Short Stories 366:226 — “Lot,” by Bryan Washington

Oof, this story. Okay, like many (half? a third? I'm not sure) of the stories in Lot: Stories, this one returns to a single family, and is told through the voice of the youngest son, who is gay and coming to grips with that, and who has already seen his father walk away by this …

Short Stories 366:219 — “Bayou,” by Bryan Washington

As a lover of speculative fiction, I think I maybe had less of a jolt reading this story from Lot: Stories than perhaps others might. Prior to this the stories have all been grounded in a very contemporary setting, but this tale opens with someone finding a dying chupacabra (which seems to have died by …

Short Stories 366:212 — “Wayside,” by Bryan Washington

Lot: Stories, Bryan Washington's brilliant collection of short fiction, has a character who spends most of the stories unnamed, but who is revisited as the collection continues. He's the lens through which about half the tales happen, and every visit with him nudges his life a bit further forward. He's back again in "Wayside," and …

Short Stories 366:177 — “Shepherd,” by Bryan Washington

The notion of a singular "coming out" is something I try to push back against whenever I see it happen, and I kept thinking about that while I was reading "Shepherd." Found in Bryan Washington's Lot: Stories, "Shepherd" is very much a story about a young man figuring out his own desires, and the ways …

Short Stories 366:170 — “610 North, 610 West,” by Bryan Washington

Throughout the tales in Lot: Stories, Bryan Washington circles back to a particular family, though the eyes of a mixed race son, and those particular tales take on the relationship between this son—the gay kid slowly realizing he's gay—and his family, usually throwing one person onto the main stage. It's an incredibly effective narrative progression, …

Short Stories 366:163 — “Alief,” by Bryan Washington

Even though by this point I'd only gotten two stories along in my reading of Bryan Washington's Lot: Stories, I'd already decided one of the things Washington did so incredibly well was to frame a narrative event with incredible voice. There's a cadence and progression in "Alief" like there was in the first story that …