Here are my favorites from the past month:
The Swimmer, by John Cheever
The tone of this story bends and flows like a slow-moving waterslide. It's just brilliant. When I finished, I just thought, Huh. Well, that's unfilmable. Of course, that means it was made into a film starring Burt Lancaster and surprisingly featuring a young Joan Rivers.
Babylon Revisited, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
I've been on a bit of a Fitzgerald kick recently, after listening to Studio 360 rerun its episode on The Great Gatsby around the release of the Baz Luhrmann movie. I read that this story is somewhat autobiographical, and I'm not surprised given its unflinching portrait of a man's return to his estranged relatives.
This Blessed House, by Jhumpa Lahiri
A story about a man dealing with his newlywed wife's idiosyncracies. This story has a deceptively light touch, the kind that makes one think, hey, I could write a story like that. Don't believe the lie.
Eight Pieces for the Left Hand, by J. Robert Lennon
Not a single short story, this excerpt in the 2005 edition of Great American Short Stories (edited by Michael Chabon) is actually eight short sketches, each a wonderful or wry slice of life in a small town. "Brevity", the last of the bunch, sums up the theme of these seemingly unrelated anecdotes with the tale of a novelist who slashed her 1,000-page opus into a single haiku. I guess you'll have to read it to learn what the haiku says. Lennon eventually wrote up 100 pieces and published them in one volume. Reading them all at once might be like diving into someone's dusty blog archives but I'm willing to take the risk. Here's to the next 92.
Some Zombie Contingency Plans, by Kelly Link
This story left a sense of unease rattling around my innards. It probably deserves a second reading, or a third. I learned there is a newish term for the genre of stories like Link's, called slipstream, which seems to be pretty darn similar to weird fiction, but maybe gussied up for the contemporary reader.
Just Lather, That's All, by Hernando Téllez
Simple yet stunning account of a barber's moral choice. Apparently this story is often assigned to American highschoolers studying Spanish. That's what Wikipedia says, anyway. Youtube also has multiple dramatizations. Class projects, perhaps?