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Approximate Reading Times
Quick Read: under 5 minutes
Short Story: 5 to 30 minutes
Novelette: 30 to 90 minutes
Novella: 1.5 to 2.5 hours
Young Adult Story by Naomi Shihab Nye. A bookish fourteen-year-old Palestinian-American girl develops a strong connection with Saleh Hamadi, an ageing Lebanese immigrant. One evening, she overhears some life advice she will remember for years as Hamadi comforts a friend who is in tears over being snubbed by a boy.
Novelette by James McPherson. An unidentified black writer describes his relationship with a young multiracial couple in the late 1960s. The intense husband struggles with his identity (both his “whiteness” and place in the world). His black wife, who has travelled extensively with the Peace Corps, is comfortable in hers.
Novelette by Saul Bellow. Set in the Great Depression, an intellectual white man gets a much-needed job delivering unclaimed welfare checks to people in a depressed black neighborhood. He wants to do well, and goes above and beyond in a quest to find the elusive Mr. Green.
German Folktale. A cruel farmer is angry with his wife for being cheated out of two cows. He promises not beat her for it if can find someone more foolish. He soon finds one: a widow who is worried about how well her dead husband is doing in Heaven.
Short Story by Anne Tyler. In common with many teenagers, a boy struggles to cope with school and peer pressure, and deal with parental authority and expectations. An insecure, overbearing mother, disinterested father, and Svengali-like tutor with questionable motives ruin the life of the young man.
Short Story by H. G. Wells. Two men kill another to get their hands on a map that shows the location of a buried treasure. They find the treasure, and as they carry some of it away learn why its owner was smiling as they killed him.