Global Reading List — A World Adventure by Book

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short stories

There a Petal Silently Falls

“Ch'oe Yun is a Korean author known for her breathtaking versatility, subversion of authority, and bold exploration of the inner life. Readers celebrate her creative play with fantasy and admire her deep engagement with trauma, history, and the vagaries of remembrance.

In this collection's title work, ‘There a Petal Silently Falls,’ Ch'oe explores both the genesis and the aftershocks of historical outrages such as the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, in which a reported 2,000 civilians were killed for protesting government military rule. The novella follows the wanderings of a girl traumatized by her mother's murder and strikes home the injustice of state-sanctioned violence against men and especially women. ‘Whisper Yet’ illuminates the harsh treatment of leftist intellectuals during the years of national division, at the same time offering the hope of reconciliation between ideological enemies. The third story, ‘The Thirteen-Scent Flower,’ satirizes consumerism and academic rivalries by focusing on a young man and woman who engender an exotic flower that is coveted far and wide for its various fragrances.

Elegantly crafted and quietly moving, Ch'oe Yun's stories are among the most incisive portrayals of the psychological and spiritual reality of post-World War II Korea. Her fiction, which began to appear in the late 1980s, represents a turn toward a more experimental, deconstructionist, and postmodern Korean style of writing, and offers a new focus on the role of gender in the making of Korean history.”

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Human Acts

Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award & named one of the best books of 2017 by Amazon, The Atlantic, San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal, & Huffington Post

From the internationally bestselling author of The Vegetarian, a “rare and astonishing” (The Observer) portrait of political unrest and the universal struggle for justice

In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.
 
The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend who meets his own fateful end; to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother; and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.
 
An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of an historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.”

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Flowers of Mold

“If you're looking for a book that will make you gasp out loud, you’ve found it.” —Kirkus Reviews

“This impressive collection reveals Ha’s close attention to the eccentricities of life, and is sure to earn her a legion of new admirers.” —Publishers Weekly

“Joining a growing cohort of notable Korean imports, Ha’s dazzling, vaguely intertwined collection of 10 stories is poised for Western acclaim.” —Booklist

On the surface, Ha Seong-nan’s stories seem pleasant enough, yet there’s something disturbing just below the surface, ready to permanently disrupt the characters’ lives.

A woman meets her next-door neighbor and loans her a spatula, then starts suffering horrific gaps in her memory. A man, feeling jilted by an unrequited love, becomes obsessed with sorting through his neighbors’ garbage in the belief that it will teach him how to better relate to people. A landlord decides to raise the rent, and his tenants hatch a plan to kill him at a team-building retreat.

In ten captivating, unnerving stories, Flowers of Mold presents a range of ordinary individuals—male and female, young and old—who have found themselves left behind by an increasingly urbanized and fragmented world.

The latest in the trend of brilliant female Korean authors to appear in English, Ha cuts like a surgeon, and even the most mundane objects become menacing and unfamiliar under her scalpel.

(Group read suggestion from Ivor Watkins, book club moderator.)

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Amsterdam Stories

“No book published in the last 10 years has had a bigger impact on me, one of those books that speaks directly to your gut, a revelation. … [T]here’s something unclassifiable about the way Nescio goes about his stories, as if every sentence is a surprise even to the writer. At the same time, there’s nobody less pretentious and more down-to-earth.”- LitHub’s “26 Books from the Last Decade that More People Should Read”

“His utter simplicity goes hand-in-hand with a great command of humour, irony, matter-of-factness, understatement and sentiment (never sentimentality or self-pity) all of which miraculously balance each other out. ... Nescio is essentially a lyricist, a poet writing in prose.” ­- Dutch Foundation for Literature

“No one has written more feelingly and more beautifully than Nescio about the madness and sadness, courage and vulnerability of youth: its big plans and vague longings, not to mention the binges, crashes, and marathon walks and talks. No one, for that matter, has written with such pristine clarity about the radiating canals of Amsterdam and the cloud-swept landscape of the Netherlands.

Who was Nescio? Nescio—Latin for ‘I don’t know’—was the pen name of J.H.F. Grönloh, the highly successful director of the Holland–Bombay Trading Company and a father of four—someone who knew more than enough about respectable maturity. Only in his spare time and under the cover of a pseudonym, as if commemorating a lost self, did he let himself go, producing over the course of his lifetime a handful of utterly original stories that contain some of the most luminous pages in modern literature.”

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Syrian Folktales

“This delightful book relates folktales from the fourteen muhafazah (i.e., governorates or provinces) of Syria. Each folktale is located on a regional map and is accompanied by a local, related recipe that’s easy to follow.“ Also woven into the book are folk sayings, Syrian history, songs, riddles, and hadith (i.e., the words and teachings from the Prophet Muhammad which serve as the second primary source of Islamic teachings). The author also includes a glossary of Syrian terms for reference.

Thoughtfully written, Syrian Folktales is a culturally-relevant and unique counterpoint to all the negativity heard about Syria presenting a view of the country that isn't political or war torn. This slim volume provides a rich look into Syrian culture and is a wonderful read for all ages.

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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Facing North

“Ten intriguing tales from the Caribbean island of Barbados—an antidote to the daily farrago of celebrity lives served up by the media. This book celebrates the true 'homo ordinarius' and his response to personal, natural and man-made challenges. A well prepared potpourri lovingly served with gentle humour and a dash of nostalgia.”

“Reminiscent of some of Mavis Gallant's short fiction, the stories—all good reads—deal with the serious current issues of politics, economics, race, sex, land appropriation, and identity...these are hopeful stories.” - Robert Edison Sandiford

”[Edison T. Williams] is a story teller! He has the technique of gripping the reader from the beginning. [His] endings are classic Somerset Maugham/O. Henry. I have my favourites among the stories: 'Desmond Lola and Bassman' is fascinating...'The New Sybaris' is a riveting read... 'Island Man' is captivating... but I really loved them all.” - Peter Laurie

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In Time of Need

A collection of award-winning Barbadian stories that showcase the controversial and often hidden aspects of the supposed Caribbean paradise.

The themes of love and relationships, domestic and emotional abuse, politics in the rum shop, sex tourism and human trafficking and more, are narrated in a satirical and humorous style, often through the voices of innocent and naïve characters.

“Issue-based writing that doesn't seem preachy or pedantic. There is humour. There is full humanity. There is certainly a love of Barbados and the Caribbean evidenced through a willingness to peek beneath the paradisical surface, poke beneath the tropical facade and embrace, warts and all, the society that inhabits our dynamic island and archipelago.” —Ayesha Gibson

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Love in a Fallen City

“Masterful short works about passion, family, and human relationships.

These six stories, most available in English for the first time, were published to acclaim in China and Hong Kong in the '40s; they explore, bewitchingly, the myriad ways love overcomes (or doesn't) the intense social constraints of time and place.

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of 20th century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang’s achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.”

“With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able truly to connect that divide, just as her heroines often disappeared inside it. She is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these excellent new translations, English readers can discover why she is so revered by Chinese readers everywhere." – Ang Lee

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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Seven Gothic Tales

Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the 19th-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe.

Seven Gothic Tales was instantly popular when it was first published, revolving around mysterious, bizarre or supernatural events that explore questions of philosophy and identity. Although writing of death and failed loved affairs, Dinesen’s lush, ornate prose also has moments of humour.

“These Danish tales are a modern refinement of German romanticism. They are peopled, or haunted, by ghosts of a past age, voluptuaries dreaming of the singers and ballerinas of the operas of Mozart and Gluck, young men who are too melancholy to enjoy love or too perverse to profit by it, maidens dedicated to chastity and others hopeful of a gentlemanly seduction; their generally fantastic adventures are exquisitely played.” —The NY Times

”A book in that special realm in which artistry is more real than reality.” — Time

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It So Happen

Written in Caribbean-English (a localized non-standard form of English specific to each country of the Commonwealth Caribbean), this book with its stories of a village in Barbados is truly a Bajan classic.

“It So Happen focuses on the Barbadian/Caribbean village and the characters found there. Callender's fictional village is full of eccentrics who he exposes in a series of moral fables.

Saga Boy and Jasper prepare for a grand stick-fight. Big Joe will do anything for the girl he loves. All the men are determined to defeat Marie in the rum drinking competition, and Pa John, the Obeah Man is foiled by his own wicket spell.

This is a must read for every local and visitor alike. Students of language and culture will find in it a wealth of material.”

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Popular Music from Vittula

“Popular Music from Vittula tells the fantastical story of a young boy's extraordinary existence, peopled by a visiting African priest, a witch in the heart of the forest, cousins from Missouri, an old Nazi, a beautiful girl with a black Volvo, silent men and tough women, a champion-bicyclist music teacher with a thumb in the middle of his hand—and, not least, on a shiny vinyl disk, the Beatles.

The story unfolds in sweltering wood saunas, amidst chain thrashings and gang warfare, learning to play the guitar in the garage, over a traditional wedding meal, on the way to China, during drinking competitions, while learning secret languages, playing ice hockey surrounded by snow drifts, outsmarting mice, discovering girls, staging a first rock concert, peeing in the snow, skiing under a sparkling midnight sky.

In the manner of David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, Mikael Niemi tells a story of a rural Sweden at once foreign and familiar, as a magical childhood slowly fades with the seasons into adult reality.”

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Havana is a Really Big City

“These humorous and poignant stories that illustrate everyday life in contemporary Havana will challenge the reader's assumptions about the Cuban reality.

Themes of class, race, gender, and sexuality are artfully interwoven in humorous and poignant narratives that make the reader pause to rethink her/his views or assumptions about Cuba and about life. This groundbreaking collection of her work, most of which is available for the first time in English translation, includes La habana es una ciudad bien grande in its entirety as well as other selected stories.

Wildcat21 says: ‘Yanez portrays Cuba as a familiar place, the well-known small-town feel. Each story introduces us to a character, ranging from children to adults to a dog, who tells us a personal account of the highs and lows of life. Each story is so different, covering a variety of themes such as sadness for lost loved ones, unhappiness with life, coming of age, and love. These stories are original and down to earth, and the emotions that flow from character to character and story to story are completely relatable. Yanez weaves so much emotion into such few words. She writes as though she's a good friend just telling you stories.’

(A special thank you to book club member, Beth Cummings for the group read suggestion.)

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The Collected Short Stories of Gopal Baratham

“The writer possesses a technically excellent prose style, so smooth that it slips down the reader’s throat like a well-made Singapore Sling.”— The Hindu

“This exciting collection brings together thirty-nine of the late Dr. Gopal Baratham’s characteristic and revered pieces. In his usual blunt, strong and controversial style, Baratham’s socio-political critiques are ‘peopled’ by characters from virtually every background and class—with their frustrated hopes, wild illusions and excesses.

Paired with a stylistic and evolving narrative voice, as seen in dialogue that fluctuates from poetic to quirky, this writer’s ambivalent medium is also his message. Readers are drawn into the depth of his work, and left with a sympathetic, sensitive understanding of events, people, actions and the complexities of relationships

(Group read suggestion from Ivor Watkins, book club moderator.)

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Beauty in Mourning and Other Stories

“This collection of short stories and novellas are the first of Auezov's works ever to be translated into English. They were written in the 1920s in the author's youth, but have an assurance and maturity that have earned them widespread popularity throughout Kazakhstan and the Soviet Union. Gunshot at the Pass was made into a successful film and An Orphan's Lot, Beauty in Mourning, Savage Grey and Turbulent Times are works, which nearly every Kazakh knows and loves. These works are revered for their seminal influence on Kazakh literature and drama, the fascinating insights they provide on the culture and customs of the steppe but, above all, as truly great, universal stories that have exercised their power over the imaginations of generations of Kazakhs and are now finally available to a worldwide audience.

Mukhtar Auezov (1897-1961) is considered one of Kazakhstan's greatest and most revered writers. On the occasion of his 60th birthday in September 1957, Mukhtar Auezov was awarded the Order of Lenin and granted the title ‘Honoured Academic of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic"‘ In 1959, he was awarded the highly prestigious Lenin Prize for The Path of Abai. After his death in 1961, one of the main streets in Almaty (Kazakhstan's largest metropolis) was named in his honour, and later a whole district of the city. In 1963, his house on M. Tulebaev Street in Almaty was turned into an official museum to honour the writer's work and achievements.”

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Mesopotamia

“A unique work of fiction from the troubled streets of Ukraine, giving invaluable testimony to the new history unfolding in the nation’s post-independence years

This captivating book is Serhiy Zhadan’s ode to Kharkiv, the traditionally Russian-speaking city in Eastern Ukraine where he makes his home. A leader among Ukrainian post-independence authors, Zhadan employs both prose and poetry to address the disillusionment, complications, and complexities that have marked Ukrainian life in the decades following the Soviet Union’s collapse. His novel provides an extraordinary depiction of the lives of working-class Ukrainians struggling against an implacable fate: the road forward seems blocked at every turn by demagogic forces and remnants of the Russian past. Zhadan’s nine interconnected stories and accompanying poems are set in a city both representative and unusual, and his characters are simultaneously familiar and strange. Following a kind of magical-realist logic, his stories expose the grit and burden of stalled lives, the universal desire for intimacy, and a wistful realization of the off-kilter and even perverse nature of love.”

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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Difficult Loves

“The quirkiness and grace of the writing, the originality of the imagination at work, the occasional incandescence of vision, and a certain lovable nuttiness make this collection well worth reading.” -Margaret Atwood

“Intricate interior lives are brilliantly explored in these short stories, now presented in one definitive collection as Calvino intended them.

In Difficult Loves, Italy’s master storyteller weaves tales in which cherished deceptions and illusions of love—including self-love—are swept away in magical instants of recognition. A soldier is reduced to quivering fear by the presence of a full-figured woman in his train compartment; a young clerk leaves a lady’s bed at dawn; a young woman is isolated from bathers on a beach by the loss of her bikini bottom. Each of them discovers hidden truths beneath the surface of everyday life. 

This is the first edition in English to present the collection as Calvino originally envisioned it, and includes two stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein.”

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The Inner Immigrant

“These essayistic short stories, penned over a thirty-year period, follow Fabian, Mihkel Mutt’s strange and self-indulgent alter ego, and his adventures in newly independent Estonia. The inner monologues of the chronically indecisive, worrying, apathetic, self-conscious and skeptical Fabian long serve as the author’s voice for delivering ironic observations of the world. These stories highlight the lingering absurdities of the previous Soviet regime, at the same time taking ironic aim at the triumphs and defeats, the virtues and vices of the Estonian intelligentsia.”

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Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia

Winner, Small Publisher Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards

Childhood stories of family, country and belonging…

What is it like to grow up Aboriginal in Australia? This anthology, compiled by award-winning author Anita Heiss, showcases many diverse voices, experiences and stories in order to answer that question. Accounts from well-known authors and high-profile identities sit alongside those from newly discovered writers of all ages. All of the contributors speak from the heart—sometimes calling for empathy, oftentimes challenging stereotypes, always demanding respect.

This groundbreaking collection will enlighten, inspire and educate about the lives of Aboriginal people in Australia today.

Contributors include: Tony Birch, Deborah Cheetham, Adam Goodes, Terri Janke, Patrick Johnson, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Jack Latimore, Celeste Liddle, Amy McQuire, Kerry Reed-Gilbert, Miranda Tapsell, Jared Thomas, Aileen Walsh, Alexis West, Tara June Winch, and many more.

”Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is a mosaic, its more than 50 tiles—short personal essays with unique patterns, shapes, colours and textures—coming together to form a powerful portrait of resilience.” —The Saturday Paper

”... provides a diverse snapshot of Indigenous Australia from a much needed Aboriginal perspective.” —The Saturday Age

“Black Australia is a patchwork—there is no homogenous black culture or experience. Adequately capturing the essence of hundreds of nations is no easy feat, but Heiss has pulled together an incredible bunch of voices that reflect the humour, intelligence, strength and diversity of Aboriginal people.” —Nayuka Gorrie, Feminist Writers Festival

“Taken together, the diversity exhibited by these fifty pieces shatters that myth [that there is only one narrowly defined way to be and look Aboriginal]. One hopes for a sequel.” —Australian Book Review

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Stone Tree

Winner of the 2011 Nordic Council Literature Prize

"Gyrðir Elíasson’s stories take us out of ourselves. Situated on the lonely western shores of Iceland, or out in the vast mountain ranges or barren lava fields, each is a study in self-exile. We follow a Boston ornithologist, speeding through the landscape chasing Arctic Terns; a boy relocating to the town of Siglufjördur to compete in a chess tournament; a husband packing his wife off to visit her aunt. In almost every story, we find people taking leave of their normal lives to take their dreams more seriously.

But even in the most desolate surroundings, Elíasson’s characters find strange company; ghostly presences in the early hours, enviable neighbours, fellow writers turning up at the same retreat, with the same ambitions. Like the wide canopy of stars under which they’re told, these stories plot a constellation of single, glittering images: a child defacing a new piano with a chisel in the middle of the night; a freezer packed with carefully wrapped dead birds, candles floating in a pond at night… Elíasson’s images are always unresolved, but are also somehow complete; like the dreams he shares with us, that lead us, through their own solitude, into other people’s. As Elíasson writes, ‘all dreams are joined at the edges, like the squares in a patchwork quilt.’"

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The Wedding of Zein

"The Wedding of Zein unfolds in the same village on the upper Nile where Tayeb Salih’s tragic masterpiece Season of Migration to the North is set. Here, however, the story that emerges through the overlapping, sometimes contradictory voices of the villagers is comic. Zein is the village idiot, and everyone in the village is dumbfounded when the news goes around that he will be getting married—Zein the freak, Zein who burst into laughter the moment he was born and has kept women and children laughing ever since, Zein who lost all his teeth at six and whose face is completely hairless, Zein married at last? Zein’s particular role in the life of the village has been the peculiar one of falling in love again and again with girls who promptly marry another man. It would be unheard of for him to get married himself.

In Tayeb Salih’s wonderfully agile telling, the story of how this miracle came to be is one that engages the tensions that exist in the village, or indeed in any community: tensions between the devout and the profane, the poor and the propertied, the modern and the traditional. In the end, however, Zein’s ridiculous good luck augurs an ultimate reconciliation, opening a prospect of a world made whole.

Salih’s classic novella appears here with two of his finest short stories, The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid and A Handful of Dates."

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