Another short film – sorry, I’m terrible at reading(!) – with a simple setup: Eunhee is preparing for a recorder exam and this one small stress applies pressure to and sheds light on her relationships with family and friends. A classic short story, I’d say, which successfully puts viewers in the mind of its nine-year-old main character.
Released 2011
Reading this story makes me jealous. The plot spans the history of the planet (I think). The voice is original and so many of the sentences are just *chef’s kiss*. A particular favourite: “Jackets didn’t used to zip up. There wasn’t a single door.” If anyone still thinks that short stories need to be small in scope, or reserved in tone, they should read this. To quote the introduction to the story on Vice: “‘Pee On Water’ is the type of story they’ll be saying, “Dang, this shit is, like, classic,” about in 500 years.”
First published in New York Tyrant and collected in Pee on Water, Publishing Genius Press, 2014. Republished on Vice here
I love stories about sibling relationships. Here, Lulu and the narrator are twins that escaped China’s one child policy and take very different paths in life. It’s a story about social media, political unrest and eSports, and has a classic feel despite its very contemporary subject matter. Apparently, Chen worked as an investigative reporter before writing fiction, which might explain her exacting style. Her collection’s just come out in the UK and I’m excited to read more of her other stories.
First published in The New Yorker, April 2019 and available for subscribers to read here; collected in Land of Big Numbers, Simon & Schuster 2021
It might just be me, but I don’t really visualise characters physically when reading. But Moniz’s characters are so fully embodied, and she writes with such vivid sensual detail that I can actually get a sense of their bodies. As her collection’s title suggests, she’s interested in the physicality of her characters, and this comes through in ‘Snow’, my favourite story of hers. It’s another classic set up (a stranger walks into a bar…) but it unfolds in surprising ways. With its description of a blizzard and a potential affair, I think it would be interesting to read it alongside Sam Shepard’s story ‘Indianapolis (Highway 74)’.
First published in American Short Fiction, Winter 2020 and collected in Milk Blood Heat, Atlantic 2022
I wrote my university dissertation on George Saunders’ ‘Escape from Spiderhead’ and Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box’ and ever since have sought out sci-fi short stories. I struggle with sci-fi novels because of all the world-building and lengthy descriptions – but Chiang, my favourite sci-fi writers, cuts through all of that. His stories might be about Science with a capital S (‘Exhalation’ is about entropy, I think?…) but don’t let that put you off, they’re genuinely fun. Reading Chiang’s stories make me feel dumber and smarter at the same time, and always hit me in the feels.
First published in Lightspeed Magazine, April 2014 and collected in Exhalation, Picador 2020. Read online here
A lot of Swanberg’s mumblecore autofiction-y films aren’t very interesting to me, but Easy, his anthology series on Netflix, shows him looking outward rather than inward. Easy shows how different lives in one Chicago neighbourhood rub up against each other – something I’ve tried to do for West London in my story collection, We Move. It’s hard to pick a favourite story from the series, but I’d definitely recommend ‘Baby Steps’. I think a script is called a ‘scenario’ in French, and that seems a fitting word for what Swanberg does here. He sets up dynamic scenarios for his characters and the actors (who I believe largely improvise) bring them to life. Kate Micucci is so good in this episode.
From Easy, Netflix, 2017
Granny Lin, the protagonist of ‘Extra’, is a character that will always stay with me. I wouldn’t change a thing about ‘Extra’ – I recommend it to anyone who asks me about short stories.
First published in The New Yorker, December 2003, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Random House, 2006
I went through a phase of listening to the New Yorker fiction podcasts to help me sleep. Because of this, there’s a whole lot of brilliant stories that I know the openings to in great detail, but whose endings I don’t really remember. One of those is ‘Seeking Ershadi’, which, in the best possible way, always sent me to sleep. I promise this is a genuine compliment! It’s in no way boring, but the gentle flowing prose and dreamlike storyline takes you effortlessly along. In the story, the protagonist believes they’ve spotted Ershadi, the actor in Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Taste of Cherry’, a film I sought out after listening and relistening to Krauss’ story. The film, already dreamlike, took on an extra layer of surrealness, as I felt I’d already encountered Ershadi myself, even though I couldn’t quite remember what happened to his character. I recommend both the story and the film, but don’t ask me about either of their endings, because I can’t say I understand them…
First published in The New Yorker, February 2018. Subscribers can read online here
This is another ekphrastic New Yorker story. Here a painter forgets one of her canvases in an Uber the night before her exhibition’s opening night. We begin in third person but – spoiler – a first person narrator appears part-way through. The story is always shifting like that. On one hand it’s essayistic – our narrator is writing an essay for the art exhibition (could it get any more Lerner?) – but the plot that unfolds is closer to a police procedural, with digressions about Uber, 80s television and the fall of the Soviet Union thrown in for good measure. Lerner writes interesting essays about art, too, so there’s fun tensions at play here, especially between visual and written art forms – on one level Lerner holds up visual art as superior to literature, but he does so while being able to capture paintings brilliantly within language, showing literature’s power. That all sounds very stuffy, so I’d also say that ‘The Polish Rider’ is very funny, too. If you like writing about painting, I also recommend Ayşegül Savaş’ stories, many of which are available free online.
First published in The New Yorker, May 2016. Subscribers can read online here
As someone trying to write “LiTeRaRy FiCtiOn”, I avoid ever having a ‘point’ to my stories – there’s no message or agenda in We Move. But for much of history, stories have served real-world purposes, with messages that teach and help people. Important information (there are lions in that valley, that water isn’t safe to drink, etc) was conveyed through fiction because stories are easy to remember and interesting to consume. I think Disney and Pixar short films continue this tradition – I binged a whole collection of them with my girlfriend when we got a free trial of Disney+ a few weeks ago. Standouts include ‘Bao’, ‘Piper’ and ‘Far from the Tree’ which in different ways are cautionary tales about overprotective parenting. They teach and they entertain, two things that some literary short fiction may potentially lose sight of. It’s also worth noting that the racoons in ‘Far from the Tree’ are super cute.
Walt Disney Animation Studios, 2021
I found this story, collected in the appealingly named A Sense of Reality, in a second hand bookshop in Leamington Spa when I was in my teens. I remember reading it and shivering at the strangeness of the tale in which a young boy, William Wilditch, chances on a door in the bottom of a tree in the garden of his uncle’s large house. He crawls down a path and finds himself in a strange abode of two very strange people, Maria, an aged woman in a tattered sequinned dress, whose only utterance is “Kwahk”, and the much more voluble Javitt, a one-legged old man. Javitt has a lot to tell William, in homilies that strike the child (and frankly, the teenage me reading the tale) as bulletins from life. I still remember the assertion “Beauty doesn’t come from beauty […] only when you come back to zero, to the real ugly base of things, there’s a chance to start again.”
This is apropos Javitt and Maria’s daughter, Miss Ramsgate, whose pictures in a magazine Javitt shows the narrator. On and on it goes, including a moment of seeing “the treasure”, until finally, several days after he went under the garden, William is able to escape. Was it all a dream? Or something far more psychoanalytical? The story is layered in other frames – the Treasure Island-esque narrative a slightly older William writes about it for the school magazine, and the present-day impetus he has to revisit the house, and the island in the pond where the whole episode took place. Rereading it now, maybe thirty years after the first time, it was no less eerie. I seem to have dreamed it myself, and when you read ‘Under the Garden’, perhaps you will have dreamed it too.
First published in 1957; collected in A Sense of Reality, Viking, 1963; also available as a Penguin 60, 1995
Not exactly fiction, but probably not exactly non-fiction either in a way I find interesting, this episode opens:
The sax wailed piercingly and Marian Jesion shouted: “Let’s go, boys.” On the forest road through the limitless darkness Jesion’s grandmother sighed a tremulous whisper: “Oh God.” Those three voices, raised simultaneously but so clearly out of step, weigh like a stone on the village of Pratki in Elk country.
It’s so theatrical! The narrator, some kind of hovering projection of Kapuścinski himself, is in this Polish village observing/learning about the village dance, in which fifteen dressed up girls stand on one side of the hall, and four boys on the other. The narration shimmers between the dance itself and reports to the narrator later: “After that number, the girls tell me, the boys started pushing and shoving each other.” In just a few pages, different elements are woven together. There are details of the dance:
The girls stood on the blue side and the boys on the red side. They were divided by the multicoloured expanse of the village hall with the bandstand pinned in the middle like a brooch […] The boys looked pensively in the direction of the girls, evaluating the quality of their high heels, nylon dresses, and Czech jewellery, as they mulled over all-too-predictable plans to be implemented later.
But there is also more of Marian Jesion’s grandmother, and of the poor dental hygiene of the village:
Pratki bachelors buy themselves motorcycles and the girls acquire, for a pretty penny, fashionable organdie slips, which is why nobody can afford a tube of Odonto toothpaste (produced y Lechia, Poznań) for three zloty and five grosz.
Lurching in and out of the piece, maybe like the young men steering around the chosen four young women in the dance, are hope, youth, violence, commerce, and… bad teeth. It’s a great piece of writing.
First published in Polish in Polityka. Collected in Nobody Leaves, Penguin 2017, also as a Penguin Modern, 2018
Ben is eighteen. The story opens with him cleaning and greasing his rifle and leaving his house late one night to go hunting in the forest with Phil and Jimmy. In a conifer forest somewhere near Exmoor, they shoot, cook, and eat some rabbit, then drink whisky. Ben is soon off to university, Jimmy about to join the army to train as a mechanic. In the forest, in between bouts of drinking, they try to shoot a deer. An animal is hit, but it takes time to figure out what’s going on, and the hunting trip ends in an undignified exit. The final few paragraphs form one of the most striking endings of a story that I’ve read, leaving the reader absolutely suspended in possibility – something only the short story, perhaps, can do, and breathtakingly done here.
First published in Chemistry and Other Stories, Bloomsbury, 2021
I’m glad to be reunited with a copy of this book, which I got at the Waterstones in Stratford-upon-Avon as a teenager. At that point, I hadn’t read anything like it, and continued to think about it off and on through the years. While I was a reporter at the Times of India in Mumbai in the mid-2000s I Googled James Hall and found only a website for a thriller writer based in Miami. I emailed to ask if he was also the author of Paper Products, telling him how much I’d loved the book, and he said that he was, but that he’d moved on to writing detective fiction because there was no way of making a living from literary stories. Anyway, I like these stories. In ‘Miami Beach, Kentucky’, which is set in a town called Sinking Fork, Kentucky, the teenage narrator’s father, Mean Buck, is the town mayor and owns the radio station. Mean Buck’s best friend is a rather unreliable writer called Thornton Blanding, and the narrator’s mother, Billie Butterworth, is a school teacher. Mean Buck, perhaps abetted by Thornton Blanding, decides that the latest improvement scheme that Sinking Fork could use is to change its name to Miami Beach, and begins to speak about it on the radio early in the morning:
“Miami Beach, Kentucky,” he said, wooing us all, all in our beds, all of us half-dazed from dreaming. “Miami Beach, Kentucky,” he whispered. “We can make our town anything we got the gumption to imagine” […] Then he went on about palm trees and ferns and lobsters and crabs and egrets and laughing gulls, sandpipers and marlin, dolphin, sailfish, red snapper, sea turtles, tarpon.
A collective delusion falls over Sinking Fork, inhabitants lying out in the “halfhearted sunshine” oiling themselves, wearing Hawaiian shirts to school, or painting their houses pink…
First published in The Iowa Review, Winter 1984; collected in Paper Products, WW Norton, 1990/Minerva, 1991
A Personal Anthology 