5 books
Lafcadio Hearn
Hearn was Greek-Irish, went to Japan in 1890 as a newspaper correspondent, married into a samurai family, took the name Koizumi Yakumo, and spent the rest of his life there. This is the collection he’s known for — Japanese ghost…
Lena Valencia
Ten stories, most of them set in the Desert Southwest, most of them about women in situations that tilt just past ordinary. A wellness retreat that goes wrong. Influencers in a canyon. A boarding school. A woman on the road…
George Saunders
Six stories, and the title one has a man and a woman playing cave people in a theme park exhibit, required to grunt at visitors, receiving a daily goat, and filing performance reports on each other. That’s the register throughout:…
Ueda Akinari
First published in 1776, the nine gothic tales in this collection are Japan’s finest and most celebrated examples of the literature of the occult. They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the…
George Saunders
This the story collection that put Saunders on a lot radars. A boy imagining himself heroic in the woods and a dying man walking out onto a frozen pond to spare his family. Prisoners in a facility being dosed with…
