As World War II comes to a close, a young man who has been interred in a Japanese prison camp is given a macabre mission, which he embraces in a disturbing fashion….
“The Passionate Friends” by Edmund White
An apparently poorly matched couple come to realize, through their fumbling efforts and some strange friendships, where their difficulties lie. This is an interesting character study – Maria and Dan are a…
“Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” by Ted Chiang
A device that lets people communicate across alternate timelines causes people to consider the nature of free will and the relationship between one’s actions and one’s character. Chiang takes a relatively abstract…
“A Friend of the Family” by Peter Robins
A boy has his first serious encounter with desire, betrayal, and bigotry with his uncle’s enticing friend. This reads a bit differently today, I suspect, than it did in the late ’70s…
“A Marriage of Convenience” by Peter Burton
The correspondence between a writer and a man who has asked him to sell off the more salacious books in his library discloses a disturbing predilection. This is a quietly disturbing little…
“Page Turner” by Robert Shearman
A pianist falls in love with his page turner, who undergoes a strange transformation before her death. This is a sweet, if odd, little story; I enjoyed its playfulness, especially in its…
“72 Virgins” by Robert Shearman
In the after-life, a man is assigned a mansion and a motley mix of 72 virgins (not all human, and only about half female), and things don’t work out as one might…
“The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang
A parrot explains the Fermi Paradox. Less a story than a meditation and thought experiment, this piece raises many more questions than it answers: why do we search for intelligent life in…
“Prima Belladonna” by J.G. Ballard
A mysterious singer wreaks havoc on a shop that sells musical plants. This story feels about a decade ahead of its time, much closer in tone to the “Dangerous Visions”-era “new wave”…
“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” by Ted Chiang
In parallel stories, a young man in mid-20th century Nigeria struggles to reconcile the oral culture he was born into with the literate culture introduced by European colonialism, and a man in…