Year: 2018

‘Slave on the Block’ by Langston Hughes

With cutting irony, this describes what most people would call a well-intentioned white couple’s interactions with a young black man. Hughes dramatizes the liberal attitude to “negroes” and the ways in which Black Art is valorized over Black Life. I love this story for its confrontational simplicity: everybody should meet it.

In The Ways of White Folks, Vintage, 1971

‘Thirst’ by Frances Kruk

Kruk’s work is vital and important. This short story is a portrait of Martha, a woman who has a skin condition. Her mother has recommended daubing herself with urine and buttermilk, but it is not helping. The story’s language loses words as the protagonist’s skin flakes off, alternately verbless (“under it the face and body of Martha”) and subjectless (“At the table pours black pepper on the shapelessness”). Kruk is better known as a poet and the language displays this, pared down to an unrivalled intensity and ending in an oblique crescendo. Something about its quiet and fizzing energy has stayed with me.

In Gone Lawn 8, 2012

‘Michael Kohlhaas’ by Heinrich von Kleist, translated by David Luke

I first heard this story in summary during a performance of Lucy Beynon and Lisa Jeschke’s amazing David Cameron: A Theatre of Knife Songs, performed in Cambridge around 2013 or ’14. Pavel tells the play’s protagonist a version of this story. Kohlhaas leave two horses as collateral with an official of a certain nobleman. He finds out that this collateral was totally arbitrary, and demands the return of his horses. When he arrives at the castle of said noble, he discovers that the horses have been over-worked and his hired man, who protested against the mistreatment of the horses, has been beaten. Kohlhaas sues the nobleman for the cost of medical treatment for both. Due to political machinations, he is unsuccessful. Kohlhaas resorts to criminal means, beginning a snowballing vendetta worthy of Kafka. The problem is that “everybody forgot about the original horse-abuse.”

First published in 1810. Collected in The Marquise of O – And Other Stories, Penguin, 1978

‘The Tale of Old Venn’ by Samuel Delany

Written in November 1976, this is a compelling meditation on the ways in which money changes ideas of gender in the genre of Fantasy. But perhaps it is better described as a parable, or a philosophical disquisition draped in dialogue and faux-anthropology. Delany is the kind of author who sets himself investigative tasks and works them out through story. ‘The Tale of old Venn’ describes the education of the girl Norema. Norema comes up with little theories about gender and gender roles, and Old Venn critiques them. Venn describes her experience of living with the Rulvyn, and their “rults” (worn only by men) and the ways in which theories and ideas about rults alter people’s behaviour, especially after one man develops a theory of rult-envy. Norema grows up, and in one of the most powerful sequences, a red ship with an all-female crew and an allegedly male captain (or is he some kind of pet? the narrative suggests as much) is burned down by heteronormative townsfolk who cannot accept or even conceptualize the ships presence as anything other than an abomination.

Adulthood is that time in which we see all human actions follow forms, whether well or badly, and it is the perseverance of the forms that is, whether for better or worse, their meaning.

In Tales of Nevèrÿona, Wesleyan University Press, 1993

‘Froggy Goes Piggy’ by Jo L. Walton

This is a wonderfully written story and a harrowing cry for change. In the near-future, as precarity becomes ever more pervasive, our protagonist Narnia encounters a cruel irony. Diagnosed with cancer, working freelance selling motion-captures of herself to pay her bills – oh, not healthcare bills, just food, travel, childcare etc. – Narnia finds that the avatar animating her rejection for cancer treatment was modelled by herself at the beginning of the story in her motion-capture rig. Narnia’s cryptocurrencies take the shape of a frog and then a pig, allowing for an extensive meditation on money’s physiognomy beyond mere number. The plaintive call for an end to free-market ideology at the text’s close rams a brand-new anterior insular cortex up your nose before delivering a near-fatal bear-hug:

It just gets worse. We really have stop. It just gets worse. It’s not even the dying that’s the problem. […] Something else happens soon, and I can’t even get into it. […] It’s all to do with the Childcare Commons. Competition between providers in any market incentivises them to raise their game, offering consumers a greater choice of more innovative and better quality products and services at lower cost. Childcare is no exception. Please. We have to stop. This has to stop. We can do better. We will. We have to stop this. This has to stop. This story starts with us.

In The Long and Short, 14th July 2016)

Introduction

A friend of mine once told me that the best short stories operated as fragments. You wanted to tell the middle of the story, only. The beginning and the end needed to linger in the reader’s mind. I think he’s right. Well, certainly to my tastes, those stories that stay with me are the ones that offer no conclusions, no easy solutions. Also, being an obtuse type, I thought I’d present to you my anthology of short stories and sell them to you through the medium of rap lyrics.