‘Health’ by Joy Williams

It would be inconceivable to me to begin any selection of my favorite stories without including ‘Health’, which is my favorite short story by my favorite practitioner of the form — my favorite writer, period — Joy Williams. I first read this story when I was eighteen, after picking up a collection put out by Graywolf in the mid-80s called Short Stories by Women. I remember that I bought it for a few bucks in the basement of the Harvard Book Store. That anthology introduced me to writers like Elizabeth Tallent and Ann Beattie — more on both of them in a moment — but it was Joy’s story, ‘Health’, that most thrilled me. It’s a fairly simple story in which a young girl, Pammy, goes to a spa to get a tan. Something serious and sundering may or may not happen while she’s in the tanning booth. (The ambiguity of the encounter — real? imagined? somehow both? — is one of the most haunting elements of the story’s construction.) She exits the tanning spa a different person; the surface area of her innocence has shrunk, irremediably, irredeemably. This story contains an entire world in it, and it’s only about eight pages. It also has the best cough in all of literature.

First published in Short Stories by Women, Graywolf, 1986, and collected in Escapes, Vintage, 1990 and The Visiting Privilege: New and Selected Stories, Knopf, 2015

‘Ice’ by Elizabeth Tallent

I’m excited by the opportunity to highlight some possibly lesser-known stories in this project, and I’d bet that Elizabeth Tallent’s ‘Ice’ is one that many do not yet know. One can feel saddened by this — one can worry about what gets lost when books go out of print, always one can worry about that — while also reveling in the opportunity to be the one to introduce this story into the life of another. This story was Tallent’s first to be published — in The New Yorker, of all places — and it opens her debut collection, In Constant Flight. The story is about a professional ice skater who’s viciously lonely and full of inchoate longings that come to define and circumscribe her. Its final scene — involving the skater dancing on the ice with a man in a bear costume — is pitch perfect, a marvelous marriage of the absurd, the comic, the cosmic, the surreal, the devastating.

First published in The New Yorker, September 1980, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Tallent’s first collection, In Constant Flight, Knopf, 1983

‘The Burning House’ by Ann Beattie

Speaking of endings, it’s hard to top the ending of this Ann Beattie story. I was assigned this story in an undergraduate literature course by Shannon Derby, and it has remained with me in all of the years that have passed since then, which are a great many years. This is Beattie at her absolute finest. A story overrun with people who are both desperate to be known and horrified by that very same prospect. The characters engage in masking — both figurative and literal — throughout the course of a boozy, smoky evening, and the story ends with the narrator, Amy, in bed with her husband. It’s from this bed that the narrator’s husband delivers a speech that ends the story, and, effectively, his marriage. Beattie leaves us there in that unforgiving wreckage. It’s a speech that Beattie, in an interview with The Paris Review, says readers approach her about more than anything else in her work. The temptation is to reproduce the speech here, but I will refrain from doing so, in the hopes that you’ll seek out the story for yourself.

First published in The New Yorker, and subsequently in Beattie’s collection The Burning House, Random House, 1982

‘At the End of My Life’ by Beth Nugent

Beth Nugent is one of the greatest writers you’ve probably never heard about before this. And it’s easy to understand why: her singular collection of stories, City of Boys, has long been out of print. It was the writer Mary Miller — a short story savant in her own right — who turned me on to Nugent’s collection. I can’t remember now which was the story Mary liked best, but for me, although I love each of the stories in that collection — which is rare, in my experience; there are usually at least one or two skips — it’s ‘At the End of My Life’ that I return to the most often. It’s a story I’ve taught every time I’ve ever taught fiction. I just never tire of it, and none of its magic nor its tragedy ever seem to be drained from it by my constant revisitations. The story anatomizes a significantly fraught relationship between Lizzie, the narrator, and her younger, developmentally challenged brother, Glennie. Lizzie longs to escape her familial predicament, but is waylaid by her love and sense of duty toward Glennie. I find that I’m most drawn to stories where some version of this dynamic is at play; stories that take up questions of obligation, of debt, of what we owe ourselves and one another. Impossible questions, naturally, and this story doesn’t provide anything like an answer. Instead, Nugent leaves us to wonder and wander inside of the place Lizzie is asking these questions from, and she does it in an idiosyncratic, singular style.

First published in City of Boys, Knopf, 1992

‘Dance in America’ by Lorrie Moore

I found it especially challenging to choose a favorite Lorrie Moore story to include on this list, though I knew she’d be on it from the get-go. There are so many wonderful options: ‘You’re Ugly, Too’ or ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’ or ‘Thank You for Having Me’ could’ve all easily taken this spot. But, for me, ‘Dance in America’ is Lorrie’s finest story. It’s one that makes me a little teary even to think about, if I’m being honest. The narrator is a disenchanted dancer visiting a college friend, his wife, and their young son, Eugene, who has cystic fibrosis. Without giving too much away, I will say that there’s a moment in which the narrator makes a promise to Eugene that she later, inadvertently, breaks, and her realization of this is one of the most gutting moments in all of Moore’s work. This story, it should also be said, is counterbalanced by Moore’s signature wit, containing one of the most hysterical anecdotes in all of fiction: a story about raccoons catching fire in the chimney.

First published in The New Yorker, Jun 1993, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Birds of America, Knopf/Faber, 1998, and The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore, Knopf/Faber 2010

‘Tumble Home’ by Amy Hempel

Choosing a favorite Hempel story was also challenging for me; there are just so, so many options. In the end, I went with ‘Tumble Home,’ which may or may not be a novella. Its inclusion in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel certainly would allow us then to call it a story, regardless. ‘Tumble Home’ takes the form of a letter written from a psychiatric rehabilitation center; a letter to a man, a painter the writer briefly met before her breakdown. The letter is an attempt to express the inexpressible, the pursuit of which, we are given to believe, may have been what caused said breakdown in the first place. The structural bones of this story are fairly simple — it doesn’t get much more straightforward than an address — but Hempel chisels from marble, and what we get is an exquisite portrait of a woman who, like the narrator in Beattie’s ‘The Burning House’ is desperate to be understood by the object of her affection.

First published in Hempel’s collection Tumble Home, Scribner, 1998, and collected in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, Scribner, 2006

‘Antarctica’ by Laura van den Berg

In a very real sense, Laura van den Berg was my introduction to the short story. It was her story ‘Where We Must Be,’ collected in Best American Nonrequired Reading, that first got my attention, and she has had it ever since. ‘Antarctica’ is, I think, her most accomplished story, and was included in Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery Stories in 2014. Few writers can accomplish what van den Berg does in this story, which is to render whole and legible a terribly unfinished, incomplete soul. She does this in the person of Lee, our narrator, who ventures to the titular frozen continent after her brother is killed in a freak accident at a research outpost. The story is populated by characters facing circumstances they never intended to incur, and those are my favorite kind of characters to watch move through the screens of language and narrative.

First published in Glimmer Train, widely available in van den Berg’s collection The Isle of Youth, FSG Originals, 2013

‘Testimony’ by Jessica Treadway

Many of my favorite stories are concerned with questions of memory and forgetting, how we are calibrated by both forces, in turns. That’s certainly the dynamic at work in Jessica Treadway’s excellent ‘Testimony,’ a story about which I am reticent to say too much out of fear of spoiling it. There are goats in this story, wonderful goats. Also: some pretty serious lying. Read it for yourself to find out more, and then we can talk about it once you’ve finished. It contains one of the most haunting endings I know of, and I know of a good number of them. And a killer last line, too!

First published in Glimmer Train, widely available in Treadway’s collection Please Come Back to Me, The University of Georgia Press, 2010

‘Days,’ Deborah Eisenberg

According to an interview she gave with The Paris Review, this is Deborah Eisenberg’s first short story. This is maddening, incomprehensible. How is it that she arrived at this voice, which feels so accomplished, so idiosyncratic, so deft? She has obviously gone on to write a great number of short stories — her Collected Stories is a veritable doorstopper — and there are so many I love, but it’s ‘Days’ to which I most regularly return. The plot is about as straightforward as it gets: A woman who has given up smoking takes up running at the local Y. Surely this can’t be enough to generate nearly forty pages, you’d think, and you’d be wrong. There are so many lines I want to quote — including a hilarious misunderstanding in which the narrator mistakes Adidas for an airline — but I think maybe I’ll just share the opening two sentences here and encourage you to seek out the rest:

“I had never known what I was like until I stopped smoking, by which time there was hell to pay for it. When the haze cleared over the charred landscape, the person I had always assumed to be behind the smoke was revealed to be a tinny weights-and-balances apparatus, rapidly disassembling on contact with oxygen.”

First published in Eisenberg’s collection Transactions in a Foreign Currency,Knopf, 1986, and collected in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, Picador, 2008

‘Reverón’s Dolls’ by Sara Majka

“Maybe ten or eleven years ago, when I was in the middle of a divorce from a man I still loved, I took the train into the city.”

So begins the first story of Sara Majka’s Cities I’ve Never Lived In, a story titled ‘Reverón’s Dolls.’ I love that first line for reasons I’m not quite articulate enough to capture in words — something about the chilly sense of narrative distance, something about how time is demarcated and gauzy for the narrator. These elements persist in the stories that follow, which are — most of them, anyway — linked. This story in particular follows our narrator — who, she admits, “wasn’t well in the way that [she] would be several years later” — and her recollecting an exhibit of the Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón she once went to see. Cities is Majka’s only book as of now, though she has published a number of terrific stories since the collection came out. Majka is a capital-M Master, and I return to these stories again and again, in awe of their wisdom, their beauty, their exquisite despair.

First published in Jerry, and collected in Majka’s collection Cities I’ve Never Lived In, A Public Space Book/Graywolf Press, 2016

‘Natural Light’ by Kathleen Alcott

This is another story where, when I go to talk about it, it feels most appropriate to just reproduce for you its opening line: “I won’t tell you what my mother was doing in the photograph — or rather, what was being done to her — just that when I saw it for the first time, in the museum crowded with tourists, she’d been dead five years.” I mean, if that doesn’t engage your interest, if that doesn’t engineer serious narrative momentum for you, I don’t know what will. To say too much would be to risk spoiling a story that you can only read for the first time once, so I will only say that Kathleen Alcott’s is one of my favorite voices to read on the page and this story is all the evidence I need to present my case that she is among the strongest sentence-level writers in her generation. I first read this story in Zoetrope, and predicted — correctly, if I can toot my own horn for a second — that it would be included in Best American Short Stories in 2019. It’s simply unforgettable.

First published in Zoetrope 22.1, soon will be more widely available in Alcott’s debut collection of stories Emergency, W. W. Norton, 2023

‘Fifty-Seven,’ Rachel Kushner

The thing about Rachel Kushner is that she understands — with an intelligence that verges on sadistic — the knotty, contradictory dimensions of the self, and nowhere as cannily as in this story, ‘Fifty-Seven,’ which originally appeared in The New Yorker. Its interests as a story — namely, the effects of incarceration on one’s personhood — in the hands of a lesser writer would result in something tawdry and tasteless, patronizing, even. In Kushner’s hands, however, what we are presented instead is a tale both searing and stirring that manages to materialize her protagonist’s singularity against the backdrop of a system which seeks to annihilate it. (Bonus: Listening to Kushner read this story for The New Yorker‘s podcast is a serious lesson in how to read your own work!)

First published in The New Yorker, November 2015, and available to subscribers to read here; not currently collected in a volume of Kushner’s work

Introduction

The short story I think of most often was about a woman whose house was damp whilst she was getting a divorce. It was written in sentence-long paragraphs and I have a vague memory of rotting floorboards with spaces between them. I have a feeling that the divorcing woman went mad for a bit – but it was a domesticated sort of madness, which prevented her from being able to pay her bills but did not prevent people from leaving her alone to look after herself. Despite being tragic in a quiet and strangled sort of way, I think it was quite funny, although I don’t remember any jokes. Things like seasons and vermin and offspring toppled out of existence between the damp and perfect paragraphs that were also sentences.

I’m about 75% sure this story exists. I came across it on the wilds of the internet via a link from I don’t know where, during a time when I was looking for I don’t know what. Probably it sat for a while on my browser in the mysterious coded potential of a small tab getting smaller, squeezed tight by informational clutter administrative and otherwise, before a routine electronic cataclysm caused my system to crash and I lost it along with some other things I had forgotten I didn’t want to forget. The divorcing woman disappeared and mostly what I remember about her are the gaps between her sentences.

Blanchot says that tone in literature is “not the writer’s voice, but the intimacy of the silence he imposes upon the word.” Sometimes I think he means something like – a writer’s voice consists in the vibrations that hang in the air after the story has finished, innocent as church bells on Monday morning. Other times I wonder if it’s the exact opposite – that when you write a story you freeze the thing you’re writing about, like a doctor freezes off a wart, and the intimate silence is the wartless unhealed wound left by words transfigured into chilly unreal.

Either way, it captures what I’m always looking for when reading; the sense of things falling away. At heart I’m something of a secular mystic, and what I like best is when a story leads me right into the middle of an Indiana Jones-style jungle bridge, but whilst it tempts me across to the other side it brings me to a plank that can’t hold the weight of the story’s specificity, so that the wood crumbles away, presenting me to the ravine. As I tumble I remember I never wanted to get to the other side to begin with, and when I started to read, this was what I hoped for: a few moments alone with the blank dark damp.

The short story is a perfect medium for this kind of plunge. With the proximity of both beginning and ending haunting every sentence, it barely exists, a vivid island of words surrounded by their opposites. My favourite stories feel as though they’re always in conversation with their own disintegration. Wanting to exist, but also acutely aware that in so many different ways they can’t, and don’t. I think about my divorcing madwoman and her gappy floorboards. The fact that her disappearance has not disappeared. That she exists as a hole in my head. She’s silent, and her story is riddled with silences, but they’re her silences, specific but inarticulate utterances of the funny aching hollow at the heart of things.

All of the twelve stories I’ve chosen left me with that sense of the apophatic. Each feels as though they have left enough space for me to fall through the cracks. The stories suggested themselves to me in thematic clumps, and I arranged them carefully, according to a design that I can’t quite articulate. The jungle bridge leads from ‘The Blank Page’ to ‘The Instant of my Death’. In between, I hope, are some pleasurable tumbles.

P.S. If anyone does know the story of my damp divorcee – please tell me! If there’s one thing compiling this list has shown me is that the silences of remembered things are usually made more potent by encountering them again.

‘The Blank Page’ by Karen Blixen, under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen

“Hear then: Where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a small snotty lass understands it or not.”

Instead of writing an introduction, I should really have just presented this story. In gorgeous, circuitous detail, it teaches us (the quiet readers of a story narrated aloud by a woman who cannot read) how to produce the most perfect kind of silence. It portrays creativity is inherently female – not, I don’t think, because it’s talking specifically about female creativity, but because it wants to use the particular muffled and obscure experience of being a woman at that time (or any time?) as a metaphor for the awful liberation offered by the symbol created by a work of art. That final image! I find it genuinely revelatory.

Published in Last Tales, Random House, 1957