Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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.
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
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)
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.
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LIST OF 2018 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)
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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)
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.
(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.