Ten Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2024

Andre Dubus III, Hiromi Kawakami, Jamel Brinkley, Jonathan Escoffery, and Pegah Ouji are just half the fine authors featured in Pravesh Bhardwaj's annual collection of ten outstanding stories to read online for free!

Young Nigerian woman in the late 1950's, photographer unknown

ᓄᐦᑕᐃᐧᕀ ᐊᐢᑯᑖᐢᑯᐱᓱᐣ nohtawiy askotâskopison, My Father’s Cradleboard by Morgan Possberg Denne

The New Gallery, November 18 - December 22, 2023

“Cradleboards have been used for thousands of years by our ancestors to carry and love for our future generations. They have protected us, acted as an external womb, and given us a place as children to watch our parents' culture and learn from a safe distance. I’ve always wondered if the fact that neither my father, his father, or myself was ever put in a cradleboard may have had a long term impact on our development, personhood, and our coping mechanisms to the ways that colonialism, residential schools and the foster care system has affected my family.

Now as an adult I deeply wish I could rewind the clock and put myself, and my father before me, and his father before him in a cradleboard as a child. To softly sing songs to us, give us safety, and to give us a connection to our culture in a safe environment. Maybe this would fix things. As kids when we were supposed to be kept safe and playing in the woods we were instead being prepped for the meat factory - the eternal meat grinder of colonialism.

The western world teaches us to push aside this childhood imagining and innocence - “These things can’t be undone!”, but what if they could? In another world somebody took better care of us, in another time we learned to drum and sing and dance, in another place we were listened to by adults who had the capacity to love and care for us.

These hot chest and aching throat feelings, the times of biting back angry tears and saying “It’s fine” have to count for something….right?”

“Morgan Possberg Denne is Two-Spirit millennial scoop and foster care survivor; with settler, Cree, Metis, and Chippewa blood connections. They have grown up in treaty 7 territory, and have relatives in southern and northern Ontario. Morgan creates imaginative, illustrative objects which could be seen as pieces of possible narratives, different ways to connect with the past and potential futures through layers of abstraction with no right or wrong answer. What matters to them is not accurately recreating the past or to predict the future, but rather to capture an inner truth and a possible alternative reality of colonial experiences. In a sense, creating new culture from a series of “what-ifs” and new stories / lore. Their work has been recently shown at the Confederation Centre for the Arts and Gallery Gachet.”

(Photos belong to me and the description and artist bio are courtesy of The New Gallery’s website)

[IDs:

1. a large wall hanging made from fish leather,

2. a close up of the same piece. the artwork has faint text cut out of the green tea tanned fish that reads “hey it’s not your fault, you know that right?”

3. a photo of the space showing a video projected onto several fish skins, a table with a vest and a hat made of fish leather, and on the table are cartons made from rawhide.

4. a coatrack on which are a rawhide hunting ruffle and rawhide fishing net resembling a badminton racket

5. a shelf seen in the background of image 3 containing a astro-turf shirt, a hand gun and pocket knife made from rawhide and a fish leather circular clip with a piece of dark hair hanging off the shelf.]

A Colossal Conversation: Alice Gray Stites On Taking Risks, Respecting the Public, and Curating for 21c Museum Hotels

The scale of time when these sculptures were made is difficult for a human mind to comprehend. Fat women have been appreciated and revered in art since art began. The modern view is the outlier, not the norm.

Image Rights (Top to Bottom)

Photo by Louvre Museum, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo by Rob Koopman, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo from Mellaart 1967, Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia 145, plate 79, used under fair dealing

Photo by Nevit Dilmen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo by Jason Quinlan, used under fair dealing

Photo by 120, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Photo by Petr Novák, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo copyright Smithsonian Institution, used under fair dealing

Photo copyright H. Jensen, Universität Tübingen, used under Fair Dealing

Why do I feel like nothing is real anymore? Like I'm living in some kind of alternate reality or something. Anyone else?

This is a piece of artwork called Unlliw, created in 2002 by Welsh artist Carwyn Evans in response to a proposal to build 6,500 new homes in Ceredigion.

It's a brilliant piece intended to provoke discussion of the cultural and environmental impact of this sort of new build housing in less densely populated areas. However, as an archaeology graduate, the thing that really strikes me about this exhibition is that it's a true masterstroke of curation - the way in which the work is exhibited in the gallery enhances the intent of the original work in a way that the artist had not envisioned.

You see, this is the landscapes gallery of the National Museum of Wales, in Cardiff. It's a huge, curved gallery that takes you on a journey throughout art history, with sumptuous landscapes by classical masters depicting the beauty of the Welsh landscape on each great curved wall, and sculptures dotted throughout the middle of the gallery. Towards the end of the gallery, you round the corner and you see this mass of cardboard, piled up against the wall, obscuring a beautiful oil painting. It's shocking. It's out of place. It's actually literally covering part of that painting, there is a part of the landscape that you just can't see any more because of these 6,500 cardboard bird houses.

It's a phenomenal use of a piece of artwork to demonstrate the original intent of the artist, to provoke the feelings that Evans wanted to provoke, and to make you think about art and curation and space in a new way.

Quite frankly it's the best single piece of curation I've ever seen.

If you want to read the full statement of work Carwyn Evans made in 2002 it's here.

screencap taken before memegate and subsequent high art renaissance on /r/parahumans

miguel o'hara & haunted by laura les

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Oh hey, weekend, c'mon in! We've got some great reading for you in this week's edition:

• How Israel uses AI for assassination in the Gaza War • A father reflects on his son’s development • The rise of the term, “gaslighting” • Toni Morrison’s expansive rejection letters • The history of PostSecret

Learn why our editors recommend these reads and find out which piece our audience loved most. 

Série, autoportrait d'un confiné, 2020, by Didier Viodé

• my sleep filled eyes fluttered open as the sun warmly shone through the tall trees creating a projection of beautiful sun and shadow shapes on the mossy ground. The colorful leaves danced down from the tall trees as bursts of wind blew by. I slowly sat up from the tree branch I often rested on as the forest animals began to awaken. Bunnies hopped along in search for a filling feast, bugs buzzed by briskly and the birds sang smoothly. As I looked below, I saw all of my materials exactly as I left them before. Softly fluttering my fairy wings, I drifted down from my tree branch. Most of my days were spent in this vast forest creating divine, expressionistic paintings. Although I built a shelter in the tree tops, I still find myself to be quite nomadic. Animals gathered back at the base of the tree to ferociously feast on their freshly hunted breakfast, and that was my cue to feed myself. Softly fluttering my delicate wings allowed me to hover over the ground to scavenge for edible berries and flowers. I would collect as many as I could, because the berries and flowers could be used to make more paint. After collecting some delectable juicy flowers and berries,I circled back to the large tree I set up at. I sat peacefully, back against the tree trunk, watching the trees blow in the wind as I crunched the juicy berries between my teeth leaving me with stained lips.

Tableaux Noir: Vault (Animation No. One) - 1″:1′-0″ diorama - mixed media - robert matejcek - 2022

Steve Zissou: "Here's where we do all our different science projects, and experiments, and so on."

- Bill Murray - The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

tags:

Berthe Morisot

Young Woman Picking Oranges (1889)