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Short Stories You Can Read In Under 10 Minutes, But

Will Stay With You Forever
By CHARLOTTE AHLIN June 1 2018

Guille Faingold/Stocksy

Is there anything better than settling down for a languid afternoon of reading your favorite
novel cover to cover, perhaps on a park bench or in a field of delightful and very relaxing
flowers? No, there isn't. But do you have time to read an entire novel in a field these days?
No, you probably don't. Whether you're juggling work or school or some unholy
combination of the two, there's a good chance that you have nasty things like
"responsibilities" and "obligations" to take care off. But even if you don't have the time, you
can still have the satisfaction of reading something start to finish: these short stories can
be read in just ten minutes (or less!), but they'll stay with you forever.
The short short story is an art form all its own. Short short story authors have perilously
few words to create an entire new world, immerse you in it, make you invested in new
characters, and then bring it all to a cohesive (or devastating) conclusion. It's no mean
feat. But a truly great, truly short story can accomplish all that in the time it takes you to
wait for the bus. You can read these stories anytime, anywhere, without missing a step in
your busy schedule:

'A Telephone Call' by Dorothy Parker

Whether you're waiting for the telephone to ring or waiting for that sweet, sweet text
notification to ding, everyone knows the feeling of waiting for their crush to get back to
them. Dorothy Parker brilliantly captures this agonizing spiral of self-doubt in her classic
short story, "A Telephone Call."

'Girl' by Jamaica Kincaid

"Girl" might be one of the best-known short short stories out there, and for good reason. In
just one paragraph of lyrical prose, we are utterly transported into the life of Kincaid's
titular girl as she wends her way through the social expectations of girlhood.

'The Huntress' by Sofia Samatar

Sofia Samatar creates an entire lived-in world in less than one page with "The Huntress."
It's the portrait of a monster, yes, but it's also a dream-like portrait of a what it's like to live
as a foreigner in a strange, new city (while also being stalked by a terrible and unseen
monster).
'A Private Experience' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
"A Private Experience" is definitely on the longer side of the short short story, but you can
still read it in one sitting. And this brief, intimate, heart-wrenching tale of two women
taking shelter from violence is sure to stay with you long past the final sentence. When the
world outside is crumbling, the bonds between strangers can mean life or death.

'Hook' by Danielle McLaughlin

"Hook" is a short story about girls, mothers, horses, and fishhooks, and boy will some of
this imagery stick in your brain. Danielle McLaughlin manages to balance the beautiful with
the grim in her stories, weaving together worlds that are alien and familiar all at once.

'The Mark of Cain' by Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay is best known for her insightful essays, but she's also one hell of a fiction
writer. "The Mark of Cain" tells the story of one woman with two husbands (kind of): the
kind man she loves, and the hateful man she's married to. They are, of course, identical, but
she always knows who is who, and she cannot seem to have one without the other.

'Five Short Stories' by Lydia Davis

Yes, technically this is not one short story but rather "Five Short Stories." Lydia Davis writes
stories so short, though, that all together they still make up one funny, sad, compact short
story about trains and lost loves that you can read and re-read in a just a few beautiful
minutes.

'The Paper Menagerie' by Ken Liu

Fair warning that if you try to read "The Paper Menagerie" as a quick break from work, you
might burst into tears at your desk. Ken Liu has created a supremely magical, endlessly
touching story about a mother and son and their living paper tiger.

'Crazy They Call Me' by Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith inhabits the world of Billie Holiday in "Crazy They Call Me," part short story and
part tribute to Holiday's life. It's a gripping reflection on music, small dogs, and how artists
are perceived by the world around them.

'The Answer' by Fredric Brown

Fredric Brown wrote dozens of weird and wonderful sci-fi stories, most of them clocking in
at just a few paragraphs. One of his best known stories has got to be "The Answer," which
takes about one minute to read, but is guaranteed to make you afraid of computers for the
rest of your life.

'Sticks' by George Saunders

"Sticks" is just flash fiction at its finest: it starts off cute and quirky, and rapidly veers into
creepy and off and heartbreaking, all without losing its sense of humor. In under a page,
George Saunders conjures up a singular character, his bizarre obsession with the pole in
his backyard, and the concerned family around him.

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Toni Morrison Quotes That Will Light Your Way, No

Matter The Situation
By KRISTIAN WILSON 6 days ago
 Francois Durand/Getty Images Enter tainment/Getty Images

Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison passed away Monday night at
Montefiore Medical Center in New York, following a brief illness, at the age of 88. I've
picked out a number of amazing Toni Morrison quotes to remember her by. Though
Morrison has died, the Beloved author should never be forgotten.

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, on Feb. 18, 1931. Following
her separation from Harold Morrison in 1963, she raised her two sons, Harold Ford
Morrison and Slade Morrison, in Syracuse, where she worked as an editor for Random
House. She published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970, and followed it up with 10
more fantastic works of book-length fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved in
1987. Morrison's last novel, God Help the Child, was published in 2015.

In addition to her adult fiction, Morrison wrote children's books and published works of
nonfiction. She and her son Slade Morrison, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2010,
collaborated on a number of children's books, including The Big Box and Little Cloud and
Lady Wind. Morrison's most recent book, a nonfiction collection titled The Source of Self-
Regard, came out in 2019.
Here are some of the best Toni Morrison quotes to move you on this sad day.

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked

people love wickedly, violent people love violently,
weak people love weakly, stupid people love
stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe.
There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone
possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn,
neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward
eye.”

— from The Bluest Eye

“There in the center of that silence was not eternity

but the death of time and a loneliness so profound
the word itself had no meaning.”

— from Sula

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the sh*t that

weighs you down.”

— from Song of Solomon

“It was a silly age, twenty-five; too old for teenaged

dreaming, too young for settling down. Every corner
was a possibility and a dead end.”
— from Tar Baby

"Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody

anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and
unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one
is looking for her, and even if they were, how can
they call her if they don’t know her name?"

Alex Wong/Getty Images News/Getty Images

— from Beloved
"If you find a book you really want to read but it
hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it."

— from a 1981 speech before the Ohio Arts Council

"It's nice when grown people whisper to each other

under the covers. Their ecstasy is more a leaf-sigh
than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point.
They reach, grown people, for something beyond,
way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue.
They are remembering while they whisper the
carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they
never sailed on. ... Breathing and murmuring under
covers both of them have washed and hung out on
the line, in a bed they chose together and kept
together nevermind one leg was propped on a 1916
dictionary, and the mattress, curved like a
preacher's palm asking for witnesses in His name's
sake, enclosed them each and every night and
muffled their whispering, old-time love. They are
under the covers because they don't have to look at
themselves anymore; there is no stud's eye, no
chippie glance to undo them. They are inward toward
the other, bound and joined by carnival dolls and the
steamers that sailed from ports they never saw. That
is what is beneath their undercover whispers."

— from Jazz
"When you get these jobs that you have been so
brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real
job is that if you are free, you need to free
somebody else. If you have some power, then your
job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a
grab-bag candy game."

— from a 2003 interview with O magazine

"Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think

it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you
are blind. It is a learned application without reason
or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve
love regardless of the suffering you have endured.
You do not deserve love because somebody did you
wrong. You do not deserve love just because you
want it. You can only earn — by practice and careful
contemplations — the right to express it and you
have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you
have to earn God. You have to practice God. You
have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good
and diligent student you may secure the right to
show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma."

— from Paradise

"We never shape the world... the world shapes us."

— from A Mercy

"Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that

chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the
couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call
it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the
largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks,
from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is
its beauty. ... People with no imagination feed it with
sex — the clown of love. They don't know the real
kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and
everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to
love like that — softly, without props."
 Jemal Countess/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

— from Love

"Look to yourself. You free. Nothing and nobody is

obliged to save you but you. Seek your own land.
You young and a woman and there's serious
limitation in both, but you are a person too. Don't
let... some trifling boyfriend and certainly no devil
doctor decide who you are. That's slavery.
Somewhere inside you is that free person I'm talking
about. Locate her and let her do some good in the
world."

— from Home

"You don't have to love me but you damn well have to

respect me."

— from God Help the Child

"Make up a story. ... For our sake and yours forget

your name in the street; tell us what the world has
been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't
tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's
wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul."

— from her 1993 Nobel lecture

"A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind;
they are its necessity."

— from The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, and Meditations