![]() ![]() Suffused with a quiet sadness, these stories linger with you long after you’re done reading. Set in Washington, DC, back when it was known as Chocolate City, Jones’s stories feel vaguely folkloric in nature, even though they are about ordinary black folks, from a girl who is given a flock of pigeons to care for to a mother living in the house her drug-dealing son bought her. ![]() Though perhaps best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Known World, this 1992 story collection first put Jones on the map. These stories focus (in spite of the title) almost entirely on women and girls navigating all manner of relationships - a 9-year-old girl and her father's new girlfriend escaping an uncomfortable birthday party a young woman having an affair with her married boss - and Kyle depicts their desire, cruelty, and insecurity with heartbreaking clarity. This one is an entirely different flavor, no less delicious. Putting together this list, I'm realizing I have something of a ~type~ when it comes to short stories - in a word, weird. Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle Bullwinkel’s writing and world-building demand space to reflect on it, react to it, and then, if you’re like me, shout about it to anyone who will listen. And I didn’t just read these stories, each revealing at once the absolute absurdity and magnificence of being alive I savored them. These stories exist in worlds just past reality, just slightly uncomfortable, familiar until, suddenly, they aren’t. Belly Up by Rita Bullwinkelīelly Up is an astounding collection of short stories - stories about girls who want to be plants, or a living boy who grew up in a family of zombies, or a dying woman who sneaks out for a night swim with an ailing man. Each story is more compelling than the last - and if you think you know where any one is headed, you're probably wrong. It opens with "The Southern Thruway" - a story about a traffic jam outside of Paris that ends up lasting for weeks, giving rise to ad hoc survival committees and alliances - and then jumps through space and time, from Cuban revolutionaries to Roman gladiators to a flight attendant obsessed with Greece. This collection, originally published in 1966, makes clear why he's so beloved. The late Argentine writer Julio Cortázar is celebrated as a groundbreaking figure in Hispanic fiction for his use of the fantastical and his rejection of conventional narrative structure. Each story follows different enchanting residents - a struggling musician who is also the last son of God, a PhD candidate whose dissertation unwittingly sparks chaos, a robot as a whole, the collection weaves incisive criticism, dark humor, and magical realism in profound explorations of belief, love, justice, and violence. ![]() The stories in The World Doesn’t Require You all take place in the fictional town of Cross River, Maryland, built by the leaders of the country’s only successful slave revolt. Arianna Rebolini The World Doesn’t Require You by Rion Amilcar Scott (Carrington was unwillingly admitted into a mental institution after a psychotic break during World War II, which she describes in the equally fantastic Down Below.) If you have a high threshold for weird - and/or if you loved Her Body and Other Parties - you should give this collection a try. Carrington was a key creator in the Surrealist movement her art and stories imagined beautiful, monstrous, and unwieldy worlds full of strange creatures and discomfiting interactions, often representative of her own mental illness. Now it's a book I regularly recommend as an all-time favorite. is a treasure and a gift to the world."). I picked up this collection back in 2017 due entirely to the cover - the portrait of a wild-haired woman, the Jeff VanderMeer blurb ("This definitive collection. The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington ![]()
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