The bizarre behavior of some parents’ offspring materializes in one household in a 2016 short story by Ben Marcus, although it’s there fantastically early, too early. Jonah is a small boy, a “cold little bird” in “Cold Little Bird,” who no longer loves his parents and refuses their affection. And that isn’t all: he reads—and agrees with—a book claiming “that the Jews caused 9/11.” Jonah and his family are themselves Jewish! Thus the lad is exhibiting an older offspring’s—a young man’s—intellectual blindness and unsympathetic bigotry. He represents youth when it is morally doomed, or seems to be.

Like “Cold Little Bird,” “Ravalushan,“ by Mohammed Naseehu Ali, is included in The Best American Short Stories volume for 2016. It concerns a real-life coup in Ghana, West Africa in 1979. Villagers marching against kleptocracy and capitalism must make way for the “hundreds of gun-carrying soldiers” they have not expected. These are revolutionaries who abduct and abuse—and worse. Interestingly, they do this to two harmless madmen in the village before seeming to deprive a simple latrine worker of his sanity. Impeccably written, this is a rich and, like Marcus’s piece, gripping story. They’re both worth seeking out.