 LIST OF 2017 SHORT STORIES.

1. "Men Without Women “BY Haruki Murakami

(Japanese author Haruki Murakami 村上 春樹, translated and published in English in
2017)

An unnamed narrator receives a phone call in the middle of the night telling him that
his former lover, who he dubs M, has committed suicide, the caller being M's husband.
He is unbearably anguished upon learning of this news.
The narrator tells of how he imagines himself meeting M when they were fourteen and
in junior high school. He asks her for an eraser in class and she breaks hers in half and
gives the piece to him; this meeting warms his heart. She then breaks his heart by
running off with sailors who promise to show her the world. He chases her, but is never
able to catch up.
In reality, he knew her for only about two years in his adult life and they only saw each
other a few times a month. She loves elevator music, and always plays "A Summer
Place". He notes that because of her death, he now considers himself the second-
loneliest man in the world, after her husband. He is also in a state called "Men without
Women," a period of sudden and intense misery after a man learns of the death of a
beloved woman.

2. "An Independent Organ" BY Haruki Murakami

(Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹 Murakami Haruki, born January 12, 1949) is a Japanese writer,
with his work being translated into 50 languages)

Tanimura tells of a time in his life when he regularly played squash with Dr. Tokai, a fifty-two
year old cosmetic surgeon and bachelor who has never lived long-term or fallen in love with a
woman. Instead, he dates married or committed women as he does not want to enter into a
serious relationship with anyone. However, for the past eighteen months, he has developed
feelings for a thirty-six year old married mother and asks Tanimura for advice. During their
conversation, Tokai mentions how he is struggling with the question, "Who in the world am I?"
and retells a story of a Jewish doctor who lost everything but his life at Auschwitz and how that
could have been him. Tokai also notes that for the first time in his life, he feels rage.
Tokai suddenly stops coming to the gym soon after and it is not until two months later that
Tanimura learns of his death from Tokai's office assistant Goto; they arrange to meet and
discuss Tokai. Goto tells of how the doctor suddenly changed his habits at work: he gave off a
different aura than before. After Tokai stopped showing up at work, Goto grows concerned and
goes to Tokai's apartment and finds him bedridden and feeble. He learns that Tokai has given
up on life after the woman Tokai loves abandoned both him and her husband for a third lover.
Tokai, lovesick and heartbroken, condemns himself to a slow death by anorexia. Goto
concludes by giving Tanimura a squash racket Tokai wanted him to have and asks Tanimura to
not forget Tokai.
The title of the story comes from Tanimura's memory of Tokai's observation that women have
"an independent organ" that allows them to lie with a clear conscience.
3. “Black-Eyed Women” by Viet Thanh Nguyen

(Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American novelist.)

(Collection: The Refugees)

It explores the experience of a Vietnamese ghostwriter living with her mother when
both of them encounter the ghost of the narrator’s brother. It is revealed that after being
killed by pirates during the family’s attempt to flee Vietnam (both the narrator and her
mother are refugees), the narrator’s brother continued to swim across the Pacific Ocean
to finally rest his soul with his mother and sister.
4. “Forbidden Fruit" (by Roshani Chokshi)
Roshani Chokshi is an American children's book author. Chokshi is known for her re-
creations of Indian folklore)

(Collection: A Thousand Beginnings and Endings)

A mountain loses her heart. Two sisters transform into birds to escape captivity. A
young man learns the true meaning of sacrifice. A young woman takes up her
mother’s mantle and leads the dead to their final resting place. From fantasy to
science fiction to contemporary, from romance to tales of revenge, these stories will
beguile readers from start to finish. For fans of Neil Gaiman’s Unnatural Creatures
and Ameriie’s New York Times–bestselling Because You Love to Hate Me.
5. “The Green Zone Rabbit” by Hassan Blasim,translated by Jonathan Wright

This story, from The Iraqi Christ, published by the excellent Comma Press (2017)
(Hassan Blasim is an Iraqi-born film director and writer. He writes in Arabic.)
(Jonathan Wright is a British journalist and literary translator)
This story, from The Iraqi Christ, published by the excellent Comma Press, is by
turns terrifying and wonderfully banal. In Baghdad’s Green Zone, Hajjar keeps a
rabbit while waiting to be briefed on an operation. The rabbit lays an egg. Things get
stranger and darker, and Blasim lays his tale out with a wonderfully dry bar-room
simplicity that makes the ending all the more explosive.
6. “ The News of her Death” by Pettina Gappah
(Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean lawyer and writer. She writes in English, though
she also draws on Shona, her first language.)

Five women talking in a hair salon while one of them has her braids done: this is all
the narrative structure Gappah needs to build a complex social landscape, telling these
women’s stories through perfectly pitched dialogue and delicately measured details.
The recurring refrain that “Kindness is late” is brilliantly deployed, and the whole
story quietly makes the point that hair is always political.
*********************************************************************************************
 LIST OF 2018 SHORT STORIES.

1. “Forbidden Fruit" (by Roshani Chokshi)

(Roshani Chokshi (born February 14, 1991) is an American children's book author)
Collection: (A Thousand Beginnings and Endings at Harper Collins.)
The Forbidden Fruit is a character-driven story about two young Emirati adults (boy
and girl), living they're lives in a contemporary Their story captures how they go about
their daily routines separately, only to experience similar experiences in life that a lot
of the Arab youth go through.

2. “Inhuman Resources” By David Dayen

Published in Huff Post Highline | July 12, 2018 | (10,400 words)
(David Dayen, American writer, is the executive editor of The American Prospect.)
David Dayen tells the story of Mike Picarella, an HSBC banker who witnessed a
coworker being repeatedly sexually harassed and had his life ruined after he reported it
to HR. The account shows how power imbalances within the banking industry prevent
whistleblowers from coming forward and why there have been so few #metoo stories
that have come out of Wall Street despite its notorious frat boy culture.
3. 150 Minutes of Hell By Lizzie Johnson
Published in San Francisco Chronicle | December 5, 2018 | (4,974 words)
(Elizabeth A. Johnson is a Roman Catholic feminist theologian. She is a
Distinguished Professor Emerita of Theology at Fordham University, a Jesuit
institution in New York City and a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood)
In 150 min. of Hell, a harrowing and heartbreaking reconstruction of a deadly fire
tornado that tore through Redding, California during the Carr Fire earlier this summer.
The fire killed eight people and ruined more than 1,000 homes.

4. “Books and Roses ”By Helen Oyeyemi

Published in Collection Book: What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

(Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi is a British novelist and writer of short stories)

The first story, “Books and Roses,” starts with an abandoned baby girl found in a
chapel in Catalonia. A gold chain and key is tied around her neck. Inside her clothes,
a note reading “wait for me” is found by a monk. Another note requests the baby to be
named Montserrat.
 Montserrat becomes a woman, and years later she gets a job as a laundress for Senora
Greta. Montserrat meets Senora Lucy, a painter and former thief, who lives on the
second floor of the house where she washes clothes. Montserrat soon falls in love with
Lucy, who wears a key around her neck given to her by a former lover. Both women
are left to discern which doors their keys unlock, and why.

5. How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story BY Donna Minkowitz
Published in Village Voice | June 20, 2018 | (4,019 words)

(Donna Minkowitz is an American writer and journalist)

Journalist Donna Minkowitz apologizes 25 years after breaking the story of Brandon
Teena, transgender murder victim and subject of the film Boys Don’t Cry.
Retroactively realizing it was “the most insensitive and inaccurate piece of journalism
I have ever written,” Minkowitz examines what she sees now as her own internalized
homophobia and ignorance of trans issues.

***********************

 LIST OF 2019 SHORT STORIES.

1 “The Era” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Guernica)

 Collection: Friday Black

 (Nana Kwame is American writer.)

Nana Kwame’s debut collection Friday Black made it onto a lot of year-end lists and
this story set in dystopian society took a while to sink in.
Together they’re called the Water Wars because of how the Federation Forces lied to
its own people about the how the Amalgamation had poisoned the water reservoirs.
The result was catastrophic/horrific. Then, since the people of the old Federation were
mad because of their own truth-clouding, they kept on warring for years and years,
and the old Federation became the New Federation that stands proudly today. Later
on, when the Amalgamation of Allies suspected a key reservoir had been poisoned,
they asked the New Federation if they’d done it. In a stunning act of graciousness and
honesty, my New Federation ancestors told the truth, said, “Yeah, we did poison that
reservoir,” and in doing so, saved many, many lives, which were later more honorably
destroyed via nuclear. The wars going on now, Valid Storm Alpha and the True
Freedom Campaign, are valid/true wars because we know we aren’t being emotional
fighting them.
2. “Redeployment” Phil Klay (Granta)

 Published In Granta Magazine

 (Phil Clay (/ˈklaɪ/; born 1983) is an American writer.)

A soldier must learn to resume his domestic life after returning from the front lines
in Iraq, in this story written by Klay, a US Marine veteran.
We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose and we called it ‘Operation
Scooby’. I’m a dog person, so I thought about that a lot. First time was instinct. I
hear O’Leary go, ‘Jesus,’ and there’s a skinny brown dog lapping up blood the same
way he’d lap up water from a bowl. It wasn’t American blood, but still, there’s that
dog, lapping it up. And that’s the last straw, I guess, and then it’s open season on
dogs. At the time you don’t think about it. You’re thinking about who’s in that
house, what’s he armed with, how’s he gonna kill you, your buddies. You’re going
block by block, fighting with rifles good to 550 metres and you’re killing people at
five in a concrete box.

3. “On Destiny” by Lee Chang-dong (Asymptote)

 Published in Asymptote journal.

 Lee Chang-dong is a South Korean film director, screenwriter, and novelist.
(I love the cinema of Lee Chang-dong, and in his oeuvre, Poetry is my favourite. The
Korean auteur is in the running for 2019 Oscars as his new film Burning (based on
Haruki Murakami’s short story “Barn Burning”) is shortlisted for best foreign
language film. No Korean film has ever been nominated in this category and we fans
of Korean cinema are rooting for Lee Chang-dong to make history. (Story translated
from Korean by Soyoung Kim.)
The story I want to tell you is about my strange destiny. I understand that you are a
novelist, so I assume that you must have heard all kinds of strange stories about all
kinds of people. But for all I know, my story is the strangest.
Do you believe in fate or fortune telling? Those who do say that a person’s destiny is
predetermined at birth, no, even before birth, as if it were written on a ledger,
meaning that no matter the struggle, people are destined to live and die according to
their palm lines. Similarly, Christians say that there is nothing in human affairs that
does not go according to God’s plans. But what those people say has never made
sense to me. I mean, if it is true, how unfair is human destiny?
4 “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son” by Saul Bellow (Granta)
 Published in Granta Magizine
 Saul Bellow was a Canadian-American writer.
I love everything Saul Bellow has written.
‘Gott meiner,’ said my father to my mother. ‘Again no money? But I gave you
twelve dollars at the beginning of the week. What have you done with it? ’I don’t
know. It went away. ’So quickly . . . by Thursday? Impossible. ‘It couldn’t be
helped. Some of it I used to pay old bills. We’ve owed money to Herskovits for I
don’t know how long.’‘But did you have to pay him this week? ’He’s right in the
block. For two months now I’ve been coming home the long way around. I gave him
three dollars. ’How could you! Haven’t you any sense? And what did you do with
the rest? Joshua,’ he said, turning to me furiously. ‘Take a pencil and write these
things down. I have to know where it all went. I bought eggs and butter on Tuesday.’
5 “Mucci” by Ursula Villarreal-Moura (Bennington Review)

 Published in Bennington Review.

 Ursula villarreal-moura: Best American Short Story Writer.
A searing story of a crumbling marriage.
The night before they had been too jetlagged for anything beyond quick showers and
sleep, but tonight Marcelo was certain they’d have sex.
Elbowing her way out of the coffeehouse, Tatum greeted Marcelo with a coffee
granita. A white dash of whipped cream streaked her left cheek.
“You have no idea what you’re missing,” she said, a brief moan escaping her throat.
“This is,” she added lolling her head around, “to die for. Want a bite?” she offered,
pushing the plastic cup toward him.

6 ‘Motherland,’ by Min Jin Lee (The Missouri Review)

 Published in The Missouri Review.
 Min Jin Lee (born 1968) is a Korean American writer

(Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko continues to make waves and I still haven’t bought it. This
story is more than a gentle reminder for me to do the needful.)

That spring, she began sleeping with an old boyfriend from her freshman year in high
school. He’d grown up into a handsome, married playboy who still had the tendency
to talk too much. One afternoon in her tiny Nagano living room, as the playboy was
getting dressed to return to his office, he bemoaned the fact that she wouldn’t leave
her dull husband, who preferred the company of his work colleagues to hers. He laid
his head between her small breasts and said, “But I can leave her. Tell me to do it.”
To this, she said nothing. Etsuko had no intention of leaving Nori and the children.
Her complaint about her husband was not that he was boring or that he wasn’t Rome
enough. Nori was not a bad person. It was just that she didn’t feel like she knew him
in any clear sense after ~eteenyears of marriage, and she doubted that she ever would.
Her husband didn’t seem to need her except to be a wife in name and a mother to his
children. For Nori, this was enough.