Short Stories

There was no guilt or remorse in her remarks.

• Short story?
• Story #2: When Our Old Stories Hold Us Back.
• Short Story: Rose.

Like many Americans I came to know, they believed in something, but just not in organized religions. She seemed to ignore it. Our friendship grew nevertheless. I made the mistake of remarking how much I loved her home-made potato latkes. Every week, she would bring a plateful of the Jewish pancake. It reminded me of the time I complimented my mother-in-law, just one week into my marriage, for her fried chili eggplant. After that, it was eggplant dishes every other night.

We made sure whenever we had her over for dinner to go easy on the spices. Rose surprised us in December when she revealed that she had been rethinking about her own faith since we had our conversation.

7 Short Stories that Will Change Your Attitude (and Spare Some Pain)

They gave me a job at the day-care center. I will be celebrating Hanukkah again.

One day at the start of spring, I came home to find her with my wife in the living room of our apartment, looking scornfully. I was never privy to the conversations my wife had with Rose, but they were certainly bonding closer and closer through the regular afternoon teas. Rose no longer had any qualms befriending people who she had assumed would kill her because of her origin. Like most Indonesian Muslims, we too had grown up with a stereotypical view of Jews.

Analysis of the genre

That changed in the months we came to know Rose. When I returned from the TV station, Rose greeted me at the stairway. Rose would make someone a great mother. My wife later told me she had been waiting for my return all day. And then came what killed whatever remaining suspicions we had of one another. This was in May and we only had a few more months before heading back home. Explaining that she was going to have surgery, Rose showed us a wall safe where she had kept all her valuable possessions, including jewelry, the title to her apartment and bank documents.

There were no further instructions. To our relief, Rose returned from the hospital a few days later. Back home, back in the communist days, it had been really hard to get records like that, but my mother had pretty much his whole collection. Once when I was a boy, I scratched one of those precious records. So I was playing this game jumping from our little sofa to the armchair, and one time I misjudged it and hit the record player. The needle went across the record with a zip—this was long before CDs—and my mother came in from the kitchen and began shouting at me.

And I knew that this one too would now have those popping noises going through it while he crooned those American songs.

Years later, when I was working in Warsaw and I got to know about black-market records, I gave my mother replacements of all her worn-out Tony Gardner albums, including that one I scratched. A story about a young man and a young woman who take part in proxy marriages for soldiers posted abroad. I wonder why it has not been filmed.

Story #1: What Life is All About

William had no girlfriends in high school, and his mother once sat him down at the table in her spotless kitchen and asked if he was gay. She said it would be fine with her. She loved him unconditionally, and they would figure out a way to tell his father. He was just absurdly, painfully in love with Bridey Taylor, who leaned on the piano and sang while he played, and he had no way of telling her. He was too shy to pursue other girls, even when the payoff seemed either likely or worth the agony.

It was too humiliating. He just stammered an unconvincing denial.

100 Great Short Stories

Pachinko is one the best-received books of and I need to buy it as soon as possible. The morning Henry Evans stopped by my office to tell me to go to Chicago, I was in the middle of my chapter-a-day habit: I did this at work because it was where I lived—fourteen hours a day, often six days a week. Lovely title and a lovely short story. It just worked its way up and overwhelmed me. If you intend to read just one story from this list, then I suggest please make it this one.

This is all new to us.

If you can call it a city. Everything here is called Village Something: It is not a lot. We left everything behind. I had nothing to do with it.

Short story | literature | www.newyorkethnicfood.com

It was Azita; Azita had it all. This story brings Take Your Daughter to Work Day to a different level, but it all ends up down in the dumps. Read short stories on your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Get your stories featured on EotW and in our newsletter.

End of the Line. There's a new gadget in town and Liza has to try it. But will the price be too high? A children's story set in the Iron Age. A girl, Morg, makes a wish to the goddess