Husband, wife, mistress. Your stock relationship fit for platitudinous movies, soap operas, and the romance series from Harlequin Enterprises (small aside: An Unexpected Amish Romance -- are they serious?).  Arturo Vivante's "Can-Can" could have foundered in one of these genres, but being a short story, it gets to the point quickly enough and leaves so much to the reader's acumen that it is impossible as a reader to feel intellectually insulted by the tripe that would have naturally emerged had the story jumped ship to become a soap opera or longer romance novel. No, this is no tripe. This goes to the heart of all human relationships and asks questions like "What

If there were a definitive checklist of prerequisites that need to be satisfied for a short story to be rightfully called a short story, then Peter Meinke's "The Cranes" would tick all the right boxes on that checklist. His story is short, can be read in one sitting thus capturing the reader's full attention with details given to pique interest, foreshadow events leading to an overwhelming climax and leave readers with questions that need to be addressed.  His story is as stately as the characters that inhabit it, be they human or faunal, progressing steadily, constructing a lifetime of conjugal experiences piecemeal in less than 1000 words -- the perfect vignette to kick off class discussions about death, suicide, dignity, love, loyalty, perseverance.

You either are a Woody Allen fan or you aren't.  Or rather, you either are a Woody Allen fan or you have little sense of humor, don't see the value of sarcasm and satire or are too full of yourself to grasp how cathartic self-deprecation can be. Woody Allen the Director has proffered a consistent outpouring of titles revolving around similar if not quasi-similar themes which time and again satisfy his fan base. Woody Allen the Author of Short Stories has been upstaged by Woody Allen the Director, unfortunately eclipsed to a great extent by the public's preference for moving pictures over written texts, which is why I was much delighted to see his short story "The Kugelmass Episode" in a recent textbook assigned to 11th graders. Naturally, my next reaction was to lament those students who would read and not understand the references to Emma Bovary in the slightest, because let's face it, how many school curricula list Flaubert as compulsory reading? ...