In this story by Vasily Aksyonov (Aksenov), a hard-drinking Russian logging-truck driver is infatuated with a stylish stewardess he meets on a flight to Moscow. He becomes so obsessed with finding her again that he spends his entire winter vacation traveling to and fro on the same flight. Disillusioned over the fruitless search, he has a moral awakening and develops feelings of guilt over a woman he had recently misled. When he does see the stewardess again, he decides to walk away and treasure the memory. Themes include machismo, unrequited love, disillusionment, moral conscience, Western influence on Russian culture. More…
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The Good Shopkeeper
A major theme of this story by Samrat Upadhyay is pride. Other themes include progress, family, social status, escapism through infidelity, humility, self-sufficiency. Set in Nepal, an accountant in a struggling international company loses his prestigious job to a younger man with better computer skills. He is married with a seven-month-old baby, and seeks help from his shady but well-connected brother-in-law. When nothing comes up, he finds solace in an affair with a housemaid he meets in a park. Through the housemaid’s simplistic outlook and lifestyle, he learns that self-worth comes from within and not a fancy job or title. More…
The Beginning of Homewood
This partly autobiographical story by John Edgar Wideman takes the form of a letter from an African-American man to his brother in prison. The central topic is how their great-great-great-grandmother Sybela escaped slavery with the son of her owner and their two illegitimate children and, after a five-hundred-mile flight across America, established a new community in a remote corner of Pittsburgh. The letter seeks to reconcile Sybela’s flight from bondage with his brother’s incarceration for murder, questioning whether the latter should be mitigated by their legacy of slavery. Themes include race, heritage, slavery, escape, freedom, justice and accountability, the supernatural. More…
Three Elephant Power
Today’s story is by A. B. “Banjo” Paterson, a famous Australian writer best known for his poems and stories about life in the countryside around the time of the country’s independence from Britain in 1900. Despite the title, this story has very little to do with elephants. It is about boys and their toys (men and their cars), and is a wonderful example of Australian ‘bush humor’. Part of the story is about the exploits of a speed-loving chauffeur named Henery, who tries to catch a car that has left the biggest set of tyre tracks he has ever seen. More…
The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head
Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy Sayers’s eccentric amateur sleuth, is saddled with his ten-year-old nephew while his parents are away overseas. As the two browse an antiquarian bookshop, the boy is attracted to the maps and pictures in a badly damaged copy of Cosmographia Universalis, an early description of the world. He buys the book, and shortly afterwards a strange man visits and offers Wimsey two hundred times what the boy paid. This leads to a “Boys Own” type adventure involving attempted robbery, Scotland Yard and a riddle leading to buried pirate treasure. Themes include curiosity, greed, mystery, deception, and philanthropy. More…