If the image of Omelas’s joyful festival curdling into the secret of the child in the broom closet gripped you, Jackson’s classic story “The Lottery” will hit the same nerve. A seemingly normal town gathers for a cheerful annual event that ends in Tessie Hutchinson’s shocking fate—an eerie echo of the townspeople who accept the child’s misery as the price of their happiness. The collection surrounds that centerpiece with other morally probing tales that make you question what a community is willing to sacrifice to keep its comforts.

If you were haunted by how Omelas’s citizens rationalize the child’s torment—and by those few who silently walk away—Never Let Me Go offers a sustained, intimate reckoning with the same ethical calculus. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy slowly discover the truth behind their schooling at Hailsham and the purpose society has assigned them, forcing you to confront the calm, bureaucratic face of a bargain not unlike Omelas’s, where ordinary people benefit from a hidden cruelty they prefer not to see.

If you loved how the Omelas narrator invites you to imagine details—the procession, the drooz, the child’s basement—and openly negotiates the story’s terms with you, Calvino’s playful masterpiece takes that intimacy to the limit. Addressing you as “you,” it builds, interrupts, and reframes narratives in real time, turning authorship itself into a philosophical game. It scratches the exact itch of being personally enlisted into a story’s making, the way Omelas enlisted you to decide what kind of city you were willing to accept.

If the distilled, parable-like punch of Omelas—the whole city, the child, and the choice—left you wanting more crystalline thought experiments, Sum delivers forty of them. Each miniature afterlife reimagines purpose, justice, and meaning in a few pages, much like Omelas compresses an ethical dilemma into a single, unforgettable image. You’ll get that same swift jolt of reflection you felt when the revelry of Omelas gave way to a walk down to the locked room.

If Omelas’s central image—the townspeople who stay, and those who walk away—left you wrestling with what moral action looks like, Camus’s The Plague gives that struggle flesh and time. In quarantined Oran, Dr. Rieux and others decide whether to accept fate or to fight a seemingly indifferent calamity. It’s a sweeping allegory, like Omelas, where the true subject is the ethics of complicity and the hard, unglamorous labor of refusing to live comfortably at someone else’s expense.