The Casual Car Pool by Katherine Bell

Written in the same way that Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield point of view writing, The Casual Car Pool is a great story about something very ordinary. Katherine Bell states: "I wanted to see if I could manage shifting among several characters' consciousnesses from paragraph to paragraph, or even sentence to sentence, without ever zooming out. I ended up buying myself that freedom by limiting the story in another way -- I didn't let my characters off the bridge or even, for most of the story, out of the car."

Ian is a normal businessman who utilizes what is known as "the casual carpool" in order to get into the city and to work faster. However, after a parachuter gets tangled on the cables of the Bay Bridge traffic comes to a complete halt for the commuters. The voice jumps between Ian, who thinks of his family at home, to the 16 year old lesbian in the back seat who wants to but can't decide on who to receive her insemination from. The story really has very little action, but it is the consciousness of the story that brings it alive and makes it truly one of the best short stories of 2006.

A New Gravestone for an Old Grave by David Bezmozgis

This is a fabulous story. One day Victor is asked by his father to to to Latvia to oversee the cutting of his gravestone. The father's connection in Latvia had just died and he still hadn't had his stone prepared for his imminent death and he had no one to trust but Victor. Victor has quite the adventure to find the stone cutter and find out about his father's gravestone.

"And then he awoke and dialed and had a conversation with his father. A conversation in which his father asked him how everything went. If he met the stone cutter. If he saw the gravestone. If everything looked as it should. And Victor answered his father, saying yes about the stone cutter, yes about the gravestone. Yes about everything. He answered him and said that everything was perfect, just the way he imagined it."

Because in the end, it didn't really matter what Victor told his father...he wouldn't know the difference anyway...

Grandmother's Nose by Robert Coover

This is a delightful story that could be taken from a perspective of something gross and dying, or as I saw this story, as a different version of "Little Red Riding Hood". While I read this story I couldn't get this story out of my head even though it may not have been the intended plot to the story.

A little girl goes to the hospital to see her seemingly dying grandmother. While there she becomes transfixed with how large her grandmother's nose is. The dialogue flows as does the children's story. In the end the wolf is cut open to get the grandmother out. A very short 3 page story that takes "Little Red Riding Hood" to the next level.

How We Avenged the Blums by Nathan Englander

A great story about Zvi Blum, a young boy living in Greenheath, Long Island, who gets beaten up by "the Anti-Semite". This story describes the struggle of a band of Jewish boys trying to even the odds with those around them. But mostly they just want to get revenge on the Anti-

Semite. So, they begin to train and fight each other to build up their courage. Even with all the courage they still ask an older boy, Ace Cohen, to help them exact revenge. "We begged him on leadership. He showed us his empty hands. 'One punch,' he said, 'Take it or leave it.'"

And so he takes his one punch that breaks the Anti-Semite's jaw.

"Anyone who stood with us that day will tell you the same. With the Anti-Semite at our feet, confusion came over us all. We stood there looking at that crushed by. And none of us knew when to run."

The Dog by Jack Livings

Chan Wei lives in China and is a mortician who is involved in dog racing on the side. His cousin, Zheng, owns a racing dog, but unfortunately the Chinese government has decided to outlaw gambling; including dog racing. Chan Wei and his wife Li Yan have been able to make some handsome profits off of this form of gambling. So this leaves Chan Wei in a predicament: should he continue to support dog racing or do what is legal? What should happen to the dog? Zheng has a plan to take care of the problem: eat the dog. So he invites all the family for a feast. While at the dinner, Zheng wants Chan Wei to kill the dog before everyone. He declines and Chan Wei is elected to cook dinner. She rushes to the market to buy whatever she can. She makes up the food and presents it to all, but both she and Chan Wei take the plates stack them up and go out and feed the dog before anyone else. Irony is the best storyteller.

The View From Castle Rock by Alice Munro

This is a great historical fiction short story. Alice Munro in her own words describes this short story: "Members of my family, bearing the names of the characters in the story, did sail from the port of Leith to Quebec City, taking six weeks for the journey, in the summer of 1818. One of them, Walter, did keep a journal of the voyage, which I have quoted throughout."

This is about a family making the great trek across the great seas from Scotland to Canada. This story is both realistic yet mixed with fiction. This is one of the best historical fiction stories I have read.

The Ambush by Donna Tartt

Spoken in the voice of a young girl, The Ambush is a powerfully yet simply told story about the Vietnam conflict. A young boy named Tim loses his father in Vietnam and he spends the entire summer playing out the final moments of his father's death in along with the young girl. What is a seemingly simple childhood game turns dangerous when they startle his forlorn mother one day. What is great about this story is the story told between the lines. Just as the children play their games while the "adults" are in the house fretting and living real world worries. The children have just found another avenue to show what they are feeling. Another powerful untold story in this short story is that the grandmother secretly resents the young girl playing with her grandson and believes that she has wrongly influenced his actions. Religious tensions flare which further add to the various conflicts throughout the story.