NinthWanderer

In no particular order:

"G-String," Nicola Barker. Love! Love! Love! A woman puts on a g-string to impress her lover and ends up using it to jury-rig his broken windshield wiper. In the process she learns that she doesn't need his validation. A lovely, witty character arc accomplished in a few compact pages with some truly great lines.

"Night Women," Edwidge Danticat. This story is incredibly lush for its brevity. Danticat's language is beautiful and evocative. It's like exploring an exquisite painting, moving from detail to detail until the full picture emerges. Must find more of this Haitian author's work.

"Who, Me a Bum?" Luisa Valenzuela. Brief social commentary from the point of view of a poor, homeless person. Interesting while I read it, but a day later I had forgotten it and had to look up in the table of contents which story I had read.

"The Child Who Raised Poisonous Snakes," Can Xue. A bizarre little story about a problem child that reads like a folktale. There's a sort of gauziness to the narrative that makes me wonder if that's a cultural storytelling convention (having read very little Chinese literature) or just something this author did with this story. A decent enough story but not one of my favorites thus far.