Steven Millhauser, "Cat 'n' Mouse"

The cat wants to catch the mouse. The mouse outwits the cat every time. How could this ever end?

(from Dangerous Laughter)

The mouse crashes through, leaving a mouse-shaped hole. The cat crashes through, replacing the mouse-shaped hole with a larger, cat-shaped hole. In the living room, they race over the back of the couch, across the piano keys (delicate mouse tune, crash of cat chords), along the blue rug. The fleeing mouse snatches a glance over his shoulder, and when he looks forward again he sees the floor lamp coming closer and closer. Impossible to stop—at the last moment, he splits in half and rejoins himself on the other side. Behind him the rushing cat fails to split in half and crashes into the lamp: his head and body push the brass pole into the shape of a trombone.

Kick ass. This is basically a blow-by-blow retelling of the epic battles between Tom and Jerry (not so much Itchy and Scratchy). There's some occasional meta stuff, wherein the two immortal enemies ponder to pointlessness of their situation, but mostly this is just matter of fact storytelling. Cat builds a thing. Mouse turns thing against cat, with humorously brutal results. Awesome. Awesome. Read it here.

Primo Levi, "Bureau of Vital Statistics"

An office dedicated to assigning causes of death is no place for a man with qualms.

(from A Tranquil Star)

This is a what-if-heaven-was-a-bureaucracy stories — believe it or not a legit and not uncommon literary genre. In this one, there's an unsettling feeling that even these people who run the world, in a sense, don't know everything. Like why the elevators sometimes don't work, for one.

Connor Kilpatrick, "Yuri"

Two guys who work at a crappy warehouse become friends.

(from McSweeney's #25)

This story is dirty and moody, but kinda scattershot. The point and the plotline were lost on my. Though there were memorable moments, it coulda used some kinda conclusion. There's nothing wrong with making the readers feel like they read a whole story. That would have been nice. So: Not satisfying but worth the time.

A.L. Kennedy, "How To Find Your Way in Woods"

Two ex-lovers reunite for no good reason.

(from Indelible Acts)

I liked how she doesn't know why she invited him to her place in the woods, and how he doesn't know why he accepted it. I didn't like the stilted back-and-forth mindgames the two played with each other, but once they started treating each other a little more civilly, the plot started feeling more lucid. This story brought to mind a very specific memory of a particularly excellent place. So, for personal reasons, I ended up liking this one.
A.L. Kennedy's home page.

Alejandro Zambra, "Bonsai"

Emilia and Julio were in love once.

(from Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2008)

This story is a heartbreaker. It's beautiful, it lures you in with spectacular moments in which to lose yourself. It warns you from the very first line, that you may not like where things are going, that Emilia is going to die. It's a promise you forget the more you learn and like about her. Surely someone like her can never die. And she does. And it breaks your heart. It's a kick to the gut.
More about this story and Zambra here.

Roddy Doyle, "Black Hoodie"

Three kids shoplift as part of a school project.

(from The Deportees)

Every age has these levels of getting it and not getting it, where you understand how one aspect of the world works — love, money, social structure — and not others things — sex, the stock market, history. I always enjoy the type of narrator, like the one in "Black Hoodie," whose worldview is at once sensible and ill-informed. He still has his youthful idealism, though Doyle tricks you into thinking that was long gone with the opening passage. The author's own knack for optimism triumphs over the story's otherwise serious circumstances and one may be inclined to call this a cop out. C'mon people, every once in a while the good guys win. If you can call them good guys.

Roddy Doyle, "The Pram"

Every day Alina feels eyes on her as she goes out to walk the baby around Dublin.

(from The Deportees)

A classic-style, old world ghost story, with slow building tension and spooky, unexplainable mystery. It's so strange whose worldview wins out. There's the prim and yuppie-ish O'Reilly family (power mom, smarmy dad, privileged kids), and there's the trapped Alina, whose only power over the kids seems to be her spoooooky immigrant status. She knows her story's a fake, right?

Siel Ju, "Five Boys, Three Guys, A Dog Walker, And A Suit"

Assessing the dudes she sees around town.

(from Zyzzyva, Winter, 2007)

boy with black arm socks at Insomnia—Los Angeles
You’re not the usual guy I date, but maybe it’s practical to date men your friends find slightly repulsive.

Just descriptions and projections, not a lot to hold onto or contemplate. Kinda funny, kinda sharp, very short. Read it here.
More on Siel Ju here.

Roy Kesey, "Martin"

A psychiatrist details the case of a patient who thinks he's a guitar string.

(from All Over)

Well, I'm pretty sure sure Martin is a guitar string, so it's a shame his doctor's too smug to realize it. Very funny story.

Neil Smith, "Bang Crunch"

A young girl gets a disease that makes her age very quickly.

(from Bang Crunch Stories)

Ever since you began to speed-age, your range of emotions has narrowed into the yellow line on a highway crossing the Prairies.

At first, when I read the name of the main character, Eepie Carpetrod, I was bummed that I was entering some zone of endless preciousness. But this is a lovely story. Fast and crafty and fantastical without feeling like it's some lame and irrelevant otherworld. Also, looks like the name is an Edward Gorey reference.

Drew Johnson, "The Last Dead"

In a world where people are almost guaranteed to live for a long, long time, a disagreement is brewing about whether to unfreeze the blue people.

(from Virginia Quarterly Review)

When the last body of the last dead was in the cairn and the door was shut, the exhausted survivors made their way back to form little enclaves all over the suddenly vast earth. The feeling was so layered as to be impossible to communicate to those who were not there. Most remember it as joy.

I like apocalypse stories, for the most part, the ones where there's a big big world and hardly anybody left in it. (Disregarding the ending, I enjoyed I Am Legend.) It's a weird environmentalist/nihilist strain in my DNA that draws me to these things, to imagine walking down the streets of an empty city and seeing the method by which the earth reclaims its territory. (I know, I really should read this.)
Drew Johnson's "The Last Dead" was an amazing take on this idea, so full of inventive conceits and images, I'm not sure where to begin, or whether I should spoil it for anybody. But. You should read this story. Here's a link, though I would recommend you pick up the physical issue, because VQR has much more than great fiction going for it.

David Mozzi, "Claw"

An old mysterious man doesn't interact much with the people from town.

(The Missouri Review, Fall, 2007)

The beginning is the elaborately described static image of a house, and it's kinda beautiful. A Simple still life. Then things get all vague and boring and I stopped caring. Kept reading. No longer cared.

Michael Martone, "Limited"

A passenger on a train watches a boy throw a rock through a window.

(from Double Wide)

I saw the rock, saw the boy who threw it. I saw it hit the window next to the seat in front of me. Saw the window shatter instantly. Saw that now I couldn't see through the window anymore.

Had to read this one quickly and kind of on the sly. I remember it was short and repetitive and kind of puzzling in the manner of Nude Descending Staircase. Ooh, you can read it here. It'll take like two minutes.

Sarah Manguso, "1-39"

Lots of people think lots of ways about things.

(from Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape)

29
Our partners wait for us on opposite coasts while in the country we become friends, knowing transgression is impossible. We swim together every afternoon, changing clothes demurely under our towels. One night the man tels a story and strokes my face to illustrate what someone did once. Despite myself I close my eyes during the touch, and afterward explain to the man and to myself that my response to the touch was just a physical reflex. Now we arm wrestle sometimes. I feel close to this man yet do not want sex with him, as he must certainly shrink from the possibility of sex with me. But I think about maybe falling asleep with him, touching hardly at all, waking up together as if something has been consummated.

Yeah, kinda hard to sum up, since this is really a post about 39 really short short stories (from that McSweeney's mini box set thing). Know what, none of these paragraph-long little things disappointed me. Some were funny, and most had a pleasant conundrum or part where the character either grew or reconsidered or thought twice about something. Above, I've typed up my favorite so far, number 29.

Alice Munro, "Hired Girl"

A girl takes a summer job as a housekeeper for a rich couple.

(from The View from Castle Rock)

I'm a perfect mutt.

Alice Munro is the bee's knees, the hornet's cornet, the macaroni's elbows. Few authors can kick so much ass with such simple action, such smart distillation of language. The surprises come from subtlety and insight, and beautifully unique moments. In this story she paints youth and age so smartly, giving neither a free pass or a hard time.
In the I Read A Short Story league, you come to notice a few common endgame moves, some slick shootout dekes authors like to try out once the overtime is over. One of the most, perhaps, common is the Future Tense Declaration Epilogue. As in:
And after this dreadful dinner party is over, I will pack up my things and I will leave this place, and I will just walk, walk across the ocean but it will only be as deep as my ankles and while it will be very cold I won't mind much because I'll be free and also the air above the water will be temperate.
(For a real example, see Daniel Alarcón's, "Florida.")
Another sneaky writer trick is the Connection With The Infinite Epilogue. For example:
And at that moment I was the dinner party, and the ocean and the ankles, and a great peace came over all of us.
"Hired Girl" has one of the best of these I can recall. Trick is to pull the trick without leaning too heavily on it, and to make sure you didn't look like such a sly little imp any time before then, so nobody see it coming.

Karen Russell, "Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows"

Two kids hide in the skating rink to see what happens at night.

(from St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves)

I wouldn't call this a tight story — I often found myself unable to come up with a clear mental picture of what the author was trying to say — but such a fantastical and chaotic ending probably wouldn't benefit from 20/20 narration. So. I found "Lady Yeti" frustrating, but amusing and memorable too. A fellow reader recommended I check out this story, and when I opened the book I discovered that I'd already put a bookmark on it. Why? The word "yeti," most likely. Everybody loves the yeti.