In 2021, we read 82 stories, 8 translations. Stories from India, Mauritius, Australia, China, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, France, UK, US, Central America, Ireland, Japan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Chile, Taiwan, Tasmania, Russia, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada.

• The Flats, by James Bradley
• Xié xie, by Belinda Hermawan
• The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet, by Vandana Singh
• The Wife, both by Vandana Singh
• Paper Menageria, by Ken Liu
• The Weight of Memories, by Cixin Liu translated by Ken Liu
• Water, by Ramez Naam
• A Good Home, by Karen Lowachee
• Lemonade, by Eshkol Nevo, translated by Sondra Silverston
• Pandemic 2121: a love story, by Anuradha Kumar
• The Rivals, by Andrea Lee.
• Damage, by David Levine
• Lacrimosa, by Silvio Morena-Garcia
• The Garden Party, Katherine Mansfield
• You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South
• Five Francs Each, by Fred Vargas
• Lucky We Live Now, by Kate Atkinson
• Tunnel of Fish, by Kate Atkinson
• Beg Borrow Steal, by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
• The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
• The Silent Majority, by Melissa Lucashenko
• The Office of Missing Persons, by Akil Kumaraswamy
• Rabbit Island, by Elvira Navarro, translated by Christina Macsweeney
• A Wrinkle in the Realm, by Ben Okri
• Casting Shadows, by Jhumpa Lahiri
• Want You Gone, by William Torphy
• Lies, by William Torphy
• Girls at Play, by Celeste Ng
• Eleven, by Sandra Cisneros
• A Manual for Cleaning Women, by Lucia Berlin
• When the Rain Stops, by Bryan Washington
• The Committed, novel excerpt Chapter 1, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• The Estero, by Gerald Haslam
• Sweat, by Zora Neale Hurston
• Mister Taylor, by Augosto Monterroso, translated by Edith Grossman
• I’ll Sell You a Dog, by Juan Pablo Villalobos, translated by Rosalind Harvey
• Big Week, by Zadie Smith
• Hardfish Woman, by James Coleman
• Standard Loneliness Package, by Charles Yu
• The Girl Who Was Plugged in, by James Tiptree, Jr.
• Full Circle, by SueGrafton
• Slippery Fingers, by Dashiell Hammett
• Three stories from Dubliners by James Joyce:
  • After the Race
  • A Little Cloud
  • Araby
• Close Calls, by Stephen Dixon
• The Marchers, by Henry Dumas
• The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, Japanese folk tale
• Sleeping Beauty, by Laura Demers
• In the company of wolves, by Angela Carter
• Third Eye Rising, by Murzban F. Shroff
• Oh Dad!, by Murzban F. Shroff
• BloodChild, by Octavia E. Butler
• I Cleaned the – , by Kanya D’Almeida
• Let’s Tell This Story Properly, by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
• At the Side of the Road, by Ethel Rohan
• American Haint, by Lyndsey Ellis
• Cat Person, by Kristen Roupenian
• One Off the Short List, by Doris Lessing
• Clara, by Roberto Bolano
• The Repatriates, by Sana Krasikov
• 37112 feet above the South Pacific Ocean, by Lennardt Loß, translated by Helen MacCormac
• The Mutation, by Francis Kirps, translated by Rachel Farmer
• Curvaceous Dolls, by Li Ang
• Wrongly Delivered Mail, by Yeng Pway Ngon
• Earthworm, Sea Horse, and Fishmoth, by Ma Sha
• The School, by Donald Barthelme
• Late, by Stephen Millhauser
• The Secrets of the Last Greenland Shark, by Mike McClelland
• A Worm to the Wise, by Marissa Lingen
• Bartleby, the Scrivener, by Herman Melville
• Are we not men?, by T. Coraghessan Boyle
• Eight Short Science-Fiction Stories, By Paul Simms
• Three Knots in the Net, by Rosario Castellanos
• Three pages of oral tales from India, by A. K. Ramanujan
• Monsters Never Leave You, by Carlie St. George
• Bitter Grounds, by Neil Gaiman.
• The Sad Ambassador, By Ananda Devi, translated by Namrata Poddar
• Honey, By Adam Thompson
• Angela’s Ashes, novel excerpt, from Frank McCourt
• At Christmastime, by Anton Chekhov

The reading club was launched in March 2020, as we went into Covid-19 lockdown. This year we read 59 stories, many written originally in English but also translations from many languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Bengali, Malayalam, French, Polish, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese.

• Folding Beijing, by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu
• This is Pleasure, by Mary Gaitskill
• Afterimage, novella by Patrick Modiano
• The Accusation, by Bandi, translated by Deborah Smith
• A Feast at Countess von Doff’s, by Witold Gombrowicz
• Premeditated Crime, by Witold Gombrowicz
• Virginity, by Witold Gombrowicz
• The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor, by Allan Gurganus
• Nawabdin Electrician, by Daniyal Muinuddin
• Foreign Returned, by Sadia Shepherd
• The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street, by Mavis Gallant
• Night Beat, by Lisa Chen
• What You’ve Been Missing, by Maria Dahvana Headley
• Give Her Honey When She Screams, by Maria Dahvana Headley.
• Four Ghana-da stories, Mosquito, Pebble, Glass, and Fish, by Premendra Mitra, translated by Amlan Dasgupta
• About Her and the Memories That Belong to Her, by Mieko Kawakami
• How Much Heart, by Mieko Kawakami
• Four refugee themed stories:
  • The Wanderers, by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Sophie Hughes
  • The War Years, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
  • The Refugee, by Bernard Malamud
  • Dori and Jina, by Choi Jin-young, translated by Soje
• Two Malayalam stories
  • The Faithful Wife, by T.S. Pillai, translated by K.M. George
  • The Blue Light, by V.M. Basheer, translated by V. Abdulla
• Ghost Child, by S.P. Tenhoff
• Radical Closure, by Bennett Sims
• The Heroic Cyclist, by Murali Kamma, translated by
• Cream, by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel
• The Miniature Wife, by Manuel Gonzales
• Haddad: A Requiem, by Edward Hamlin
• Headlights, by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell
• Toward Happy Civilization, by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell
• Baba Yaga and the Pelican Child, by Joy Williams
• With Hair of Hand-Spun Gold, by Neil LaBute
• Grace Jones, by Irenosen Okojie
• Cargo, by Syed Waliullah
• Who is Like God, by Akwaeke Emezi
• Little Cousins Make Bad Third World Wheels, novel excerpt from Akwaeke Emezi
• Pedro Paramo, novel excerpt from Juan Rulfo, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
• Havana Red, novel excerpt from Leonardo Padura, translated by Peter Bush
• House Taken Over, by Julio Cortazar, translated by Paul Blackburn
• We Wanted More, memoir excerpt from Justin Torres
• Tiger! Tiger!, by Kunal Basu
• The Poem of All My Days, by Norah Burke
• One More Night Behind the Walls, by Peter Mountford
• Lemon Trees, by Ellen Weeren
• Orange World, by Karen Russell
• Daddy Thing, by K.C.Mead-Brewer
• Bad Neighbors, by Edward P. Jones
• Silence, Exile, Cunning, by Siddhartha Deb
• The Abandoned Village, by Hassan Blasim, translated by Jonathan Wright
• Rhythmic Exercise, by Mohamed Makhzangi, translated by Yasmeen Hanoosh
• Spider the Artist, by Nnedi Okorafor
• Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs, by Lavie Tidhar
• The Luncheon, by Somerset Maugham
• The Luncheon, by Jeffrey Archer
• The PersuAsians, by Karen Yamashita
• Hell is the Absence of God, by Ted Chiang

In 2022, we read 73 stories, 62 writers, 9 in translation. Writers from India, Pakistan, Nigeria, U.S., U.K, Ukraine, China, Germany, Russia, Ecuador, Ireland, Egypt, Japan, Australia, Kenya. Stories included: reworked folk tales, science/speculative fiction, noir, literary fiction.

• Shells I, by Savannah Johnston
• Oysters, by Emily Raboteau
• The Fifth Element, novel excerpt, by Terry Pratchett
• A Collegiate Casting-out of Devilish Devices, by Terry Pratchett
• The Lender of Time, by Salman Rushdie
• The Seventh Wave, intro and episode 1, by Salman Rushdie
• The Fairy’s Midwife, English folk tale
• Midwife to the Fairies, modern reworking by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
• When the Old Gods Die, by Mike Resnick
• Shout, by Dagoberto Gilb
• Everything is Nice, by Jane Bowles
• The Fqih, by Paul Bowles
• The Appliance Crisis, by Beth Goder
• Candide; Life-, by Beth Goder
• How to Say I Love You with Wikipedia, by Beth Goder
• The Trouble Easers, by Bapsi Sidhwa
• Half a Day, by Naguib Mahfouz
• Pig Son, by Sequoia Nagamatsu
• Jackalope Wives, by Ursula Vernon
• In a Grove, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
• The Wolf, by Kavita Bedford
• How Far She Went, by Mary Hood
• Microbiata and the Masses, by S.B. Divya
• The Ukraine, by Artem Chapeye, translated by Zenia Tompkins
• The Man in the Lift, by Anna Prizkau, translated by Charlotte Wührer
• E-Friends, by Emily Adrian
• Another Day in Paradise, by Suma Jayachandar
• The Biographer’s Hat, by Cynthia Ozick
• The Shawl, by Cynthia Ozick
• Shanghai Murmur, by Ti-Peng Chen
• Lulu, by Ti-Peng Chen
• Graded, by Alison Ojany
• Parenting, by Emily Howorth
• Hammer and Sickle, by Eugene Datta
• The Current Climate, by Aravind Jayan
• Recitatif, by Toni Morrison
• Until Gwen, by Dennis Lehane
• A Gentleman in Moscow, novel excerpt, by Amor Towles
• Great Upheavals Make for Great Opportunities. And Men Will Come to Grasp Them, by Stefan Heym
• Disappointment, by Jenny Bhatt
• Lalit and Labanyo, by Troilokyanath Mukhopadhyay, translated by Arnab Bhattacharya
• The Old Woman at the Metro Theatre, by Buddhadeva Bose, translated by Somdatta Mandal, Indrani Das, Pritam Bandyopadhyay, S. Siddharth
• Cattle Haul, by Jesamyn Ward
• Mr Cartoon, by Chris Offutt
• The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson
• The Most Dangerous Game, by Richard Connell
• Mother and Son, by Akhil Sharma
• Elmhurst, by Han Ong
• My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age, by Grace Paley
• Wants, by Grace Paley
• The Prophet from Jupiter, by Tony Earley
• The Deer, by Jenny Offill
• The Ghost of Firozsha Baag, by Rohinton Mistry
• Hussaina Qaachu, by Nadir Ali, translated by Amna Ali
• Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies, by Salman Rushdie
• The Harmony of the Spheres, by Salman Rushdie
• Rain, by Zubair Ahmad, translated by Anne Murphy
• Unstory, by Zubair Ahmad, translated by Anne Murphy
• Lulu’s Pleasure Palace, by Cherry Muhanji
• The IWM 1000, by Alicia Yánez Cossío
• The Manager of ‘The Kremlin’, by Evelyn Waugh
• Jeeves Takes Charge, by P.G. Wodehouse
• The Behavior of the Hawkweeds, by Andrea Barrett
• Tiny, Smiling Daddy, by Mary Gaitskill
• The Embassy of Cambodia, by Zadie Smith
• The Eyes Have It, by Philip K. Dick
• Small Girl Landlady, by Adachioma Ezeano
• Kabuliwallah, by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by Arunava Sinha
• The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, translated by Constance Garnett
• Taylor Swift, by Hugh Behm-Steinberg
• In the Event, by Meng Jin
• My Mother is An Abandoned Kmart, by Amy Cipolla Barnes
• The Courter, by Salman Rushdie

When Covid-19 isolated us at home in March 2020, some of us worried about how to continue community. I thrive on connection. On Facebook I read that a friend in Delhi was starting an online book club. The time didn’t work for us here in the Bay Area, so I thought we’d start our own. A post on Facebook showed that a number of people interested, most local but when we got going we’ve had members living in D.C. and Thailand.

Our ambition to discuss books, novellas mainly, didn’t pan out. Too short a time to read a book a week. And we wanted to keep a weekly schedule. We went over to short stories, and sometimes, novel excerpts. We rotate choices among our attendees – there’s a range of taste there – and we’ve read mystery and noir, science/speculative fiction, re-imagined folk and fairy tales, and lots of ‘literary fiction.’ We prefer texts available online and sometimes people share scanned stories. We’re grateful to all the magazines and sites out there that generously publish short fiction.

Our stories have spanned the globe and have included many translations from languages around the world.

Some of us are writers and have many writer friends; we’ve read some stories from our friends and people we’ve known. We’ve kept away from reading stories any of us have penned.

Our members have enjoyed most of the stories, though not every single one. Our discussions have always been energetic and often set off additional explorations into authors, other writing by them, different topics and subjects. It is so enriching to see such a range of writing and the brilliance of so many writers.

In 2022, we’ve read 73 stories, 62 writers, 9 in translation. Writers from India, Pakistan, Nigeria, U.S., U.K, Ukraine, China, Germany, Russia, Ecuador, Ireland, Egypt, Japan, Australia, Kenya.

In 2021, 81 stories, including many translations, including from Chinese, Japanese, Marathi, Russian, Spanish, French, German, Hebrew.

In 2020, we read 58 stories.

In separate posts, I will share lists of all the stories we’ve read each year.