The Barber's Unhappiness by George Saunders

It's a George Saunders double-feature today and both are masterpieces. 

Nobody in the short-story game today writes like George Saunders. Granted, his quirky style isn't for everyone but it just clicks with me. It actually took a while for me to warm up to him but now I'm hooked. His idiosyncratic style and off-beat humor is such a delight, so refreshing to read. Even more remarkable is that despite the general weirdness or surreal elements, these stories remain deeply human. It's the unexpected emotional pathos that took my surprise in many of his stories, including The Barber's Unhappiness, featuring a fairly unlikeable protagonist and yet by the end, it's difficult not to root for him.

Saunder's first-person narration is incredible. It’s not quite stream-of-consciousness, but we’re completely embedded in the barber’s inner world—his anxious thoughts, paranoia and deeply neurotic personality. He overanalyzes everything, spirals into self-doubt at the slightest provocation and constantly beats himself up for his perceived failures. It’s often very funny with an underlying sadness. The Barber is an everyman in the truest sense with many relatable concerns: aging, loneliness, indecision, missed chances, the fear that time is running out to find love or meaning. Who hasn’t been there?

His mind bounces from one thought to another, interrupting itself, doubling back, chasing tangents, and catastrophizing every possible outcome. Self-indulgent? Sure. But that’s exactly what makes it so relatable. Saunders captures that exhausting mental loop so accurately it almost hurts. You feel like you’re sitting in the barber’s head, watching the wild, frantic machinery of his thoughts spin out of control. When he meets a beautiful younger woman at his driving class, that familiar mix of hope, disbelief, and self-sabotage kicks into high gear. As overwhelming as that might sound, it is also very very funny. Saunders wrings humor from every anxious pause and overthought moment, piling cringe on top of observation, wit, and oddball charm. Somehow, he keeps it from tipping into misery. I still don’t know how he pulls it off, but the end result is completely absorbing and surprisingly delightful.

Then we come to the end, which is just perfect. It’s ambiguous, tender, and tinged with hope. Suggesting that maybe, just maybe, things could work out for the barber and his new lady friend. No grand resolutions, no miracles. Just the fragile possibility of genuine connection. 

The Semplica Girl Diaries by George Saunders

Laughter best medicine, etc., etc., 

I could throw around a whole dictionary’s worth of superlatives for The Semplica Girl Diaries by George Saunders and it still wouldn't do this amazing short-story justice. This has to be a modern classic, right? It’s one of those stories that feels immediately iconic, the kind you finish and then just sit there thinking, how did Saunders even come up with this?

Told through a brilliant first-person diary format, the narration is hilarious, quirky and poignant all at once. Saunders leans hard into satire with light sci-fi touches, creating a world that’s only a few unsettling steps removed from our own. On the surface, the narrator is just a well-meaning suburban dad trying to keep up appearances, give his kids a good life, and prove to himself and others that he’s made it. Beneath the glossy surface, the story becomes a warped, nightmarish version of the American Dream, where status symbols matter more than empathy and “keeping up with the Joneses” slides effortlessly into moral horror. You see, it has become a status symbol to display immigrant women as yard decorations, connected by harmless wires through their skulls. These women volunteer and get paid to be there, but this is still weirdly disturbing, right?

What makes the satire so effective is how normal everything feels to the narrator. He talks about debt, social pressure, birthday parties, and lawn envy with the same anxious sincerity, even as the world around him grows more grotesque. Saunders skewers the idea that success and happiness can be bought, measured, or displayed, showing how the American Dream (when reduced to consumption and comparison) can hollow people out without them even noticing. It’s hilarious in that awkwardly uncomfortable kind of way and by the end, it lands with a emotional sucker punch that’s both shocking and deeply moving. 

I may not have been entirely convinced before but George Saunders is truly a masterful short-story writer.

Closer by Greg Egan

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

I’ll probably need to revisit Closer by Greg Egan a few more times before I fully wrap my head around it, because there is a lot going on here. It’s deeply philosophical and the final act gets super weird in that very Egan way. Subjective versus objective reality, shared memories, merging identities, gender swapping, consciousness transfer into clones and the slow drift toward a singularity of mind. There’s no shortage of big ideas here and often felt like I was constantly sprinting just to keep up.

The story keeps circling one deceptively simple question: how can one person ever truly understand the consciousness of another? In Egan’s future, advanced technology brings humanity tantalizingly close to an answer. At eighteen, the narrator undergoes a procedure know as the switch, a common rite of passage in which the physical brain is removed and replaced by the "jewel" (this tech appears in another Egan story called "Learning to Be Me"), a device implanted shortly after birth that can store, copy, and manipulate consciousness itself. The science is fascinating but it’s really just the framework for a much more intimate exploration of connection and identity.

That’s where the line “Nobody wants to spend eternity alone” comes in and why it’s so important that it opens and closes the story. Michael, the narrator, is in a relationship with Sian, yet he’s constantly uneasy about how little he can truly know her inner world. Even with all this advanced technology, there’s still a gap between minds that can’t quite be bridged. His reflection that “Language had evolved to facilitate cooperation in the conquest of the physical world, not to describe subjective reality” drives home just how limited our tools for understanding one another really are.

The tragedy and the tenderness of Closer is that the desire to fully merge with another person contains curiosity and intellectual ambition but more importantly, it’s this unshakeable fear of isolation stretched across eternity. If consciousness can be copied, extended, or made effectively immortal, then loneliness becomes an even more terrifying prospect. That single line reframes the story as a technological possibility, intrinsically linked to a very human anxiety: no matter how advanced we become, the deepest motivation behind all this mind-bending science is still the same old hope of not having to be alone forever.

You can read this story HERE.

Magnificent Desolation by Jess Walter

Buzz Aldrin.

Neil Armstrong tends to hog all the glory from the 1969 moon landing. Everyone knows his famous line, but Buzz Aldrin (and, let’s be honest, the other guy) rarely get a mention. Jess Walter’s Magnificent Desolation takes its title from Aldrin’s much less celebrated remark when he stepped onto the moon, which feels perfectly on-brand for a story about being perpetually overshadowed. The result is a quirky, darkly funny piece sprinkled with interesting factoids about the moon-landing and a gently mocking tone that never takes itself too seriously.

The narrator is a seventh-grade science teacher with a crush on the mother of one of his students, a boy who is failing because his religious beliefs won’t allow him to accept empirical evidence. Buzz Aldrin is also the teacher’s personal hero, so the science-versus-religion debate becomes both deeply personal and comically overblown. Walter has a lot of fun poking at this clash, letting it spiral into awkward conversations with the kid and misplaced bravado.

The story builds toward a hilariously unhinged moment when the narrator loses his cool after the woman’s ex-husband claims the moon landing was fake. What should have been a routine parent-teacher conference turns into a physical altercation that lands the narrator in the hospital. Overall, Magnificent Desolation is a quick, entertaining read, full of offbeat humor and a narrator whose earnest devotion to science (and Buzz Aldrin) makes his slow unraveling surprisingly funny.

You can read this story HERE.

Safe Harbor by Morgan Talty

Coffee and Cigarettes. 

There’s a simplicity to Morgan Talty’s stripped-down writing style that really works for me. There’s no fluff, filler, or unnecessary detours. Just tightly focused storytelling that lets small, seemingly inconsequential details evoke emotional resonance. It’s a narrative approach that taps directly into pure raw emotion without ever spelling things out and Talty pulls it off again and again in Night of the Living Rez.

He uses this same technique in Safe Harbor, which follows the narrator visiting his mother at a rehab facility. She keeps asking him to bring her cigarettes. They drink coffee together. Too hot at first, then cold enough that it has to be reheated in the microwave. Outside, the narrator notices an exterminator checking rat traps along the building. On the surface, these details feel odd or mundane, almost random. But that’s kind of the point. Talty lasers in on the narrator's pensive observations and awkward moments with his mother to show how emotionally distant and fractured this relationship is between them. The big feelings aren’t expressed through dramatic conversations; rather, they are buried beneath small rituals, silences, and observations that say more than the characters ever do out loud.

We are only given brief exchanges between mother and son, yet we still get a strong sense of their shared history and unresolved grief hanging between them. When the narrator explicitly reflects on generational trauma (whether parents or children suffer from it more), it feels less like a thesis statement and more like a thought he’s been carrying around for years, never quite able to resolve it.

The ending is abrupt and unsettling. The mother has a seizure and is rushed to the hospital, and the narrator, following behind, ends up in a serious car accident and is taken to the same hospital. It’s jarring, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, but it too feels intentionally unresolved. The story doesn’t offer closure or answers, just the sense of shared, unspoken grief and damage that continues to ripple outward. If anything, that ambiguity reinforces Talty’s approach: trauma isn’t neatly explained or wrapped up. It just keeps showing up in these seemingly inconsequential ways.

Cat in the Rain by Ernest Hemingway

Wet kitty.

Cat in the Rain is quintessential Hemingway. Similar to his other short-fiction, nothing really happens in terms of plot. It's all about inference, reading between the lines, suggestion, metaphor, everything left unsaid. 

An American couple is vacationing at a hotel in Italy. The wife is looking out the window on a rainy day and sees a cat hiding under a table. She tells her husband that she wants to rescue the cat. The husband, George, is indifferent towards his wife and even snaps at her out of sheer annoyance. The emotional isolation between them is palpable. 

Perhaps the cat represents the wife’s unfulfilled emotional needs, especially her desire for care, agency and connection within an emotionally distant marriage. Hemingway’s minimalist style makes the lack of warmth between the couple more striking. George remains passive and disengaged, absorbed in his reading, while his wife longs for small comforts: the cat, longer hair, silverware, candles. These details suggest a craving for stability, nurturing and being seen. The rain and the closed hotel room reinforce her sense of confinement and isolation.

Importantly, the cat isn’t just about wanting a pet; it’s about wanting something to care for and, implicitly, wanting to be cared about. The hotelkeeper’s brief attentiveness contrasts sharply with George’s indifference, underscoring how starved she is for simple kindness. When a cat is eventually sent to her (possibly not even the same one) it suggests a hollow attempt to satisfy a deeper need that remains unresolved. This story exposes the emotional emptiness beneath this seemingly ordinary relationship filled with longing and dissatisfaction.

You can read this story HERE.

The Weirdos by Ottessa Moshfegh

Boom shakalaka 

I was glad to finally read something by Ottessa Moshfegh, who comes highly recommended and got a lot of buzz a few years ago with her novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Maybe I should have started there because The Weirdos didn’t really do it for me. The first paragraph is fantastic with one of those openings that makes you think, "oh, this is going to be good" and then it slowly unravels into a series of quirky little vignettes that never quite add up to anything satisfying.

To be fair, Moshfegh’s writing style is the clear highlight here. Her offbeat humor and deadpan cynicism are on full display and there’s a distinct cadence to the prose that keeps things moving along smoothly, even when the story itself feels like it’s wandering aimlessly. Unfortunately, the actual narrative feels thin, as if “weird” is doing most of the heavy lifting.

The female narrator is stuck in a miserable relationship, and her landlord boyfriend feels less like a person and more like a walking sketch, cartoonish. He is prone to bursts of random behavior like ordering a shotgun to deal with the crows supposedly taking over their apartment complex or rubbing his crystal skull for good luck. The “weirdos” of the title turn out to be a couple looking to rent an apartment (also embodying the quirkiness trait), and somehow the narrator ends up brokering the deal because her boyfriend is too busy attending auditions in his quest to become the next James Dean. 

By this point, the randomness stops being charming and starts feeling exhausting. Each odd detail seems designed to one-up the last, but instead of building toward something, it just piles on. Eventually, I found myself less amused and more annoyed, wishing the story would either settle down or give all this quirkiness a reason to exist. In the end, it felt like a great opening trapped inside a story that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be strange, satirical, or just obnoxiously random.

You can read this story HERE.

Her First Palestinian by Saeed Teebi

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

I really wanted to enjoy this more. As one of the runners-up for the 2021 CBC Short Fiction Prize, Her First Palestinian by Saeed Teebi didn’t leave much of an impression on me, though I am still curious to read the rest of his collection. It’s rare that I come across any Palestinian short-story writers and maybe that’s on me for not looking hard enough. Given how the social and political crisis in Palestine has escalated in recent years, especially with the ongoing genocide, any story that centers Palestinian identity risks becoming heavy-handed or overly didactic. That’s unfortunately the case here and while that alone doesn’t bother me too much, it becomes an issue when there isn’t a particularly strong or compelling story underneath it all.

As the title story of Teebi’s debut collection, the plot follows a Palestinian-Canadian narrator whose girlfriend is a lawyer with little knowledge of Palestinian history. He begins educating her, and before long she becomes deeply invested in Palestinian activism and liberation. So much so that she travels to the West Bank as a humanitarian volunteer. She eventually joins a legal team representing a Palestinian man, and her growing fixation on "fighting the good fight" causes their relationship to slowly (and quite literally) drift apart. What’s really at stake here isn’t just political commitment, but competing ideas of what it means to be Palestinian. Her activism seems to gravitate toward a purist, almost idealized notion of identity rooted in proximity to the struggle, while his experience as a Canadian immigrant places him in the uncomfortable space of the diaspora as a Palestinian, slightly removed. The narrator’s conclusion that he is not a true Palestinian in her eyes gestures toward a real and painful tension within Palestinian identity, where displacement, exile and inherited trauma complicate any single definition of belonging. That idea is compelling enough, but it could have used more nuance. The story hints at this crisis of legitimacy and belonging without fully unpacking how arbitrary and damaging these internal hierarchies can be, especially when they begin to fracture intimate relationships.

The subject matter is undeniably important and it genuinely is refreshing to read a Palestinian short-story writer. Unfortunately, the story feels frustratingly surface-level. It gestures toward the enormity and moral urgency of the Israel-Palestine conflict but never really grapples with it in a meaningful or challenging way. The politics are carefully sanded down, the emotional stakes remain muted and the narrative seems hesitant to take any real risks. Instead of unsettling the reader or offering a sharper, more personal perspective, the story opts for a safe, broadly palatable approach. Moreover, it acknowledges injustice without interrogating it deeply. In the end, it feels less like a story that confronts the conflict head-on and more like one that circles it cautiously, afraid to push too hard or say too much.

You can read this story HERE.

Toenails by Jorge Luis Borges

The big toe is the captain of the toes!

The title alone hooked me and then the piece went off in a completely different direction than the usual intertextual, magical-realist, mind-bending Borges I was expecting. Instead, Toenails might just be the most elegant and poetic thing ever written about…well, toenails. I can’t say I’m aware of many other writers brave enough to lovingly describe “semitransparent, flexible sheets of a hornlike material,” but here we are. Yet somehow, it works. It’s also funny in a very oddball, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of way.

I wouldn’t argue with anyone who says this feels more like a prose poem than a short story, especially since it’s barely half a page long. It’s a lightning-fast read although I have spent more time thinking about my own toenails than the story itself, which reminds me: I should probably go cut mine again before they accidentally cut my wife's shins under the blankets. They grow too fast!

A Fruitful Sunday by Agatha Christie

When grapes gossip, it always turns into raisin eyebrows.

And with that, the 2025 Agatha Christie short-story reading challenge comes to a close! Fanda’s selections ended up being a mixed bag. The Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple stories were clearly the standouts. The Listerdale Mystery collection landed somewhere in the middle, while Partners in Crime (sorry, Tommy and Tuppence) firmly brought up the rear. After a long hiatus, I am honestly a bit shocked that I managed to finish just under the wire. Cue a very deserved pat on the back. Overall, it was a fun experience and gave me a new appreciation for Christie as a short-story writer. The mystery/detective genre really shines in novel form, where there’s room to scatter clues, red herrings, and misdirection while letting characters breathe. Short stories don’t have that luxury, so everything has to be precise and economical. Much to Christie’s credit, she often pulls that off impressively.

A Fruitful Sunday, from The Listerdale Mystery collection, was decent, nothing special. As a fan of puns, I’ll admit the title gave me a chuckle. The setup is simple enough: a married couple heads out for a lazy Sunday drive and picnic, stops at a fruit stand and buys a basket of grapes. Once they’re settled in and enjoying the afternoon, the wife discovers a valuable necklace hidden at the bottom of the basket. Naturally, the husband recalls a recent robbery involving a similar jewel, worth a cool £50,000. Jackpot? Maybe. Except keeping it (or pawning it off) would be tricky because of all the media attention. Bot to mention the small problem of thieves and police likely searching for the thing, putting our picnic-loving couple squarely in danger.

Unfortunately, the climax is pretty silly and more deflating than clever. The upside is that the story is mercifully short and doesn’t overstay its welcome. Still, it would’ve been nice to wrap up this reading challenge with something a bit more memorable or at least less grape-related disappointment.

Blindman's Buff by Agatha Christie

"You're it."

I am happy to finally be done with the Tommy and Tuppence stories because the majority of them have been disappointing. Be sure to add Blindman's Buff to the list of duds in Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime collection, which you're better of skipping. 

The whole thing is very silly, and not in a charming way. There’s a lot of cringeworthy ableism baked into the premise. Tommy decides to pose as a blind detective, shenanigans predictably follows and because he’s been impersonating the detective Blunt throughout these stories, someone now wants him dead. I really don't have much to add here other than the final confrontation between Tommy and the villain is laughably contrived. I feel pretty confident saying that Tommy and Tuppence are the weakest of her recurring characters, lacking the sharp plotting, clever clues, and effortless charm that make Poirot and Miss Marple such a pleasure to read. Even the lesser-known Listerdale mysteries are better. Instead of ending on a high note, this story just reinforces how disappointing this particular duo has been overall.

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 ridiculed by a pair of baffled extraterrestrials because, well, as the title says, we’re only 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 golden age 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 pretty  bleak, but I think that might have been the author's intention. Faulkner captures how racism is mor than just an ideology. It’s a pressure cooker, intensified by environment and collective rage. The heat exacerbates the inherent racism, becoming a metaphor for a society rotting from the inside, ready to explode at the slightest provocation.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang

Tamagotchis: pure 90's nostalgia.

I usually don’t mind the length of Ted Chiang’s short stories. More often than not, the extra pages are there to support the propulsive storyline or he's setting up for some kind of mind-blowing payoff at the end. The Lifecycle of Software Objects, though, feels a bit different. It’s closer to a novella and I’m not entirely convinced the story earns all those extra pages. Don’t get me wrong, it's still worth reading because this is still Ted Chiang, one of the best science-fiction short-story writers working today. He has an uncanny ability to cram a novel’s worth of ideas into a relatively compact form. Here, however, the seams start to show. The story occasionally spins its wheels, revisiting the same ideas, before drifting toward an ending that feels less like a conclusion and more like the opening chapter of a sequel.

So what’s it actually about? Imagine living inside an MMORPG, something like World of Warcraft or Skyrim. In this virtual world, there are creatures called “digients” that players can raise and train like pets. Powered by increasingly sophisticated AI, these digients start off performing simple tasks, but over time they learn new skills, develop personalities, and eventually communicate in meaningful ways with their owners. As the technology improves, they go through multiple iterations, growing more complex and self-aware, until their consciousness can be transferred into robotic bodies in the real world.

I’m glossing over a lot of the plot because Chiang packs in a ton of background detail and long stretches of technological and social evolution. The problem, for me, is that the emotional stakes never quite rise to match all that world-building. The story spends so much time mapping out the gradual progress of AI that it sometimes feels more like a case study than a narrative and I never fully connected with the characters, who came across as a bit stiff and underdeveloped despite the extra length.

The central theme of free will for artificial intelligence is at the core of this story. Chiang is less interested in flashy sci-fi spectacle and more concerned with the moral responsibility humans have toward the intelligences they create. At what point do the digients stop being property and start being something closer to people? If they can learn, change, and make decisions, do they deserve autonomy? Moreover, if granting them free will means exposing them to suffering, neglect, or exploitation, is it ethical to do so at all? The story raises uncomfortable questions about ownership, consent, and control, especially in a capitalist system that treats technology as disposable once it’s no longer profitable.

Ultimately, I’m a bit torn. There’s a lot here to admire, especially in how thoughtfully Chiang explores the idea of AI free will over long stretches of time. But the execution didn’t fully land for me and the ending left me unsatisfied. If you’re already a fan of his work, you’ll probably find plenty to chew on. If you’re new to Ted Chiang, though, this might not be the best place to start.

The Kidnapped Prime Minister by Agatha Christie

10 Downing Street.

Being stuck sick in bed for the past few days has been incredibly frustrating, especially with Christmas around the corner and my reading plans going completely off the rails. When you’re dealing with fever, fatigue, congestion and that lovely brain fog, there isn’t much you can do besides sleep, stare at the ceiling, or half-watch movies you won’t remember later. Thankfully, Agatha Christie’s short stories were there to keep me company. They turned out to be exactly the kind of cozy, low-stress comfort reads I needed to recover and fend off total boredom. 

Hercule Poirot to the rescue!

The Kidnapped Prime Minister is very much a classic, cookie-cutter Poirot mystery and I don’t mean that as a complaint. We already know the outcome: the flamboyant, fastidious Belgian detective will crack the case using his immaculate logic and those ever-reliable “little grey cells.” The real pleasure, as with so many Christie stories, is in watching how he gets there. The clues are neatly arranged, the misdirection is deliberate, and Poirot’s deductions unfold with satisfying precision. As far as the actual story goes, it's mostly good fun with Poirot outsmarting everyone and making British officials look like fools in their investigation of tracking down the missing Prime Minister. Although I probably could have done with less of the whole British diplomacy being vital to world peace rhetoric but hey, that's just me nitpicking. 

Christie had this narrative formula down to a science, which probably explains how she was able to produce such an enormous body of work without it feeling completely stale. Writing short-story detective fiction is no small feat. There’s very little room for error: the setup, clues, red herrings, and solution all have to fit into a tight space without feeling rushed or unfair. Christie’s real skill lies in how effortlessly she balances clarity with complexity. She gives you just enough information to play along, while cleverly steering you away from the truth until the very end. 

We often reserve our highest praise for writers who produce dense, “serious,” or deeply profound literature, but it’s worth recognizing how much talent it takes to consistently deliver smart, entertaining mysteries in such a compact format. Making it look easy is part of the trick, and Christie makes it look very easy indeed.

One Christmas Eve by Langston Hughes

'Next,' goddamn it! This is not the DMV!"

Despite my adoration for Langston Hughes’s poetry and short fiction, it is hard to believe that I have never actually reviewed any of his work on this blog. That feels like a pretty big oversight and is quite embarrassing, which I’m finally fixing today!  Hughes is one of the towering figures of the Harlem Renaissance that requires no introduction, a literary rockstar of his day, and yet I sometimes wonder how often people really read him anymore. My guess? Not nearly enough, which is a real shame.

If you are searching for a cozy, feel-good Christmas story to put you in a festive mood, One Christmas Eve is very much not that kind of tale. Hughes doesn’t soften or sentimentalize anything. Instead, he uses the holiday, a time supposedly built around generosity, kindness, and innocence, to expose how deeply racism shapes everyday life for working-class Black folks.

At the center of the story is little Joe, whose excitement about seeing Santa Claus is painfully relatable and heartbreaking all at once. Like any child, he buys into the magic. But that magic shatters almost immediately when the Santa he encounters at a local movie theatre turns out to be cruel, hostile, and openly racist. Rather than offering warmth or wonder, this Santa ridicules Joe and frightens him away, reinforcing the idea that even spaces meant for joy aren’t safe for Black children.

What resonates for me is how ordinary this cruelty feels. Joe’s mother gently explains that it wasn’t the “real” Santa. He's just a mean, racist white man in a costume. That moment lands with such devastation. Santa Claus is supposed to belong to all children, a universal symbol of happiness and goodwill. Hughes shows how hollow that promise is in a society built upon the foundations of white supremacy For Joe, racism doesn’t arrive in some abstract form; rather, it shows up wearing a red suit and a white beard.

Set against the backdrop of 1920s or 1930s America, the story reminds us that racism isn’t just explicit hatred or violence against marginalized groups. It’s the small, everyday microaggressions and humiliations that steal childhood innocence and replace wonder with fear. Hughes strips away the fantasy of Christmas to reveal a harsher truth: in a racist society, even joy is unevenly distributed. It’s not exactly a comforting read but a stark reminder of why Hughes still matters. He forces us to look closely at the gap between the ideals we celebrate and the harsh reality of systemic racism.