Year: 2023

‘The Garden Party’ by Katherine Mansfield

It is impossible for me to think about Mrs. Dalloway without also thinking of ‘The Garden Party’ which should be recommendation enough. Mansfield’s story, like Woolf’s novel, is about death in the middle of a party, but instead of Clarissa and her middle-aged memories and longings we have Mansfield’s child protagonist Laura hovering between the worlds of childhood and adulthood, innocence and knowledge, life and death, wealth and poverty, witness, and denial. Written in prose like dappled sunlight and deep shadow.

First published in 1922 as a three-part serial in the Westminster Gazette and later collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories, Alfred A Knopf, Inc and widely anthologized and available, including at Project Gutenberg

‘I Stand Here Ironing’ by Tillie Olsen

“I stand here ironing and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.”

Olsen gives us everything in the first line: the never-ending work of poverty and motherhood, the single, unpartnered I, the impossibility of explaining, the impossibility of giving what is needed, the never-ending continued attempt to give it anyway. “I Stand Here Ironing” is a mother’s agonized internal monologue in response to a well-meaning social worker’s questions about her oldest daughter. How to gather the threads of history, circumstance and harm that distorted her daughter’s life? How to explain what she could have been, might still be? It’s the way the daughter shines darkly from within this lament that breaks my heart wide open. Both social worker and mother have seen “her rare gift for comedy on the stage that rouses laughter outof the audience so dear they applaud and applaud and do not want to let her go.”

First published in Pacific Spectator, in February 1956. Collected in Tell Me a Riddle, Dell Publishing, 1956

‘The Debutante’ by Leonora Carrington

“It was to escape from the world that I found myself each day at the zoo. The beast I knew best was a young hyena. She knew me too. She was extremely intelligent; I taught her French and in return she taught me her language. We spent many pleasant hours in this way.”

Carrington was twenty when she wrote “The Debutante.”  I think of her living with Max Ernst—more than twice her age and married—in a village in Southern France in an old farmhouse bought with money cadged from her mother but registered only in his name, World War II already a threatening cloud on the horizon. I think of her painting alongside an already well-established artist and then slipping away to write these fierce, strange, little stories, making worlds only she could see. I was twenty-three when I bought the then new 1993 Virago edition of Carrington’s stories and read this feral, bloody, wildly funny story about disturbingly entitled rebellion (the poor maid!). I’ve been writing towards it ever since. 

Originally written in 1937. Possibly published in French in a small magazine—Carrington’s publication history is complex! Collected in The Seventh Horse and Other Tales, Plume, 1988. Republished with an introduction by Marina Warner by Virago in 1993. Now available in The Debutante and Other Stories, Silver Press, 2017 and The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, Dorothy, 2017

‘I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like’ by Noy Holland

Woooo! Technically this story is too new to me. There was supposed to be something else here. But don’t we deserve a shot of pure joy? I walk around reciting lines, humming them, like it’s a song not a story. It might be a song, not a story. I can’t stop singing it.

Collected in I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like: New and Selected Stories, Counterpoint Press, 2017

‘Wants’ by Grace Paley

“Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years so I felt justified.” A woman runs into her ex-husband on the way to return two Wharton novels that have been overdue for eighteen years. (She checks them out again after paying the fine because she read them so long ago.) They reminisce a little. “But as for you,” the ex says, “it’s too late. You’ll always want nothing.”

He had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment.

And she sits back down on the library steps to consider her wants. That’s it. That’s the whole story. But contained within it are a few lifetimes, a critique of state bureaucracies, a philosophy of breakfast, self-acceptance, change, continuance, and several more unforgettable lines.

Collected in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974

‘Conversation with My Father’ by Grace Paley

Ars poetica in the form of an argument, one I’ve often had with myself. “I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” says the narrator’s father from his hospital bed, “the kind de Maupassant wrote, or Chekov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and write down what happened to them next.” And so she tries, and (according to her father) fails, due to jokes and a too firm commitment to the possibility of change. “Tragedy!” he shouts in the final lines, “When will you look it in the face?” (I sometimes walk around my house saying this to myself, but it makes me laugh so the narrator wins after all.)

Collected in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974

‘Love’ by Grace Paley

This story made me think it was possible to marry someone who would say, “What a good idea,” when I announced I had written a poem, and who would discuss whether government policy looks more like a floor or a ceiling. (Reader, it was possible.) I think maybe once a week, with great longing, about the scene where the narrator sees her former friend Margaret in the market and, taken off guard, they forget their enmity and smile at one another. The narrator takes Margaret’s hand as she passes, kisses it, and presses it to her cheek, a gesture of love that is not—as her husband suggests later—truly for Margaret, but for Louise, who Margaret took with her and who the narrator misses even more. How many different kinds of love can you get into one five page story? So many. 

Collected in Later the Same Day, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985

‘In This Country but in Another Language My Aunt Refuses to Marry the Man Everybody Wants Her To’ by Grace Paley

Only two pages long, but isn’t the title already a story unto itself? The man is never mentioned. Indeed, the story is mostly about what is not there. The aunt refuses to tell the narrator about the terrible things the grandmother has seen. The grandmother and the father tell the aunt she has not lived. The horrors of war and revolution flare up in a sentence or two, go on humming in the background. I cannot separate this story from ‘Conversation with My Father.” I think of it as the matriarchal counterpoint. The final lines: “My grandmother said to all our faces, Why do you laugh? But my aunt said, Laugh!”

Collected in Later the Same Day, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1985

Introduction

I have not yet read everything there is. So these sorts of lists cause me a degree of discomfort. Here are twelve stories which occurred to me. They were not chosen with any organising principle in mind. None that I am aware of in any case. Unless …. 

I have the suspicion that there is something about a great short story that is entirely sufficient to the sliver of life spent reading it. You begin it at exactly the right moment, it fills you completely while you read, it makes the changes to you that the author intended – or even better, changes they could never have predicted – and it leaves you as you leave it, gone from each other entirely. Something has happened to you. But it has been so subtle and so quick that you have not noticed. The person who finishes the story is other than the person who started it. Necessarily, when this happens, the reading itself is forgotten.

So, here, maybe, are twelve stories that were not quite good enough.

‘The Colonel’s Photograph’ by Eugène Ionesco, translated by Jean Stewart

This was, somehow, part of the set reading in either English or French (I read it in English, but perhaps we looked at the French as well) in secondary school in Ireland in the 1980s. It was the first non-realist piece of fiction that I’d ever encountered and it made a huge impression on me. What is going on? How are people being murdered continuously even though everyone knows what the murderer looks like, and how he operates, and where? Why are there military trucks in the street? Who is the colonel? Why are people so interested in his photograph? So interested that it gets them killed? What you need to understand is this: the contents of Edouard’s briefcase, the rumble of those military trucks, the click of the impossibly tall policemen’s boots, a bouquet of flowers, a fountain.

The original, ‘La Photo Du Colonel’, first appeared in Nouvelle Revue Française, 1st November 1955. This translation is from the collection of the same name published by Faber & Faber in 1967, and in the USA by Grove Press in 1969

‘Mystery in São Cristóvão’ by Clarice Lispector, translated by Katrina Dodson

Much as in Ionesco’s story, there is something here – barely hidden – that should worry any homeowner, family man, upstanding member of society. The fragility of bourgeois life is much attested to, but it’s always fun to see it wobble, and in this close-to-perfect story Lispector – genius of the invisible incident – gives everyone the heebeegeebees.

Appears in the New Directions / Penguin Modern Classics Complete Stories, 2015. The original, ‘Mistério em São Cristóvão’ was first published in a pamphlet by the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Health in 1952. More famously of course in the collection Family Ties in 1960)

‘How Things Were Done in Odessa’ by Isaac Babel, translated by Peter Constantine

From 1923, this tells the story of how Benya Krik became The King. It’s funny and it’s not-funny, but it is funny, because you have to laugh. I would also commend to you the story of the death of Froim Grach. And any other of the Odessa stories for that matter. And any of the Red Cavalry stories, of course. And anything by Babel. Everything, in fact, by Isaac Babel. For Isaac Babel is The King.

First published in Russian in LEF: Journal of the Left Front for the Arts #4, 1923. Appears in the Norton Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, 2002

‘The Story’ by Cathy Sweeney

A story about a story is one of my favourite sorts of stories. In this story by Cathy Sweeney is another story, by a man called Albert Solberg. It is read by the narrator in a shed, on and off, smoking a pipe, in secret. The secret story is always, ultimately (isn’t it?) a love story. And even a story about a love that appears afterwards, when it is all too late, when there is nothing to be gained from it but pain and sorrow, is still a love story.

From the collection Modern Times, Stinging Fly Press, 2020