On "How to Spend a Cul-de-sac Summer" by Jaime Netzer (822 words) ***

I've been seeing more and more often stories as sets of instructions. Here's one that combines the instructions with a tale of innocence lost. What I like about this piece is how subtly that innocence is lost. There's this craving to do wrong but also a craving to do right by mom's commands. Slowly, the main character moves further and further from mom toward the inevitable. Read the story here at Twelve Stories.

On "Snowed In" by Gary Percesepe (515 words) ***

This short tale works in metaphor and language. It's a familiar metaphor, but Percesepe adapts it well. The weather outside--it's winter and stormy. Inside, there's a fight going on, or the tail end of one, and yet also there's passion. In a sense, that's what this story is all about: turmoil--emotional and physical. Read it here at Twelve Stories.

On "97 Sketches of the Same Naked Man" by Matthew Olzmann (877 words) ***

This piece is pretty much what one expects: descriptions of a naked man. But it is the essayistic thought behind the work that makes Olzmann's tale shine, the way that he mimics that thought in the artwork itself. The naked man is dead, and as such, what does his life amount to? What of these works of art? How much do each of us leave undone when we depart without warning? Read the tale here at Twelve Stories.

On "Your Vasectomy Journal" by Timothy Gager (833 words) ***

I'm not at the point in life where a vasectomy is something I'm looking for, but this short piece has an interesting structure and is an interesting comment on how such a surgery might go and on how the relationship around it might also go. Its conclusion is one I think some men can identify with--this idea that in a sense the surgery is immasculating and something to be feared. Read the story here at Twelve Stories.

On "The Day You Were Sad" by Jennifer Levin (771 words) ***

I remember walking into a Japanese bookstore in New York once. Everything was in Japanese. I don't know the language, don't even know the symbols that are used in the written tongue. I knew then what it is like to be illiterate--completely illiterate. I mean, if go to a European country, I can at least parse out the alphabet, recognize a few cognates. But here, I was clueless. The writing around me might as well have been abstract art.

A few years ago, I was having drinks with a friend when the sister of his wife (now ex-wife) came by and started talking. After she left, he said something to the effect of, "Couldn't you tell that she was crying?" No, I couldn't. Something horrible had happened to her and I was as blank about it as I'd been about the language in that bookstore.

I've never been one to read signs very well--that is, body signals, heart signals, people signals. I'm an illiterate when it comes to that, though I think I have gotten a little better with age. But only a little. Here's a story about just that sort of thing. All the signals are there, so many signals one says, Um, how could you have missed that? But miss it the narrator did. And thinking about its meaning for her life and for the life of the person who she missed is what this piece is all about. Read it here at Twelve Stories.