‘On the Gull’s Road’ by Willa Cather

I think the best thing about the spark decision I made, when asked over the phone by someone at the University of Essex during clearing in the summer of 1998 ‘Would you like to do English and European Literature or English and United States Literature?’, to answer ‘United States’, was Willa Cather. The fact I made that decision because Plath and Poe and Sweet Valley High and Jackie Collins jumped into my head when I was asked the question, is by-the-by.

I’m not sure I’d have discovered Willa Cather so soon (or ever?) if I hadn’t. My Ántonia is one of my favourite books, and I love it wildly and loyally, and this story is its worthy companion in my heart. She writes with spaces and rhythm and, somehow, a soaring plainness, if there can be such a thing. Vast and clear without every being fussy, but also, detail of the like you can’t imagine not having known before you read it. She also is a champion when it comes to unrequited love.

Though when we are young we seldom think much about it, there is now and again a golden day when we feel a sudden, arrogant pride in our youth; in the lightness of our feet and the strength of our arms, in the warm fluid that courses so surely within us; when we are conscious of something powerful and mercurial in our breasts, which comes up wave after wave and leaves us irresponsible and free.

I just, absolutely and unapologetically to my bones, love stuff like that.

First published in McClure’s in December 1908. You can read it here

‘A Clear Well-Lighted Place’ by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway. How lazy and obvious to pick him, for so many reasons. I wish I had discovered and been shown so many other writers when I was younger. I wish, at school, we’d been shown all those stories and voices that never had their chance. And I really did think about doing this anthology without this story, from the perspective of me now, not me as I went through life, and the stories I clung to, or that rose up unexpectedly and captured me.

However.

I was twenty when this story found me, came to me, as it was, by being read aloud to those who had turned up to an American Short Story seminar by one of my university professors. I was finding it hard to be alive, sometimes. The world was (is) so big, and human beings so small, so insignificant, or as I suppose I felt, I was so insignificant, what would happen if I just… disappeared.

He read this story, in his beautiful voice (I still think of him reading this, or pieces of Moby Dick in The American Novel seminar, and nothing I’ve ever heard read aloud has ever come even vaguely near it) and I was moved. So. I found an old copy of the collected stories in a second-hand bookshop and cut this one out, stuck it in the back of my diary, and if I ever felt like I might be alone in the universe, I read it.

Obviously, I’ve moved on. I’ve read much better and more complicated and more stylish, more beautiful stories since. I’ve read more important ones too, ones that crack open the world and write it new.

But, this story, it made me pause and think that maybe there wasa point to me, that there was this huge café, with thousands upon thousands of tables, where the occupants were just looking for a clean well-lighted place, to feel connection. And it made me feel better, about everything. So.

It can be found in so many places, but I have a copy of The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The First Forty-Nine Stories, Scribner, 2014

‘The Philanderer’ by Mahesh Rao

I love the book of short stories this comes from and my favourite changes each time I’ve reread it. The title of the complete book comes from there being “1.2 billion people living in India; more than 1.2 billion stories in one country”. Each story focusses on one of those stories, and does so with the sort of deft, humorous, gentle, brutal, careful skill that makes me know I’ll never truly be a proper writer of short stories.

‘The Philanderer’ is a story that’s so simple in tone that it belies the sophistication of the telling. A divorced man who seems outside of his sexual conquests, who happens to wear a range of ties, all different shades of cerulean, is awful, yet longing, and hoping, and also so matter of fact and unaware of his inner self, that there are moments where you feel empathy, or disgust, or you laugh. Or something else. It’s such good writing, without ever showing off.

It makes me laugh. It also makes me wince. It says far more than the amount of words in it really should, and that’s all to do with the skill in the writing, which is not show-offy but subtle, elegant and funny. I love it.

He dissuaded his partners from chatter during sex, whether it was talk of private parts, immanent manoeuvres or, more simply, praise. He found it gauche and distracting. But not everyone would comply.
‘What this country needs,’ one woman had said, her face glistening as she held onto the headboard, ‘is more Muslims. Like you. Secular.’
Unwilling to respond at that precise moment he said, ‘I’m very close. Here, bite on my thumb.’

You should read the whole book, really. But, today, this is my favourite.

from One Point Two Billion, Daunt Books, 2015

‘I Told You I’d Buy You Anything So You Asked For A Submarine Fleet’ by Owen Booth

This story won the White Review Prize in 2015, so you’ve probably read it, and if you haven’t, go away and do that (and read all Owen’s stories, because doing that is better than anything I could possibly say about any of them).

I was having a bit of an awful time when I read this one. I was struggling with my writing. I was reading, reading, reading, but I couldn’t write, and I’d become a bit of a recluse because some awful stuff had happened, and I wasn’t sure how to navigate it, or if writing was the way forward, or… what. Stories are always about the words, but they’re about when those words come to you, the exact time and place when read them. I read this story on a day when I was wondering how and if to be, and other than it being, very obviously, brilliant, in style, it hit me somewhere that I will always be thankful for.

It’s just brilliantly done, for starters. I love writing that is deceptively simple, has a voice that is consistently funny, without ever laughing at anybody, at least, not cruelly, or at least, not without making you laugh at yourself first. When you laugh, you’re laughing about things you know to be true about you, as well as others. I always admire writers who can do that, who make you laugh without holding back any punches when it comes to the absurdity of what human beings, and ultimately yourself, really are.

It’s also absurd, and moving, and has simple yet perfect descriptions like this: The air was so cold it smelt like iron.

Anyway, I read this story and I remembered writing could be new, and I wanted to read everything he’d written, and I remembered there were not only one way to read, or write. It’s a story that reminded me human beings are ridiculous and brilliant and utterly baffling and wonderful. Which is pretty much everything I want from a short story. It’s obvious why it won. And it’s not even his best story. And yes I am a bit jealous.

Published in The White Review, 2015, and available online here

‘Ritual Stitches, Good Red Wounds’ by Helen McClory

I will ready anything by Helen McClory and so should you. One of the things I love about using Twitter is the writing it’s brought to me, that I may have missed had I never joined.

Helen does things differently. Her stories are written like poetry, are funny, are bright, are complete and vivid and make you think. She deconstructs old ideas and makes them new. She is a proper artist. I loved her first collection On the Edges of Vision, and her novel Flesh of the Peach.

And this story, from this collection, got me right from the very beginning.

Muggy air. Plum in up to the wrists. Picking rinds from the stopped waste disposal. He’s pulled the machinery out so nothing can get you. But you know there are so many ways in which you can be gnawed upon. It scares you into effrontery, into brittle spectacle. No roses, you say, no damn chocolate, like thin poise is going to help you live intact.

Yeah, that’s the opening.

It’s a story about physicality, and memory, and damage. It’s about who owns you (and who you own), and for how long and in in what ways. It’s about the body and the mind and how they are separate and the same, and how they tell stories, together and by themselves. It’s about escape and power and the nearness and farness away of everything. Reading it always takes my breath away, and I can’t articulate why, really.

It’s very short, and it’s dazzling.

from Mayhem and Death, 404 Ink, 2018

‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ by Patrice Lawrence

I was at the Federation of Children’s Book Groups conference earlier this year, talking about representation in children’s books, how each child deserves to see themselves in stories, and it was such a wonderful event. When I agreed to do it, and looked at the line up, I squealed when I realised Patrice Lawrence would be there. I loved Orangeboy, and Indigo Donut, and I’d loved this story, in this collection.

The panel was brilliant, Lawrence was joined by M.G. Leonard, and it was chaired by Kate Wilson of Nosy Crow, talking about this book which was published to celebrate women and girls, to coincide with the anniversary of women’s suffrage. I’d loved this story when I’d read it, so it was a proper treat to hear her talking about it.

It’s about Olive Christian Malvery, who came to London at the turn of the twentieth century, from India and was shocked by the working and living conditions of women and children in the city. She investigated, reported, and campaigned on the lives of some of the capital’s most vulnerable and marginalised people. I wish we’d learned about her at school (there’s a lot to say, somewhere else why we didn’t). The story is about lots of things: sense of self, how a person loves and cares, feels, and exists and is able to champion others when they themselves have very little. About bravery. And family. And unfairness.

It’s beautifully written, and the opening image has stayed with me.

Angel’s hair was full of spiders. That’s the first thing I remember about that day. I’d thought they were ants, but I should have known. I’d dug out enough ants’ nests in the dry earth down by the canal. These were what Nanna called penny spiders, tiny things, running down Angel’s forehead and cheeks in a quick, grey stream, dodging my hands as I tried to sweep them off her. But I didn’t want to squash them.

All the stories in Make More Noiseare worth reading. And, for me Patrice Lawrence is one of those writers I would happily read a shopping list by. So, read all of her books, immediately.

From Make More Noise, Nosy Crow, 2018. You can read it online here through Booktrust

‘Meat’ by Padrika Tarrant

Sometimes you read a writer’s work and want to tell them how much you are in awe of them, but you don’t say anything because it would just embarrass them, and you, so you stand blinking in the corner, imperceptibly nodding.

That’s how I felt when I read Padrika Tarrant’s novel,The Knife Drawer, how I felt when I read her book of short stories Broken Thingsand it’s how I felt when I read this year’s The Fates of the Animals. Gosh. Some writers, they transcend space and time and you can’t really say anything about their work other than, ‘Please read it.’

This story starts: They are waiting. They are meat.

I think it might be my favourite opening to a story, ever. You should just read everything she’s written because it’s all like that.

Or like this.

There is a part that wants to kill, to open its bloody maw, screw its eyes and sink its fangs into the men in spattered Wellingtons, into their strong and red-flecked arms. But champing against empty air is torture for the jaws.

When people I know say, ‘Who’s an author I should read, who I might not have heard of?’ I always say Padrika Tarrant. And, I say that to you, too.

from The Fates of the Animals, Salt Publishing, 2018

Introduction

It’s often said that words are slippery things. Sometimes, though, even the most evanescent words — spoken in an instant, then falling away into silence — are stickier than might be intended, with consequences that far outlast the utterance. Sometimes, words that are written down for posterity end up giving permanence to transient things they capture inadvertently, and sometimes, as fleeting as they may be, they are able to revive the presence of people who were lost a long time ago. Each of these dozen stories pivots on the very particular use of words: not just to represent or respond to the world, but instead to reshape it.

‘The End of Something’ by Ernest Hemingway

A boy. A girl. A lake, a boat. A conversation that doesn’t strike at the heart of the things that really matter, and then a single spoken phrase that brings everything crashing down. With just five short, devastating words, the boy destroys his relationship with the girl — spits on the affection she shows him — and the damage he inflicts is all the more brutal given how calmly he speaks to her. ‘The End of Something’ is a masterpiece of understatement, of reticence, and of compressed structure: everything that precedes those five words gives them an incredible charge, so that, despite their brevity, they send shockwaves through the entire story and bring the drama to a turning point. And that’s not all. After the girl leaves him, the boy comes to feel that he has done wrong, and he convinces himself that he can win her back. He makes plans to apologise, to return their relationship to the way it was before he spoke. But the story knows more than the boy does. Look at the title. It’s definite and final. There will be no new beginning. The words the boy can’t see — words that are given only to the reader — suggest the unwritten aftermath of the story, the unavoidable consequences of the words the boy chose to speak.

from In Our Time, Boni & Liveright 1925; reprinted in The First Forty-Nine Stories

‘We’ll Both Feel Better’ by Dylan Nice

A young man. A young woman. An airport, then Australia. ‘We’ll Both Feel Better’ is a sentimental evocation of ‘The End of Something’ — it is set almost a century later, yet it shares much the same spirit — and it pulls the neat trick of giving the young man a genuine chance to make amends but having him screw it up a second time. Here, the two characters have flown from their homes in the United States to Brisbane, Australia, to study abroad. “She moved and talked in ways that made me feel smaller than I was,” the young man says of his companion, with whom he is not quite in a relationship. “I told her embarrassing things about myself. I thought saying them made them less true.” At the end of one embarrassing story, he makes a self-deprecating admission: “I was clueless.” The young woman’s response — not spoken seriously — is: “You still are.” The young man stews on it and then decides to admonish her. “The rest of the trip I’d prefer not to be condescended to,” he says. But he is the condescending one, and he knows it, even if he’ll never admit it — and even if, at the end, he ends up destroying their relationship by refusing to acknowledge, in words, that he was in the wrong.

from Other Kinds, Short Flight/Long Drive 2013

‘Rare Birds’ (Part 3) by Luke Carman

Luke Carman just might be the best Australian writer that nobody outside Australia has heard of. In this stretch of his long story ‘Rare Birds’, he performs the miracle of transforming a tawdry situation into something unexpectedly tender, then ripping the tenderness apart with even greater ferocity than Hemingway and Dylan Nice. The young man of the book’s title lives in the western suburbs of Sydney. One day, there’s a knock at the door and he finds a young woman looking for him. “[S]he blushed at my gaze,” he says, “and we fell in love on the doorstep like only two desperate twenty-year-olds can do.” They spend months working lowly jobs to scrape together enough money to buy a car, escape the suburbs, drive around Australia. The first days and weeks of the journey are blissful. Then the rot sets in. Eventually they arrive at a spectacular sight which, for the young man, has the feeling of a climax to an odyssey. It is sublime, it moves him profoundly and awakens in him “a strange awe,” and he turns to the young woman to gauge her reaction. No expression on her face, only a “pale look of indifference.” He wants to speak of the unnamable emotions he feels, but she has nothing to say about what she sees. He wants to search for words that are adequate to their situation, but she has none to offer him. “Motherfucker,” he spits at her. That’s the beginning of the end of something. The end itself arrives when the young woman speaks words that echo those of the boy in Hemingway’s story.

from An Elegant Young Man, Giramondo 2014

‘The Woman With Too Many Mouths’ by Cathy Sweeney

The narrator of Cathy Sweeney’s Kafkaesque story is an aspiring novelist whose ambition to “write [a] great novel” is successfully realised and absolutely inconsequential. “Years passed,” he says at the end. “I wrote my great novel. I could write a hundred pages about writing my great novel, but no one would read it. My novel was published. … And then nothing. What else is there?” Well, there’s this, his brief account of his relationship with “the woman with too many mouths”: far fewer words than you’ll find in his great novel, but these words are the more significant ones, particularly because he’s trying to find words to speak about a woman who has more than one mouth and can’t really speak at all. “The woman with too many mouths was almost ugly,” he says; “her beauty depended on the angle of the moon, her perception of my perception, and so on.” As he repeatedly reminds his readers, looking back on the relationship long after it has ended, the woman had too many mouths and strange things happened when she opened them: she spat out rain, she breathed out hay, and at one point, the narrator says, “moths, not two but twenty, the ones you think are butterflies until someone says otherwise, flew out of the woman’s mouth and around my bathroom.” He meets her again after they split up, he reignites their romance, and then things become violent — at her insistence. The narrator’s great novel, which is all that matters to him, doesn’t matter at all in the retelling. All that matters are the memories he can’t shake about his union with that unearthly woman, and this story is his attempt to find the few words that will cleanse his mind of them.

from The Stinging Fly, Issue 19, Volume 2, Summer 2011; read it at The Lonely Voice here or listen to it read aloud by Kevin Barry here

‘Words and Things’ by Jon Raymond

If Jon Raymond is widely known at all, it is thanks to his collaborative work with the filmmaker Kelly Reichhardt. Reichhardt’s first two films, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, were based on stories in Raymond’s Livability, and Raymond wrote the screenplay for Reichhardt’s neo-Western gem Meek’s Cutoff. In ‘Words and Things’, Raymond traces the development of a relationship between an art critic, David, and a practising artist named Jen — a relationship that starts off fraught, blossoms into romance, and then begins to collapse. What’s special about the story is not its depiction of the relationship itself, but the way the dynamics between the two characters play out via the incompatibilities between their chosen art forms: “words” for David, “things” for Jen. The drama rises steadily as the two characters think they have found a common language in which to communicate, only to understand that they can’t really reach one another after all, and the final pages of the story bring them to a point of artistic unity but interpersonal distance. Jen arrives home after an event at a gallery where David was also in attendance. There’s a message on her answering machine. She listens to it and hears David’s voice, David’s words, describing Jen’s physical presence in the gallery, while he was watching her from across the room. “It was strange how David’s words had waited for her like that,” Raymond writes, “how they had been preserved in the telephone like actual objects with weight and texture.” Then the machine clicks off. Then there’s silence. Then there’s just the sound of the world around Jen, a world without David’s presence, but with his words able to be summoned up again at the touch of a finger.

From Livability, Bloomsbury 2009

‘Miss Lora’ by Junot Díaz

“Years later,” it begins, “you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it?” Done what? Fallen in love with Miss Lora. “It was 1985,” says the narrator, Yunior. “You were sixteen years old and you were messed up and alone like a motherfucker. You were also convinced… that the world was going to blow itself to pieces.” The prospect of death is everywhere. Yunior’s brother, Rafa, is dying, and is long dead by the time Yunior starts telling the story. The story is ostensibly about Yunior’s sexual education by Miss Lora. She is his neighbour, older than him, a teacher at a local school, and much more experienced. She awakens in him a knowledge of his own sexuality, although, far from pleasing him, this knowledge only leaves him confused and angry. But really, indirectly, the story is about Rafa, and about Yunior’s search for words to fill the space opened up by his absence. Miss Lora is ancillary to this exercise: Yunior knows that Rafa would show only confidence if he were to take up with Miss Lora, and part of Yunior’s retelling involves trying to use Rafa’s language to reanimate his brother’s spirit, to convince himself that he can feel what Rafa would feel in his situation. Ultimately, though, words fail everyone. The relationship turns sour, and the final pages unfold like a slow apocalypse of refusals to speak and of spoken words that lack the power to change things.

From This Is How You Lose Her, Penguin 2012; read it at The New Yorker here