Pretty Story Bag: 7 Sweet Tales to Carry Along

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A renowned Russian composer is tasked with creating his most difficult piece yet; a symphony for his country’s dreaded dictator.

Alice Munro once said: “I want the story to exist somewhere so that in a way it’s still happening … I don’t want it to be shut up in the book and put away – oh well, that’s what happened.” Atwood articulates the same position in this fun, thought-provoking story that begins with a man meeting a woman, then offers variants of what happens next. Any ending that isn’t death, she concludes, is false, and the interesting part of stories isn’t what happens, but how and why. “Going to Meet the Man” by James Baldwin (1965)A character participates in a march for a cause they believe in when violence breaks out against the people.

As a public school superintendent, you must build and get funding to achieve the status of greatest public school district in the world. A pregnant teen faces the reality that her life is going to be much different from her high school peers.As a ghost haunting a house, you must figure out ways to scare the families living there enough to make them move out. A spaceship lands in a local town, offering the latest technologies from space at a discount price. A man finds out the tape worm in his body is beginning to take control of his mind; the other problem- he is too afraid of surgery to remove it.

A dramedy about a separated couple raising their kids under the same rough, waiting for the day they'll all go to college.A character is told a deep family secret that they must protect until their death, no matter how much it torments them. In the midst of a war, the women of a local town abandon their neighborhood only a week before their husbands and sons return. When described in summary, there is a danger of reducing Borges to a collection of tropes: labyrinths, mirrors, invented books (he avoided “the madness of composing vast books” by pretending they exist and writing commentaries on them). But with these elements he explored some of the most thrilling ideas in fiction. Labyrinths and strange books are both present here, as is a theory of existence that anticipates the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Extraordinarily, all these elements are enfolded within an account of a wartime espionage mission. “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” by Tadeusz Borowski (1946) Two characters swear never to fall in love or date. One of them becomes disappointed the other kept their oath. A character is sold the "Best Year of Their Life" by an illustrious company, with the caveat that they must die afterward.