Evening in Paradise is a collection of previously uncompiled stories from the short-story master and literary sensation, Lucia Berlin. After reading them, Dwight Garner of The New York Times wrote, "Berlin probably deserved a Pulitzer Prize." The stories take us from Texas...

1 The pharaoh Necko was not content to rule the Upper and the Lower. He wanted knowledge of the whole. So he plopped a crew of Phoenicians down in the Red Sea and told them to go home...

The fantastic has always been at the edges of Heather O'Neill's work. In her bestselling novels Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, she transformed the shabbiest streets of Montreal with her beautiful, freewheeling metaphors. In Daydreams of...

In his review of A Manual for Cleaning Women, Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times that Lucia Berlin is “the real deal. Her stories swoop low over towns and moods and minds.” We couldn’t agree more and, in addition to...

Our National Short Story Month celebrations continue with a master of the macabre. “Monument” by Amelia Gray can be found in her latest collection, Gutshot. The townspeople met at the graveyard at the agreed-upon time. They...

By Andrés Neuman Translated from the Spanish by Richard Gwyn This story first appeared in The Coffin Factory, issue 3 I entered the hospital dying of hatred and wanting to give thanks. How fragile is rage. We might shout, hit, spit at a stranger. The same person to whom – depending on their verdict, depending on whether they tell us what we are anxious to hear – we might suddenly express our admiration, or hug, or swear an oath of loyalty. And it would be genuine, that love. I entered without thinking anything, thinking about not thinking. I knew that my mother’s present, my future, depended on the toss of a coin. And that that coin was not in my hands and maybe not in the hands of anyone else either, not even those of the doctor. I have always thought that the absence of god liberated us from an unbearable weight. But more than once, I have missed the idea of divine mercy when entering or leaving a hospital. Filled with seats, corridors, hierarchies and ceremonies of hope, silent on their upper floors, hospitals are the closest thing to a cathedral in which we unbelievers may tread. I entered trying to avoid this kind of reasoning, because I was afraid that I would end up praying like a cynic. I lent an arm to my mother, who so many times had given me hers when the world was enormous and my legs very short. Is it possible to shrink overnight? Can someone’s body turn into a sponge that has soaked up so many fears that it gains in density, while losing volume? My mother seemed shorter, thinner, but nevertheless more laden down than before, as if earthbound. Her porous hand closed over mine. I imagined a child in a bathtub, naked, expectant, squeezing a sponge. And I wanted to say something to my mother, and I didn’t know how to speak.

There's something about Etgar Keret's short stories that works especially well online. Perhaps it's their terseness, their easy vernacular, or their wry approach to the fundamental oddness of modern life. Also, magic goldfish. Gary Shteyngart—novelist, Twitterer, and illiteracy advocate—reads "What, of This Goldfish,...

Every month we'll roundup highlights from our Longreads page, where we'll be posting articles, interviews, and stories longer than 2,000 words. (Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.) From the past...