Looking for Mr. Green
A major theme of this story by Saul Bellow is work ethic. Times are tough in 1930s Chicago. An intellectual white man starts a much-needed job delivering unclaimed welfare checks to people in a depressed black neighborhood. On his first day his younger supervisor implies that, as a city worker, he isn’t expected to “push too hard”. That’s not the way he works: he wants to do well for doing-well’s sake, and goes above and beyond in a quest to find the elusive Mr. Green. Other themes include poverty, race, suspicion, duty, tenacity, identity.
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This story by Vicente Rivera Jr. is set in Intramuros, the walled city within Manilla, shortly before the Japanese invasion of World War 2. It deals with an often-overlooked aspect of forced evacuation during war: the severing of personal relationships as families flee a conflict. A budding friendship between a protective young man and lonely eleven-year-old girl is put on hold as they go their separate ways. The friendship is clearly important to both, and their parting is especially bitter as neither has a chance to say goodbye. Themes include loneliness, friendship, war, displacement, regret.
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Combine a boy with his throat cut who runs out onto a country road, a seemingly deserted town where the only community building still in use is a desecrated church, a hoard of murderous children, and a mysterious presence living in the surrounding cornfields, and you have a typical 
The major themes of this unsettling horror story from