15 Must-Read Short Stories For The Month Of October

Looking for a burst of inspiration? To laugh out loud? To sob uncontrollably? Looking for that human strangeness that both connects and divides us all? Look no further.

1. The Husband Stitch By Carmen Maria Machado

Via granta.com

(If you read this story out loud, please use the following voices:

Me: as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same.

The boy who will grow into a man, and be my spouse: robust with his own good fortune.

My father: Like your father, or the man you wish was your father.

My son: as a small child, gentle, rounded with the faintest of lisps; as a man, like my husband.

All other women: interchangeable with my own.)

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2. Last Night By James Salter

Via newyorker.com

Walter Such was a translator. He liked to write with a green fountain pen that he had a habit of raising in the air slightly after each sentence, almost as if his hand were a mechanical device. He could recite lines of Blok in Russian and then give Rilke's translation of them in German, pointing out their beauty. He was a sociable but also sometimes prickly man, who stuttered a little at first and who lived with his wife in a manner they liked. But Marit, his wife, was ill.

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3. Peacetime By Luke Mogelson

New Yorker / Via newyorker.com

I was living in the armory on Lexington Avenue. First Sergeant Diaz had given me the keys. I slept on a cot in the medical-supply closet. “Two weeks, max,” I’d told Diaz. But as the months went by I kept postponing a reunion with my wife. I was comfortable where I was. The armory took up an entire city block. There were secret passageways, subterranean firing ranges, a gym with an elliptical. At night, if drunk, I connected to a bag of saline. I always woke up hydrated. I never had a hangover.

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4. Of Possible War By Caitlin Scarano

aroomofherownfoundation.org / Via aroomofherownfoundation.org

When I wake up and come in to make coffee, my dead brother sits at the kitchen table. He doesn’t look much different than he looked before, except his skin seems a bit thinner. As the florescent light buzzes on, I think I can see the whole blue-green cartography of his circulatory system.

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5. Sleep By Colm Tóibín

newyorker.com / Via newyorker.com

I know what you will do when morning comes. I wake before you do and I lie still. Sometimes I doze, but usually I am alert, with my eyes open. I don’t move. I don’t want to disturb you. I can hear your soft, calm breathing and I like that. And then at a certain point you turn toward me without opening your eyes; your hand reaches over, and you touch my shoulder or my back. And then all of you comes close to me. It is as though you were still sleeping—there is no sound from you, just a need, almost urgent but unconscious, to be close to someone. This is how the day begins when you are with me.

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6. Apollo By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

newyorker.com / Via newyorker.com

I visited my parents in Enugu, in their small overfurnished flat that grew dark in the afternoon. Retirement had changed them, shrunk them. They were in their late eighties, both small and mahogany-skinned, with a tendency to stoop. They seemed to look more and more alike, as though all the years together had made their features blend and bleed into one another. They even smelled alike—a menthol scent, from the green vial of Vicks VapoRub they passed to each other, carefully rubbing a little in their nostrils and on aching joints. When I arrived, I would find them either sitting out on the veranda overlooking the road or sunk into the living-room sofa, watching Animal Planet. They had a new, simple sense of wonder. They marvelled at the wiliness of wolves, laughed at the cleverness of apes, and asked each other, “Ifukwa? Did you see that?”

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7. Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice by Nam Le

thehoopla.com.au / Via all-story.com

My father arrived on a rainy morning. I was dreaming about a poem, the dull thluck thluck of a typewriter's keys punching out the letters. It was a good poem—perhaps the best I'd ever written. When I woke up, he was standing outside my bedroom door, smiling ambiguously. He wore black trousers and a wet, wrinkled parachute jacket that looked like it had just been pulled out of a washing machine. Framed by the bedroom doorway, he appeared even smaller, gaunter, than I remembered. Still groggy with dream, I lifted my face toward the alarm clock.

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8. Major Maybe By Ann Beattie

newyorker.com / Via newyorker.com

The red-haired homeless lady was arrested after she fell in the street and a taxi almost ran over her. Just before her mad dash into traffic (who could account for her actions?), she’d accused a black dog on a leash of being the Devil, an assertion that had been strenuously objected to by the dog’s owner. The dog’s name was Major Maybe, and his story was better known in our neighborhood than the red-haired lady’s. The breeder had named the dog Major, and the family that adopted him—our next-door neighbors, the Leavells—tried to call him something similar in order to avoid confusing him. They’d tried Mark and Mason, but the dog would not respond to any name beginning with “M” until the family’s four-year-old daughter, who talked to her dolls a lot—telling them that maybe they would go to Barneys and maybe they would go to the park and maybe they would get a cookie if they were good. . . . As you must have guessed, little Corey Leavell came up with the only new name the dog would accept. Later, it was thought funny to call him Major Maybe.

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9. Reading Comprehension: Text No. 1 By Alejandro Zambra

newyorker.com / Via newyorker.com

After so many study guides, so many practice tests and proficiency and achievement tests, it would have been impossible for us not to learn something, but we forgot everything almost right away and, I’m afraid, for good. The thing that we did learn, and to perfection—the thing that we would remember for the rest of our lives—was how to copy on tests. Here I could easily ad-lib an homage to the cheat sheet, all the test material reproduced in tiny but legible script on a minuscule bus ticket. But that admirable workmanship would have been worth very little if we hadn’t also had the all-important skill and audacity when the crucial moment came: the instant the teacher lowered his guard and the ten or twenty golden seconds began.

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10. Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

ikewrites.com / Via tnellen.com

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

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11. The Apologizer By Milan Kundera

newyorker.com / Via newyorker.com

It was the month of June, the morning sun was emerging from the clouds, and Alain was walking slowly down a Paris street. He observed the young girls: every one of them showed her naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short. He was captivated, captivated and even disturbed: it was as if their seductive power resided no longer in their thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts but in that small round hole at the center of the body.

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12. The Duniazát By Salman Rushdie

newyorker.com / Via newyorker.com

In the year 1195, the great philosopher Ibn Rushd, once the qadi, or judge, of Seville and most recently the personal physician to the Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub in his home town of Córdoba, was formally discredited and disgraced on account of his liberal ideas, which were unacceptable to the increasingly powerful Berber fanatics who were spreading like a pestilence across Arab Spain, and was sent to live in internal exile in the small village of Lucena, a village full of Jews who could no longer say they were Jews because they had been forced to convert to Islam. Ibn Rushd, a philosopher who was no longer permitted to expound his philosophy, all of whose writing had been banned and burned, felt instantly at home among the Jews who could not say they were Jews. He had been a favorite of the Caliph of the present ruling dynasty, the Almohads, but favorites go out of fashion, and Abu Yusuf Yaqub had allowed the fanatics to push the great commentator on Aristotle out of town.

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13. The Veldt By Ray Bradbury

huffingtonpost.com / Via http://www.d.umn.edu

"George, I wish you'd look at the nursery."

"What's wrong with it?"

"I don't know."

"Well, then."

"I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it."

"What would a psychologist want with a nursery?"

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14. The Freezer Chest By Dorthe Nors

newyorker.com / Via newyorker.com

When I think about it, the freezer chest, it’s with a sensation of the ferry rocking and the North Sea beneath us, black because it was January, and then the artificial lighting of the lounge where they were sitting, Mark and the others—Starling, Henrietta, Poul, and Susanna—and where I was also sitting, with our English teacher, Bo, who found me interesting to talk to, because, as he said, “One would never know that you were so young.” But, in any case, they were sitting together over in a corner, and it was 1989, the d.j. had left, no one wanted to dance, it was late and a long way to Harwich, and then he went to bed anyway, the English teacher, and I was actually friends with Henrietta, so I wasn’t sure what to do. It was then that he called me over to the group, Mark did, and said that he wanted to tell me the story of the freezer chest.

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15. Musa By Kamel Daoud

newyorker.com / Via newyorker.com

Musa was my older brother. His head seemed to strike the clouds. He was quite tall, yes, and his body was thin and knotty from hunger and the strength that comes from anger. He had an angular face, big hands that protected me, and hard eyes, because our ancestors had lost their land. But when I think about it I believe that he already loved us then the way the dead do, with no useless words and a look in his eyes that came from the hereafter. I have only a few pictures of him in my head, but I want to describe them to you carefully. For example, the day he came home early from the neighborhood market, or maybe from the port, where he worked as a handyman and a porter, toting, dragging, lifting, sweating. Anyway, that day he came upon me while I was playing with an old tire, and he put me on his shoulders and told me to hold on to his ears, as if his head were a steering wheel. I remember the joy I felt as he rolled the tire along and made a sound like a motor. His smell comes back to me, too, a persistent mingling of rotten vegetables, sweat, and breath. Another picture in my memory is from the day of Eid one year. Musa had given me a hiding the day before for some stupid thing I’d done, and now we were both embarrassed. It was a day of forgiveness and he was supposed to kiss me, but I didn’t want him to lose face and lower himself by apologizing to me, not even in God’s name. I also remember his gift for immobility, the way he could stand stock still on the threshold of our house, facing the neighbors’ wall, holding a cigarette and the cup of black coffee our mother brought him.

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