Gina Berriault’s protagonist is a struggling young actress who has just begun a day job as a social worker in the women’s ward of a city hospital. With no qualifications or experience, she finds it hard to maintain clinical detachment and begins to identify with the suffering, often troubled women in the ward. She reflects on turning points in her own life, and concludes that women are shaped by the beds (a metaphor for common life experiences) they have chosen, or someone else has chosen for them, to lie in. Themes: empathy, choice vs. superstition/destiny, identity, aloneness, connection. More…
The Last Rung on the Ladder
This heart-wrenching story by Stephen King explores a common feature of modern life: the way many families drift apart as younger members leave home. As children, the protagonist and his younger sister shared a life-threatening adventure involving a broken ladder. The girl’s comment afterwards: I knew you must have been doing something to fix it. You’re my big brother. I knew you’d take care of me. Later in life, he is too busy climbing a different ladder to be there when needed. Themes include faith, family drift, loss of innocence, isolation, despair, guilt. More…
The Coffee-house of Surat
In this story from Leo Tolstoy, customers in an Indian coffeehouse overhear a disillusioned religious scholar questioning his servant about the existence of God. This sparks a debate about which religion is God’s favorite. Arguments are put forward supporting most of the mainstream European and Asian religions of the day, as well as some unusual ones like idolatry and fire-walking. The answer (that God is not exclusive to any one system of beliefs) is provided in an allegorical tale from a Confucian scholar about a debate over the existence and path of the sun. Themes: diversity, bigotry, intolerance, religious pluralism. More…
The Answer is No
This story explores the dilemma of a teacher who, having been raped by a trusted tutor at fourteen years of age, must face the attacker again as her school’s new headmaster. She refuses to cower before the man, and manages to maintain her dignity and self-respect through two encounters. Naguib Mahfouz is one of the few Islamic writers with the reputation to be able to not only successfully take on such a confronting issue, but also present it from an openly feminist perspective. Themes: abuse of trust, sexual assault, strength of character, courage, empowerment. More…
The Serial Garden
Joan Aiken’s Serial Garden is part of a collection of old-style children’s stories about the Armitage family, who seem to think it completely normal as impossible events take place around them. In the story, a picture on a cereal packet leads a young boy to a magical garden that has been inhabited for fifty years by a haughty princess pining for her lost lover. The boy almost manages to reunite the couple, but his mother accidentally dashes his plan at the last minute. Fortunately, the princess now has a dog to keep her company for the next fifty years! More…