Restoring innocence to short stories

 kw: book reviews, fiction, short stories, anthologies, humor

I created this image using the Flux Schnell engine in Leonardo AI, as a riff on one of the stories in Something to Look Forward To by Fannie Flagg. It's a story that brings together threads that connect a few of the other stories. But you'll have to read them to find out how.

A few of the stories have a science fictional element. Others seem to be vignettes and slices of life of rather ordinary people. The main characters are named in the story subtitles. There is typically a twist at the end, usually humorous, and in a few cases, such as dialog between an elderly Kansas woman and her hyper-liberal, California-dwelling granddaughter, the humor is in the contrast of viewpoints. One story brought me to tears, sweet-and-sour tears.

We read of priests who pull practical jokes on one another, a writer who takes a surprising pen name for a "coming back from retirement" book, and an interstellar secret agent. That alien agent, by the way, supposedly harks from a galaxy some 27 billion light years away. That's a fuuur piece, folks, considering the visible (and potentially reachable) Universe is less than half that radius. Other than that and another numerical oddity I'll pass over, the story is really quite fetching. The last story in the book adds a coda.

I really can't comment on these story by story as I often like to do. It is too hard to avoid spoilers, and I fear I've committed a couple anyway. Reading this was an enjoyable romp through stories that didn't cause me to cringe or wince, stories that show how bygone innocence is still very viable.