Pretty Story Bag: 7 Sweet Tales to Carry Along

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The summer that Belly turns sixteen, major changes impact everyone staying at the Fisher’s beach house. After the Conklins arrive, the two families begin to settle in for what at first seems like a typical vacation—but it soon becomes clear that this summer won’t be the same as those before. Belly has blossomed into a beautiful young woman, and both boys notice the change in her appearance. However, Conrad’s moodiness makes Belly feel more distant from him than ever before. She learns that Conrad has quit the football team, broken up with his girlfriend, and started smoking. Initially, the cause of Conrad’s sullen mood is unclear. As the story progresses, the reader learns more about the difficulties facing the Fisher family.

Although Belly and Cam date throughout the summer, romantic tension between Belly and Conrad grows. At a house party, Conrad becomes aggressive with a young man in his twenties. To prevent them from coming to blows, Belly steps between them to break up the argument. Later, as she sits alone with Conrad in a car, he gently strokes her hair. He is on the verge of saying something to her, but the moment passes.A character realizes they are a part of a lab experiment in the middle of a test and desires to do nothing but escape.

A series about the experiences of an acid trip, and the ways it shapes people's lives before and after. An elderly man moves to a home and realizes it was cursed by the family that lived there previously. Narayan, who wrote more than 200 short stories, called them “concentrated miniatures of human experience in all its opulence”. The opulence of the clay horse at the centre of this story has faded beneath the Indian sun, but the conversation it triggers between an American tourist who speaks no Tamil and Muni, a poor peasant who speaks no English, is not only very funny, but also telling about the degree to which misunderstanding is an unavoidable part of human interaction. “Minutes of Glory” by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1976) As a ghost haunting a house, you must figure out ways to scare the families living there enough to make them move out. A hermit's caretaker passes away, forcing her to make trips outside to interview a new candidate for the job.Miscommunication, antic disposition, voyeurism, glee – this translation of one of Aichinger’s most famous stories provides windows upon windows upon windows. Simply expressed and made to linger long in the mind, it was my first experience of the prizewinning Austrian writer and her dark, precise prose styling, and the start of an ongoing pursuit on my part to read more of her work. Eley Williams “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe (1843) The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa Lahiri, will be published on 7 March. “A Simple Heart” by Gustave Flaubert (1877) Cheever is known as a chronicler of the suburbs, but in this story the leafy neighbourhood of Shady Hill, a recurring location in his fiction, blends the domestic with something much stranger, almost magical. The story is comic (its title mirrors William Wycherley’s 1675 comedy of manners The Country-Wife), but darker currents work beneath its surface and it builds to a stunning finale that is one of the most rapturous passages Cheever ever wrote. “An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad (1897)

Key to a great short story is the tension and torsion created within each sentence. “Paradise” combines remarkable disquiet, poetry and narrative drive. O’Brien is a phenomenal architect of landscape, both physical and human, imbuing her setting with exact detail, lush discomfort, intrigue and counterintuitive fate. The main character, a nurse, has been taken to the overseas villa of her rich lover. Not only must she learn to swim and entertain his companions, she’s interviewing – without any real prospect – for the position of wife. The story is lit with sexual chemistry, but travels a horribly misaligned path. Its true test lies in finding an exit from the female dream. Sarah Hall “Hands” by Sherwood Anderson (1916) Motor neurone disease left her mind as sharp as ever, but it gradually destroyed her muscles, making it hard for her to communicate with her family. It left her in a wheelchair, catheterised and fed through a tube. Diane fought against the disease for the last 2 years of her life and had every possible medical treatment.Thought-provoking … Margaret Atwood. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood (1983) When described in summary, there is a danger of reducing Borges to a collection of tropes: labyrinths, mirrors, invented books (he avoided “the madness of composing vast books” by pretending they exist and writing commentaries on them). But with these elements he explored some of the most thrilling ideas in fiction. Labyrinths and strange books are both present here, as is a theory of existence that anticipates the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Extraordinarily, all these elements are enfolded within an account of a wartime espionage mission. “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” by Tadeusz Borowski (1946) A father and daughter take a hunting trip every year together, but every year they grow farther apart. Only afterwards did I discover that this was in fact a piece of densely textured reportage, but it taught me so much about how to write a short story that I will always see it as one. A young man, Werner Hoeflich, trapped by a fire, escapes by leaping from the window of his New York apartment, across the intervening gap and in through the window of the adjacent building. It has the richness of a novel, the raw and dirty grip of life and was, for me, a revelation. Fine language and a deftly conjured mood are all well and good, but fiction – of whatever length – should thrill. Mark Haddon “The Window Theatre” by Ilse Aichinger (1953)