‘Family Physics’ by Catherine Lacey

Bridget, the main character in ‘Family Physics’, is someone who gives up on marriage after three months and once walked out of college and drove around the US for so long that her family presumed she had died, personifying the drifters that populate Lacey’s collection. In this story, Lacey’s dig at the absurdity of family obligations is both funny and sad. Of all her deft snapshots, this, about how Bridget’s sister had become someone she no longer recognised, stands out.

And, sure, people always disappear into new people, and no one can stop the way new versions of people overtake the old versions of people, but something about the new Linda was so menacing that it made me suspicious of what she’d done with the old Linda.

You leave the story none the wiser about how the next decade of their family dynamics will pan out, which might sound frustrating but actually renewed my appreciation of the genre in a way that reminded me of Joy Williams’s dictum – that a short story doesn’t care what you think about it. Let’s face it, short stories usually leave you (well, me anyway) hungry and vaguely unsatisfied, making them far more realistic than novels, which try and con you into thinking you’re getting the complete picture.

First published in The Sewannee Review, Spring 2018. Collected in Certain American States, Granta, 2018. Read it online here

‘#36 DEAREST’ by Joy Williams

With some stories you’re smitten from the first sentence, which is just as well when it’s from 99 Stories of God. Each story is less than a page long, some just a couple of paragraphs. I could write out the whole of ‘#36’ and probably still hit my word count. It’s about a house owned by Penny, a house Penny never liked but her tenants adored. They want to buy it but she takes against them. “Penny found them irritating in any number of ways – they were ostentatious, full of self-regard, and cheap. They also did not read.” That I read this after a short-lived stint as a landlord with tenants I also came to loathe might have everything to do with why I love the story so much if it wasn’t also perfectly written. Penny is both a normal person and, in her own way, God. Find the collection; there are 98 other gems as well as this one.

Collected in 99 Stories of God, Tuskar Rock Press, 2017

‘Vuotjärvi’ by Sarah Hall

There’s a watery theme emerging but I make no apologies. Nor for choosing two by Sarah Hall. There is more swimming, more sensual evocation of time with a lover, and plenty more of Hall’s brilliant wordsmithery in this story about an unpronounceable Finnish lake. Air is glutinous, silence “benthic”, and no, I’m not ashamed to say I had to look that up. (“Of, relating to, or occurring at the bottom of a body of water.’) Even the mosquitoes get painted with care, “their legs floating long and dusty behind them”. A sense of doom builds from the opening two lines: “She stood on the pontoon and watched him swim out. His head above the lake surface grew smaller and more distant.” Another story that will haunt any lake swimmers among you.

Collected in The Beautiful Indifference, Faber & Faber, 2011

‘The Haväng Dolmen’ by Chris Power

I wasn’t going to pick this story, which is from Power’s first book. I didn’t know which to choose, so I re-read them all again, and could have stopped anywhere, enthused about any of them. En masse, they throb, a collective sense of unease building throughout, amplified by the same character, Eva, cropping up in three linked tales. Throughout Power’s simple language deceives, obscuring complex themes that make his work well worth revisiting. ‘The Haväng Dolmen’ starts with an archaeologist’s talk at a conference in Sweden and accompanies him on a trip to a Swedish stone-age burial site. The experience is intense, reviving memories of a bitter childhood encounter with a mean French boy on holiday and the knowledge that we are all going to die. Sometimes, though, it helps to remember that everyone shares these thoughts, which is why I’m recommending this but hoping you’ll be inspired to read the entire collection. (Incidentally, I knew nothing about this book when I picked it up in a bookshop, intrigued but the scratched-out face of a woman on the front. I didn’t even know Chris’s gender. And my experience was probably all the stronger for going in blind, so I hope I haven’t given too much away.)

First published on longreads.com. Collected in Mothers, Faber & Faber, 2018. Read it online here

‘Bad Latch’ by Curtis Sittenfeld

If life is complicated, people are even more complicated. Often I read to remind myself of this, not to mention to feel better about myself. Being reminded not to be too hasty to write people off never hurts either. In ‘Bad Latch’ a new mother is overwhelmed not only about being a new mother, but also because another mother seems to be winning, assuming you view parenting as a competitive sport, and if someone can price a $62 maternity tank-top on sight, then it’s probably safe to assume she’s not the laid-back type. To be fair, everything about Gretchen seems annoying, from the overpriced top to her performative earth mother stance. But guess what? Life doesn’t always pan out as planned and Gretchen turns out to have her own problems like everyone else. Sittenfeld writes characters you feel like you know while steering clear from stereotypes. She’s a gem of a writer and I can’t wait for her next book, which (as far as I can tell) turns the opening story from this collection, ‘The Nominee’, into a novel about Hillary Clinton.

First published in The Washington Post, New Fiction Issue, 2015.Collected in You Think It, I’ll Say It, Doubleday, 2018. Read it online here

‘The Last Reunion’ by Jane Gardam

I didn’t mean to pick so many stories that close collections, but here is another. ‘The Last Reunion’ brings together four older women who met at college as much younger women. The finality comes from the reunion itself, a final act for a women’s college that is closing down, or rather, amalgamating with a male college and moving counties, but also, one suspects, from the meeting of four people who won’t meet again, not least because they don’t even seem to like each other very much. Gardam, a brilliant and prolific writer, is a master at wry putdowns and deft characterisation. Read it and your life will flash backwards and forwards, almost simultaneously.

Collected in The People on Privilege Hill, Europa Editions, 2008. Read the first few pages here

‘The Isabel Fish’ by Julie Orringer

Where was Julie Orringer when I was “coming of age” like most of the characters in her stories? It’s not that I’d have been able to relate to all their predicaments – I still don’t know what the ‘Devvies and Sallies’ are that Tessa is trying not to take while babysitting her little niece in ‘Care’ – but it might have been enough knowing those characters were out there. Again, it was hard to narrow my choice – writing this I’m worrying I cheated this entire exercise, picking collections rather than stories – but perhaps it doesn’t matter when each story is so good. ‘The Isabel Fish’ is the title story in How to Breathe Underwater in all but name: a teenage girl needs to learn how to breathe underwater in preparation for a family holiday to St Maarten in the Dutch Virgin Islands so her parents sign her and her brother up for scuba lessons in the local Y pool. But if that sounds rosy, the set up is anything but. The girl is the “canker of her brother Sage’s life”. He hates her because of what happened “last November”, which we quickly learnt involved his girlfriend, Isabel, drowning after a car crash. His sister survived. There is revenge, guilt and, unexpectedly, hope, all woven together with dexterity and panache. I cried.

Collected in How to Breathe Underwater, Viking, 2004. First published in The Yale Review, July 2003

‘City People’ by Lydia Davis

I first read ‘City People’ without any knowledge of the literary phenomenon that is Lydia Davis, which is an embarrassing admission. Unsurprisingly, I adored it. Another Davis story written expressly for me, or for the me that might struggle after leaving the city for the countryside. So many of her stories seem to have been written expressly for me, something I suspect is true for many others, damnit. They are sharp, dry and, usually, funny. And often very, very short. In ‘City People’, which at 130 words is shorter than this paragraph, a couple struggle with their move to the countryside, feeling uneasy at the strange noises and quarrelling more. “They cry, or she cries and he bows his head.” Everything is wrong, although not necessarily with the countryside. “We’re city people,’ he says, ‘and there aren’t any nice cities to live in.’”

Collected in Samuel Johnson is Indignant, McSweeney’s, 2001. Also, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Picador, 2010. Read online here

‘The Sewing Room’ by Mary Costello

If you’ve read this far and I still haven’t convinced you to dip into any of the stories, then this is the one. The one that catapulted me into my obsession with the form. I love Costello’s own story almost as much as I love this one, which closes her first collection. (She has since written two novels, the most recent, The River Capture, published this autumn.) ‘The Sewing Room’ is a simple tale about a moment of passion with life-long consequences. The writing is bare and unsentimental, the emotional impact brutal and devastating. Alice opens her story at the end of an afternoon sewing ahead of an evening to mark her retirement as an Irish primary school teacher. “There had been a child,” we learn early on, our readerly hackles right to be raised at that ominous ‘had’. Costello got the idea for the story from overhearing a snippet on the fringe of a gathering about how “so-and-so’s son is a lawyer now, in Boston”. Alice is Costello’s so-and-so, the baby the Boston lawyer. Costello allows Alice only a flash of judgment about what happened, leaving the reader to feel furious on her protagonist’s behalf. Buy The China Factory to read this story and you’ll be rewarded with the rest of the collection, which is equally luminous.

Collected in The China Factory, The Stinging Fly Press, 2012

Introduction

This took some doing. How on earth does one begin to choose a mere, magical twelve? Ultimately, I decided by creating three categories: stories that inspired me to write when I was much younger, and before I ever published, that lingered in my memory; next, contemporary stories that make me feel happy right now, ones that keep me writing. Then I snuck in a third category: new and upcoming writers, published by the University of Roehampton’s Fincham Press, where I am an editor. I think these five young women are fabulous now, and I think their writing is going to stay with you, and give you permission, and make you cry, and feel, and laugh in the future.

‘Fern’ by Jean Toomer

This has to be number one, because it’s haunted me for 30 years, ever since that first reading, age 19, English undergraduate at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. I have driven my own students mad with it ever since. That first line, daaamn, it grabbed me by the throat: “Face flowed into her eyes…” It made me sit up and ask what was possible on the page, and to ask what I was allowed to do as a writer. Fern is a bewitching woman with that way of attracting men and not giving a damn, standing on her veranda, eyes all in the distance, neck-back inches away from an errant nail in the wall, unknowable, indefinable. The narrator is obsessed by her, they go out one day, she faints – or perhaps it’s a sexual metaphor – whatever the case, in the end, nothing is really concluded or even understood. You’re left with the odd impression that Fern or women like Fern will be standing there swaying forever, perplexing men, and also with the idea that women like this are probably very easy to understand, if men could make listening more important than conjuring enigmas of hurt and beautiful women. Toomer’s style is often odd, his prose is full of unapologetic lyricism, sensuality, and even now, when I read him, I want to sway, sway, like a cornflower, want to be lost in the sound of the South, this bewitching, complex place, so packed full of pain and beauty.

The more I learned about Toomer himself, the more fascinated I became, about the mixed race heritage that he seemed to deny, at why he was never quite the cream of the Harlem Renaissance crop like Zora Neale Hurston and Baldwin, at why he remained that confounding thing, a ‘writer’s writer’, which is to say, not commercially successful. Some reports suggest his eventual spiritual conversion gave him insurmountable writer’s block. I think every word of his anti-narrative prose was a gift, and that Toomer was doing something with language that no other black writer then or since has quite accomplished. It’s not just the surrealism, or the beauty, or the pain. He gave no fucks, and every part of my learning, rebel-self responded viscerally.

First published in Cane, Boni and Liveright, 1923. Read the story online here

‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid

When I was growing up, I found a lot of Caribbean literature [shhh, whisper it] unbearably worthy. Perhaps it was what they gave us to read at school, perhaps I had swallowed a colonialist aesthetic [ahem, Stephen King], but there was something so obedient about these literatures of my youth, before I had the capacity to realise, for example, what Naipaul or Sam Selvon were trying to do. Our nonfiction, speeches, essays, our political rhetoric from Garvey to Fidel was so subversive and often so beautiful, our poets from Mutabaruka to Louise Bennett so playful and irreverent. Was reggae our only recourse for story? It was really only when the deliciously vulgar and mischievous Anthony C. Winkler blew Kingston apart with his 1987 novel The Lunatic that I stopped being so annoyed by the literary conservatism. All along, it was Antiguan writer Jamaican Kincaid’s short stories that sustained me. She never explained her femaleness, her heritage, her blackness. She was just that, and you accepted it, and she assumed your ass would get her, and if you didn’t, she seemed unbothered. She was a modernist, a sometimes-magic realist, and she seemed fearless to me. ‘Girl’ is one of her better-known and most beloved short works, taking the form of a list of declarative statements or commands, made by an unknown mother figure to who we presume is a daughter. In one long, unfurling, brilliantly detailed sentence, we see the entirety of domestic and social expectation on a young black girl’s head. I realise, curating this anthology, how important sound is to me, just as in Jean Toomer’s work, so in Kincaid. “Are you really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?” Kincaid asks, a po-face, bad-gyal call-to-arms. I wanted to be exactly that kind of woman.

First published in The New Yorker, June 26, 1978. Collected in At The Bottom Of The River, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983. Read it online here

‘Death in The Woods’ by Sherwood Anderson

I have an abiding fondness for the tragic, under-sung artist and Anderson is one of them. He has an astonishing ability with character and this piece is one of the best examples of him showing off his craft and huge empathy. An old woman is responsible for feeding things: cows, men, dogs. The fact is that her entire world has fed on her, and Anderson chronicles her life and solemn death with such wisdom and tragic understatement. The ‘dog scene’ is unforgettable. It’s that bold eye, that truth-seeking, that intense regard for small things, that precision of language, that kindness, that gets me every time. Read everything he has ever written, I say. And slowly.

First published in Death in The Woods and Other Stories, 1933, Liveright. Read the story online here

‘The Distance Of The Moon’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

This is a gloriously sensual story, narrated by a man who wants another’s wife – but the true star of the show is the moon. Calvino imagines it so close it risks dipping its scales in the sea. Fishermen gather lunar milk as the protagonist writhes in unrequited love. I still remember discovering magic realism and fantasy – adult literature that gave me permission to work seriously with playfulness, allegory and the “precious muck” of detail. This is a great example of the form – full of texture and motion and mischief and longing. I suggest you read it while eating a very good crème brûlée.

First published in Cosmicomics, Giulio Einaudi (Italy) and Harcourt Brace (US), 1965. Currently available from Penguin Modern Classics, 2010, and as a £1 Penguin Modern, 2018. Read the story online here