A man who lives alone, surrounded by television screens, is troubled by an intruder. The story itself wasn’t terribly surprising, but the premise felt weirdly prescient – replace the television screens with…
Category: Story a Day 2022
“A Dead Cert” by Seán Ó Faoláin
While visiting Dublin from her home in Cork, a woman meets with an old male friend and their flirting turns into a sort of challenging emotional combat. This is a quietly dark…
“A Hotel in Germany” by Catriona Ward
A movie star and her assistant have a strange, dark relationship. This is an odd and disorienting story. There is some back story implied, of near-immortal, vampire-like creatures who are made less…
“Exhalation #10” by A.C. Wise
A man blessed and cursed with acute hearing helps his police detective friend hunt for a killer who has left behind gruesome recordings of his crimes, which have begun to seep into…
“Tragic Event” by John F. Gilgun
A man returns from San Francisco to the small town where he grew up, and tries to convince his childhood friend to go back to San Francisco with him after a terrible…
“The Biographer’s Hat” by Cynthia Ozick
A questionable biographer of a questionable literary/cultural figure insinuates himself into a woman’s life and draws her into complicity with his intended deceits. This is a nice little story that draws on…
“The Dead Time” by J.G. Ballard
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…