Again, you might be tempted to pick ‘Muzungu’, but this is the one for me. She turns Beckett inside out without surrendering the deadpan for a moment. It’s a masterly wrestle: she recombs the fabric of the Beckett text to find new, deep, rich infinities that are all their own. I suppose it’s as much a critical essay in the mode of a short story (in this case, a parody commissioned by McSweeney’s). She does have a critic’s eye when she leaps on Beckett’s one properly tin-eared moment, for sure, but a writer’s subtle mercy in making it work in a different way.
First published in McSweeney’s 49: Cover Stories, 2017
A Personal Anthology 