Short stories by Ben Lerner, Hye-young Pyun, and Katherine Heiny; a short novel by Fumiko Enchi; and a graphic novel by Rachel Ang

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Hey I understand you're angry, the first message said. A man's voice, probably a man my age. 
—From "The Ferry," a short story by Ben Lerner, The New Yorker (April 10, 2023), pp. 52-59. 

When he opened the front door—he was leaving on his way to work in the city—a letter fluttered to the ground. The envelope had been stuck in the doorjamb, and it was crumpled as if someone had tried to force it in.
—From the title story of To the Kennels: And Other Stories, a collection by Hye-young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Heinz Insu Fenkl (Arcade Publishing, 2024). "To the Kennels" begins on page 25 of the hardcover. An earlier version of this story, translated by Yoosup Chang and Heinz Insu Fenkl, appeared in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Harvard University, Korea Institute, Vol. 2, Fall 2008. 

On Tuesday night, Sasha and Monique decide to go to the bar where Sasha is supposed to meet [her married lover's wife] and scope it out. It is a shockingly seedy place, even for this high up on Amsterdam Avenue, with decaying wood walls and a dank unpleasant smell.  
—From Single, Carefree, Mellow, a collection of short stories by Katherine Heiny (Knopf, 2015). 

Tsuneo Ibuki and Toyoki Mikamé sat facing one another in a booth in a coffee shop on the second floor of Kyoto Station. 
          Between them on the narrow imitation-wood tabletop were a vase holding a single white chrysanthemum and an ashtray piled high with cigarette butts, suggesting that the two men had been in conversation for some time. 
—From Masks, a novel by Fumiko Enchi, translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter (Vintage Edition, 1983).  

I don't think I believe in leagues. That implies that attraction is more hierarchical than it actually is.
—From I Ate the Whole World to Find You, a graphic novel by Rachel Ang (Drawn & Quarterly, 2025). 

Poetry by Tadeusz Dąbrowski and Kirmen Uribe, fiction by Hye-Young Pyun, and nonfiction by Meghan Daum and Caroline Knapp

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It's as if you'd woken in a locked cell and found

in your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentence

in a language you don't know.

—From "Sentence," a poem by Tadeusz Dąbrowski, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The New Yorker (July 22, 2019), p. 60. 

Our grandmother worked at the cannery.

And our mother and aunts.

They were workers, not housewives.

Or were that, too.

—From "Back from the Cannery," a poem by Kirmen Uribe, translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin, The New Yorker (November 23, 2020), p. 60-61. 

The same thing for lunch every day. Every day he ate the same thing, the Set A menu from the cafeteria in the School of Liberal Arts. And the Set A menu was always the same. It included rice, soup, kimchi and three side dishes. The three side dishes did consist of of something different each day, but the overall menu was so similar from one day to the next that by the time he was on his way home, he could barely remember what side dishes he'd eaten.  
—From Evening Proposal, a collection of short stories by Pyun Hye Young (whose name is now usually listed in English as Hye-Young Pyun), translated from the Korean by Youngsuk Park and Gloria Cosgrove Smith (Dalkey Archive Press, 2016). Originally published in Korean by Moonji Publishing Company, 2011. This particular segment is from "Monotonous Lunch" (pp. 49-61).

People who weren't there like to say that my mother died at home surrounded by loving family. This is technically true, though it was just my brother and me and he was looking at Facebook and I was reading a profile of Hillary Clinton in the December 2009 issue of Vogue.  

—From The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, a collection of essays by Meghan Daum (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).  This section is from the first essay, "Matricide."

When you love somebody, or something, it's amazing how willing you are to overlook the flaws. Around that same time, in my thirties, I started to notice that tiny blood vessels had burst all along my nose and cheeks. I started to dry-heave in the mornings, driving to work in my car. A tremor in my hands developed, then grew worse, then persisted for longer periods, all day sometimes.  

        I did my best to ignore all this. I struggled to ignore it, the way a woman hears a coldness in a lover's voice and struggles, mightily and knowingly, to misread it.  

—From Drinking: A Love Story, a memoir by Caroline Knapp (Dial Press/Bantam Dell/Random House, 1996).  

Fiction by Hye-Young Pyun, Lena Andersson, and Tove Jansson

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Danger warnings are more common than actual danger.  And yet when danger finally does strike, it does so without warning.  That was why the man thought nothing of the quarantine notices and infectious disease prevention regulations posted all around the airport.  He knew that the more caution signs there were, the less danger he was in.  As if overhearing the man's thoughts, a health inspector in a hazmat suit who was scanning the temperatures of disembarking passengers looked hard at the thermometer and gave him a warning frown.  Was it the man's slight fever?  The stink of alcohol wafting off of him?  He clamped his mouth shut and slipped a hand up to his forehead.  It felt like the lid of a rice cooker set to warm.
--From City of Ash and Red, a novel by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade Publishing, 2018). Originally published in Korean as Jaewa Ppalgang (Changbi Publishers: South Korea, 2010).  Please note: this book contains some specific violence that may not be for everyone. 

Traffic was at a standstill, the cars blocked by a crowd of pedestrians in the middle of the street.  Their voices were nearly loud enough to drown out the blaring of horns.  What had happened?  She could feel everyone's eyes on her.  Could sense them stopping mid-sentence to stare at her.  Stepping back to open a path before she could get too close.  Turning their heads when her eyes met theirs.  Whispering to the people next to them.

        Of course, if she'd actually found the courage to lift her head and look, she would have seen that the others barely registered her presence, but she couldn't manage it.  Se-oh let her head drop further and further.  Any moment now someone was going to recognize her and grab her by the throat or curse at her and demand to know where she'd been hiding.  She hurried away from them.  

--From The Law of Lines, a novel by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade Publishing, 2020).  Originally published in Korean as Seonui beopchik (Muhakdongne Publishing Group: South Korea).

Every other weekend, Hugo went away.  He said he was going to Borås, where his frail mother lived, but there was something about these trips to Borås that did not quite add up.  There was an unusual vacuum around them, the way unusual vacuums usually surround lies.  The baffling thing was that there was no reason to doubt that the trips were genuine, in the same way that there was no reason he should name a place where he was not going.  But there was still something not quite right.  

        On one of the evenings when they met over food and wine and then went back to his studio, [Ester] saw a train ticket sticking out of the inside pocket of his jacket, which was hanging on the back of a chair.  When he went to the toilet she got up and walked round the room, looked at the art works on the walls and gave the ticket a slight tweak, so light that it hardly counted as an act.

        The ticket was from the previous weekend.  Stockholm-Malmö return, it said.  Not a hint of Borås.

--From Willful Disregard, a novel by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death (Other Press, 2016).  First published in the United Kingdom by Picador (2015).  Originally published in Swedish as Egenmäktigt förfarande – en roman om kärlek (Natur & Kultur: Stockholm, Sweden, 2013).  This segment is from page 38 in the paperback. 

In the past few months at home in Stockholm, she'd written her first play, which was to be performed the coming autumn at a country theater in Västerås.  The play would send her life in a new direction, but of this she knew nothing yet.  The production was called Threesome and was a melancholy reflection on the agonies of love.  Ester Nilsson had striven for psychological realism, and that's exactly what she thought she'd achieved, but the critics would call it absurdist.

        ...

        Threesome was about a man trapped in an unhappy marriage who meets another woman but can't bring himself to leave his wife.  The play was not prophetic.  Nothing is prophetic.  What may look like a prediction is really just a heightened awareness of what has previously come to pass.  What has happened will happen again sooner or later, somewhere, sometime.  And it's likely that it will happen again to the same person because people have their patterns.  

--From Acts of Infidelity, a novel by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel (Other Press, 2018).  First published in English in the United Kingdom by Macmillan Publishers International Limited (2018).  Originally published in Swedish as Utan personligt ansvar (Natur & Kultur: Stockholm, Sweden, 2014).  These segments are from pages 3-5 in the paperback.  

On a windless day in November, shortly after sunrise, she saw a squirrel on the boat beach.  It sat motionless near the water, hardly visible in the half-light, but she knew it was a living squirrel, and she hadn't seen anything alive for a very long time.  The gulls didn't count, they were always flying away.  They were like the wind across the waves and the grass. 

--From "The Squirrel," a short story Tove Jansson.  This story (pp. 38-55) and "The Summer Child" (pp. 150-165) were included in The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella (New York Review Books, 2014). The stories were first published in Swedish by Schildts Förlags AB (Finland).  English translations first appeared in several books (Sort of Books: London, 2006-2013).

Novels by Roy Jacobsen and Hye-young Pyun, stories by Dorthe Nors, and a poem by Marjorie Lotfi Gill

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In the wake of the two disasters there followed yet another, this time connected with a widow's pension; you see, my father managed to get hitched again before he fell to his death, and to have another child, a girl, whose name we did not even know, so that now there was another widow somewhere out there, receiving the money that Mother and I should have had, and squandering it on the pools and taxis and perms.
--From Child Wonder, a novel by Roy Jacobsen, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett with Don Shaw (Maclehose Press/Quercus: London, Great Britain, 2011).  Originally published in Norwegian as Vidunderbarn (Prodigy) (Cappelen Damm: Oslo, Norway, 2009).

Ask me for the measure of rose water
in baklava, how to butter each layer of filo
away from the corner so it holds itself apart
under heat, or the exact crush of pistachio,
fine as rubble, not yet dust.
--From "The Wrong Person to Ask," a poem by Marjorie Lotfi Gill, Rattle (May 15, 2018).

After a while, the nurse came back.  She unplugged a number of cords that connected Oghi to the machines, then double-checked the bed and slowly wheeled him out into the hallway.  
        Oghi lay there and watched as the hospital ceiling and fluorescent lights rushed past.  He had a feeling he would be in that bed for a while.  Not just a few hours but for days to come.  All this talk about the importance of willpower must have meant that, unless he wanted it badly enough, he would have a tough time getting better.  It meant there was absolutely no chance his body would mend on its own, that even repeated treatment would not guarantee recovery.  The doctor's and nurse's reactions told Oghi that he'd taken a long time to wake up.  He'd probably received all sorts of medical care already.  The cables, the respirator, the tubes snaking in and out of him told him that his had not been an easy fight.
--From The Hole, a novel by Hye-young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade Publishing, 2017).  Originally published in Korean as Hol (Moonji Publishing: Seoul, South Korea, 2016).

The Bangs work a lot and never shop for groceries themselves.  Everything in the refrigerator is ordered online.  Every Sunday evening they place their order.  Every Monday a box is left outside the door with all their food.  One of these Mondays the box contains a tomato weighing more than four pounds, which the Bangs do not believe they ordered.  The first thing is that they cannot possibly eat a tomato that big.  The other thing is that they are paying by the ounce.  It's too expensive, says Mrs. Bang, so Mr. Bang calls the online grocery store to complain.  At seven that evening, while I am busy in the guest bathroom, the doorbell rings.  
--From "The Big Tomato," a short story by Dorthe Nors, from her collection Karate Chop, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Graywolf Press, 2014), pp. 23-28.

For smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee with the hairstylist I get my hair done for half price.  Once in a while, a fat lady who lives in our building walks by on the street outside.  She has permission to keep a dog in her apartment, because her dog can't bark.  
--From "Hair Salon," a short story by Dorthe Nors, from her collection Karate Chop, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Graywolf Press, 2014), pp. 51-54.  "Hair Salon" was first published in Gulf Coast, Issue 24.1 (Winter/Spring 2012).

Short fiction by Garth Greenwell, Hye-young Pyun, and Alan Bennett and a poem by Julie Bruck

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He laughed again when I warned him not to post it on Facebook.  I'll hunt you down, I said, one of the phrases I had used often in my seven years as a teacher, four of them here in Bulgaria, a career whose end we were celebrating that night.  He held up his hands, smiling broadly.  Don't worry, he said, I won't, I just want to remember this forever.
--From "An Evening Out," a short story by Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker (August 21, 2017), pp. 62-69.

Oghi opened his eyes to a faint glimpse of white clothing.  He heard his name: "Oghi.  Oghi."  The voice was soft, kind.  Eight days had passed since his emergency surgery, eight days during which he had slipped in and out of consciousness. 
--From "Caring for Plants," a short story by Hye-young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell, The New Yorker (July 10 & 17, 2017), pp. 64-71.

His paintings were small, suggestions 
of houses, pinpricks of green for trees.
--From "A Marriage," a poem by Julie Bruck, The New Yorker (November 7, 2011), p. 78.

'I gather you're my wife,' said the man in the waiting room.  'I don't think I've had the pleasure.  Might one know your name?'
--From "The Greening of Mrs Donaldson," the first of two stories in a little book called Smut by English dramatist Alan Bennett.  The book, originally published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Ltd and Profile Books Ltd, was published in the United States by Picador (2012).  The story "The Greening of Mrs Donaldson" was originally published in the London Review of Books (2010).