Schwarzschild Radius by Connie Willis

That is one mighty stache.

I’m a little confused about the decision to include Schwarzschild Radius by Connie Willis in The Big Book of Science Fiction (edited by Jeff VanderMeer). It really doesn’t have the usual fingerprints of the genre. Honestly, it reads far more like historical fiction than sci-fi. Sure, there are mentions of astrophysics, black holes, and even a letter from Einstein, but that’s pretty much where the science-fiction angle begins and ends.

The bulk of the story is devoted to the grim, claustrophobic horrors of WWI trench warfare. The narrator recounts his time at the front to a scientist named Travers, who’s researching Karl Schwarzschild, a famous German physicist whose work shaped Einstein’s theory of relativity and who died during the war. The protagonist’s connection to Schwarzschild comes from a chance encounter in the communication trenches, where he and his comrade Müller huddled under freezing skies and barbed wire.

Travers is absolutely riveted by the tale for the sake of his paper. Me? Not so much. I kept waiting for some striking sci-fi twist or bigger speculative element, but it never really materializes. As a piece of historical fiction, it’s decent enough. The biggest takeaway was learning Schwarzschild's influence on Einstein and his theories of gravity without knowing black holes existed (hence, the title). 

Cool, cool.

The First Seven Years by Bernard Malamud

Shoes can be fixed. Hearts? Not so easily.

After reading the wonderful The Magic Barrel, my ADHD/hyper-fixation naturally pushed me to dive deeper into Bernard Malamud’s short stories, and The First Seven Years did not disappoint. Malamud is such an effortlessly gifted storyteller. The prose just glides along, and before you know it, you’re fully wrapped up in the little dramas of ordinary people trying their best to live the American dream. 

What I especially enjoyed here is how Malamud opens with rich, immediate characterization and then lets the plot unfold from that foundation. It’s a refreshing reversal of the usual formula. Right from the start, we are encouraged to sympathize with Feld, a humble shoemaker who believes education as the key to success and upward social mobility. He has big dreams for his daughter. Miriam. and is determined to match her with a respectable college student who brings his shoes in for repair.

This is where Malamud cleverly plays with a longstanding Jewish stereotype: the idea that Jews are preoccupied with money or material success. He uses it not to reinforce the stereotype, but to expose how these expectations shape Feld’s worldview. Feld’s obsession with securing his daughter a match in a higher social bracket reflects the pressures within the Jewish immigrant community in post-WWII America: to climb, to assimilate, to “make it.” When Feld finally realizes that moral worth doesn’t correlate neatly with financial standing, the moment lands with even more poignancy because we’ve watched him chase that stereotype so earnestly.

And then there’s Sobel, Feld’s apprentice. He's a Jewish refugee from Poland whose traumatic past (the implication being that he escaped the Nazi Death camps), low-economic status, and impulsive behavior complicate Feld's plans to running a successful shoe repair business. His role adds nuance to the story’s social hierarchy: he is poor, displaced, and rough around the edges, yet still deeply moral and sincere. 

My one small gripe is Sobel’s romantic declaration. While honorable in intent, it definitely comes across as a little creepy. He’s been in love with Miriam for years, watching her grow up and waiting for his moment. If you pause to do the math, it suggests he may have been pining when she was still very young, so yeah...But maybe I’m nitpicking. Ultimately, the heart of the story lies in Feld’s moral and spiritual transformation, as he learns that wealth and status have nothing to do with integrity or love. And in classic Malamud fashion, that realization feels both timeless and deeply human.

You can read this story HERE.

The Lesson by Toni Cade Bambara

$1000 for toy sailboats? Hell nah.

Toni Cade Bambara has such a knack for writing in the voices of Black children. These voices feel authentic, funny, sharp, and delightfully irreverent. The Lesson is a perfect example. The narrator, a young Black girl with plenty of attitude and zero patience for adult nonsense, is wildly entertaining. Her witty side comments and no-filter observations are hilarious but they are also Bambara’s way of using humor as resistance. The jokes and lively narration push back against the dehumanizing weight of racism, showing how laughter can become a small but powerful form of dissent. Through this voice, Bambara reminds us that even though Black life is shaped by inequality, it still remains vibrant, complex, full of joy and bite.

Race, humor, and subjectivity collide in this story that’s funny and profound all at once. The plot itself is simple: a group of neighborhood kids is whisked off to an upscale toy store by Miss Moore, the educated, socially conscious woman who has appointed herself responsible for teaching them, well, a lesson that will become important for their survival as they get older. Essentially, she wants them to see the economic gap they have been shielded from by childhood innocence and sheer lack of context. There is a huge disparity between black wealth and white wealth. Oh, don't forget that no matter how hard you work, you likely won't have any social mobility due to systematic racism. Heavy stuff to to teach a kid, for sure. But by filtering everything through the narrator’s hilarious commentary and her friends’ chaotic energy, Bambara keeps the tone lively while still landing the deeper message.

Telling the story through the eyes of this sharp-tongued, skeptical kid allows humor to expose the structures of inequality without flattening or moralizing them. The comedy doesn’t undercut the seriousness; rather it highlights black oppression, making the lesson Miss Moore wants to teach resonate even more.

You can read this story HERE.

The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe

Danse macabre.

My original plan was to post a Halloween double-feature review with The Masque of the Red Death, but that obviously didn’t happen. Now it’s nearly December, which makes this a bit late for spooky season, but whatever. Edgar Allan Poe is welcome any time of year, so here we go.

One of the few certainties in this life is death. Rich or poor, death does not discriminate. It is the one thing none of us can outrun. Still, we love to pretend otherwise. Poe taps into that illusion with Prospero’s partygoers, who barricade themselves inside a lavish, fortified abbey while a deadly plague devastates the world outside. They convince themselves they’re untouchable, safe behind stone walls and silken fabrics.

And then the mysterious stranger arrives.

This is where the story’s creep factor really kicks in. There’s something deeply unsettling about the way the mysterious figure simply appears in the middle of their revelry. Silent, uninvited, and dressed like a walking corpse. No one knows how he got in. No one speaks to him. They just see him and suddenly the whole atmosphere shifts from uninhibited decadence to incomprehensible fear. Poe's inimitable brand of horror comes from the building upon this gradually increasing fear that these people can no longer hide from their mortality.  This slow realization that death has literally slipped through the cracks and is now calmly walking among them. 

There's plenty of symbolism and allegory to unpack here but what keeps me coming back to this story is the gothic atmosphere: that creeping sense of inevitability, the haunting visuals, and the delicious dread that only Poe seems able to conjure.

You can read this story HERE. 

The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud

Pick a card, any card!

Although I didn’t care much for Angel Levine, Bernard Malamud completely won me over with The Magic Barrel, which totally lives up to the hype. The writing is smooth, flowing with such ease with a climax that is both bizarre and profoundly moving, culminating in one of the most unforgettable final sentences I’ve ever come across in a short story:

“Around the corner, Salzman, leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead.”

Fantastic stuff. 

Of course, context matters, so let me elaborate a little bit more on why this story resonates on such a deep emotional and spiritual level without spoiling too much. 

Blending Jewish folklore with a shimmer of magical realism, Malamud pulls off something remarkable. The story walks a delicate line between humor and aching sadness, especially in the way it explores the protagonist’s loneliness and wavering spiritual grounding. The plot is simple enough: Finkle, a rabbi-in-training, reluctantly hires the matchmaker Pinye Salzman to find a wife. With his diminutive stature and horn-rimmed glasses, he is an elusive, eccentric figure whom the narrator playfully calls a “commercial cupid,” “Pan,” and “trickster.” Those nicknames fit him perfectly. His methods involve embellishment, misdirection, and a kind of theatrical manipulation that increasingly irritates Finkle, who only wants honesty but instead finds himself tangled in half-truths and emotional confusion.

This exhausting search for a partner becomes more than a series of awkward dates. It becomes a crisis of faith. Finkle’s disappointment with Salzman’s tomfoolery and his inability to find the “right” match begins eroding his confidence not just as a future rabbi, but as a person searching for meaning. The emptiness he feels grows heavier, pushing him into a fog of religious doubt, insecurity, and spiritual despair. His loneliness becomes almost metaphysical, an ache of the soul.

And then something miraculous happens. Finkle discovers a photograph Saltzman left behind. An image of a young woman that grips him instantly and almost supernaturally. He becomes consumed by the need to meet her, as though the photo has awakened something dormant within him. A spark. A longing. Perhaps even a sense of destiny. Ironically, the moment he finally wants Salzman’s guidance, the trickster vanishes. It’s unclear (deliberately so) whether Salzman is a flesh-and-blood matchmaker or a folkloric figure who slips between the spiritual and physical worlds.

The ending brings all of these threads together with a beautiful mix of irony and transcendence. Finkle meets the mysterious woman, but what he encounters is not the simple, romantic resolution he imagined. Instead, he steps into a moment that forces him to confront the complexity of love, brokenness, and grace. The final image of Salzman chanting prayers for the dead is haunting and somewhat comedic: Is he mourning the past selves they must shed? Is he blessing their union? Is he signaling that love, to be real, requires the death of illusion before rebirth can occur? Could these prayers be asking God's forgiveness for these two lonely souls? 

You decide.

In that single gesture, the story ties together its central themes. Faith is not steady. It’s something tested, lost, and rediscovered in unexpected ways. Love is not a neat fix but a transformative, often painful force. Redemption comes when Finkle finally opens his heart, not to perfection, but to imperfection and vulnerability, which are the very things he once resisted.

It’s an ending that’s ironic, mystical, and deeply human all at once.

You can read this story HERE. 

Night Women by Edwidge Danticat

A Fruitful Gathering by Raymond LaFaille

What struck me immediately was the unnamed narrator’s intimate and powerful voice. Her presence on the page feels vivid, all encompassing. She speaks with an aching and fresh lyricism that never tries to beautify her suffering but instead captures it with an honesty so poetic that her trauma can only be expressed in metaphors. Her voice is threaded with pain and exhaustion, but also with a fierce, unwavering love for her son. It’s this blend of tenderness and desperation that gives the story its emotional gravity.

On the surface, the plot is simple. But nothing about the world she describes is simple. The narrator lives in a cramped one-bedroom shack in Haiti with her young son, separated only by a thin sheet as she tucks him into bed before another of her gentleman callers arrives. As the title indicates, she's one of the many Night Women of Haiti that must do whatever is necessary to provide for their family. However, the harsh reality of her life as a prostitute isn’t sensationalized; rather, it’s poetically dramatized, reflecting the lived experiences of many Haitian women in the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Danticat gives these women visibility, dignity, and a voice. She highlights not only the crushing weight of poverty in Haiti but also the unwavering resilience required of women to survive it, especially when survival demands painful sacrifices. The narrator is constantly navigating this impossible terrain. As a mother, she is trying to shield her son from the harsh reality of her work, but she also knows that she can’t protect him forever. She’s painfully aware that he’s growing older, more perceptive, and that one day he will understand what happens after he falls asleep on the other side of that thin sheet.

This realization adds another layer of heartbreak to the story. She tries desperately to preserve his innocence, whispering stories and soothing him into dreams, hoping sleep will spare him from witnessing her nightly burden. But beneath that hope is the fear of the moment her son’s childhood will collide with her reality. It’s this emotional tension, this push and pull between love and necessity, that makes the narrator feel so achingly real.

What elevates the story even further is the narrator’s poetic imagination. There’s a rhythm and unique cadence to her thoughts; a softness that contrasts sharply with her dire circumstances. Danticat also sprinkles in myth and folklore that add to the elements of magical realism. Lines like, “There is a place in Ville Rose where ghost women ride the crests of waves while brushing the stars out of their hair,” remind us that even in the harshest lives, imagination can be a refuge. These mythic fragments don’t take us out of the story, quite the contrary. They deepen it, revealing how the narrator holds onto beauty wherever she can find it.

Night Women might only be a few pages, but it feels expansive: emotionally, thematically, and lyrically. It’s a testament to Danticat’s ability to take a single voice and turn it into a haunting, unforgettable presence. 

I really need to read more from this author, pronto.

How the Marquis Got His Coat Back by Neil Gaiman

Myconids - The Mushroom people.

I am becoming more convinced that Neil Gaiman is a far stronger short-story writer than he is a novelist, and How the Marquis Got His Coat Back just keeps proving my point. It’s a dark, twisted fantasy packed with intrigue, oddities, and a delightfully eccentric cast. Gaiman’s imagination isn’t just present here, it’s doing somersaults.

The premise is wonderfully strange: the Marquis de Carabas, a mysterious nobleman of questionable morality, awakens from death in a chamber rapidly filling with water. Before he can properly process being alive again, he realizes his beloved (and magically significant) coat has gone missing. First order of business: escape imminent drowning. Second: track down the coat that’s practically an extension of his identity. It’s a fantastic hook, and the opening scene grabs you by the collar and refuses to let go.

What impresses me most is how effortlessly Gaiman conjures a world that feels both fully realized and deeply bizarre without bogging the story down in exposition. He gives you just enough world-building to stay grounded. No small feat given this is a place where humans co-exist with anthropomorphized elephants and mushroom people. His imagination feels boundless, but he never lets it overshadow the momentum of the narrative. The writing is smooth and elegant, propelled by a storyteller who knows exactly when to dazzle and when to get out of the way. It’s playful, brisk, and wonderfully weird from start to finish. 

The Leap by Donald Barthelme

Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan in Waiting for Godot.

Donald Barthelme seems to be channeling his inner Samuel Beckett in The Leap, a short story composed entirely of dialogue. We’re dropped into this fragmented, often delightfully incoherent conversation between two men who manage to talk about nothing and everything at once. One of their recurring debates is the big one: the existence of God and what it really means to take a “leap of faith” in a world that can be equal parts cruel and inexplicable. One man is a believer and the other needs a bit more convincing, referred to as the “double-sided” man. As a contrarian at heart, Barthelme has always loved playing with dualities, irony and paradoxes so the label feels very on-brand.

In classic Barthelme fashion, nothing is straightforward. He nudges the reader into searching for meaning in this verbal tennis match, and just when you think you’re finally onto something he yanks the rug out and veers into a totally different direction. You can practically hear him laughing somewhere. His usual bag of tricks is on full display here, including playful repetition, which fuels the story’s frolicsome little tête-à-tête. Sure, there’s some genuinely witty banter, but the philosophical digressions start piling up fast. To be honest, a good chunk of it went right over my head although I caught glimpses of hermeneutics, phenomenology, inequality, God-as-artist musings, and the usual science-vs-religion showdown. There’s even a Kierkegaard reference that feels like a sly wink to his earlier piece, Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel, which could make for a fun comparison if you’re feeling brave enough.

My favorite moment comes when the cynical, double-minded man challenges the logic of the so-called “Divine Plan.” He points out that if humans keep propagating at an exponential rate (because really, what else are we doing?), we’re heading straight for a claustrophobic dystopian nightmare:

“Because there’s not going to be any room to fucking move, man, do you follow me? There’s not going to be any room to fucking sneeze, without you sneezing on somebody.”

It’s one of the few moments that genuinely made me laugh. I only wish the story leaned into that kind of humor more often instead of leaving me tangled in its more evasive, puzzle-box chatter. But that’s Barthelme for you. Forever flippant, forever perplexing, and somehow still has me coming back to his work even though it might not always hit the mark.

The Finkelstein 5 by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Say Their Names.

In the wake of racial injustice and the BLM protests, The Finkelstein 5 by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah feels painfully relevant. Almost uncomfortably so. The hardest part is realizing that the story isn’t tapping into a distant historical moment; it’s speaking to a reality that hasn’t changed nearly as much as it should have. Police brutality and racial violence against Black Americans continue, and under the Trump regime, that tension and fear feels amplified. The story’s sadness, frustration, and simmering anger permeates beneath the surface, then erupts in an ending that’s as tragic as it is inevitable because we have seen so many versions of this ending play out in real life. 

One of the aspects that struck me most was the way the young Black protagonist must constantly calibrate his “acceptable” level of Blackness just to move safely through the world. He’s created a scale from 1.0 to 10.0 with 1.0 being the version of himself most palatable to white society, 10.0 being fully, unapologetically Black but also perceived as dangerous. That constant internal negotiation, that ever-present fear of how one’s Blackness will be interpreted, shapes every detail of his daily life. As someone who identifies as Black and is familiar with the mental gymnastics required to navigate predominantly white spaces, this portrayal hit close to home. It’s both surreal and deeply validating to see that experience reflected so clearly on the page.

At the center of the story is a court case involving a white man who brutally killed five Black children with a chainsaw (hence the title). He justifies his action in court by claiming that he feared for his life and those of his children whom the other black children were allegedly antagonizing outside the public library. It’s impossible not to think of so many high-profile cases of black people being senselessly murdered by police or racist bigots. The George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin case seems most relevant here, hovering in the background. Adjei-Brenyah doesn’t shy away from calling out the grotesque failures of a judicial system that repeatedly upholds white supremacy. The story isn’t subtle about this at all, nor should it be. It forces you to confront the ugliness directly, and in doing so, it becomes a sharp political commentary on black oppression in America, a critical indictment of the systems that continue to fail us.

The Finkelstein 5 is powerful not because it shocks (although it certainly does) but because it resonates deeply with America in the here and now. Adjei-Brenyah captures the fear, exhaustion, and quiet resilience that define what it means to be Black in a society that too often refuses to see our humanity. It’s heartbreaking, furious, and unapologetically loud in all the ways it needs to be, making it one of the most memorable and emotionally charged pieces I’ve read in a while.