Short Story by N. V. M. Gonzalez. A description of life, ritual and coming of age in a Philippine subsistence farming family during the planting season. The major conflict in the story, where families band together to communally sow each other’s kaingin (slashed and burned fields), is with nature
Novelette by William Trevor. Set during the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, the lives of those living behind the walls of a large English estate are contrasted with the misery of the rural poor. The issues are considered from multiple points of view, including those of servants and staff.
Quick Read by Arkady Averchenko. A husband throws his wife’s lover from the sixth floor window of their apartment building. Through the windows on the way down, the falling man sees different ways his life could have gone. As he reaches the bottom, he is happy with his gruesome fate.
Short Story by Vladimir Nabokov. A series of vignettes describing the narrator’s observations of some everyday aspects of Berlin life: pipes left on the footpath, the streetcar system, people he sees working on the streets, the city zoo and the pub in which he is drinking with a friend.
Short Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The abusive behaviour of a seemingly deranged woman forces her family to flee their home. In keeping with the narrator’s description of her “not a human being but a fire from Gehenna [hell]”, small fires tend to pop up around her wherever she lives.