A Martian court poet narrates the arrival of an Earth hero who turns out to be an everyman; the villain and trap are staged without his knowledge, and translation is visual: people only see what they already understand. "Demanifesting" as the word for dying. Theme: "Lite or Light." Session, all-play. Rescheduled from Aug 21 to Aug 19 for Hannah's Vancouver trip. All Play.

A kid on a family road trip run entirely in therapy-speak (family hero, family mascot, feelings deducted from allowances) finally gets herself a cause and an effect at the aquarium. Deeply sad and very funny at once. Theme: "Lite or Light." Session, all-play. Rescheduled from Aug 21 to Aug 19 for Hannah's Vancouver trip. All Play.

Wilde's most self-important firework is certain the prince's wedding is held in his honor; "pylotechnic," doubled down on. JC saw Trump in the 1880s and found it comforting. Theme: "Lite or Light." Session, all-play. Rescheduled from Aug 21 to Aug 19 for Hannah's Vancouver trip. All Play.

Everyone has read the ex-husband's blog ("I Can't Stand My Wife"); the pregnant narrator would rather source a replacement parmesan grater. "It was my life that was lying in the middle of my life... like a poleaxed wildebeest." Theme: "Lite or Light." Session, all-play. Rescheduled from Aug 21 to Aug 19 for Hannah's Vancouver trip. All Play.

An enforcer of a Stalin-like regime walks the machinery of punishment he built, and then walks home. Told with almost no interiority; whether the flatness is the point is the argument. "Dzh" is short for Dzhugashvili, Stalin's real name.

A man tells the story of his own betrayal from the honorable man's side, in reverse, so his listener will despise him properly. "Whatsoever one man does, it is as though all men did it."

A first date built on small lies that compound until the narrator dreams she is her own wife. App-era identity in three pages.

A young woman comes down to breakfast carrying a nightmare that refuses to stay one; "her face was a devastated field." Dávila compresses dread into a single morning.

A man arrives at night in a village where he was once important, and the dream-logic never breaks. A proof-of-concept for The Unconsoled; Ben Marcus called it "restrained."

A utopia priced on one child's suffering, subtitled "Variations on a theme by William James." The walking-away is the question, not the answer.

Jemisin's direct reply to Le Guin: what if you stayed? A utopia defended by enforcement, which is its own trap.

Bradbury's astronauts falling to Earth after their ship breaks up, talking until they burn.

A failed actress moves from LA to a Chicago motel; "I never had... I just had a can of gravy and a hairbrush." Sad without being depressing, in Moore's surprising little bursts of language.

A dreamlike childhood memory of stealing roses from rich gardens. "A thief of roses... has 100 years of forgiveness."

A Victorian machine built to raise children rationally, told as a museum catalog entry. Mechanical parenting and what it costs.

Woolf's narrator circles a small mark on the wall and lets the mind go everywhere else; one of the first stories off the Woolfs' own Hogarth Press.

Childhood memory through scrambled cable TV and brass reflections.

Overwrought but genuine metafiction, "macaroni on macaroni."

An angel crash-lands in a muddy courtyard and becomes a sideshow attraction. "The world had been sad since Tuesday."

A writer's hypothetical poor aunt materializes on his back and won't leave; a story about the people memory quietly discards.

A contemporary haunting that asks where ghosts are allowed to live.

A couple of about a hundred dig their own grave as a last practical act, bickering over what to bring; they lie down in it, find it comfortable, and agree not to answer the gate. A parable with a sweetness and a harshness that are both real. All Play.

A child's summer in a Quebec river town, her English painter father, and the sign he paints for the Chinese cafe. Memory holding on to one good thing. All Play.

A dystopia where lateness is a crime and one man's jelly beans jam the schedule. All Play.

A woman dies on her honeymoon and lands in an afterlife where her memory of her soulmate dissolves; time loops instead of ending. All Play.

A scientist testing whether bees can teach each other, while being accused of failing to teach her own daughter. The last word goes to a man past fear: given everything, "it would be radically unreasonable to come to any other conclusion."

A retired casket salesman walks the Michigan woods near his house, naming things and trying not to, toward what may be his last night. An unsentimental portrayal of sentiment; found in a box of discarded Grantas.

Elderly parents choose a birthday present for their institutionalized son, who reads the whole world as a message about himself. Then the phone rings. One of the great endings.

Two erstwhile lovers, one a superhero, meet at an abandoned Land of Oz theme park; melancholy played straight in a world of levitating waitresses.

Two married men travel to an island wedding while their surrogate's pregnancy turns precarious; Link fencing the fantastic out, mostly.

From Atavists, Millet's linked Los Angeles stories titled by type; contemporary to the point of bruising.

An older couple's bingo night is spoiled by a young couple cheating; under it, an illness nobody at the table can see.

George Willard and Helen White at the fair after dark, the moment youth takes "the backward view of life." Winesburg's quiet peak. All Play.

Berlin narrates a lonely woman's Saturday while explaining why she's telling it in third person. The seams are the story. All Play.

A village flower show embarks on "its short, eager life" and ends in catastrophe; built from a real 1891 invitation with the disaster copied on its back. All Play.

Possibly Nabokov's last unpublished story (1926, surfaced 2015): a man stops mid-journey, removes his boots, and walks barefoot toward the Polish border, in a parody of Soviet pseudo-folk style. All Play.

A contemporary Los Angeles riff on Cheever.

Neddy Merrill swims home pool by pool across the county while the seasons, and his life, slide out from under him.

The village ritual that made 1948 New Yorker readers cancel their subscriptions.

Cosmic horror in expat Hong Kong, novella-length surveillance dread.

A boy sent home for his father's wallet lets the night streets of his town rearrange themselves into dream. Both authors are also visual artists.

Presented as a story, revealed to be an essay: a family invents a breed name for their dog and the invented name changes what people see. On naming, and the ethics of a good lie. Both authors are also visual artists.

A rest-cure patient and the wallpaper she is left alone with. Gilman, divorced by 1894, was "an early adopter of divorce."

A man visits the axolotls at the aquarium until the glass stops mattering.

Kafka's one-paragraph double vision of a circus rider, and which version we can live with.

Li's characters live inside literature; one says, "My life is a William Trevor story."

A blind piano tuner remarries; the second wife tunes the house against the memory of the first. Trevor is "the Irish Chekhov."

A lonely divorced lawyer narrates her affair with her carpenter, a separated husband, and the slow claim his daughter Dot makes on her.

Link rewires the old tale of the boy who couldn't shudder.

Rumors move through an Oxford college that students are being tracked by their library cards; the rumor mutates with each teller, from eugenics conspiracy to rankings hygiene.

A parrot at the Arecibo telescope asks why humans listen so hard to the stars and not to the talking species going extinct beside them. Commissioned as a museum video installation. All Play.

Berlin on the days after her sister's death, where grief hides in errands. All Play.

Mrs. Mallard gets one hour of imagined freedom; came recommended by Ruben's dad, who taught the classics. All Play.

On memory and the fear of invention: "The older I get, the more I am drawn to what is incomplete. Unfinished paintings, uncompleted books..." Three endings from Freeman's Conclusions anthology.

A son inventories his father the way his father inventoried erasers and toy cars: beige ledgers as "the sum of his working days." "I always wanted to have known my father before I entered his life." Three endings from Freeman's Conclusions anthology.

Johnson's essay of endings in the natural world. Three endings from Freeman's Conclusions anthology.

A fable of a Soviet-era orphanage for disabled infants, escaped by a girl guided out by what she takes for a saint under the linoleum. "A small, secret relief for the overworked attendants: not all babies learn to crawl." Read with Eula Biss's "Time and Distance Overcome" alongside: an essay that follows telephone poles into the history of lynching.

A bereaved photographer drives Orlando at night because she can't stand her neighbor's wailing; the neighbor, it turns out, weeps professionally. Then a ghost shows up in a photo of her backseat. Read with Eula Biss's "Time and Distance Overcome" alongside: an essay that follows telephone poles into the history of lynching.

The town fool who chooses belief over humiliation, every time, and wins something the town can't see. Translated by Saul Bellow.

Folktales that never existed, told with the specific language of ones that did: a white-haired baby who eats a region into famine, a burned village whose writer can only "offer an isness that isn't is anymore."

A whole Wyoming life told as a resume, no scenes, all weight. All Play.

A father takes his young son across a river he's crossed before; the river has other plans. All Play.

Bowles's short puppet play: two puppet sisters bickering over safety versus freedom inside one intimate room. All Play.

A boy on the high-dive ladder on his thirteenth birthday, in second person, one decision long. All Play.

A boy's birthday cake, an accident, and a baker who calls and calls; it ends with bread at 3am and nowhere else to be.

Akaky Akakievich saves for the coat that finally makes him visible. The clerk story all Russian literature allegedly came out of.

A middle-aged woman privately doubts her daughter's love and her own path, and finds herself pursuing her husband's ex and the ex's daughter. The resolution isn't triumphant; it's time passing.

A young woman decamps to the Bay Area after college: a German landlady who says "we have art so as not to die of the truth," a friend in a Vanagon, and a betrayal reckoned with years later. "Grace is a gift undeserved, yet given anyway."

An ogre's wife after the ogre eats their children by mistake; fairy-tale grief with an image system near the end that's downright incredible.

Jinny gets remission news she doesn't share, and a kiss on a floating bridge she didn't plan.

Gilead-world Robinson: prodigal Jack at his father's house, grace offered and dodged.

A dying father asks his writer daughter for one simple story; she can't keep hope out of it, he can't let it in.

Small-town Mayo: Eileen, armor-plated, and her depressed oldest friend Murt, out of the hospital a fourth time. The title is the etiquette of an unlocked front door.

A burned-out book critic heckles a bank robber; the bullet finds the one memory that still matters. "They is, they is."

Squeaky Parker, the fastest thing on two feet in Harlem, discovers mid-race what her brother Raymond could be.

A man dead of cancer at fifty-five narrates his afterlife, which inexplicably includes a running-app coach. Dying, disappointingly, teaches him nothing: "Running, like death, happens to you."

A striving dad's diary of the lawn ornament every good family wants; the ornaments are people. Two diaristic frames, wildly dark and wildly funny and wildly strange.

The medieval saint who flew out of her own funeral, told from inside the family that had to live with her. Two diaristic frames, wildly dark and wildly funny and wildly strange.

Sleeps through a revolution, wakes to a country that changed its king; Irving is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. All Play.

A daughter home for Thanksgiving on the last farm among the outdoor malls rides the old horse to Walmart; farce curdles into realism on the ice. All Play.

A young critic whose taste outstrips her means works an art gallery job, mostly by getting fired and stealing. Witty on scent, class, and early adulthood. All Play.

A man alone by a rising river, building the flood in his mind.

A boy named for the author his father survived a train wreck reading.

Northeast China, fathers, and a chauffeur who falls asleep and stays dreamed-about long after the story ends.

The girl with the green ribbon, retold as a life; everyone knows how it ends, which is the horror. All Play.

No monsters: a brother, a sister, a barn ladder, and what trust costs later. All Play.

Opens on the Santa Anas that make "meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife." All Play.

The months of the year swap stories around a fire; October's is about a boy who runs away. All Play.

A cold Good Friday, two widows at a fire, and Peter's denial suddenly present-tense; Chekhov called it his favorite of his own stories. With Barthelme's "The School" alongside: everything the class adopts dies, deadpan, until the children ask the real question.

An Irish academic in Manhattan, badly mentored after her own long-ago assault, overcorrects when her daughter is harassed at school; the ending returns to Ireland, "so many rainbows that we stopped looking for them." With Barthelme's "The School" alongside: everything the class adopts dies, deadpan, until the children ask the real question.

An alien seed grows into a being who nudges scientists toward spaceflight for millennia without knowing why, then stows away to the Moon; the closing analogy is the pollinating bee.

Emma Bovary's dog catches her despair, then runs. Flaubert from the floor's eye view.

Korean SF braiding quantum physics and time travel with grief: a bereaved mother, a stranger who knows too much about time, and the school pressure-cooker underneath.

Anson Hunter and the sentence everyone misquotes: "They are different from you and me." Superiority as a slow leak.

A painter once forced by her father to prove herself by sewing a suit is rediscovered by an art impresario who wants copies of the suit as artworks; an art-world satire that descends into a personal inferno.

Chicago sends its most promising man to Tahiti to make his fortune; he finds a better definition of one.

A middle-aged man runs into his first lover, now eighty, in a diner; the whole story is one conversation about what he was, what he is, and whether he'll admit it. He wants to stand in the snow watching it fill their tracks. Both from Murakami's Birthday Stories anthology.

Crows fly into an old woman's apartment on the birthday her son forgot; the stranger who comes to shoo them out gives her more than he does. Both from Murakami's Birthday Stories anthology.

A sorcerer dreams a man into existence, organ by organ, and the fire knows the rest.

Old men on a Mississippi spillway pier, trading grief and one enormous fish.

Learning the heptapods' language rewires how a linguist experiences time, and her daughter's whole life arrives at once; the source of Arrival.

Humanity asks ever-larger computers how to reverse entropy. INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER, until.

Newlyweds on the train to their honeymoon, saying everything except the thing.

A man stops trusting words and writes his wife a long confession, in words.

A jealous husband, his wife's blind friend, and a cathedral drawn with four hands. It ends with eyes closed.

A girl spends a summer with the Kinsellas and learns what care feels like; the walk to the well, the coat, the last word.

A reformer father saves a club-footed delinquent and sacrifices his own grieving son to the project. Self-deluded parents become monsters.

A mom's churning writer-brain meets a real threat to her kid, and the bold action isn't what she drafted. Self-deluded parents become monsters.

Harry dying of gangrene on safari, cataloguing every story he'll now never write, with the leopard frozen near the summit. Men fucking it up.

George, a sixty-year-old songwriter "undeterred in his habits and pursuits," road-tripping the South and failing his Nashville daughter again; hugely flawed, and you want him to have a happy ending anyway. Men fucking it up.