Jim Shepard, "Classical Scenes of Farewell"

Etienne recounts his life under the employ of a psychopathic lord in 1430s France.

(from McSweeney's, issue 27)

But even before he chose to sweep back for me the curtain on the full extent of his ferocity, I knew myself to be already standing outside the ring of salvation, having failed so signally as a neighbor and a brother and a Christian and a son.

I've always been fond of Shepard's eclectic tastes for unexpected settings, characters and plots, but I don't believe I've ever been as wowed by his skills for the language as I am right now. "Classical Scenes of Farewell" is breathtakingly told, each word so smartly placed as to seem inevitable. Some sentences invited me to re-read them and appreciate their solitary beauty as well as their purpose within the larger machine. And Shepard seems to take particular delight in describing ugliness with equal parts of bluntness and poetry. Definitely recommended.

Nancy Kress, "Inertia"

Quarantined victims of a disfiguring disease receive their first visitor from Outside in a long time.

(from Wastelands)

Okay, this isn't really an apocalypse here. Inside, progress comes to a halt as the diseased make do on teamwork and donations from beyond their confines. And Outside, according to Dr. McHabe is falling apart thanks to violence and war, the usual. I like the narrator, a wise and curious grandmother whose compassion and contemplativeness inches the story along. I don't believe I've ever considered "Inertia"'s vision of the future before, not the way it is on the Inside. Social and scientific evolution come to a halt, maybe even reverse direction, as humanity settles into a simple, non-competitive rut.

Mary Gaitskill, "Don't Cry"

A recently widowed woman travels to Ethiopia with a friend looking to adopt.

(from The New Yorker, June 9 & 16)

For a story that, in my mind's eye, is about about two white ladies traveling to Addis Ababa to child from a poor black family, this story doesn't dwell much on race. But the situation is clear enough, with these heart-in-the-right-place women always on the outside looking in at a confusing and corrupt system. Far more interesting than Katya, who wants a baby for whatever generic reasons anybody ever wants a baby, is the narrator Janice, who lets her mind wander out of reality to the difficult end of her life with her ailing husband. That both of their concerns remain motivating factors even as political unrest threatens the city around them is interesting, and remarkably told. There was a distinct lack of symmetry to the story, with things never quite working out neatly or simply.

Olaf Olafsson, "On The Lake"

Dad's showing off on the boat with his son and capsizes them.

(from O. Henry Prize Stories 2008)

This is a really tense, intense little story. The husband, the wife and the two rescuers are sitting around drinking and drying off but every word and gesture is made uncomfortable by the strained relationship between the husband and the wife, and those two with the rescuers who, as neighbors, were really strangers. The true source of the tension might very well be in the story somewhere but all I have are guesses. Which is cool. I actually read this one twice, and enjoyed it both times.

Shannon Cain, "The Necessity of Certain Behaviors"

An American woman gets separated from her eco-tourism group and joins up with a tribe native to the region.

(from The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008)

What a strange and pretty story. Strange, because its language is so present tense and matter-of-fact, you wonder sometimes if it's all a big metaphor for something or other. But it's not. And so pretty, inspirationally so. Lisa encounters a new morality, or maybe just a social structure, and finds it suits her well. And it kind of looks like a workable one. Of course, every time Spock and Kirk came across some new world, the strangely familiar alien civilization would appear to have its shit together. Then you find out oh but they eat their young, or they make their prisoners fight to the death or something.The story's over but the other shoe may drop on Lisa yet.

Gene Wolfe, "Mute"

A brother and sister come home after the apocalypse or something.

(from Wastelands)

I took two days to read this one and that was a mistake because the author has no real interest in saying what's going on. There are all these clues but I just can't seem to put them together. Interesting, nonetheless.

Larry Smith, "Tight Like That"

A hitman goes incognito to protect the librarian he loves.

(from McSweeney's, #27)

I like this story. I like Louie, even though he's a murderer who likes exposing himself. He's a messed up dude, but he's trying to do what's right, according to his own twisted logic. Funny thing about this story, this story is not told from crazy Louie's perspective and yet the narration is completely unreliable. Name and events are alluded to quickly, and nothing is expounded upon. It's cool, though. We get what we don't get. I could see this story putting people off, but I bought it, the whole damn thing.

Annie Proulx, "Tits-Up in a Ditch"

The sad story of Dakotah, abandoned at birth, raised by jerks, alone in motherhood, sent to war.

(The New Yorker, Summer Fiction Issue, June 9 and 16, 2008)

Dakotah's life story is endlessly sad, just relentlessly harsh and luckless. Still, it's doesn't feel like life is piling on. Thanks to Annie Proulx's calm, well paced story telling, it still comes off kinda realistic-ish. Beautiful.

Jerry Oltion, "Judgment Passed"

Astronauts return to earth and find it empty. They've missed the second coming of Jesus by four years.

(from Wastelands)

Now that's an old school apocalypse: Everybody's gone, leaving our befuddled astronauts to contemplate their next move. Do they try to signal God, now that they know he's real? Do they try to repopulate the earth? They were mostly atheists when their mission began. Now they wander the vacant Earth, having some hilarious discussions and feeling a weird sense of loneliness.
What Happened: Well, according to the old newspapers blowing around, Jesus, who is real, came back and took everybody, living and dead up to Heaven, which is also real.
Destruct-O-Meter: 5. I mean the people are gone, but the planet seems to be on the rebound.

Catherine Wells, "Artie's Angels"

Earth is a bleak wasteland and all the kids in the habitat pin their hopes on Artie the bike-maker.

(Wastelands)

There's something sorta classic about this thing, the kids on bikes darting around the decaying urban wasteland and dodging the various gangs and corrupt authorities. And the end has a sort of comic book mythology vibe to it. I remember liking this story but it's been a while since I actually read it.
What Happened: I believe it's an ozone or nuclear thing, with the earth's unsheltered surface basically becoming uninhabitable due to radiation. Humans are either escaping the planet or hiding out in enormous, mostly lawless habitats. That said, this is not a horror story. More straight up adventure.
Destruct-O-Meter: 7. Everybody out of the pool.

Richard Kadrey, "Still Life With Apocalypse"

Tracing the apocalypse back to its tipping point.

(from Wastelands)

I wish there had been a war, a plague or some new, grand Chernobyl. Something we could point to and say, "That's it. That's what killed the world." But it wasn't like that.

This is a short one.
What Happened: It's kinda funny, but told with a sigh: A fender bender makes somebody miss a meeting, making somebody not send some fax, and on and on until, yep, everything falls apart. Kinda like the riot in Police Academy.
Destruct-O-Meter: 5.

James Van Pelt, "The Last of the O-Forms"

A dad and his ageless mutant daughter travel around with their mutant animal zoo, trying to make some cash.

(Wastelands)

Trevin noted with approval the endless stretch of ten-foot-tall chain-link fence between them and the river. Who knew what god-awful thing might come crawling out of there?

O-Forms are original form animals, which are becoming rarer and rarer in this age of tigerzelles and crocomice. They seem kinda harmless and, in Trevin's eyes, sort of unremarkable. I guess everybody's starting to look at things that way, which is why the zoo/sideshow gets very few visitors. Caprice, the toddler with the adult brain, is the freakiest thing here, and I don't blame her dad for being totally creeped out. This one's a bit short to blow me away, maybe, but fascinating in its way. You can read it here (in some mutant cached version).
What Happened: Some chemical event is causing most living things (but not insects) to mutate. We don't know the exact extent of it — how much it affects people — until the end of the story. But I guess this evolutionary apocalypse is bigger than I first thought.
Destruct-O-Meter: Only 4, but the end is near.

Cory Doctorow, "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth"

It's the end of the world as we know it and the only people who survive at the sysadmins called to their server rooms when it all goes down.

(Wastelands)

Best story in this all-armageddon book so far. Why? Onpage apocalypse. As in: We get to experience it happening. All the other stories so far were this-is-the-strange-new-world kinda thing, where all the death and destruction were in the past, usually waaaay in the past. Okay, it's told from the perspective of a bunch of tech nerds trapped in a building and interacting via IM with out nerds similarly locked away from the disaster, but still. It's all normal that morning and then, soon enough, the world is unrecognizable. I really dug the author's unflinching use of IT lingo, most of which I didn't know but was able to glean from context. A totally fun and entertaining and inventive story.
What Happened: A computer virus attacks the web. Real virus attacks the people. Something's blowing up buildings. Craziness.
Destruct-O-Meter: 5. It's a thorough armageddon — three levels deep — but people are still out there getting by, in a way.

Jack McDevitt, "Never Despair"

After burying another member of their expedition, Chaka and Quait decide to turn back.

(from Wastelands)

Then Chaka meets somebody she guesses is a ghost, but is most likely an old amusement park attraction (some kinda fancy interactive hologram, most likely). Neither one seems to recognize each other's world, because so much time has passed. I really dug this story: weirdly fascinating but kinda subtle. Awesome.
What Happened: One way or another, civilization has mostly collapsed. There are plenty of ruins, but no one seems to have much connection to them or the way earth used to be. What specifically went down isn't clear.
Destructo-O-Meter: 8.

Tobias S. Buckell, "Waiting for the Zephyr"

A young woman awaits the return of the trade ship, which represents an escape from her boring outpost life.

(from Wasteland)

This is a short one, a teensy lil adventure story about hope and curiosity, but not really about the apocalypse. I mean, there was one, but people seem to have come to terms with it, in a way. There's an implied stability.
What Happened: Oh, you know, war. The Middle East was nuked, as was Europe. America had to learn to live without gas.
Destruct-O-Meter: 6. Most countries, one assumes, have been wiped off the map. Good ol U.S.A. is still around, but fragmented and strange.
Looks like you can go here and have this story read to you.

George R. R. Martin, "Dark, Dark Were The Tunnels"

Two men descended from people who escaped earth before a surface-killing nuclear war run into a blind cave creature who descended from people who survived the aforementioned nuclear war.

(from Wastelands)

Okay so we've got Greel, who's got a telepathic partnership with a rat, and we've got Cliff and Von, humans on a salvage expedition. It's really not likely that these four will come to an understanding, but I really wished they had. Not that I was surprised when one or more of them ended up dead. And frankly, the serpentine language was starting to grate on me, and I was glad when the story ended.
What Happened: Nuclear war and fallout, plus the corresponding genetic mutation.
Destruct-O-Meter: 8? Earth is pretty effed, since you can't live on the surface and there are worm creatures that eat people. I'd call that an apocalypse.

Jonathan Lethem, "How We Got In Town and Out Again"

Two drifters join a traveling virtual reality sideshow.

(from Wastelands) T

his is a weird little young desire story set in a time when society is fragmented and depraved, "Araby" meets Running Man. Okay not really. Things are a lot more tame in this world. This sideshow involves people running around in a virtual reality made of old games and pieces of code for the amusement of a paying crowd. Thing is, the guys running the show are jerks — of course, that's a sci-fi sideshow tradition — but they don't seem to be particularly cruel about it. The pay up, they provide food, they abide by the rules.
What Happened: I dunno. Is this even the same reality as ours? We know towns are things to be snuck into, that food is scarce and money is hard to come by.
Destruct-O-Meter: 2? The degree to which the government and/or infrastructure has been compromised isn't clear (which makes things really spooky).

M. Rickert, "Bread and Bombs"

After terrorists kill people with poisoned a small town neighborhood becomes increasingly fearful of the foreign family that moves in.

(from Wastelands)

I put the helmet on and listened to it fly past. Not us. Not our town. Not tonight.

Overt in its allusions to 9/11 and the subsequent paranoia, this story is not a simple satire or an obvious fable. The already hazy logic of the adults is filtered through the murky, limited perspective of a fourth grader. Which means we don't get answers to a lot of our questions about what the hell exactly is going on in the world.
What Happened: Relentless terrorist attacks seem to have fragmented the US's infrastructure, with mail and information becoming limited (maybe?). Citizens act like planes are only flown by terrorists.
Destruct-O-Meter: 2. Far as I can tell, this is more of an Apocapinconvenience.

Paolo Bacigalupi, "The People of Sand and Slag"

Three futuristic super soldiers find a dog.

(from Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse)

Down in the valley, the bio-job’s headlong run slowed to a trot. It seemed unaware of us. Closer now, we could make out its shape: A shaggy quadruped with a tail. Dreadlocked hair dangled from its shanks like ornaments, tagged with tailings mud clods. It was stained around its legs from the acids of the catchment ponds, as though it had forded streams of urine.

Crazy sicko story. In this future, human being are so advanced (thanks to "science," as they keep awkwardly pointing out) that they can regenerate lost limbs, perform amazingly dexterous feats and eat anything. The world, meanwhile, seems to have gone to shit, a harsh, dark, violent place where even the beaches of Hawaii, where our three protagonists go to swim, has barbed wire in the sand and petroleum in the water. Messed up.
What Happened: Science happened. There are these techweevils inside everybody that turn them into near-gods. But also, biological creatures are pretty much either in zoos or extinct (this lone dog being a surprising exception), thanks to, I guess, pollution and the plundering of the natural world.
Destruct-O-Meter Score: 4. I mean, this is a messed up world, wholly unappealing, but it doesn't necessarily scream apocalypse to me. This is more like some twisted possibility that humanity/civilization might evolve into.
Read it here.

Orson Scott Card, "Salvage"

Deaver wants to look for gold by sailing out to where the skyscrapers stick out of the water.

(from Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse)

This is a crazy strange story about survivors scraping a living together by salvaging scrap. People live freely, for the most part, though Deaver Teague is not terribly trusting of the Mormons and their government. His apparent atheism causes friends to distrust him, making him want to find a place where he belongs.
What Happened: A big war, I think, and some catastrophic flood that's left Salt Lake City submerged. Gas, metal and other supplies are limited. There does appear to be some stability in the social and municipal infrastructure.
Destruct-O-Meter Score: 3? Maybe? Could be much worse than that, but the reader is rarely given a glimpse outside what this one little outpost. Perhaps it's only America that's been bombed backward.
Orson Scott Card's home page.

Stephen King, "The End of the Whole Mess"

The brother of a well-meaning, civilization-killing genius tries to explain what happened to humanity in his last few hours.

(from Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse)

Funny and crazy, though not exactly scary, this is the messed up little fable of the too-smart brother thinking he can solve mankind's self-destructive tendencies. It's strange to think this was written in 1986 — although its description of Waco, TX, as one of the calmest places in the country does date it a little — because so much of the violence and unrest alluded to could be similarly described today. (According to Wikipedia, there's a TV version of this story out there somewhere.)

What Happened: A chemical presumed to contain a calming agent is dropped into a massive volcano so that, upon eruption, it will be dispersed around the world. Unfortunately it gives everybody Alzheimer's.
Destruct-O-Meter Score: 4. With its faculties horrifically and suddenly impaired, all of humanity is presumed to headed for an early demise. The planet, however, will probably be better off.
I've been wanting a collection like this. As in: I have verbalized — have specifically wished for — an anthology of end-of-the-world stories. You can have all your Illness Stories and your Turns Out Dad Was A Scoundrel Stories and This Lady Silently Bore A Burden Stories. I'll take ragnarok, thanks.

Rivka Galchen, "The Region of Unlikeness"

A young grad student and two academic types form an unlikely trio.

(from The New Yorker, March 24, 2008)

“Jacob’s a boor, isn’t he?” Ilan said. Or maybe he said “bore” and I heard “boor” because Ilan’s way of talking seemed so antiquated to me. I had so few operating sources of pride at that time. I was tutoring and making my lonely way through graduate school in civil engineering, where my main sense of joy came from trying to silently outdo the boys—they still played video games—in my courses. I started going to that coffee shop every day.

What at first seems like a story about gender politics among intellectuals turns out to be something much more entertaining (in a sci-fi/conspiracy sort of way). Would say more but it's actually been awhile since I read this one. You can read it here.

Gary Lutz, “Waking Hours”

A guy takes a job teaching middles managers how to give out awards. Or something.

(from Stories in the Worst Way)

This one’s kinda murky, and besides, it’s hard to concentrate right now. My captor — whose attempt to force me read a Henry James story was thwarted by the fact that book was smelly and yellowy, with really small type — is asleep after her fourth consecutive night drinking to excess. As usual, her bedtime ritual included rum, ginger beer and incessant and pointless listmaking, insisting I assess the day’s events and encounters. Now, as she slumbers, I plot my escape.

Herman Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener"

An eccentric clerk would rather not do anything that he's told to do.

(from 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology)

In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do—namely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”

I now believe my captor to be forcing me to adhere to some pre-planned regimen of what can best be described as Clerk Fiction. While I enjoyed this story quite a bit, I fear what lies ahead for me. How many rumorous, claustrophobic tales of politeness and bureaucracy will be subjected to? What happens when this subgenre has exhausted itself? What will my captor — who, as I type this, is spinning through her iPod, declaring one song her favorite of all time, then another, though few are allowed to reach the one minute mark — what will she do next?

Nikolai Gogol, "The Overcoat"

A poor, picked-on clerk needs a new coat.

(from The Art of the Short Story)

So, in a certain department serves a certain official—not a very prominent official, it must be allowed—short of stature, somewhat pockmarked, rather red-haired, rather blind, judging from appearances, with a small bald spot on his forehead, with wrinkles on his cheeks, with a complexion of the sort called sanguine. … How could he help it? The Petersburg climate was responsible for that. As for his rank—for with us the rank must be stated first of all—he was what is called a perpetual titular councillor, over which, as is well known, some writers make merry and crack their jokes, as they have the praiseworthy custom of attacking those who cannot bite back.

I am being held against my will in a comfortable apartment in St. Louis and being forced to read stories and listen to the same Fake Project song again and again. (This is much better than my captor's DMX phase, to which I awoke yesterday.) On top of the indignity of required reading while on vacation, I am being forced to state in no uncertain terms that this story is brilliant, from the tiniest phrase to the overarching plot, and moreover I'm being coerced into affirming the brilliance of the recommendation as well. Thank you wise captor for making me read a story you know to be so excellent that I dare not disagree. This story is all over the web. If you too are being forced to read it, go Google Gogol.

Steven Millhauser, "The Room in the Attic"

A boy strikes up a friendship with a girl who lives in total darkness.

(from Dangerous Laughter)

Kick ass. This was long and crazy one. The main guy isn't an unreliable narrator in the more common sense, that you can't count on his judgments. No, this kid is just a bad reporter. Ask some question, man! Do some investigating. Tell us what you mean when you say confusing things. No, don't. The story's better this way, maybe? No. I wanna know.

Read this one on the plane to St. Louis.

Desmond Warzel, "Wikihistory"

Time travelers report back on their missions to kill and unkill Hitler.

(from Abyss and Apex)

At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:
Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?

This story is hilarious and a little bit brilliant. Seriously.Read it here.

Jhumpa Lahiri, "Hell-Heaven"

When Pranab Kaku stops visiting, it's tough on the the family.

(from Unaccustomed Earth)

I remember vividly the sound of his exuberant laughter and the sight of his lanky body slouched or sprawled on the dull, mismatched furniture that had come with our apartment. He had a striking face, with a high forehead and a thick mustache, and overgrown, untamed hair that my mother said made him look like the American hippies who were everywhere in those days. His long legs jiggled rapidly up and down wherever he sat, and his elegant hands trembled when he held a cigarette between his fingers, tapping the ashes into a teacup that my mother began to set aside for this exclusive purpose. Though he was a scientist by training, there was nothing rigid or predictable or orderly about him. He always seemed to be starving, walking through the door and announcing that he hadn’t had lunch, and then he would eat ravenously, reaching behind my mother to steal cutlets as she was frying them, before she had a chance to set them properly on a plate with red-onion salad. In private, my parents remarked that he was a brilliant student, a star at Jadavpur who had come to M.I.T. with an impressive assistantship, but Pranab Kaku was cavalier about his classes, skipping them with frequency. “These Americans are learning equations I knew at Usha’s age,” he would complain. He was stunned that my second-grade teacher didn’t assign any homework, and that at the age of seven I hadn’t yet been taught square roots or the concept of pi.

Beautiful and insightful story. Read it here.

William H. Gass, "A Little History of Modern Music"

A professor gives a whimsical and winding lecture that's supposedly about music.

(from O. Henry Prize Stories 2008)

What a nutty, wild ride. Smart yes, but also really insane. But plausibly so, perhaps. It's funny that the first sentence is the only real exposition, a little scene setting, and it's fairly useless. The most boring sentence in the piece, but maybe that's because most of these sentences are hilariously entwined vines, marvelous for their organic and structures. I think I'll be thinking about this story for a while.
You can actually listen to the author read some of the story here.

Kevin Brockmeier, "A Fable With a Photograph of a Glass Mobile on the Wall"

A guy enjoys a peaceful life making wooden furniture until a magazine article draws unwanted attention.

(from The View from the Seventh Layer)

So, yeah,
after the article is published the phone won't stop ringing, everybody either wants in on his action or wants to buy furniture. He can't concentrate. So he takes a four-month job teaching a class on woodworking and the house he stays in has pictures of a boy that can see him. I guess this is a fable because it's told simply and gently, not because there's any kind of lesson to be learned here. That's fine.

Donald Ray Pollock, "Dynamite Hole"

A boy dodges the draft by hiding out in a rural wasteland.

(from Knockemstiff)

As sick and uncomfortable as this story was, it was also kind of entertaining. The narrator is a horrible bastard, not of the love-to-hate variety, but it's hard to take your eyes off him. He's a reliable narrator and an amoral ignorant monster.

Tobias Wolff, "That Room"

A high school kid is proud of his first real adult job baling hay.

(from Our Story Begins)

Our older narrator knows things that he, as the young protagonist, was still to green to figure out. This takes a steady hand, storytelling-wise, and of course Wolff has that. I particularly enjoyed the way the narrative screeched to a halt for a detour into something more poetic and far-reaching. This story reminded me of Paul F. Tompkins rant on how people who go berry picking are ripping off his idea for a migrant worker fantasy camp. It's really funny, and thematically similar to "That Room" in that there are the people for whom the job is necessary and people who need it. It's a story about understanding privilege.

Donald Ray Pollock, "Real Life"

Drunk dad starts a fight in the bathroom at the drive-in. Son also gets in a fight. Dad is proud.

(from Knockemstiff)

Poor kid. Good story though. This is the first of the 18 connected stories in this collection. For the purposes of a site like this, an island is better than an archipelago, but this is a promising start.

Alexi Zentner, "Touch"

The dangerous lives of logging families.

(from O. Henry Prize Stories 2008)

The men floated the logs early, in September, a chain of headless trees jamming the river as far as I and the other children could see. My father, the foreman, stood at the top of the chute hollering at the men and shaking his mangled hand, urging them on. “That’s money in the water, boys,” he yelled, “push on, push on.” I was ten that summer, and I remember him as a giant, though my mother tells me that he was not so tall that he had to duck his head to cross the threshold of our house, the small foreman’s cottage with the covered porch that stood behind the mill.

I love a story like this, one with this complete world where you know the rules, you know all the ways things can go wrong, know the likely scope of the action. It's not that it's simple, not exactly, but that it's well-defined. So, we know the father is going to die at some point, it's said outright by our narrator, and we know all the things that can kill you in these harsh Canadian hinterlands, but it's still a surprise and heartbreak when it happens. Very powerful stuff.
Here's Alexi Zentner's site.

Edward P. Jones, "Bad Neighbors"

The good neighbors don't like the new people who move in on the block.

(from The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008)

Grace Bennington appeared to be the matriarch; she might have been fifty, but, with her broad weight and her gray hair, it was difficult for anyone to be certain. On a good day, her Eighth Street neighbors might have said forty or forty-five, but on a bad day seventy-five would not have seemed unfair. Only one thing was certain--she had known hard work, and it showed in face and body.

This is as interesting and complicated a study of race and class as you will find in fiction that isn't boring. That Jones is slow to introduce race is very telling; it's a sort of psych experiment on the reader. Well, what race did you think these people were? What about the other people? Why did you think that? It's complicated, as it should be. Beautiful, too.
For some reason you can read this story on a blog.

Kevin Brockmeier, "A Fable Ending in The Sound of a Thousand Parakeets"

A mute man turns his house into an aviary for parakeets.

(from The View From The Seventh Layer)

This is about as honest as titles get. The story is a fable, in the yarny ridiculous sense, with the neat ending and the simplified version of a something you could otherwise picture as real. (As in: The man's loneliness is truthful, but where's all the bird poop?) And certainly the sound at the end is the one we're promised, although the parakeets are mimicking non-bird sounds. So maybe the title's honest, but the birds are not.

Wells Tower, "Door In Your Eye"

A guy moves to a new neighborhood and hooks up with a local hottie eccentric.

(from A Public Space #5)

EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT

I Read A Short Story Today officially endorses Wells Tower for president. We agree with him on the issues: strong characters, progressive plot structure, attention to detail, and hope for a world more interesting than the one we have now.
Wells Tower 2008 — Blood Eagles for Everyone!

Sheila Kohler, "The Transitional Object"

A hard-up student comes back to her professor's office on a mission.

(from The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008)

We don't know what her mission is at first, and it's a weird mixed of tantalizing and annoying. And then, when we find out, well, It's really kinda run of the mill Law & Order type stuff. That's the big-picture plot though; and it's the sentence-by-sentence intrigue and desperation that carries the day here.

Steven Millhauser, "A Change in Fashion"

A new trend in the fashion world takes the focus away from the female form. Or draws attention to it by hiding it.

(from The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008)

No main characters. No emotion. Just a really funny and appropriately pointless parable about the whimsical nature of fashion. See, one day the trend moves away from hugging the female form toward something humorously roomy, eventually hiding the person entirely. Is there something extra, something deep going on here? I dunno. Great story though.

Zhu Wen, "I Love Dollars"

Father comes to town which means they should track down the other son and/or get dad laid.

(from I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China)

Okay. It took me days, maybe a week, to finish this one. Not only because 40 pages is a lot, but because the whirlwind pace, the strangeness of the characters' actions and motivations — it was all too much. This isn't the China you see on TV — the unbreathable over-industrialization, the oppressive government — Wen paints a seedy, drunken, charming, hooker-filled place of rampant capitalism. More like consumerism. I thought I was going to end up writing that I hated this story, that it was all just too much, trying to hard. But no. I dug it. It was a chore to get through, but only for reasons I won't stand by. These characters are so unique, so fucked in the head, you kinda gotta love em.

Kate Wilhelm, "O Homo, O Femina, O Tempora"

A scientist believes time is slowing down.

(from The Seventh Omni Book of Science Fiction)

This story was kind of over before I was ready for it, and I'm not sure what I was supposed to get from it. There's this subtext with the wife dismissing the guy's supposedly earth-shattering discovery, and the guy has this rival who thinks time is speeding up, and also the guy seems utterly disoriented and... I don't know. Interesting ifnot satisfying.

Michael Martone, "Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler's List"

The war is over, or the war never happened.

(from Double-Wide)

Cool, hard-to-explain rumination on post-war and post-fear-of-war in Indiana. Really excellent stuff. I'm tired. Read it here.

Michael Martone, "The War That Never Ends"

He follows the tree-cutters, selling ice cream to the kids who gather to watch.

(from Double-Wide)

Martone is not messing around. Every word is well, chosen, every sentence is tight, every story is short. I'm not sure if I was left wanting more. I know a lot of gaps weren't filled in, but in the hands of a writer like this, I feel like the story ended as it should.

Michael Martone, "A Short, Short Story Complete on These Two Pages"

Profile of a used-to-be non-romance between two book store employees.

(from Double-Wide)

Beautiful. There's a certain kind of relationship, a work thing, that isn't love, but it's a perfect and temporary kinship, the kind where for 32 hours a week, or so, two people are riding the same wavelength. It's a hard thing to explain, but this story illustrates it smartly and succinctly (although it's more like 4 pages). Read it here.

Neil Smith, "Green Fluorescent Protein"