‘The Hermit’s Story’ by Rick Bass

This story approaches the extremities and possibilities of both the singular tale and the dreamscape, and locates them in a remote valley in the American West before centering that valley and reaching out farther and farther into an ephemeral, snowy, icy space I won’t spoil by explaining here.

Bass is a fine writer, but I walk around and in this one story as a thing apart from all his work—and most other short stories. There are so many things here you could imagine someone going on about as “wrong”: the title, the overelaborate and obviously reverse-engineered narration, the disarray of the whole story around its one central story-within-a-story, a few asides that add nothing concrete and never come back round.

I’ve taught this for quite some time and (more than anything I’ve taught) students remember it and later bring it up on their own. A gone-a-decade student recently informed me she keeps my course packet for her annual reread of ‘The Hermit’s Story’.

First published in The Paris Review, Summer 1998. Collected in The Hermit’s Story, Houghton Mifflin, 2002

‘Interregnum’ by Naiyer Masud, translated by Muhammad Umar Menon

I find I get more pleasure reading around among the many offshoots of Kafka that rereading Kafka himself. Can Xue has Kafka in back of her somewhere, but Naiyer Masud’s first-person dreamscapes are tied a little too easily to the fact that he’s a translator, into Urdu, of Kafka. Lucknow exists in Masud’s stories as a kind of isolation chamber of the old in the new, and perhaps a particular, older Islamic cultural life in contemporary India. There’s a tremendous sense of stagnation and ferment and of how memory and consciousness are impacted by these, like water passing through rock.

‘Interregnum’ is a father-son story, of patrimony and instruction and resistance to both. The narrator puzzles over what and how and who is teaching him, and over the traces of his father, a mason, in the restored decoration of the city.

Someone once noted that Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mister Lawrence is more or less the only POW movie where the whole story doesn’t revolve around escape. I don’t know exactly why that seems like the only thing for me to say about Masud’s work and his Lucknow, a city that to my knowledge was his lifelong residence, but I’m going to go with it.

In Essence of Camphor, The New Press, 1999

‘Ark of Bones’ by Henry Dumas

This story first came to me by way of an aside in an essay by Hilton Als, and if Als—a master of so many short forms—admires a thing I head right for it. I’d like to put in a preorder for an imagined future Taschen edition of his Instagram posts.

And yet I find it hard to write about Dumas and, in particular, ‘Ark of Bones’. Dumas was shot and killed by a NYC Transit Police Officer in 1968 and left behind a strange, extraordinary, and only partially realized body of work. I’ve published one overlong essay on Dumas: looking back on it, I wonder if not being able to figure out what makes this story tick sent me down so many of that essay’s cul-de-sacs.

Fish-hound and Headeye and the supernatural ship they find on the river, the ‘Ark of Bones’ are so… real, somehow, as plausible as the river or the South through which it flows. So, too, the river flowing through this writer’s unfinished novel, Jonoah and the Green Stone, is as full of incident and as fearful a world as in Melville’s The Confidence Man or Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, and seems to me more like those than Twain’s river.

All I know for sure is how inexorable I find the opening line of this story: “Headeye, he was following me.”

Included in Echo Tree: The Collection Short Fiction of Henry Dumas, Coffee House Press, 2003, available via The National Humanities Resource Center Toolbox here

‘June Recital’ by Eudora Welty

If Chekhov is guarded by the ossified ‘Lady with Lapdog’, Welty has been obscured behind two stories. One, like so much of Faulkner’s short fiction, is as much Saturday Evening Post as Welty: the folksy-as-hell tour de force ‘Why I Live at the P.O.’.

Welty wrote the other story, ‘Where is the Voice Coming From?’ late in the day and the story is justly famous as a strange footnote to history (the murder of Medgar Evers by Byron de la Beckwith), but has also become, or at least it seems so to this Mississippian, a kind of cover for not really talking about Welty’s racism—not in the way we’ve engaged with Faulkner’s and begun to talk about O’Connor’s.

Welty’s racism is all the more important and problematic, because it is so casual, and, comparatively, perniciously moderate, even as it is shot through some of the most beautiful short stories ever written. The Golden Apples is a collection of excruciating beauty, and treats all of the world as strange and terrible and inexorable and small.

In particular, ‘June Recital’ reaches its long arm round several dozen people and gathers them into a dance they’re unaware of, we’re unaware of, something that ‘The Dead’ alone of Joyce’s stories manages, but in a true third person that decenters any possible Gabriels and leaves the story hovering in collective forgetting, the real truth of the back-there-where-the-mule-died of Southern literature is that the fabric of what is known by everyone about everyone is always slipping out of memory. The collective memory is an act of collective amnesia. I’d like to say that the racism in this and other of the stories is a deliberate examination, but it isn’t.

Peter Orner once said that Welty was so clearly the greatest American short story writer that the question wasn’t even interesting to him. Without quite agreeing to that, exactly, I have never found a writer that allowed me to disagree.

In The Golden Apples, Harcourt Brace and Company, 1949

‘Dead Memories… Dead Dreams’ by Kathleen Collins

One of my favorite interviews with the late, great Mavis Gallant is enlivened by a generational paradox—the interviewee, a fine writer, seems to believe in very narrow limits of external identity (in whatever form) to define characters and who they are and what they’ll do: characters are individuals. The tension of the interview is that Gallant doesn’t appear to believe that the force of the individual can push back quite so hard. In a story like ‘Grippes and Poche’ Gallant makes people and story out of facts and doesn’t rate consciousness as highly as we’ve come to expect in short fiction. We like our characters as more acting than acted upon—and ultimately that determines more than it should who is allowed to be a character in contemporary fiction.

Line-by-line, I’d compare the rediscovered posthumous collection of Kathleen Collins’ stories more to someone like Leonard Michaels, but in her understanding of character, she is more like Gallant than not, and her stories are full of intractable fact warping experience. The last story in her posthumous collection, ‘Dead Memories… Dead Dreams’ is a clockwork nightmare of colorism within the African-American bourgeoisie… butthe people are not automatons butneither do they escape but neither do they stop being individuals butthat individuality is neither vantage nor panacea.

This is a story of people who don’t jump the tracks. A daughter of a dark-skinned, poor father and a well-off, light-skinned mother, the narrator must watch all of these relatives as stars in their courses. That their certainty is itself a kind of armor against the unspoken, larger prejudices only makes this story (told without a single white character) all the larger.

As writers enamored of consciousness on the page, we too often let our characters think their way to a perspective that sometimes even saves them from their situation, but at least offers them the grace of understanding. We become their deus ex machina by so constantly shortcutting to the moment when they become their own.

So that as the narrator’s father grinds on in his groove, committed to the understanding that he has always had that has never benefitted him, Collins gets at something about how rare the rational actor actually is in the world.

In Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Ecco, 2016

‘The Rightangled Creek’ by Christina Stead

I’ve written about this novella—subtitled as a sort of ghost story—elsewhere. But I can’t shake the fact of ‘The Rightangled Creek’ enough to leave it out. Sometimes I think of Christina Stead as George Eliot, but angry in a 20^thCentury mode. Like Eliot, she throws out characters in droves, and yet the comparison is not right, somehow.

The Man Who Loved Children is both gateway and masterpiece, but there’s more to her work than this one book, not least this sixty-page novella of a country getaway for leftist intellectuals whose every plan and conceit will be knocked down in turn. We get the endless Stead torrent of people and talk and event giving way to event—in succession rather than in development. That last is perhaps Stead’s most unnerving commitment to true realism: things happen one after another with no sense of consequence or pattern or control. Out of the torrent, we pluck snatches of lives coming unglued: the leftist couple in rural retreat doing everything for their beloved child… who is a sort of Stalinist commissar and a terror to the locals. The ghosts of the house. The enthusiastic, back-to-the-earth twins who view poison ivy as a superstition. Stead never relents. That’s part of the marvel of her work and part of why—I think—it remains a lonely outpost.

In The Puzzleheaded Girl, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1967

‘Your Duck Is My Duck’ by Deborah Eisenberg

I’m still more than a little surprised that every short story-reading human I meet doesn’t greet me by grabbing my shoulders and demanding that we talk right now about Deborah Eisenberg’s ‘Your Duck Is My Duck’. This is the sort of story whose omission from, well, anywhere at all ought to mean an early and well-earned retirement for the editors in question. I myself missed it when it appeared in Fence: thank heaven for them, for the O. Henry anthology, and for Lauren Groff in championing this story of the rich and poor, artists and patrons, painters and puppeteers.

As that list suggests: one of the greatest challenges in writing fiction with anything to say about right-the-hell-now is getting everybody in the same room. Your Duck not only manages this, but, unblinking, shows how little doing so might matter, how much deeper we’re in it than we imagine, how very late is the hour.

When our narrator, a struggling painter, tries to return some dresses given by her very rich hostess, we get this: “‘The dresses?’ she said. She smiled vaguely, and patted me, as though I had barked.”

There’s so much in this story—every twist and turn is a necessary point on the map of itself. Any account of it would just devolve into endless quotation until the whole story would be typed out below. I won’t do that to you—if you promise to seek the story out yourselves.

In Your Duck Is My Duck, Ecco, 2018, and available through Electric Literature here

Introduction

My first acquaintance with Portuguese fiction was, unsurprisingly, with The Book of Disquiet. A book that I read as I would a collection of short stories, picking the book up at whim, reading a fragment here, another there. There is very little short fiction from Portugal available in translation and you will notice that my selections draw from just two publishers. What does exist in translation, however, is certainly enough to whet the appetite and to highlight Portugal’s remarkable contribution to the art of the short story.

‘Sesame’ by Miguel Torga, translated by Ivana Rangel-Carlsen

Torga’s miniatures, published as Tales from the Mountain in 1941 and New Tales from the Mountain in 1944, rarely stretch to more than a couple of pages and yet contain a plenitude of wisdom. Collectively, they form a richly textured mosaic of rural life. Taken singly, each is its own uniquely perfect narrative. In ‘Sesame’, a young boy, his imagination fired by the tales he hears read aloud by the village storyteller, attempts to unearth the gold he believes to be buried under Gallows Mountain. What follows is a meditation on fiction and the imagination. Wonder is swiftly followed by disenchantment and yet, in the tale’s final lines, awe and mystery return in the most mundane and beautiful of ways.

First published in Contos da Montanha, 1941. Translation in Tales & More Tales from the Mountain by Miguel Torga, Carcanet, 1996

‘So Many People, Mariana’ by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

In my view, a contender for the title of finest short story in existence. Mariana is a figure at odds with her environment and. more specifically, the deeply patriarchal world of Salazar’s Portugal. A Job-like figure, beset by misfortune, she is rebel, victim and accomplice, at times rebellious and, at others, complicit in her own sufferings. Carvalho’s assertion that loneliness can be a source of strength as well as of tragedy still feels revolutionary so many decades after its initial and controversial publication.

First published as ‘Tanta Gente Mariana’ in 1988. Translation in the anthology Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers, Dedalus, 2018. Also available in a translation by John Byrne in Professor Pfiglzz and His Strange Companion and Other Stories, Carcanet, 1997

‘The Man of Dreams’, by Mário de Sá-Carneiro, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

In a cheap restaurant in Paris, our narrator meets a man who claims to be able to control his dreams, a man who “dreamed life and lived dreams”, a man who, like the author, rails against convention, cliche and the simplistic binaries (love/hate, male/female) with which we stifle freedom. He is a figure who stands proudly for movement, fluidity and imagination.

In The Great Shadow, Dedalus, 1996

‘Two Hands’ by Hélia Correia, translated by Annie McDermott

Nature, in Correia’s imagination, is a cantankerous old woman, dealing natural death with one hand and accidental death with the other. Overworked and exhausted, a temporary lapse in attention results in a misallocated death, leaving a woman, Barbara, without a death of her own. This is a strange story that, like most of Correia’s work, combines brutality and violence with an exquisitely dark and dry sense of humour.

In the anthology Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers, Dedalus, 2018

‘The Silence’ by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Jennifer Alexander, Elenice Barbosa de Araujo, Sally Bolton, Clara Buxton, Tom Gatehouse, Felix Macpherson and Maria Reimondez

A woman in a house, in apparent synergy with her surroundings. Yet there is tension in the air; a sensation that the property is observing her. The stillness is eventually broken by the scream of an unknown woman. Is her scream a cry of pain or of warning? Is it, perhaps, a plea for help? No easy answers are offered and yet, in the air of watchfulness that pervades the narrative, it’s not difficult to sense the all-seeing eye of authoritarianism, of the fear that keeps us at home and prevents us from coming to the defence of others.

In the anthology Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers, Dedalus, 2018

‘The Mandarin’ by Eça de Queiroz, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

An exuberant and cutting work of fantasy from one of the greats of Portuguese fiction, ‘The Mandarin’ is a no holds barred account of human weakness, in which nobody escapes censure and everybody is flawed. With the mere tinkling of a bell, Teodoro magically brings about the death of a wealthy mandarin, gaining his riches in the process. Predictably, wealth isn’t all its cracked up to be. What prevents this story from becoming tediously moralistic is that there is not a character within its pages left untouched by money and greed. All are found wanting – including the reader.

First published in 1880. Translation in The Mandarin and Other Stories, Dedalus, 2018