‘Concerning the Bodyguard’ by Donald Barthelme

Imagine a story told almost entirely as a series of questions. Here is one such story in which we learn, indirectly, about a bodyguard’s life and the life of his employer, “the principal”. Plot is subtly interwoven into this story. Salman Rushdie was the writer from whom I first heard of this story when he read it for The New Yorker podcast. Years earlier, in the 1990s, one of my first jobs after leaving university was with Penguin Books, publishers of many authors including, as it happens, Eric Carle, Donald Barthelme and Salman Rushdie. While I never met Carle or Barthelme, I did occasionally see Salman Rushdie. This was at the time when Rushdie lived under the death threats of his fatwa. Rushdie had to have bodyguards and there was extra security at our offices which made Rushdie’s reading of the story particularly poignant.

First published in The New Yorker, October 1978, and available to read online there. Collected in Forty Stories, Putnam, 1987, and by Penguin, 1989. Hear Salman Rushdie read it online here

‘Mrs. Sen’s’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

The story of Mrs. Sen centers around a lonely woman, known to most as the “professor’s wife”. She relies on letters from home and on food preparation to feel at home in a foreign land. Mrs. Sen doesn’t have a child of her own but she looks after someone else’s child and, perhaps because I was pregnant at the time of reading it, I felt the character’s loneliness quite viscerally. It was the summer of 1999, while on a holiday in Kingston, Jamaica that I read this story as well as the others in Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies. I was so enthralled by the stories that I began reading them out loud. Food in ‘Mrs Sen’s’ serves as a metaphor for the condition of migration and diaspora and the culinary descriptions were what struck me the most as I rolled the words around on my tongue. Mrs. Sen “… took whole vegetables between her hands and hacked them apart: cauliflower, cabbage, butternut squash. She split things in half, then quarters, speedily producing florets, cubes, slices, and shreds. She could peel a potato in seconds. At times she sat cross-legged, at times with legs splayed, surrounded by an array of colanders and shallow bowls of water in which she immersed her chopped ingredients.”

First published in Salamander magazine. Collected in Interpreter of Maladies, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999/Flamingo, 2000

‘The Red Carpet’ by Lavanya Sankaran

I had just begun my first novel, InDependence, when I found this gem of a story which would later become the title story of the author’s debut collection of short stories. I was so taken by the depiction of character, setting, and social class in this story of a young man, Raju, who works as a driver for the rich Mrs. Choudhary in Bangalore, that I read it aloud to myself, pausing at various points trying to figure out the magic that went into crafting the story. Years later I included this story in literature classes that I taught to undergraduates. Ever an advocate for the joy of reading aloud, I would read parts of this story to my students.

First published in The Atlantic, and available to read online here. Collected in The Red Carpet, Dial, 2005, and more recently in digitlal form by Tinder Press, 2016

‘The Shawl’ by Cynthia Ozick

When I began writing, I looked to other texts for guidance. I wanted, amongst other things, to know how best to write about history in the context of fiction and ‘The Shawl’ became one of my teachers. This harrowing story, told in very few words, is about a mother, her baby, and her niece who live through the horrors of the Holocaust. Rosa, too starved to produce milk, feeds her child on her shawl:Magda took Rosa’s nipple, and Rosa never stopped walking, a walking cradle. There was not enough milk; sometimes Magda sucked air; then she screamed. Stella was ravenous. Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones.This is one story that I have never actually heard read aloud yet it feels as though I have, as both silence and sound lie at its heart.

First published in The New Yorker, May 1980, and available to read online here. Collected, together with a companion novella, ‘Rosa’, in The Shawl, Knopf, 1989

‘Without a Shadow of Doubt: My First Lesson in Art and Film’ by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

The question of “race” comes up in much of my work and this story I found to be a brilliant take on the subject. Two young Kenyan boys set off to discover whether everybody’s shadow is black like theirs, or whether, as they suspect, white people have white shadows. This is a beautifully written story— both touchingly funny and profound in its insights on childhood and on race. To hear and see the author read this story aloud with a twinkle in his eye (as I did recently in San Francisco) was one of the most enjoyable author readings I’ve ever had the pleasure of attending.

Collected in Minutes of Glory, The New Press, 2019

‘Black Girl’ by Ousmane Sembène

Another guide for me in terms of thinking about writing history and exploring the impact of colonialism and racism through fiction came in the classic film based on the short story La Noire de (Black Girl) directed by its author. It’s the story of a domestic worker who leaves Dakar, Senegal, dreaming of a new life in France, only to arrive on the Côte d’Azur to find that her life is not at all what she’d expected. There are lines from the story that I will always remember due to the power of the main actor’s voice. One example being when she cries with excitement at the prospect of working abroad: “J’ai du travail chez les blancs!” she exclaims, only to later find that it is misery that awaits her as she is exploited by her employers.

Based on a short story first published in Voltaique, Présence Africaine, 1962. In the translated collection, Tribal Scars, Inscape, 1975, the story is translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy as ‘The Promised Land’

‘Healthy Start’ by Etgar Keret, translated by Miriam Schlesinger

Humour combined with deep seriousness is not easy to write, but one writer that does it well is Etgar Keret. While I usually prefer listening to Keret read his own stories in his distinctive Israeli accent, I first heard this story read by the actor John Conlee who reads it well. ‘Healthy Start’ is a story about the pleasure of pretending to be someone else, which is a story that particularly appeals to me as a writer. What if you went to a cafe every morning and pretended to be that person that another has come to meet— anything from a business acquaintance to a lover. This is the premise of a wonderfully imaginative and at times very funny story. The fact that the author was once mistaken to be somebody else in a cafe and considered playing along, is an interesting meta story to this story.

First published in English in Tin House, Vol 8, No. 2, 2008. Available to read online at Litro magazine. Collected in Pitʹom Dfika Ba-Delet, Zmora-Bitan, 2010, and in translation in Suddenly, a Knock at the Door, FSG, 2012. Hear it read online here.

‘Hitting Budapest’ by NoViolet Bulawayo

Just read the first line of this story out loud and listen for the jazz in the variety of names that Bulawayo uses: “We are on our way to Budapest: Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me.” Darling, the child protagonist of this story, and her aforementioned friends are struggling to survive in a desolate land. Innovative in its language and tone— the characters of this Caine Prize-winning story leap from the page in prose that walks a tightrope between comedy and tragedy. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing the author read from this story on several occasions, perhaps most memorably at a sold-out reading in San Francisco where Bulawayo and I began our conversation about this story (which would ultimately become the first chapter in the novel We Need New Names) with music and dancing.

First published in The Boston Review, November 2010 and incorporated into We Need New Names, Chatto & Windus, 2013. Read it online here

‘Fairness’ by Chinelo Okparanta

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of reading many great short stories by fellow Nigerian authors, including many that I read while serving as an editor on The Weaverbird Collection: New Fiction from Nigeria 2008. One of the most inspiring recent collections of short stories comes in the form of Okparanta’s stunning debut, Happiness Like Water. Okparanta writes lyrically with a keen eye for character and in her story, ‘Fairness’, two young women—one a house maid and the other the employer’s daughter—try bleaching their skin, with disastrous results. Shortly after this story was published, I had the privilege of being in conversation with Okparanta at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco where she read beautifully from a section of this story.

Collected in Happiness Like Water, Mariner Books, 2013, and in The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories, 2014

‘Without Inspection’ by Edwidge Danticat

Sometimes when I’m feeling stuck with my writing, all I need is a great story to lift me up and make me feel inspired and motivated again. This is what happened recently when I heard Danticat read her story, ‘Without Inspection’, for the The New Yorker podcast. This is the story of Arnold as his life flashes before his eyes in the last few seconds of his life— a moving story of love, trauma, and migration. It reminds me in some way of Tobias Wolff’s classic short story, ‘Bullet in the Brain’as what rises to the top in those last few seconds of life is love— love, in this story, for the loved ones that the main character leaves behind.

First published in The New Yorker, May 2018, and available to read online here. Hear the author read it online here

‘Better Days’ by Dianne Reeves

Dianne Reeves, possibly the greatest living jazz singer today, is a storyteller at heart. ‘Better Days’ from Reeves’ album, Welcome to my Love, is a touching story about a child finding comfort and wisdom in the words of her grandmother. In the song’s refrain: You can’t get to no better days/Unless you make it through the night, listeners are transported (like the child) by the grandmother’s stories. I’ve now had the pleasure of hearing Reeves sing this song live on stage. “My Grandma took me everywhere” Reeves sings, varying the song with improvisation, as all good storytellers do, depending on the context in which she sings it. This has become my go-to song when celebrating some milestone with my writing.

Great stories take us everywhere. And if they’re really good, they lift right off the page like music.

Released on Dianne Reeves, Blue Note, 1987. Listen to it online here

‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ by Brian Aldiss

Aldiss was a key figure in the new wave of science fiction writing in Britain in in the 1960s and 70s, and immensely prolific (80 novels, more than 300 short stories). Fifty years on ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ is – no surprise – dated in many of its assumptions and entirely off-message for modern readers when it comes to female agency. The then-future technologies will seem quaint to today’s reader – “the photostat in her hand, still moist from the wall-receiver” – although Aldiss is bang on the money when it comes to the internet and retina scanning. He also anticipates the loneliness and boredom of modern life, the isolation (in particular) of women in a male hegemony.

In a starving world there’s also an obesity problem, mentioned in this clunky bit of exposition:

Though three-quarters of the overcrowded world are starving, we are lucky here to have more than enough, thanks to population control. Obesity’s our problem, not malnutrition. I guess there’s nobody round this table who doesn’t have a Crosswell working for him in the small intestine, a perfectly safe parasite tape-worm that enables its host to eat up to fifty percent more food and still keep his or her figure. Right?

Yeah, right.

I realise I’m not making a strong case for this. But I recall being spellbound as I read the story in our local library as an unhappy teenager, and brooding for days afterwards on what reality was, and how to figure out my place in my family and in the world. It triggered in me a disabling self-awareness and lack of ease. I’m still living with that.

The story was optioned by Stanley Kubrick and spent many years not being made before it was eventually released as A.I. Artificial Intelligencein 2001, directed by Steven Spielberg. I haven’t seen it.

First published in Harper’s Bazaar, December 1969, and collected in The Moment of Eclipse, Faber, 1970, and widely thereafter. It is available to read online here. Picked by David Collard. David is a writer and researcher based in London. His latest book is About a Girl (CB editions) and he is currently working on a group biography of writers associated with Ian Hamilton’s New Review in the 1970s. His previous contributions to A Personal Anthology can be read here.

‘The Kimono’ by H. E. Bates

I have a strange hardback, The Best of H.E. Bates, published for the American market in 1963, with a preface from—of all the unlikely American writers to introduce H.E. Bates—Henry Miller. (It seems clear to me that the sorts of American readers who would’ve liked Bates would’ve turned tail at Henry Miller’s name, and Miller fans would’ve been nonplussed by Bates squarely-made, well-made, often rather straightforwardly English stories.)

I bought it more than twenty years ago on a summer’s day in Provincetown on Cape Cod. My not-yet-wife was then working as an au pair. Provincetown is of course an American vacation spot of long standing, a terminal vacation spot—you must go back the way you came—and the Cape is written about by writers as far from one another as Thoreau, Henry Beston, Cookie Mueller. So maybe the place of purchase is the only real reason why I thought of ‘The Kimono’ for this list. Or maybe I thought of this Bates story—the only one from that thick book to linger in my mind—because it’s a story that hinges on very hot weather.

Or perhaps I’m sending it because it’s a story about people who are never really on holiday, and so for whom the idea of escape becomes unbearable. Arthur Lawson narrates: a very middle-of-the-road type from Nottingham, in great, big, new, vast 1911 London to interview with a firm of electrical engineers. Arthur becomes lost and goes into a shop for an ice in a drab part of London. In the shop there’s a woman bending over a broken cooler. She’s wearing a poorly fastened kimono. That’s all I can say—I’ve already said too much. But I’ve never forgotten it, and never let the book slip away, entirely on account of that one story. Or maybe when and where I bought it, which, at this remove amount almost to the same thing.

First published in 1936 and collected in Something Short and Sweet, Jonathan Cape, 1937 and widely thereafter. Picked by Drew Johnson. Drew’s fiction has appeared in Harper’s, VQR, The Literary Review, New England Review and elsewhere. You can read his full Personal Anthology here.

‘Murke’s Collected Silences’ by Heinrich Böll, translated by the author

I loved this story when I first read it, well before the digital age would have rendered obsolete the physical job of cutting and splicing tapes. I love it now for all kinds of different reasons.

Murke is employed by the national radio. He is too bright for his job. One morning, he is directed to delete the word God from a recorded talk by someone who is eager to re-write his public profile, so history must be adapted accordingly. The person is too important to disobey. I love that this story includes so much while so very little actually happens. There is the smoking of cigarettes, the daily addiction to anxiety and fear in the old lift at the Broadcasting House, a laconic revulsion against good taste, against Art and Culture and against the inevitable kow-towing to self-important people. I love that everything is there in the story—even dogs. Small everyday battles are being fought. Subversive acts are winning in tiny ways that can make a person feel hope about one thing at a time. And while all this happens, Murke is collecting silences in the form of little pieces of cut-up audio tape removed from the recording. No one wants to hear silence on the radio. Murke’s collection is just another small part of the meaningless and absurd activities of his life.

This story is not about the glorious hopeful silence of summer. This is silence stored in a biscuit tin. Kept for another day.

“What kind of left-overs?” asked Humkoke.
“Silences,” said Murke, “I collect silences.”
Hukoke raised his eyebrows, and Murke went on: “When I have to cut tapes, in the places where the speakers sometimes pause for a moment – or sigh, or take a breath, or there is absolute silence – I don’t throw that away, I collect it. Incidentally, there wasn’t a single second of silence in Bur-Malottke’s tapes.”
Humkoke laughed: “Of course not, he would never be silent. And what do you do with the scrap?”
“I splice it together and play back the tape when I’m at home in the evening. There’s not much yet, I only have three minutes so far – but then people aren’t silent very often.”
“You know, don’t you, that it’s against regulations to take home sections of tape?”
“Even silences?” asked Murke.

First published in Great Britain 1967 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, collected in various editions including Absent Without Leave, Marion Boyers, 1983. Picked by Erica Van Horn. Erica is an American writer and artist. She has been living in Tipperary, Ireland for the last 22 years, a deeply rural setting from where her writings evolve in a daily journal. Recent publications include TOO RAUCOUS FOR A CHORUS, 2017 (Coracle), EM & ME, 2017 (Coracle) and LIVING LOCALLY (Uniformbooks). Her papers are held at the Beinecke Library, Yale University.