‘Wage packet’ by Stanley Donwood

The last time I was thinking about writing some short stories, in 2012, I asked for recommendations of collections on Twitter. This collection, by the artist Stanley Donwood, was one of them, and this story in particular has never left me. It’s of the classic escalation type, but maybe it also stuck with me because it evoked a particularly horrible job I had briefly the first summer I was at university, working in a department store café for under minimum wage (‘we have a special student rate’). The story opens with a simple line: “During a period of poverty more pronounced than usual I consider applying for a job.” The job in question is as a dishwasher in a restaurant.

The friend who used to work there tells me that in a restaurant there is a structured hierarchy of abuse; the owner harangues the manager, who insults the chef, who turns angrily on the preparation staff, who vent spleen on the waiting staff, who then unleash their fury on the dishwasher. The dishwasher has very little room for manoeuvre in this concatenation of spite.

The last line of the section I’ve quoted draws attention to one of the features of the story that I enjoy: its use of both a flat tone of resignation and an almost geometric appreciation of the different formations of unfairness. I’ll only add the following hints: every night after work there is a form of lock in, and that the back room of the kitchen houses a type of industrial macerator that deals with scraps of food, a large metal machine known as ‘The Pig’.

First published in 2011, collected in Household Worms, Nosuch Library 2012 and Humour, Faber, 2014; also as a limited edition chapbook of “nearly 100 copies”, 2014

‘Miyah Mansur’ by Birendra Kumar Bhattacharya, translated from Assamese by Arunabha Bhuyan

The protagonist of this story is a writer, waiting at a river dock near his home for a boat to arrive containing the first printed copies of his book. While he waits, he watches the itinerant labourers unloading other cargo. The writer is at first repelled by the lack of interest that the clerk in the dockyard takes in him: “The realization that he did not understand me as a person, my worth, brought a deep pain within me. Suddenly, the happiness of writing and publishing a book was no longer there.” While he waits, he begins to watch the men, some asleep after hard labour. It’s raining heavily, and the Brahmaputra becomes turbulent; an approaching passenger boat is tossed about. The narrator’s servant then says that Anu, the narrator’s wife, is on that boat, returning from her mother’s house. In the drama that plays out, the dock clerk has an important part. Later, another labourer describes all such workers (from East Bengal, now Bangladesh) as “homeless” (aghori), a condition that still evokes suspicion in Assam. It’s that very condition of being placeless that seems to have allowed the dock clerk – whom the narrator doesn’t see as like himself in religion, language, or kind – to behave selflessly. The story always brings a lump to my throat.

Collected in The Greatest Assamese Short Stories Ever Told, selected and edited by Mitra Phukan, Aleph 2021

‘Ganjefa’ by Naiyer Masud, translated by Muhammad Umar Memon

I first read a story by the Urdu short story writer Naiyyer Masud in the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. Later, I came across this volume of his stories in translation (that edition published by Penguin India) in a bookshop in Pune. They really are extraordinary stories, “shimmering”, as the translator notes in his preface, between the mundane and the dreamt. ‘Ganjefa’ (which means a game of cards) opens with the narrator noting, “I began to feel bad about my life the night of the riots.” A young man educated in Allahabad and now returned to his native city, Lucknow, where he doesn’t work, but lives (as his dead father used to) off his mother’s earnings. After the night of the riots, humiliated by being asked by the police not only “What’s your name?” and “Where do you live?” but “What do you do?” he decides to look for work. “Gradually I started to go out less and less, or rather I should say more and more, because now I stepped out several times a day, only to come back shortly thereafter, go out again, return again…”

First published in 1997, collected in Snake Catcher, Interlink Books, 2006

‘The Midnight Mass’ by William Carleton

William Carleton is a fascinating figure. He was born into a Catholic farming family in County Tyrone and spent a couple of years training to be a priest, but dropped out and ended up converting to Protestantism. His stories, written for readers in England, offer scenes of rural Irish life with a certain amount of anthropological gloss. This story, set over Christmas, takes place in a village in the shadow of a mountain, and follows love rivals Frank McKenna and Mike Reillaghan, both interested in Peggy Gartland (Peggy loves Mike, and wants Frank to leave her alone). Also featured: a blind fiddler, and a holy man of sorts, and a climax that takes place during a blizzard on the mountain.

First published in 1834 in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, second series. Here collected in The Party Fight and Funeral, Mercier Irish Classics vol. 4. Available to read online on Project Gutenberg

‘Mathematics’ by Wendy Erskine

I liked this story from the opening line: “The drawer beside Roberta’s bed contained remnants of other people’s fun: a small mother-of-pearl box, inlaid with gold, a lipstick that was a stripe of fuchsia, a lucky charm in the shape of a dollar sign.” Roberta is a cleaner for the properties owned by Mr Dalzell. “She got used to the sick and even the shit.” In one of them, as well as the remnants of a fairly scary-looking party, she finds a little girl of eight or nine, and takes the child home with her. Shimmering with unease, the story also has the irresistible allure of an unexpected gift.

First published in Dance Move, Picador 2022

‘Kookaburra Sweet’ by Irenosen Okojie

Kara has missed her flight from Sydney to London. ‘That was the problem with being late often. It actually changed outcomes when it mattered.’ She buys another ticket, and while waiting in the airport meets an Aborigine man named Kizzy who offers her some Kookaburra branded licorice. She takes a handful and stashes them in her rucksack. Back in London, she finishes the last of the sweets in between the train station and her flat; a metamorphosis of sorts begins: ‘Sure enough she was not herself. Or she was herself, but something different. Something skewed and accidental, something tainted with the margin particles of an incense-smelling man who could mimic the curves of a sidewinder.’ The story made me smile, with its absolute repudiation of what a short story might be for, how it might be shaped, how it might work. Liberating.

First published in Nudibranch, Dialogue Books 2019

‘Old Ghost’ by Anna Metcalfe

Fiction that happens in part in an unnamed place is tempting to write, and hard to pull off. The narrator of ‘Old Ghost’ is driving a taxi, and living in a shared flat in Paris with Rina, a fellow immigrant or refugee. Old Ghost, the character of the title, is a friend – originally a friend of her brother’s. “Actually he was not my brother’s friend; he was trying to become my brother’s friend.” Instead, it is the narrator who befriends Old Ghost, playing cards with him. The story, written in short sections, is full of corrections and elision:

“Did you always know you would leave him?”
“No,” I say. I don’t like this. She knows.
“So tell me about the maps.”
I tell her about the maps.

Sometimes fiction that elides details – names, places, years – reads to me as though the writer is (understandably) dodging a problem. But in this story the elisions moved me. Something is said but much is not, and in that a space is held, tender, for what was lost.

First published in the first issue of The Lonely Crowd in April 2015, and collected in Blind Water Pass, John Murray, 2016

‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald

It could almost have been any of the stories in this volume, that I pored over and re-read from about the age of eight, but maybe this is the one that most exuberantly plays with the poeticising of industrialised America. I think one of the things I learned from and loved in Fitzgerald is that the everyday is itself splendid and elevated (or can be). Just as the narrator of This Side of Paradise, his first novel, loves Swinburne, I love Fitzgerald for that lift of exuberance. What to say about this story? As you know, it follows John T. Unger, an inhabitant of Hades, a small town on the Mississippi, when he visits his friend Percy Washington’s home during a holiday from St Midas’s School, where both are boarders. Fitzgerald has fun with every element of the story. For example, the town where John and Percy alight from their train is called Fish: “There were twelve men, so it was said, in the village of Fish, twelve sombre and inexplicable souls who sucked a lean milk from the almost literally bare rock upon which a mysterious populatory force had begotten them.” In this story greed is the force that’s celebrated, with and without irony, and when greed fails, it’s disillusion that returns; that is to say, the end of the story is all about the end of stories, and coming back to lumpen life.

First published in The Smart Set, June 1922, and collected in Tales of the Jazz Age, Scribner, 1922 and elsewhere, including The Collected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Penguin Modern Classics, 1986

Introduction to a ‘Southern’ Personal Anthology

I live in Florida, and although I’m not a native, I consider myself a Southerner. “The South” is a nebulous, diverse, and perplexing region in the United States of America, often romanticized, vilified, ridiculed, championed, and misunderstood. It’s difficult to define exactly where the South begins and ends. Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi are the South, but what about Kentucky or Missouri? Texas is the South, but at some point, it also becomes the West. A common joke is that Florida stops being the South the farther south one goes into Florida. The boundaries are murky.

So too is so-called “Southern literature” hard to pin down. The great Georgian moralist Flannery O’Connor declared that “anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” Here I think we might let the word “Northern” stand for any reader not from the South. O’Connor imbued her work with grotesque distortions to bring “alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life.”

In compiling this Personal Anthology, I have sought to offer up a dozen tales from/of the nebulous, dirty, fecund South that bring unaccustomed experience to life for the reader.

‘Désirée’s Baby’ by Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1851.

At the end of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which may or may not be a piece of Southern Literature (it is)), our hero Huck promises to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it.” Huck’s dream of evading domestic responsibility (embodied in the maternal presence of Aunt Sally) is a signal theme of American literature, wrapped loosely in a transcendentalist garb that might help disguise all those Manifest Destiny urges seething underneath.

The freedom to light out for the Territory does not transcend all identities, as Kate Chopin’s short, dark, ironic story ‘Désirée’s Baby’ shows. Our Désirée is a foundling of uncertain parentage, discovered beneath the phallic “shadow of the big stone pillar” by her adoptive father Valmondé. Eighteen years later she’s transferred to another man, Armand Aubigny, who falls in love with Désirée, “as if struck by a pistol shot.” But when Désirée’s baby – also Aubigny’s baby – is born, something is a shade off. I won’t spoil the story for those who haven’t read it, but it’s part of a pattern Chopin develops of female heroes whom she frees (as in Edna Pontellier of The Awakening) but can’t quite save. Chopin frees her heroes, but there’s nowhere for them to go, no Territory to light out for. Other writers will come to imagine other freedoms though.

First published in Vogue, Jan., 1893, and collected in Bayou Folk, The Riverside Press, 1894 and available to read here

‘Karintha’ by Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer was born in Washington, D.C. in 1894.

Toomer’s major work Cane was heavily influenced by his early career as an educator in rural Georgia. ‘Karintha’, the first piece in Cane, announces many of the work’s larger themes and strange style. The brief, impressionistic story touches on female sexuality and male desire, and shifts between prose and poetry, anticipating the form of Cane to come – is this a novel? A story cycle? A collection of fragments? A century after its composition, Cane still feels odd and fresh.

First published in Cane, Boni and Liveright, 1923 and available to read here

‘The Jilting of Granny Weatherall’ by Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter was born in Indian Creek, Texas in 1890.

Old Granny Weatherall lies on her bed waiting to die, attended by Dr. Harry and her daughter Cornelia. Her consciousness spills over the edges of the narrative proper, blending with a third-person voice, merging memory with fantasy and dream. A dead child wanders in – her name is Hapsy (not quite Happy, just as Cornelia is not quite Cordelia). And then in comes jilter George, who left her waiting at the altar. She patches a life together nonetheless, but the jilting haunts her on her deathbed. ‘The Jilting of Granny Weatherall’ is an extraordinary feat of harnessing consciousness in prose. It culminates in a devastating negative epiphany that echoes Emily Dickinson’s ‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died-‘: “/and then it was /There interposed a Fly /- With Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz /- Between the light – and me -/ And then the Windows failed /- and then I could not see to see -“

First published in transition, 1929 and first collected in Flowering Judas, Harcourt Brace 1930

‘Sweat’ by Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama in 1891 (although she claimed that she was born in Eatonville, Florida in 1901 for much of her adult life).

In the third chapter of Genesis, Yahweh ejects Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and condemns them to a life of toil: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Historically, most of the blame has been pinned on Eve (Adam’s sin is listening to a woman). Zora Neale Hurston’s intense short story ‘Sweat’ reverses the expulsion from Eden and absolves her hero from sin. Delia is a washerwoman in the black township of Eatonville, Florida. She’s a hardworking, deeply spiritual woman who’s spent fifteen years in an abusive marriage to her jobless, cheating husband Sykes. Her life comes down to “Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat.” When Sykes cruelly tricks Delia into thinking the bullwhip he’s brought into the house is a snake, she finally snaps and defends herself. Sykes ups the ante, bringing in a real snake. Karmic consequences ensue. We get a snake, a tree, a cleansing, and a survivor who, through her own work, her own sweat, returns to the “spiritual earthworks” of her home and garden.

‘Sweat’ condenses some of the themes of Hurston’s major work, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The hero of that novel, Janie, like Delia, survives (and is witness to) disasters (natural and personal). Hurston’s conclusions contrast Kate Chopin’s – she figures out a way for her heroes to live freely.

First published in Firell, November, 1926 and collected in Spunk, Turtle Island Foundation, 1985 and The Complete Stories, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008

‘Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden’ by Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1909.

There are plenty of heavy hitters in Welty’s first collection A Curtain of Green (‘Petrified Man,’ ‘Why I Live at the P.O.,’ ‘Powerhouse,’ ‘A Worn Path’), but none of the stories are as odd and abject as ‘Keela.’ The story’s grotesquerie might first be read as absurd, but underneath is a bedrock of difficult reality. The plot concerns a former carnival barker named Steve, who, with the aid of a local bartender named Max, seeks out a clubfooted black man. This man is Little Lee Roy, who was once Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden: “‘They dressed it in a red dress, and it ate chickens alive,’ [Steve] said. ‘I sold tickets and I thought it was worth a dime, honest.'” There’s so much to unpack in ‘Keela’ that it’s no wonder it isn’t widely anthologized like ‘Why I Live at the P.O.’ or ‘A Worn Path.’ The story resists easy interpretations. Is it about white guilt? Is Little Lee Roy a victim or empowered through the story’s events? How do we untangle the identities Welty knots up in Lee Roy/Keela? An answer – not the answer, but an answer – is that ‘Keela’ shows that America, and in particular the American South, is a freak show con game powered by exploitation.

First published in A Curtain of Green, Doubleday, 1941