The Outing

It’s hard to pick a favorite from Davis’s massive body of work (“Break it Down” and “The Center of the Story” are two more that I love, though they’re a bit long for this list), but on the flip side, pretty much everything she writes is good. I like “The Outing” because it’s the skeleton of a story, poking fun at the notion of “what happens”—and yet still creates a powerful sense of what indeed happened. How does she do it?