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 an 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.

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.

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!