Introduction

This isn’t my attempt to establish a personal canon, nor is it necessarily a list of my personal favorites — if so, we’d see a few repeat offenders here. Rather, here are twelve stories that, when I look back, stand out to me as signposts in my literary journey, schooling me in style and guiding me toward themes that would later resurface in my own work. Reading each one of them brought about a revelation—a moment where I realized, “Oh, so you can do that?”