My nightstand is rich with short story collections-and why wouldn't it be? Bedtime is the best time for short fiction, which can pack a satisfying wallop without the risk of keeping you up all night.

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Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

Not quite knowing what is going on is one of the most pleasurable aspects of Inherent Vice. Private eye Doc Portello, occasionally emerging from a fog of marijuana smoke, somehow manages to decipher a trail of increasingly convoluted clues that bring him ever closer to solving the mystery of the enigmatic Golden Fang. There's a lot happening, a tangle of motives, an undercurrent of melancholy and a deliciously dodgy cast of characters all negotiating 1970 Los Angeles, but I was perfectly happy to just tag along with Doc as he drifted through his lonely, yet strangely enviable life, reflecting on every little pleasure that presented itself.

The Rapture by Liz Jensen

You can feel the heat coming from Liz Jensen's apocalyptic thriller from the first page. Set in a stifling twenty-first century England it tells the story of a world on the cusp of disaster seen through the eyes of Gabrielle Fox, a distressed art therapist who is already trying to deal with her own history of personal calamity. If this incendiary mix of psychiatry and global warming were not enough to tempt us Jensen gives us Bethany Krall, a teenage killer raised in evangelical hellfire, who is in possession of an uncanny ability to predict catastrophes. As the two womens' lives become increasingly intertwined Gabrielle comes to realize that turbulence, even in its most powerful form, obeys specific rules. Tense and haunting, The Rapture is a thrilling read that remained in my thoughts long after I had reached the final page.

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Rosie Chard is a British writer and landscape architect who immigrated to Canada in 2005. She now lives in Winnipeg, where she divides her time between writing and garden design. Her first novel, Seal Intestine Raincoat, was published by NeWest Press in Sept 2009.

José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 with novels that combine surrealist experimentation with a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism, died on Friday at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. He was 87.

A novel by Mr. Saramago, "The Elephant's Journey," is to be published posthumously in English on Sept. 8 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

To read the full article from the New York Times Click Here.

On my night table at the moment sit a small stack of collected poetry works, a very boring novel I haven't been able to finish, and a lovely little book by Kurt Vonnegut. Of the poetry, I have most enjoyed dipping into Pier Giorgio Di Cicco's Living In Paradise and Robin Skelton's Selected Poems. Each of these collections covers a significant portion of the author's writing life, affording me a chance to understand the development of each author's interest and character.

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