I have seen a post circulating for a while that lists 10 short stories everyone should read and, while these are great works, most of them are older and written by white men. I wanted to make a modern list that features fresh, fantastic and under represented voices. Enjoy!

1. A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri — A couple in a failing marriage share secrets during a blackout. 

2. Stone Animals by Kelly Link — A family moves into a haunted house.

3. Reeling for the Empire by Karen Russell — Women are sold by their families to a silk factory, where they are slowly transformed into human silkworms. 

4. Call My Name by Aimee Bender — A woman wearing a ball gown secretly auditions men on the subway. 

5. The Man on the Stairs by Miranda July — A woman wakes up to a noise on the stairs. 

6. Brownies by ZZ Packer — Rival Girl Scout troops are separated by race. 

7. City of My Dreams by Zsuzi Gartner — A woman works at a shop selling food-inspired soap and tries not to think about her past. 

8. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor — A family drives from Georgia to Florida, even though a serial killer is on the loose. 

9. Hitting Budapest by NoViolet Bulawayo — A group of children, led by a girl named Darling, travel to a rich neighborhood to steal guavas. 

I’d like to add:

11. Good Country People by Flannery O’Connor

12. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (this one is my favorite short story of all time)

13. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

14. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates

15. Désirée’s Baby by Kate Chopin

16. The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin

17. Impressions of an Indian Childhood by Zitkala-Ša

18. “My Dear You,” Rachel Khong — love, loss, & absurdity in the afterlife

19. “The Husband Stitch,” Carmen Maria Machado — a feminist retelling of the folklore story “The Green Ribbon”

20. “Inventory,” Carmen Maria Machado — one woman’s retrospective list of her life’s sexual encounters

21. “Boys Go to Jupiter,” Danielle Evans — what happens after a white college student poses for a photo in a Confederate flag bikini

23. “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” and “Mountain Ways” by Ursula K. Le Guin — The first is a study of philosophical questions similar to the trolley problem, told in very loose form. The second is a science-fantasy story about two women navigating love and sexuality in their society’s polyamorous marriage rituals. But honestly you should read all of Le Guin’s short stories and novels, she’s amazing.

24. “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler — One of my all-time FAVORITE short stories, about a future where humans live alongside large insect-like aliens, and serve as hosts for their eggs and larval young. It’s gruesome, gory, unsettling, and honestly pretty horrific but it’s really wonderful–if you can handle horror in your stories I highly recommended it. Butler’s novels are also wonderful, please check them out if you can (not all of them are this unsettling)

25. “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi” by Pat Cadigan — A trans allegory in which future humans go through surgery to become invertebrate sea creatures (cephalopods and arthropods mostly) in order to better work in space. Wonderfully weird in so many ways.

I’ve also posted about it multiple times.

Plus, Amazon, Google, Kobo, B&N are all explicit in their user agreements that they have the right to terminate your account, seize your library, and delete anything and everything off of your account at any time, for any reason, without giving you anything in return, including paying you back. 

Like, it super scary that they not only can do that, but are legally allowed to. 

I’ve seen people suggesting using the program called Calibre  to transfer and  convert your files from whatever program you purchase them on, so that if one of those companies do decide to be a dick, you will retain your e-copies safe and sound on your hard drive. Just don’t be an asshole and post those copies to pirate sites. 

https://www.epubor.com/drm-removal-tools.html

Because yes, the terms of service sure say that. But every time they’ve /tried/ on a significant scale, they’ve been challenged and backed down. And every time they tried to stop DRM removal tools from being made and sold, they’ve failed. What they’re doing relies on keeping off enough toes that a significant bloc never gets pissed enough to push through a class action suit.

He’s intentionally ignoring your signals because he’s looking for a way to bully himself closer to you. He’s a photographer who knows you’re a cosplayer and he knows how awkward it would be for you to cut those ties. You said yourself he’s goaded you into feeling sympathetic towards him. He knows what he is doing.

In your tags, you said that advice was welcome, so here I go. I strongly advise you to, next time he sends you something inappropriate, to say “Hey, I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this, but it seems like when I gently said that I wasn’t interested, you didn’t understand what I meant. I didn’t want to cause any awkwardness or hurt feelings by saying it again more clearly, but at this point I don’t know what else to do, because you’ve been sending a lot of stuff like this  even though I don’t send any back. Thanks for understanding that I’m handling this as gently as possible! Hope we can be professional and chill when we inevitably run into each other, there’s no hard feelings on my end about the miscommunication.”

Final advice: give him as little follow-up chat as you can possibly manage. In all necessary future chats, avoid apologizing and avoid accusing.

Don’t apologize because you don’t have anything to apologize for, at all, and because you don’t want to give him an opening for acting like you have. Don’t accuse because even though he deserves to be accused, it gives him an opening to act like he’s been victimized by you or by circumstances, which he hasn’t.

Also, in case you feel this way: don’t blame yourself for getting into this situation, because you did not ‘get’ into this situation. He made this situation and arranged it around you until you were stuck in it. He did so carefully in a way that he could claim innocence on if called out.

5th richest person on the entire fucking planet wants you to give him more money

It’s easy to forget how disgustingly, perversely rich this man is. He could live in the most absurd, decadent luxury, never lifting a finger, until he turned 1000 years old without spending even a tenth, a twentieth, of the money he has now. He could buy a Tesla and drive it into the ocean, every day, for the next 100 years, without spending even a twentieth of his money.

Even 1 billion dollars is so much money that the human brain has troubles fully comprehending it, so much more money than any one, ten, twenty human beings would ever need in the span of a lifetime, even assuming a lifestyle more comfortable than that enjoyed by basically any other human throughout all of history. He has over 63.

And he wants you to donate to him?? TO HIM??? He could improve the lives of untold hundreds of millions of people if he just decided to give away some of his absurd riches. He could give away 95% of his money without it impacting the quality of his life in any measurable way. And he wants people to just give him more of it?

You know what would actually surprise me nowadays? A male character showing up being super nice and then by the end he… still is??? 

Like, turns out being outwardly kind and polite isn’t a smokescreen but something he does because he’s genuinely kind and polite. Like, shockingly, men like that can and do exist.

The thing is, I don’t know why I feel like a man.  I was teased and bullied for it a lot when I was little.  I’ve never had stereotypically American male interests.  I never cared about sports or cars or guns.  I was more interested in music and cooking and the arts.  I’ve always been emotionally in tune and sensitive, even when I did my best to suppress my emotions to survive a childhood of abuse from other children.

It’s not physical either.  I don’t feel like a man because I have a penis or a beard.  If you put my brain in a robot body or any other body, my essence would still feel male (I assume).  I literally can’t imagine what being any other gender would feel like, since I feel so acutely male.

I think that’s why the concept of being transgender always made sense to me.  I’m a man.  I don’t have any bloody clue why I feel like a man, but I don’t feel that it’s tied to my body or my interests or the way that I’ve been treated.  I feel like a man because of something beyond that.  Something ephemeral.  So, why couldn’t others feel the same?  Why couldn’t a person who’s been misidentified as a girl feel like a boy for the exact same nebulous reasons that I do?

And, since gender really doesn’t make any sense to me anyway, why couldn’t there also be people who feel as if they don’t have one?  Or who flow across genders like a ship on a map?

Are there people out there whose sense of their own gender is inseparable from their physical form?  If you put those people into robot bodies or, simply, other physically different bodies, would their gender identity also swap?  If so, why?  Are they actually more lost in their gender identity than I am and they need to hone in on the physical in order to anchor themselves?

and my immediate thought was "okay so if someone is acquitted the state is like 'we shouldn't have to cover the cost of their stay in the prison because they shouldn't have been there in the first place" which is, of course, utterly fucked up.

but no... it's worse than that.... it's because pay-to-stay incarceration in the United States is a thing... as in it's common practice for prison inmates to be charged for their stay in prison (https://truthout.org/articles/fighting-the-fees-that-force-prisoners-to-pay-for-their-incarceration/). This was news to me.

this is "we're billing the guilty for their stay; the acquitted should have to pay us for their stay too"

MONEY. WE WANT MONEY. MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY. WE CAN DO SO MUCH WITH IT. WE HAVE ACCESS TO DEALS YOU COULD NEVER. MONEY

That aside.

 I’m only going to talk about food items but if your food bank takes personal items, a lot of times diapers, feminine hygiene products, etc, are very very welcome. 

1) Canned chicken and beef 

looooooove this stuff. It’s expensive, it lasts forever, it tastes good and it can be used a variety of ways. This stuff is fucking catnip to food banks, it’s so hard for us to provide proteins. 

2) Fancy nut butters

Peanut butter is a standby for food banks as a shelf-stable inexpensive protein, but if we have a family with a kid with a peanut allergy that’s not going to work. Non-peanut butters are expensive and it’s something we hardly ever see donated. (we also like peanut butter, but that’s easier for us to buy ourselves than non-peanut butters)

3) Canned or packaged tuna

You may notice a trend here in shelf-stable proteins. And yeah. That’s basically it, so I’m not going to keep harping on it. But this stuff is a godsend. 

4) Easy breakfast things for kids (Granola bars, instant oatmeal, and the like) 

Whatever Donald Trump tells you, most people who get food from food banks are actually working their asses off and so they have to leave Obama to raise their baby or whatever, and they don’t have a lot of time in the morning. Things like this that kids can make for themselves are expensive. (Another trend you may be noticing–donate shit that costs a lot of money. That helps us more than all the shitty green bean cans in the world) But they are so helpful for busy working families where the parents may not have a set schedule and sometimes little Amanda is making her own breakfast before she runs off to school. Don’t let kids go to school hungry. 

5) Shelf-stable juice