Andy Weir’s Annie is a bad girl who sleeps around and likes to play nasty pranks on people. Whenever she has a free night she sleeps with Paul, whose wife has left him. However, she has two problems with Paul. First, he is a morning person and she is a night owl. He wakes at 6.00am every day while she doesn’t like getting up until 10.00am at the earliest. More importantly, there is a big age difference between them. Her dream, which she achieves in the story, is to sleep with Paul’s sixteen-year-old son. More…
Tom Tit Tot / Rumpelstiltskin
The protagonist in Tom Tit Tot is a lazy girl who doesn’t appear to be good at anything except eating. Her mother lies to the king by saying she is a whiz with the spinning wheel. For some reason this is just the kind of girl the king is looking to marry. The poor girl can’t even spin a top, so in order to avoid losing her head she accepts an offer of help from a small magical creature. As the creature helps the girl, she must try to guess its name. If she can’t, she shall become “its”. More…
Testimony of Pilot
This powerful story by Barry Hannah follows the journey of a boy and several companions from youthful pranks to high school band competitions, musical success, fulfilling careers and, in two cases, premature death. Set between the mid-1950s and the late-1960s, the story highlights several aspects of the American South’s small-town culture of the day: family wholesomeness, racial segregation, the sexual revolution, the rise of rock and roll, and the Vietnam War. Themes include the transformative power of music, friendship and rivalry, sexuality, gender roles, misogyny, racism, isolation, patriotism, and social change. More…
The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance
This story by M. R. James is in the form of four letters a man sends his brother as he travels to a small village to investigate the disappearance of their uncle. After an extensive search the uncle, a clergyman, is presumed dead. A highlight of the story is a vivid dream the nephew has of a frightening, life-like Punch and Judy show. This foreshadows the denouement… When a real Punch and Judy show comes to town the next day, the missing man rises from the dead and exacts vengeance. Themes include mystery, murder, revenge, justice, the supernatural. More…
The Disk
Jorge Borges gives this story a timeless quality by setting it in medieval times and framing it like a fairy-tale. A traveler arrives at an isolated woodcutter’s hut claiming to be an exiled king descended from Odin, the Norse king of the gods. He supports this by showing the woodcutter what he claimss to be the disk of Odin, the only one-dimensional object in the universe. Ironically, the woodcutter answers: I do not worship Odin, I worship Christ… and then kills him to possess Odin’s disk. Theme: the desire to own something that holds power over the world around us. More…