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“Without Inspection,” Edwidge Danticat
The invited response upon finding Arnold hurtling through the air toward his death is to wonder what put him in that position. Even with the idyllic, flashing memory that follows—of his son, Paris, and Paris’s mother, Darline, the three of them happy and together on Paris’s kindergarten graduation day—it’s very possible that Arnold’s story will […]
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“The Narayans,” Akhil Sharma
The story is told from the perspective of a community of Indian immigrants in Edison, New Jersey. It centers on an act of incest and its aftermath, to which the first-person plural “we” bears imperfect and scathing witness. Not everyone in the community views or responds to the events in the same ways, but the […]
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“Los Angeles,” Ling Ma
Ma employs a “mash” of striking imagery throughout “Los Angeles.” The story opens with three “wings,” one of which, the wing housing the narrator’s 100 ex-boyfriends, is “like a gnarled, broken arm.” It’s an image of a grounded, broken-winged bird that, like the narrator’s ties to these boyfriends, is incapable of flight. It’s an image […]
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“Pulse,” Cynan Jones
The story opens in a tense period of waiting. A couple and their young, unexpected but very present child are holed up in a cabin in the middle of a storm after two weeks without heating, and a pine tree is threatening to fall on nearby power lines. There’s a glaring sense of powerlessness, of […]
Short Story Stack 