Sylvia Plath, From The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath

Jenny Hval, from Girls Against God

Short Story Recommendations

These all fuck me up to a varying degree of emotions

Crime

Philomel Cottage - Agatha Christie

Lamb to the Slaughter - Roald Dahl

Death and the Compass - Jorge Luis Borges

Horror

The Landlady - Roald Dahl

A Walk in the Dark - Arthur C Clarke

The Wife’s Story - Ursula K Le Guin

The Veldt - Ray Bradbury

The Hanging Stranger - Philip K Dick

The Colour out of Space - H P Lovecraft

The Spider - Hanns Heinz Ewers

Sad

The Life You Save May Be Your Own - Flannery O’Connor

A Small, Good Thing - Raymond Carver

Cathedral - Raymond Carver

The Haunted Boy - Carson McCullers

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas - Ursula K. Le Guin

The Chef - Andy Weir

The Martyr - Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

Jambula Tree - Monica Arak de Nyeko

The Rats Do Sleep At Night - Wolfgang Borchert

Sci-Fi

Love is the Plan the Plan is Death - James Tiptree Jr

The Last Question - Isaac Asimov

The Nine Billion Names of God - Arthur C Clarke

The Star - Arthur C Clarke

Reunion - Arthur C Clarke

The Commuter - Philip K Dick

Exhibit Piece - Philip K Dick

To Serve Man - Damon Knight

Brothers Beyond the Void - Paul W Fairman

What the Fuck?! 

The Lottery - Shirley Jackson

A Collapse of Horses - Brian Evenson

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby - Donald Barthelme

Hopeful Monsters - Hiromi Goto

The Box Social - James Reaney

He-y come on ou-t - shinichi hoshi

The Garden of Forking Paths - Jorge Luis Borges

Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang (just the entire collection bro)

Other

Broken Routine - Jeffrey Archer

A Man Who Had No Eyes - Mackinlay Kantor

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been - Joyce Carol Oates

The Lady, or the Tiger - Frank R Stockton

The Continuity of Parks - Julio Cortázar

The Dinner Party - Mona Gardner

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings - Gabriel García Márquez

On Exactitude in Science - Jorge Luis Borges

Sorry to break it to you but you literally have to face your fears and slaughter them. Otherwise you will live a small life that you do not want. You literally have to view your biggest fears and attack them head on. You have to fall into the abyss to find your way out. The easy path does not exist. There is no get out of jail free card. You have to allow yourself to die a spiritual death over and over again in order to reinvent yourself into the person you are actually supposed to be. And you have to be painfully honest with yourself and the people around you. It’s horrible but it’s truly the only way.

- James Baldwin talking about Love

― Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

Takuboku Ishikawa, from a poem featured in On Knowing Oneself Too Well: The Selected Poems of Takuboku Ishikawa

Angela Carter, from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; "The Courtship of Mr Lyon,"

heaviness.

this week i felt so heavily taxed it’s like i’m being robbed of something.

i don’t want to be here. i don’t want to be around anyone but a few, i don’t want to be perceived, i don’t want to be thought of. i don’t want the smiles from certain people because i don’t deserve them, i have fooled them with only a few actions they’ve seen of me and the surface that looks clean and flawless. that’s the thing— if only they knew me deeply would they maybe back the hell away, not smile as much, refuse to look me in the eye with such cordiality.

i am not even being cruel to myself. i am honesty right now. this heaviness weighs on my back like a load i can’t pretend isn’t there anymore. i look in the mirror and the reflection is so tired, so fed up. if only i could open the minds of people around me just to erase the memory of me from them and disappear somewhere. if only everyone forgot me for a second, and i had no trace of prior existence— a fresh start where i can begin newly again, where perhaps even i’d be known to myself as someone with less baggage, less of all the bad things that have happened to me and continue to happen under the surface which makes it all the more insidious and sickening. i am tired of myself. of the people who made me who i am today. i hope to get lighter. so much so that i fly away as if filled with helium, never to come back down on this wretched planet with its wretched people who see the worst in me and the deceived who see the best in me.

a love like that, all mine🫀

Joanna Glenn, from her novel titled "All My Mothers," originally published in 2021