Every now and then I need a breather from long books, but I can't not read anything. At these times I like to read short stories.

In Washington, I would walk up to the Cleveland Park Library and pick up a collection of short stories that I maybe read about in the New York Times book review. In Bamako, that's not possible. However, I do have a big old stack of New Yorkers and Harper's, because each time we go home we collect the magazines that have arrived since our last visit. We work our way through the articles pretty quickly, but I have to be in a certain special mood for the Fiction, so I save it for later.

Sunday I sat with the stack of dusty magazines, carefully folding down the corner of the first page of the Fiction in each of them. Magazines without Fiction went into a box I'll drop off at the Peace Corps office someday. I took the stack of magazines with dog-eared Fiction and put it in my nightstand. Each night I read one or two.

My favorite so far is a Joyce Carol Oates story called "The Cousins," from a 2004 Harper's. It's a story told in letters between two women, a professor of biology who has written a memoir, and a Florida woman who read the memoir, and thinks she has something important to tell the writer.

I love this story because of the way the letters change over the course of the story. At first they are straightforward and sunny, if a little eccentric, in the Florida woman's case, and brusque and dismissive in the writer's case. But the letters shift and slide and surprise, and the task of interpreting them gets more complicated. In the end you feel that some transaction of great emotional consequence has taken place, and yet it's never clear what happened.