Pretty Story Bag: 7 Sweet Tales to Carry Along

Product Information

Laurel Conklin and Susannah Fisher have been best friends since childhood, and now spend summers together with their children. Susannah has two teenage sons: Conrad, the eldest, is about to attend his freshman year of college, and Jeremiah is still in high school. The Fisher boys have been a source of friendship and fascination for Belly for as long as she can remember, and she’s been harboring a crush on Conrad for years. Both families have faced challenges; Susannah had cancer, and the Conklins recently divorced. A granddaughter attempts to connect with her long-lost grandmother by cooking through the family cookbook. James Joyce explores the turbulence and humiliation of adolescence. Photograph: Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet/Getty Images “A Bright Green Field” by Anna Kavan (1958) A witch struggling to make ends meet starts to read tarot cards and sell crystals as a side hustle.

A renowned Russian composer is tasked with creating his most difficult piece yet; a symphony for his country’s dreaded dictator. Telling personal stories can be extremely powerful. We are building a network of people willing to share their experience to help us strengthen the case for law change.

Do you have a story to tell?

Poe is a master of the “unreliable narrator” – a voice that speaks with devastating spontaneity and is utterly convincing – that has come to be a staple of much suspense and horror fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries. Unhampered by the literary pretensions of certain of Poe’s other, longer stories, totally committed to its unrepentant pathology, and its visceral celebration of this pathology, “The Tell-Tale Heart” is the very essence of Poe, as Poe is himself the very essence of the American gothic tradition. Joyce Carol Oates “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce (1890) A small community puts aside their differences to resist a corporation looking to make some changes to their town. A game in which you must interview people, discovering their personal stories, to find the perfect candidate.

Two ballerinas carpool to their next lesson together and uncover some surprising information on the way. A character is told a deep family secret that they must protect until their death, no matter how much it torments them. A character realizes they are a part of a lab experiment in the middle of a test and desires to do nothing but escape. A famous saying gets credited to the wrong person, but no one will believe them when they correct people.Diane had to go through the one thing she had foreseen and was afraid of – and there was nothing I could do to help.

A character finishes creating the first time travel machine, only to discover it can only move in two-minute increments. Alice Munro carries us deep inside particular moments. Photograph: Alice Munro./Alamy “The Siren” by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1961) verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ The thing that is most striking about this story, aside from its restrained, grave beauty, is that it should manage to be so moving. On one level it is a dryly detailed and topographically exact portrait of a small town in the American midwest, but on another it is a devastating threnody for lost love. Gass was one of the great prose stylists, and the writing here is typically smooth and pellucid, conjuring its effects by stealth and unflagging control. Simply, and by simple means, a masterpiece. John Banville “American Express” by James Salter (1988)