Trobicana - I Say Them Very Quietly

10 Female Written Short Stories Everyone Should Read

I have seen a post circulating for a while that lists 10 short stories everyone should read and, while these are great works, most of them are older and written by white men. I wanted to make a modern list that features fresh, fantastic and under represented voices. Enjoy!

1. A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri — A couple in a failing marriage share secrets during a blackout. 

2. Stone Animals by Kelly Link — A family moves into a haunted house.

3. Reeling for the Empire by Karen Russell — Women are sold by their families to a silk factory, where they are slowly transformed into human silkworms. 

4. Call My Name by Aimee Bender — A woman wearing a ball gown secretly auditions men on the subway. 

5. The Man on the Stairs by Miranda July — A woman wakes up to a noise on the stairs. 

6. Brownies by ZZ Packer — Rival Girl Scout troops are separated by race. 

7. City of My Dreams by Zsuzi Gartner — A woman works at a shop selling food-inspired soap and tries not to think about her past. 

8. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor — A family drives from Georgia to Florida, even though a serial killer is on the loose. 

9. Hitting Budapest by NoViolet Bulawayo — A group of children, led by a girl named Darling, travel to a rich neighborhood to steal guavas. 

10. You’re Ugly, Too by Lorrie Moore — A history professor flies to Manhattan to spend Halloween weekend with her younger sister.

Tracy Chapman and Alice Walker were in a relationship when they both lived in Brooklyn in the mid 1990s.

Walker discussed the relationship with an interviewer in The Guardian in 2006:

“"Why was it kept so quiet at the time? "It was quiet to you maybe but that’s because you didn’t live in our area,” she answers with a throaty laugh. She has written about the relationship in her journals, which she plans to publish one day.

So why did they decide against using their relationship to make a big social impact like other celebrity lesbian couples, such as Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, have in the past? The idea seems to amuse her. “I would never do that. My life is not to be somebody else’s impact - you know what I mean? And it was delicious and lovely and wonderful and I totally enjoyed it and I was completely in love with her but it was not anybody’s business but ours.”“

“During the 1980s and 1990s (and often still today) bisexuals were vilified as being the disease vectors who “spread AIDS to the general population,” as if they themselves were not part of society. In reality, bisexual health workers and activists designed and developed some of the first city, county, state, and federally-supported safer sex protocols now in use around the country. In San Francisco, bisexual activists David Lourea and Cynthia Slater worked to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS before they, themselves, died of the disease. As early as 1981, they were providing safer-sex education in the city’s bathhouses and BDSM clubs, and by 1983, Lourea had been appointed to San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein’s AIDS Education Advisory Committee. In 1984, he convinced the city’s public health department to include bisexual men in its weekly “New AIDS Cases and Mortality Statistics” reports, a model later adopted by other public health departments across the country. Slater started the first Women’s HIV/AIDS Information Switchboard in San Francisco in 1985.

Other bisexuals have made important contributions to HIV/AIDS prevention, including Rob Yaeger at the Minneapolis AIDS Project and Alexei Guren, who as well as founding Pridelines, was involved with the 1983 founding of the Health Crisis Network in Miami, Florida which did outreach and advocacy for Latino married men who have sex with men. From 1992 to 1994, Lani Ka’ahumanu was project coordinator at Lyon-Martin Women’s Health Services in San Francisco for an American Foundation for AIDS research grant—the first grant in the United States targeting young high-risk lesbian and bisexual women for HIV/AIDS prevention and education research.”

Making Bisexuals Visible by Loraine Hutchins

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