If you get to the end of this selection, you’ll notice that the many of the following pieces all coalesce around a subtheme, which is that they are fave stories from fave collections. The former were very hard to extract from the latter, so I wanted to mention each story as a choice in and of itself but also a synecdoche for the collections that they are contained within. ‘Escape From Spiderhead’ is a seminal piece from a seminal collection (please ignore the offensively underwhelming Netflix movie adaptation from 2022). The story is set in a luxurious high security drug testing facility, with characters that are infused with different drugs which influence their emotional states and behaviour. The story is unctuously satisfying in its playfulness with language. The real-time internal monologues of the main character, Jeff, that track his emotional modulation, are somehow at once tender and deeply unsettling. The merging of the familiar yet contrasting languages of bureaucratic big-tech and awkward interpersonal intimacy is both hilarious and very sad, but it’s the ending of the story, where this clipped, emotional sterility breaks out into descriptions of the garden surrounding the Spiderhead compound, that does it for me.
First published in The New Yorker, December 2010. Collected in Tenth of December, Random House, 2013. You can access it here
A Personal Anthology 