Gardner Minshew isn’t the Northwest’s first out-of-nowhere sports story, but he may be the best - The Seattle Times

Gardner Minshew isn’t the Northwest’s first out-of-nowhere sports story, but he may be the best - The Seattle Times
These 15 Jewish Heroes Saved Books From The Censors - Jewish Journal
18 Great Short Stories You Can Read Free Online - Book Riot

Posted: 21 Sep 2019 05:21 PM PDT

Move over Movember, Meptember is in the spotlight now. Gardner Minshew and his signature mustache are captivating the nation the way they did the state of Washington a year ago.

The Washington State University product and Jaguars rookie has a better completion percentage (73.9) and passer rating (110.6) than any other NFL quarterback has had through his first three games in the Super Bowl era. It may be short-lived, but for the time being, Minshew is a bona fide star.

Fascinating as this tale may be, it's also out of nowhere. Before Cougars coach Mike Leach recruited Minshew to Pullman, he was set to be a third-string QB at Alabama before starting his coaching career. Now, he's a sixth-round draft pick playing at a Pro Bowl level.

So it got me thinking: What are the most notable out-of-nowhere sports stories to come out of the Northwest? Here's a countdown. And by all means, tell me who I missed.

7. Edgar Martinez

Gar was not a coveted prospect. He signed a $4,000 minor-league contract and didn't play a full major-league season with the Mariners until he was 27. Word on the street is his career turned out OK.

After seven All-Star games, two American League batting titles, and a designated-hitter award named in his honor, Martinez was finally inducted into the Hall of Fame last August. Was he the greatest Mariner ever? No. But he may be the most beloved.

6. The 2003-04-05 Huskies men's basketball teams

After going 10-17 in his first season at UW, coach Lorenzo Romar watched his Huskies lose their first five Pac-12 games in January of 2004. But behind Nate Robinson and Brandon Roy, Washington won 12 of its next 13 to force its way into the NCAA Tournament, then earned a No. 1 seed in the Dance the following year. That '04-05 team was probably the best Husky Hoops squad to date. We'll see how long that previous sentence is valid.

5. Steve Largent

A fourth-round pick in 1976, the Seahawks receiver made seven Pro Bowls, was named a first-team All Pro three times and held the NFL's all-time receptions record for several years. With Jim Zorn throwing to him, Largent helped the Seahawks receive national attention in their formative years in the NFL.

4. Johnny and Eddie O'Brien

No scholarship offers despite leading their New Jersey high school basketball team to a state title. Rejected by Seton Hall after a tryout. Finally, after the 5-feet-9 twins worked in a factory for a year, Seattle U offered them full rides to play basketball and baseball, and the rest is … borderline mythology. Seattle U's men's basketball team went 90-17 in the three years they played, and its baseball team went 62-14. Johnny was a first-team All-American in hoops, and both were drafted by the Milwaukee Bucks before signing with the Pittsburgh Pirates. When Elgin Baylor is a fellow alum, and it's unclear whether he's the best overall athlete to emerge from your school, you know you're pretty good.

3. The 2015-16-17 Huskies women's basketball teams

Before March 21, 2016, not many Seattleites could have told you who Kelsey Plum was. Then, she and the seventh-seeded Huskies shocked second-seeded Maryland in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Two dominant wins in Lexington, Ky., followed, putting the Huskies in the Final Four for the first time in program history. The next year? Ho hum. Just Plum setting the NCAA all-time scoring record and teammate Chantel Osahor leading the nation in rebounds.

2. The 1977-78-79 Sonics

Seattle won just five of its first 22 games in the 1977-78 season, prompting the brass to fire head coach Bob Hopkins and replace him with future Hall of Famer Lenny Wilkens. What ensued was one of the more dramatic turnarounds in NBA history. The Sonics finished 47-35 in 1978, then captured the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference the next year before winning their only championship. Fine. I'll be optimistic. Before winning their first championship.

1. The 2012-13-14 Seahawks

Truth is, Russell Wilson (third round), Richard Sherman (fifth), Kam Chancellor (fifth), Michael Bennett (undrafted) and Doug Baldwin (undrafted) could each be their own items. Together, they formed the Out-Of-Nowhere Avengers. The Seahawks were 7-9 in each of their previous seasons before vaulting to 11-5 in '12, winning the Super Bowl the next year, and going back to the SB a year later. These teams need no introduction, but at one point, most of their key cogs did.

Honorable mentions

* Bucky Jacobsen: He only played 42 big-league games, but when he hit nine home runs for the Mariners in the summer of 2004, he earned permanent folk-hero status in Seattle

* The 2001 Mariners: They lost Alex Rodriguez in the prior offseason, Ken Griffey Jr. the year before that, and Randy Johnson the year before that…then tied an MLB record by winning 116 games.

Matt Calkins: mcalkins@seattletimes.com; on Twitter: @matt_calkins. Matt Calkins joined The Seattle Times in August 2015 as a sports columnist after three years at the San Diego Union Tribune. Never afraid to take a stand or go off the beaten path, Matt enjoys writing about the human condition every bit as much as walk-offs or buzzer-beaters. His mom reads the comments so take it easy on him.

These 15 Jewish Heroes Saved Books From The Censors - Jewish Journal

Posted: 22 Sep 2019 02:00 AM PDT

It started in 1982.

A former reference librarian named Judith Krug was working as the director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom for the American Library Association. It was Reagan time in America, the era of televangelist Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority. Falwell had recently put out a letter, suggesting that "Our Bodies, Ourselves," "The Catcher in the Rye," "Forever" and a slew of other books didn't belong in school libraries. Around the same time, the American Civil Liberties Union was fighting the school board of Island Trees, New York, to put banned books such as "Soul on Ice," by Eldridge Cleaver and Bernard Malamud's "The Fixer" back on the shelves. It had been only two years since Reagan had taken office, and the number of censorship cases in America had already tripled.

"It's not just the anti-sex education people," Krug told The Washington Post at the time. "All sorts of people are trying to keep out things that they don't approve of, including feminists and anti-feminists, blacks, Jews, single-issue groups."

In response, a national coalition, led by Krug, initiated "Banned Books Week," to focus on protecting literature that would-be censors deemed objectionable. 37 years later, Banned Books Week is still a thing, which is both a tribute to its founders' commitment and a sad commentary on the fact that, even in 21st Century America, the war against censorship goes on. The ALA's most recent list of challenged and banned literature includes books that contain profanity, LGBTQIA+ characters, or anti-police themes. Banned Books Week runs from September 22-28 this year. To observe this celebration and defense of purportedly controversial books, we're profiling some of our community's most outspoken opponents of censorship.

RABBI ISRAEL H. LEVINTHAL: Defiant Spiritual Leader

The ravages of censorship and the heroism sometimes required to fight it can be told in the story of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, a once-thriving cultural mecca in Crown Heights. The building still stands at 667 Eastern Parkway as the educational institute Oholei Torah. Here, in December of 1934, in response to the plague of Nazi book burnings, the center, under the leadership of Rabbi Levinthal, inaugurated the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books, offering "unceasing defiance to Nazi brutishness and witnessing the indestructible life of the human spirit."

The library was the second of its kind, the first being the Paris-based German Freedom Library, also known as the "Library of Burned Books." According to Nikola von Merveldt, writing in 2007 for Library Trends, the advisory board included Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser and Albert Einstein, who was one of two featured speakers at the library's inaugural dinner along with Rabbi Levinthal. "You may burn books, but the letters of the books are indestructible," Levinthal said in his speech entitled "The Book Versus the Sword." Levinthal, who became the spiritual leader of the Brooklyn Jewish Center in 1919, remained in that role until his death in 1982 at the age of 94. As for the fate of the library, which became less of a priority for the Brooklyn center as the extent of Nazi barbarism became known, its holdings were ultimately donated to the Jewish Theological Seminary. Only one item was left behind — a manuscript about Unified Field Theory that was found in a safe in 1979. Its author was Albert Einstein.

MORRIS ERNST: Savior Of Ulysses

The 1933 case was called "The United States V. One Book Called 'Ulysses.'" At issue was James Joyce's day in the life of Leopold Bloom, which, in 1921, had been deemed obscene by New York's Court of Special Sessions, which fined Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap for publishing "Ulysses" in the Little Review. As a result, "Ulysses" had, for all intents and purposes, been banned in the United States. Resurrecting "Ulysses" became the project of Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf and Morris L. Ernst, the son of an Alabama peddler, who went on to work as general counsel for the ACLU. Ernst successfully argued before Judge John M. Woolsey that "Ulysses" was not pornographic but instead, a work of literary merit. In its 1976 obit for Ernst, The New York Times reported that Ernst's success in the "Ulysses" case yielded an unexpected windfall for the lawyer: In place of a fee, Ernst received royalties for the book he defended. In a fascinating deep-dive into the history of the "Ulysses" case, Michael Chabon writes in The New York Review of Books, "the history of the ACLU is a history of great struggle, bitter and glorious. But it is also—it is first of all—a history of great lawyers, like Morris Ernst, who brought as much artistry and erudition and sly, masterful skill to defending one book, called 'Ulysses,' as its author had brought to its creation.

CHARLES REMBAR: Defender Of His Faith

If he hadn't been the cousin of Norman Mailer, things might have turned out a whole lot differently for Rembar, a lawyer and literary agent, who helped Mailer sidestep would-be censors of "The Naked and the Dead" by suggesting he use "fug" instead of that verb's more-familiar spelling. Rembar, the New Jersey-born product of Harvard, the U.S. Army and Columbia Law, would later successfully defend Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," John Cleland's "Fanny Hill" and D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover," which, according to Rembar, "devoted more of its pages to the act of sex…than anything ever before sold over the counter." "Censorship is old, as old as history," Rembar wrote in his optimistically-titled book "The End of Obscenity." "The idea that the government should not interfere with freedom of speech—should even protect it — has been with us only a few centuries." Rembar died in 2000 at the age of 85.

BARNEY ROSSET: The Most Dangerous Publisher

For a time, Rosset was known as "the most dangerous man in publishing." He was born the son of a banker in 1922 in Chicago, where his best childhood friend was cinematographer and photographer Haskell Wexler. "I'm half-Jewish and half-Irish, and my mother and grandfather spoke Gaelic. From an early age, my feelings made the I.R.A. look pretty conservative," Rosset told AP in 1998. "I grew up hating fascism, hating racism." As publisher of Grove Press and founder of the Evergreen Review, Rosset introduced American audiences to the work of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Herbert Selby Jr., Malcolm X, and the Beats. In a life filled with controversy, Rosset gained the greatest notoriety for publishing D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover," Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" and William S. Burroughs's "Naked Lunch," which led to legal battles between Rosset and the U.S. Postal Service, the Supreme Court and the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. In his memoir, "My Life In Publishing and How I Fought Censorship," Rosset wrote that he wanted to be remembered as "the publisher who broke the cultural barrier raised like a Berlin Wall between the public and free expression in literature, film and drama."

JEROME LAWRENCE: A Censored Opponent Of Censorship

No, there's nothing Jewish at all about the key figures in the famed Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, in which Tennessee high school teacher John T. Scopes went to trial for teaching the theory of evolution from a biology textbook. The case pitted Clarence Darrow, an agnostic, against William Jennings Bryan, a notably fiery Protestant. But the reason we know this case as well as we do is largely because of "Inherit the Wind," the 1955 play that dramatized the trial, written by Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence, aka Jerry Schwartz. The play was adapted for a 1960 film starring Fredric March and Spencer Tracy. In a remembrance of Lawrence, who died in 2014 at the age of 88, Violet Spevack recalled in the Cleveland Jewish News that the author credited his passion for social justice to his Jewish upbringing. As co-writer of one of the most famous scripts about censorship and freedom of censorship, Lawrence saw his own work censored a great many times when creationists sought to shut down productions of his play, which had been written in response to McCarthyism. "We were indignant, appalled at thought control in the mid-'50s," Mr. Lawrence told The New York Times in 1994. "So we went back in history to another case where people were being told what to learn, what to think, and it did have a great effect on the country."

BEATRICE LEVIN: Teacher Of Salinger

Levin was a prolific author of articles and books, among them a 1946 history of Jews in theater based on research she conducted while studying at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. But it is another author's book with whom Levin is most associated: "The Catcher in the Rye," by J.D. Salinger. In 1960, Levin was a high school teacher at Edison Preparatory High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she ran afoul of school administrators for teaching Salinger's novel, a perennial target for censors. According to "Battle of the Books," Lee Burress's study of censorship in American public schools, Levin was not the only teacher to incur the wrath of her superiors for teaching "Catcher"; an instructor in Louisville, Kentucky, was reportedly fired that same year for the same reason. According to a 1960 article in Time Magazine, Tulsa's school superintendent Charles Mason said he found the book "shocking," but left the decision of whether to retain Levin up to the school's principal who decided to keep Levin on but get rid of the book. Levin resigned.

ALLEN GINSBERG: Witness For The Defense

"I am Jewish; and I should be offended. What Burroughs is doing, he is parodying this monster; he is parodying this anti-semite…Don't you realize he is making a parody of the monstrous speech and thought processes of a red-necked Southern, hate-filled type, who hates everybody?" Those words were spoken by Ginsberg in 1966 in the Massachusetts Supreme Court on behalf of William S. Burroughs's novel "Naked Lunch," which had been banned four years earlier. Ginsberg, along with fellow author Norman Mailer, had been called as a witness to testify on behalf of the book. This was hardly Ginsberg's first encounter with censorship. Ginsberg's "Howl" had been targeted in 1957 by U.S. Customs, which seized copies of the poem being imported from England. And, both City Lights owner and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and bookseller Shig Murao were arrested that same year for selling "Howl" to an undercover cop. Throughout his life, Ginsberg fought censorship not only in the U.S. In 1985, he was one of a group of writers who called out the Soviet Union for imprisoning writers. "I also put in a plug for gay rights, but that didn't go over too big," Ginsberg told the Washington Post at the time. And in 1988, as vice-president of PEN, Ginsberg criticized Israel for the suppression of reading material in the West Bank and Gaza. Not long before he died in 1997, Ginsberg told the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, "The censorship of language is the censorship of consciousness."

LEANNE KATZ: Feminist Crusader

From the day it was founded in 1974 until she died in 1997 at the age of 65, the National Coalition Against Censorship was headed by Katz. The coalition was started at the ACLU where Katz had been working, and according to Katz's obituary in The New York Times, defended such authors as Maurice Sendak, Robert Cormier, Madeline L'Engle and even Geoffrey Chaucer when their books were removed from classrooms and libraries. Throughout her career, Katz found herself speaking out not only on behalf of authors, but also of filmmakers and artists, including Robert Mapplethorpe. Additionally, she spoke out against anti-pornography crusaders who she saw as harming women with their paternalistic policies. "Censorship only protects ignorance," Katz told the Christian Science Monitor in 1984. "We must arm our young people with tools for understanding and thinking about problems. And we don't do this by shutting them off from ideas or discouraging critical thinking."

NADINE GORDIMER: Fierce Opponent Of Apartheid

At the height of censorship in apartheid South Africa, Nobel Prize-winning author Gordimer saw three of her books banned, including the anti-apartheid novels "July's People" and "Burger's Daughter." The South African Publications Board declared that the latter book violated the country's Publication Act of 1974. "The authoress uses Rosa's story as a pad from which to launch a blistering and full-scale attack on the Republic of South Africa (and) its government's racial policies," the board wrote. "The whites are the baddies, the blacks the goodies." Gordimer, the daughter of a Jewish watchmaker, would go on to become a vice-president of PEN. "Writers are not taken seriously in America — they're regarded as entertainers," she told Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times in 1986. "And in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, they're taken so seriously that sometimes they can't be published at all. In South Africa, as writers, I doubt whether we have any influence on the Government at all. But I do think South African fiction writers, if we've been of any use at all, have helped rouse and raise the consciousness of the outside world to the long-term effects of life in our country. To put it very simplistically, a newspaper account, however good, tells you what happened. But it's the playwright, the novelist, the poet, the short-story writer who gives you some idea of why." Gordimer died in 2014 at the age of 90.

JUDITH KRUG: Warrior Against Censorship

Krug, who passed away in 2009 at the age of 69, founded the Freedom to Read Foundation and was perhaps this country's most vocal and visible warrior in the battle against book censorship. "If I have an agenda, it is protection of the First Amendment. Libraries in this country cannot operate unless we can stand foursquare on the First Amendment," told American Libraries back in 1995. "And if that becomes a partisan position, well, okay, I guess if I have to be partisan I will be partisan on behalf of the First Amendment." Today, the Judith F. Krug Memorial Fund provides grants for organizations planning events during Banned Books Week. In its 2009 obituary for Krug, the JUF News called Krug a "hero to librarians."

JUDY BLUME: A Challenging Author

"It came with the election, the presidential election of 1980," Blume told NPR's Neal Conan in 2016. "The next day, I've been told, the censors were crawling out of the woodwork and challenging, like 'it's our turn now, and we're going to say what we don't want our children to read.'" Blume, whose father was a New Jersey dentist, holds the dubious distinction of having had more of her books challenged or banned than any other author. In the first decade of the 21st century, the American Library Association compiled a list of the Top 100 banned or challenged books — Blume wrote four of them: "Forever," "Blubber," "Tiger Eyes" and "Are You There God, It's Me Margaret," the latter of which is currently being adapted for film. In a 2014 interview conducted by Lena Dunham for The Telegraph, Blume recalled her reaction to the censorship of her books: "My thoughts were: this is America, we don't ban books here! But of course I know a lot better now. And I wasn't the only one. But when you say to me, 'No, you can't do this,' I say, 'Oh yes, I can!'"

HAROLD PINTER: Ally Of Salman Rushdie

In 1989, after "The Satanic Verses" was published and the Iranian government placed a $2.6 million bounty on the head of its author Salman Rushdie, who was forced to go into hiding, one of the author's most vocal defenders was the playwright (and son of a Jewish dressmaker) Pinter. Pinter co-authored letters defending Rushdie's purportedly blasphemous book, and led a delegation to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher's residence, insisting that the government give Rushdie full protection. Pinter, whose plays would grow more pointedly political as his career went on, told reporters at the time, "The government has a responsibility to protect its citizens and make it clear it will not tolerate that. The government can make some serious statements and take some serious action. It should confront Iran with the consequences of its statement." While Rushdie remained in hiding, Pinter delivered a speech that Rushdie had written entitled "Is Nothing Sacred?" "Wherever in the world the little room of literature has been closed, sooner or later the walls have come tumbling down," Pinter said, quoting Rushdie. In 2014, Rushdie was awarded the PEN/Pinter prize, given to authors who show "fierce intellectual determination to define the real truth of our lives and our societies."

LESLÉA NEWMAN: Front Line Soldier In The Culture Wars

When The Forward last checked in with Newman earlier this year, she talked with us about her most recent children's book: "Gittel's Journey: An Ellis Island Story." The book is based on stories she heard from her grandmother and her aunt about their journeys to America. But Newman is still probably best known for "Heather Has Two Mommies," the sweet, life-affirming children's story that Newman self-published back in 1989 when no mainstream publisher would take on a book about the titular girl and her lesbian moms. The book ignited the ire of conservative groups throughout America. In 1993, Georgia lawmakers wanted to move the book to the adult section of public libraries. A school board in Queens tried to remove "Heather" from a recommended reading list. "Throughout the '90s there were many, many instances of people using the book for their own political agendas," Newman told Publishers Weekly in 2014 on the 25th anniversary republication of the book. "On Christian TV there was someone saying my book was the work of the devil. It was astonishing." Still, the success and ultimate acceptance of Newman's book does speak to some progress that has been made since the publication of "Heather." Though it was named one of the American Library Association's most-challenged books in the 1990s, it hasn't appeared on that list in a decade.

DAVID LEVITHAN: Author and Activist

In the fall of 2018, the public library in Rumford, Maine, received a letter co-signed by three local pastors, who took issue with a banned books display. "The library should not be promoting a far left view that sees homosexuality as acceptable," the letter declared. "The library is not to be an adult bookstore, but a family resource. The pastors drew attention to one book in particular — "Two Boys Kissing," which has made the American Library Association's "Top Ten Most Challenged Books List" three out of the past four years. The book — which concerns two teenage boys who attempt to break the Guinness world record for longest kiss — is the work of David Levithan, the New Jersey-born author, whose books include "Wide Awake," "Every Day," "Someday" and "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist," which he co-wrote with Rachel Cohn. His novel "Wide Awake" featured America's first gay, Jewish president. "I don't think there is even remotely an obligation of an author to be an activist," Levithan told School Library Journal in 2016. "I respect any colleague who does not want to do that, but for me, that's always been part of my writing. If you believe that books can help make the world better, then I'm totally up for getting out there and doing that."

SUZANNE NOSSEL: Freedom Fighter

During "Banned Books Week" this year, PEN America will be directing its focus onto what it sees as one of the biggest battles in the censorship fight — book banning in the American prison system, where, according to PEN, prisoners are denied access to literature including legal materials and dictionaries. At the heart of this campaign is Nossel, PEN's executive director who came to the organization by way of Amnesty International, the U.S. State Department and Human Rights Watch. "Tens of thousands of books are banned in prisons," Nossel told a reporter earlier this month. "Systems ban access to everything from classics including Alice Walker's 'The Color Purple' and Toni Morrison's 'Paradise,' to coloring and self-help books. These restrictions are stunningly arbitrary and defeat the ability of incarcerated people to learn, explore and envision a future. We call on states and the federal government to lift these pointless bans and uphold the freedom to read." Nossel partially credits her many fights for social justice to the story of her maternal grandparents who fled Nazi Germany for South Africa. "Looking back to what first sparked my own interest in human rights issues," Nossel told the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights in 2012, "It has everything to do growing up as an American Jew."

This story "These 15 Jewish Heroes Saved Books From The Censors" was written by Adam Langer & Forward Staff.

18 Great Short Stories You Can Read Free Online - Book Riot

Posted: 19 Mar 2019 12:00 AM PDT

When I have no idea what to read, I find a bunch of free short stories online, save them onto the Pocket app, and read them as if I've compiled my own short story collection. Like a music playlist I create to match a mood, I create short story playlists to break a book slump, or to sample a bunch of different authors' writing.

As to where to find great stories, The New Yorker stories are generally best, but require a subscription if you read too many in a month. I also like Narrative Magazine, which will ask you for an email, but their stories are free too. Tor of course has some great free stuff, and you can find most of the classics through Gutenberg. The stories on this list that are not from any of these publications, I found through simple Google searches. If I'm interested in an author, but don't necessarily want to read a whole book, I look to see if they have any short fiction available that I can read first.

From this list, my favorites are Zadie Smith and Italo Calvino's stories. I'd never read Zadie Smith, but after loving "The Embassy of Cambodia" I started On Beauty (a 500 page book) and I absolutely love it. Both stories satisfied a reading itch I needed scratched.

Here are a few of my favorite free short stories you can read online right now.

"The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges

The world is a library that contains all the books that have ever been written, but most of them are indecipherable. Many people venture to the library to find the meaning of life. It reminded me of Terry Pratchett's Discworld library.

"Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species—the unique species—is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret."

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson

This used to be my favorite short story, and I might only think that because I read it when I was a freshman in high school and I remember being shocked by the ending. It's always stayed with me.

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor

Another story with an ending that you won't forget anytime soon. O'Connor was a master. If you've never read any of her work I would start here.

"In the Penal Colony" by Franz Kafka

It's a chilling story. A man known as the Traveller is visiting a foreign penal colony where he is shown a special machine used to execute prisoners. The machine inscribes the prisoner's crime onto their body until they die (kind of sounds familiar if you've read the fifth Harry Potter book). It takes twelve hours of torture before the prisoner dies. I told you it was chilling!

"The Devil in America" by Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor)

Kai Ashante Wilson has quite a talent. This ties present day police brutality towards African Americans to post-emancipation America and a family of freed slaves that are living with the Devil that followed them from Africa.

"The City Born Great" by N.K. Jemisin (Tor)

Cities, once they are old enough, must be born. New York City is ready to be born, and must be led into the world by a reluctant midwife.

"Spider the Artist" by Nnedi Okorafor (Lightspeed Magazine)

Okorafor is a wonderful storyteller, and if you've never read her books, this would be a great place to start. And if you like this short story, Binti: The Complete Trilogy was released in February!

"Exhalation" by Ted Chiang (Lightspeed Magazine)

Oh, you've never read Ted Chiang? Well, you must go out now and read this story and then read Stories of Your Life and Others and his new collection Exhalation: Stories, which comes out in May. I was shocked by how good and complex his writing was. I had no idea that the movie The Arrival was based on one of his short stories.

"The Daughters of the Moon" by Italo Calvino (The New Yorker)

I don't know. It's either Zadie Smith's "The Embassy of Cambodia" or this story that is my favorite on the list… I can't decide. I think it's this story. A story about the people of Earth deciding to throw away the Moon. It's a story of consumerism. Luckily, I own "The Complete Cosmicomics", so I can continue reading Calvino's magnificent short story collection.

"The Embassy of Cambodia" by Zadie Smith (The New Yorker)

After you read "The Devil in America" read this story and see if you can find the parallels. This was my first time reading Zadie Smith because I'd always heard mixed reviews, but if her longer fiction is anything like this short story, I'm in love. If you need help figuring out where to start with Zadie Smith's books, check out our Reading Pathway guide to Zadie Smith.

"Sweetness" by Toni MOrrison (The New Yorker)

A prelude to Morrison's book God Help the Child, this is the story of Bride's mother, and her rationale for raising her daughter in a loveless home.

"Girls, At Play" by Celeste Ng (Bellevue Literary Review)

"This is how we play the game: pink means kissing; red means tongue. Green means up your shirt; blue means down his pants. Purple means in your mouth. Black means all the way."

The first four sentences of this short story sent chills down my spine. A superbly told story of the extremes of girlhood and adolescence; the pressures girls face as they get older.

"On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning" by Haruki Murakami (Genius)

Love at first sight, if you believe love is predestined rather than a choice. Fated love, to me, no matter how hard my heart becomes, still seems ridiculously romantic. I haven't read Murakami in a long time but now I'm itching to pick up one of his books (I really want to read 1Q84, but it's soooo long!).

"Chechnya" by Anthony Marra (Narrative Magazine)

This was Anthony Marra's first published short story, and works as an outline for his novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomenon. It's the kind of story you read while holding your breath.

"The Fruit of My Woman" by Han Kang (Granta)

This story was written in 1997 before the publication of The Vegetarian. The two stories share many of the same themes, and it's evident that this story served as a blueprint for the later book. In "The Fruit of My Woman" the wife is slowly turning into a tree (something that also comes up in The Vegetarian). The allusions to Daphne turning herself into a laurel tree to escape the advances of Apollo are hard to miss, but there's no clear indication that Daphne was an actual influence on either story. Han Kang can do no wrong in my eyes.

"A Lady's Maid" by Sarah Gailey (Barnes & Noble)

I love Sarah Gailey. This is a great introduction if you're unfamiliar with her work. It's Victorian London with androids—so much to love!

A hot and bothered story about a house falling in love with the girl who lives in the attic. I loved everything about this story. This is included in Johnson's short story collection, Fen, and I can't wait to get my hands on it. Also, the writing style reminded me of Samantha Hunt.

"Hollow" by Breece D'J Pancake (The Atlantic)

Breece D'J Pancake died when he was 26. He was from West Virginia, and I would label his writing "grit-lit". This story was almost too gritty for me. He's the kind of writer that other writers love. His short story collection has a blurb from Joyce Carol Oates.

Want more short stories? Check out our post on the 100 best short story collections!

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