A drama series about a spaceship and its crew set out to discover new galaxies, and the many things they encounter. A hermit's caretaker passes away, forcing her to make trips outside to interview a new candidate for the job. Two ballerinas carpool to their next lesson together and uncover some surprising information on the way. Diane had to go through the one thing she had foreseen and was afraid of – and there was nothing I could do to help. A father and daughter take a hunting trip every year together, but every year they grow farther apart.

A series about the experiences of an acid trip, and the ways it shapes people's lives before and after.A character realizes they are a part of a lab experiment in the middle of a test and desires to do nothing but escape. She was fully aware of what the future held and decided to refuse artificial ventilation. Rather than the fear of dying by choking or suffocation, she wanted a doctor to help her die when she was no longer able to communicate with her family and friends. She discussed this with her husband of 25 years, Brian, who had to come to terms with what she wanted and to respect her decision. Sarah’s father sends her from Canada to Grenoble as a way of ending her relationship with a married professor, but she ends up on the French Riviera. There she meets Roy, an ex-prison inspector, and rashly moves in with him. The story’s charge arises from a combination of wit, the awfulness of the relationship’s collapse, and Gallant’s profound grasp of the psychology of love affairs. She talks about her characters in a way that makes you feel your own perceptiveness is being worked like a muscle. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) A character hosts an auction for the items of a beloved neighbor who has recently passed, to most of the neighborhood's dismay.

A kid attemps to ignore distractions during church after being promised an ice cream sandwich for good behavior. A department store sales person runs into an old high school classmate who threatens to reveal information that could lose them their job.Mavis Gallant shows a profound grasp of the psychology of love affairs. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian “In the Tunnel” by Mavis Gallant (1971)

Miscommunication, antic disposition, voyeurism, glee – this translation of one of Aichinger’s most famous stories provides windows upon windows upon windows. Simply expressed and made to linger long in the mind, it was my first experience of the prizewinning Austrian writer and her dark, precise prose styling, and the start of an ongoing pursuit on my part to read more of her work. Eley Williams “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe (1843) It is uncertain whether it was Turgenev or Dostoevsky who said, “We all came out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’”, but his influence on those writers – as well as on Tolstoy, Kafka, Nabokov, Borges and many more – is profound. The main character of this bleakly hilarious story, the downtrodden government clerk Akaky Akakievich, is arguably the first antihero in modern literature, and his doomed pursuit of a new overcoat one of the most memorably absurd quests in fiction. “Six Feet of the Country” by Nadine Gordimer (1953) A character's home is split in two by a sudden Earthquake. They must work to find a way to the other side, where something valuable is.Motor neurone disease left her mind as sharp as ever, but it gradually destroyed her muscles, making it hard for her to communicate with her family. It left her in a wheelchair, catheterised and fed through a tube. Diane fought against the disease for the last 2 years of her life and had every possible medical treatment. If you love JG Ballard, you should read Anna Kavan. Few novelists, Ballard said, “could match the intensity of her vision”, and that same intensity fuels her stories. The narrator of “A Bright Green Field” claims to encounter the same, unnaturally vivid field of grass wherever she goes. It’s an unlikely candidate for a bete noire, but Kavan’s descriptions of a mountain town in the gathering gloom, loomed over by “the sheer emerald wall that was the meadow”, create an atmosphere of powerful unease. “Extra” by Yiyun Li (2003) Telling personal stories can be extremely powerful. We are building a network of people willing to share their experience to help us strengthen the case for law change.