mere superstition and how modernity, when imposed without empathy, can become just another form of oppression. It’s a simple story on the surface, but the roots of its conflict run deep, making Dead Men’s Path a sharp and unsettling reflection on what gets lost when progress refuses to listen.

You can read this story HERE. 

Work by Denis Johnson

Copper wires can fetch a pretty penny. 

I haven’t come across many writers who can do what Denis Johnson does: write about deeply flawed, often pretty ugly people and still treat them with real empathy. His characters are drug addicts, alcoholics, abusers. Not exactly the kind of people you are eager to root for and Work doesn’t ease you in gently. It opens with the narrator shooting up heroin in a hotel room with his girlfriend, getting into an argument, punching her in the stomach, then hopping on a bus and running away like a complete coward. A real charmer.

He eventually ends up at the local bar where he runs into an old friend named Wayne. The two of them decide the best way to make some quick cash is to rip copper wiring out of the walls of abandoned houses. That’s basically the plot and yet Johnson makes it feel full and alive. The prose has this steady, natural rhythm that’s almost poetic, even as it wades through some very bleak territory. The narrator is stuck in an endless loop of addiction, loneliness, guilt, regret, and despair. Johnson never excuses his behavior, but he also never flattens him into a monster. You are left feeling the weight of his damage without being told what to think.

There are two moments in the story that really stuck with me because they feel so strange and jarring, almost out of sync with everything else. The first is when the two men see a naked woman parasailing at night along the river near the abandoned houses. Is it a drug-induced hallucination? Something symbolic? Something real? Johnson leaves it deliberately unclear. That kind of ambiguity is a hallmark of his work. He trusts the reader to sit with uncertainty and draw their own conclusions.

The second moment is the final paragraph, which hit me like a ton of bricks. It comes out of nowhere and almost feels misplaced at first. The narrator recalls a painful childhood memory of his mother being abused by his father. It’s written in such a plain, direct, unadorned way that it’s devastating. In a few short lines, Johnson quietly opens a door into the narrator’s past and hints at the trauma underneath everything we have just witnessed.

Incredible stuff.

The Mourners by Bernard Malamud

Kessler, the egg candler.

Bernard Malamud is such a natural storyteller. Even when his stories are steeped in hardship and suffering, there’s almost always a deep current of compassion running underneath. A belief that flawed people are still capable of moral awakening or spiritual change. We see all of that on full display in The Mourners, a deceptively simple story about an elderly, retired egg candler named Kessler who is being evicted by his landlord, Gruber. Kessler lives alone in his small apartment, keeping mostly to himself. Early on, we learn that he abandoned his wife and children over thirty years ago. It's a small detail that seems almost incidental at first but as the story progress, seems to weigh heavily on him, suggesting a long history of guilt and regret.

After a petty argument involving the janitor, Gruber seizes what he’s clearly been waiting for: an excuse to get rid of the old man so he can jack up the rent for the next tenant. Gruber is small-minded, cruel, and rigidly focused on rules when they benefit him. Malamud makes it clear that this eviction isn’t really about policy. It’s more about power, convenience, and a total lack of empathy. Perhaps even some antisemitism as well. 

As the story progresses, the title takes on deeper meaning. Mourning here isn’t just about death in the literal sense. Kessler mourns the family he abandoned and almost certainly lost forever. He mourns the life he never lived and the moral failures he can’t undo. But the mourning doesn’t stop with him. There’s also a unsettling suggestion that Gruber himself is something to be mourned. He's morally and spiritually hollow, alive but inwardly dead.

This idea comes to a head during the story’s powerful climax, when Gruber storms into Kessler’s apartment yet again, threatening eviction. In a moment that’s both shocking and deeply symbolic, Kessler asks him, “Are you a Hitler or a Jew?” It’s a blunt, uncomfortable question, but that’s exactly the point. Malamud strips the situation down to its moral core. Gruber is being asked to choose: will he align himself with cruelty, authoritarianism, and indifference to suffering, or will he recognize his shared humanity and take responsibility for the harm he’s causing?

What makes this moment so effective is that it shifts the moral weight of the story. Kessler, for all his past failures, emerges as someone capable of moral and spiritual clarity, while Gruber is exposed as the one truly lacking it. The irony of the ending and the subtle shift in perspective towards Gruber, underscores Malamud’s belief in spiritual transformation. Redemption is possible, but only if one is willing to confront their own inhumanity.

By the end, The Mourners becomes a story not just about eviction or poverty, but about moral responsibility. It's about who we choose to be when faced with another person’s vulnerability. Kessler mourns his past, his family, and his losses, but he also ironically mourns Gruber, a man who still has time to change yet seems tragically unaware of how spiritually empty he has become.

You can read this story HERE.

The Thumb Mark of St. Peter by Agatha Christie

The Thumb Mark of St. Peter is probably my favorite Miss Marple story from The Thirteen Problems collection and a big reason for that is quite simple: she’s the one presenting the mystery this time. Any story that gives Miss Marple the floor is already off to a strong start. Like Hercule Poirot, she’s one of those classic Agatha Christie creations with a very distinct personality and her own brilliant approach to crime-solving. She may look like an unassuming elderly lady from a sleepy village who enjoys knitting, but don’t let that fool you! Her understanding of human nature, sharpened by decades of village life, makes her surprisingly formidable.

One of the pleasures of this story is just listening to her talk. Miss Marple’s dry wit, sly observations, and gentle little quips are genuinely funny, especially when you realize she’s usually the smartest person in the room and knows it. She doesn’t bulldoze her way through a mystery; she sidles up to it, smiling pleasantly the whole time. She even takes a break at one point in her narration to focus on her knitting. Classic Miss Marple. 

The mystery itself revolves around her niece, who was stuck in an unhappy marriage before her husband suddenly dies several years later. Miss Marple casually notes that there’s “insanity in the family,” and before long, rumors ripple through the village that the wife poisoned her husband. Perhaps with arsenic or poisoned mushrooms. On paper, the setup sounds fairly straightforward, even a little mundane.

However, the real fun here isn’t the plot itself; rather, it's the way Christie structures it. Miss Marple slowly feeds the group (and us readers) a series of small clues, hints, and suggestive details as the story unfolds. Nothing is emphasized too heavily, and no single fact screams “this is important!” Instead, Christie plants information that seems incidental at first, trusting the reader to tuck it away. For example, what does fish and the marks of St. Peter's thumb have to do with providing the answer to the husband's mysterious death? It’s classic Christie misdirection: you are given everything you need, just not in the order you expect, and not with any helpful flashing arrows pointing at the solution. 

As Miss Marple investigates, each observation adds another piece to the puzzle. You can almost feel Christie nudging the reader: Are you paying attention? Did you notice that detail? By the time the truth comes out, it feels less like a shocking twist and more like a satisfying click, when everything finally locks into place. The final reveal is admittedly a bit over-the-top, but somehow that only adds to the charm. It’s theatrical in that very Agatha Christie way and it works because the groundwork has been laid so carefully. Miss Marple, needles in hand, calmly dismantles the gossip, clears her niece’s name, and reminds everyone that appearances and village rumors are rarely the whole truth. Of course, watching her do it is an absolute delight.

Home for Christmas by Carson McCullers

Christmas Fruitcake. Pass.

Merry Christmas everyone! 

I wasn’t planning on featuring two Southern writers in one day, but sometimes these things line up nicely. After reviewing the simmering ugliness of Faulkner’s Dry September earlier, it’s refreshing to pivot to something more wholesome. Carson McCullers’ Home for Christmas is a tender coming-of-age story that couldn’t be more different in mood or intent. There’s no racial violence here, no overt cruelty. Just a young girl standing at the edge of adolescence, slowly realizing that Christmas doesn’t feel the way it used to.

Told in the first person, the story follows a pensive, introspective narrator who realizes that something fundamental is shifting. The magic of Christmas hasn’t disappeared entirely, but it’s thinning out, becoming harder to hold onto. She watches her younger sister, still a full believer in Santa Claus, too excited to sleep on Christmas Eve and recognizes the widening gap between them. Time is technically moving the same for both of them, but emotionally, they are in completely different worlds. As she puts it so simply and so perfectly: “The time was the same for both of us, and yet not at all the same.” That line alone captures the ache of growing up.

McCullers fills the story with familiar holiday rituals: driving with her father to gather elderberries, wandering through toy shops, decorating the Christmas tree, her mother baking fruitcakes. These details feel warm and lived-in, the kind of sensory memories that cling to childhood. But what makes them emotionally impactful is the narrator’s awareness that she’s already beginning to experience them differently. She’s not able to fully enjoy Christmas in the same way as her younger siblings, constantly measuring it against the past.

At just four pages, McCullers wastes no time getting to the emotional core of the story. On the surface, it’s about family, togetherness, laughter, and the cozy rituals that make Christmas feel special. Beneath that, though, there’s an underlying sadness. Each Christmas becomes a marker of time, a reminder that childhood is fleeting. The gifts still get opened, the tree still gets decorated, but something essential is slipping away and the narrator knows she can’t get it back. Home for Christmas captures that bittersweet moment when you realize that Christmas will keep coming, year after year, but you won’t experience that magic in quite the same way again like it was when you were a kid.

You can read this story HERE.

Dry September by William Faulkner

White power!

William Faulkner drops more n-bombs than most gangster rappers, which can be pretty shocking if you're not already familiar with his work. I still find it jarring and impossible to ignore. I honestly don’t know enough about Faulkner’s personal racial politics to say whether this reflects his own beliefs or whether he’s deliberately trying to capture the ugly, everyday racism of the early 20th-century American South as he saw it. Probably some combination of the two. Either way, I much prefer his short stories over his novels and Dry September is a strong example of why.

Even though I still think Faulkner is a bit overrated overall, there’s no denying that he was a a gifted writer. This story makes that clear almost immediately. His prose is tight, controlled, and unsettlingly poetic, which only heightens the horror of what’s happening. What really stood out to me is how effectively he uses the oppressive heat to mirror the simmering rage and racism of the white men at the center of the story. The town feels baked dry by the sun, tense and brittle, like it’s just waiting to crack.

Faulkner makes the heat feel almost alive. The air is thick, the dust hangs everywhere, and everything seems slowed down and irritated by the weather. As a reader, you can practically feel the sweat on the page. That physical discomfort feeds directly into the men’s emotional state. They are restless, angry, and looking for somewhere to unload all that pent-up frustration. When a rumor spreads about a Black man allegedly raping a white woman, it gives them exactly the excuse they have been waiting for. Logic, evidence, and truth don’t matter. The heat and their racism combine into something combustible, and from that point on, the outcome feels grimly inevitable.

The final section of the story is what stuck with me the most. Faulkner shifts perspective and gives us a glimpse into the inner life of the white mob leader, revealing not just a virulent racist but also an abusive husband trapped in a miserable domestic life. I’m not sure Faulkner wants us to sympathize with him (if anything, I don’t think he does), but the insight adds another layer to the story. It shows how this man’s cruelty spills out in every direction, not just toward Black people but toward anyone weaker than him. His violence isn’t situational; it’s foundational to who he is.

Dry September is disturbing, uncomfortable, and bleak, but I think that might have been the author's intention. Faulkner captures how racism isn’t just an ideology. It’s a pressure cooker, intensified by environment and collective rage. The heat doesn’t just set the scene; it becomes a metaphor for a society rotting from the inside, ready to explode at the slightest provocation.