Author: Jonathan Gibbs

‘Tangled Up in Blue’ by Bob Dylan

When I was a kid, my dad had this beat up leather case he stored his albums and 7” singles in which I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere near (which obviously meant that all I wanted to do was see what was inside!) One day, when I was about 11, I sneaked it into my room and was flicking through the records when the title of a song caught my eye – Tangled Up in Blue. I had no clue what it meant so I took the single out and played it on my cheap little record player. From that first verse – “Early one morning, the sun was shining, I was laying in bed, wondering if she’d changed at all, if her hair was still red” – I was intrigued. I didn’t know songs could be life stories like that, I was totally immersed in the lyrics and invested in this relationship with the singer and the redhead who worked in a “topless place” who gifts him a book of poems written by “an Italian poet from the thirteenth century”. I played it over and over. Some of the language was confusing, his phrasing too clever for my youthful mind, and it felt like a riddle I had to solve, or hieroglyphics on a tomb I needed to decipher, but it definitely made me feel something. A connection. A sensation of words transporting you someplace else. I never had that with a song before. ‘Tangled…’ feels like poetry because it is.

From Blood on the Tracks, 1975, Columbia Records

‘Tralala’ by Hubert Selby, Jr

There was a gnarly guy named Kenneth who was in my English class in college. He had a shaved head, a fetish for plastic buttons and lived on a diet of bongs and Kraft cheese slices. Importantly, he also had a flat where me and my mates could go and drink vodka and listen to records. To say his flat was monastic, is an understatement – stained mattress in the living room, bare floorboards, cigarette butts everywhere – but he had a ton of vinyl and even more books. Mounds of them, all piled up in precarious piles, floor to ceiling. It was here I discovered Thomas Pynchon, Aleister Crowley, William Blake, Plutarch, Alexander Trocchi. It was like the best, most fucked up, library ever. It was also where I discovered – Kenneth’s hero – Hubert Selby, Jr. He, reluctantly, gave me a loan of his dog-eared copy of ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’.

Which brings me to ‘Tralala’. 

She picks up sailors, takes them to a room, knocks them unconscious then robs them. Her world is bleak and unrelenting, like a fever dream that keeps escalating and escalating, but you can’t look away. The horrifying last paragraph of the story provoked an intense, almost violent, physical reaction from me. I carried the image of it with me for days. Weeks. Took me a decade before I could brace myself to read it again.

Some stories can be parasites that infect you and alter your DNA a little. 

First published in Last Exit to Brooklyn, 1964, Grove Press)

‘Birdland’ by Patti Smith

When I was a teenager, I used to lie on my bed in my room in the dark and listen to John Peel on the radio. One night he played a song called ‘Birdland’. I didn’t realise at the time that it was inspired (just like Kate Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’) by Peter Reich’s memoir of his father, Wilhelm Reich. The first line – “His father died and left him a little farm in New England” – is softly spoken by Patti, over a mournful, sparse piano, and the story is about a boy, at his father’s funeral, who believes he sees a UFO being piloted by his dead dad. There are too many achingly beautiful lines to quote, but I always loved “It was as if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars, ‘cause when he looked up they started to slip…”

I went out and bought Horses the next day. (God, I miss John Peel)

From ‘Horses’, 1975, Arista Records

‘Blood’ by Janice Galloway

I once wrote in a short story of mine – “a woman is fluent in the language of blood”. Never was it more evident than in this visceral, almost carnal, story about a schoolgirl who starts her day having a sanitary towel jammed into her mouth to stem the bleed from a tooth extraction at the dentist and ends with her, at school, stuffing toilet paper in her underwear to stop a heavy, unexpected, period. She seeks solace in a music rehearsal room with a rosewood piano and Mozart playing, but the door won’t lock, and she hears the approaching footfall in the corridor of the students as the ‘unstoppable redness’ seeps from her, unable to stanch the bleed. 

The story is sinewy, compressed, with not one ounce of flab. Truthfully, I could have picked any of her stories. Janice Galloway is not Scotland’s best writer, she is simply the best writer, full stop.

From Blood, Vintage, 1991, and also The Picador Book of the New Gothic, Picador, 1991

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff

The last paragraph of this – the final, split-second thought (of a childhood baseball game in the heat of summer) as a bullet shatters through his skull – is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful things I’ve ever read. 

First published in The New Yorker, September 1995, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Night in Question, Bloomsbury, 1995

‘Game’ by Donald Barthelme

A great short story is tightly wound, not one wasted moment, and ‘Game’ is a breathless, claustrophobic, paranoid tale which takes place in a single room in an underground bunker. The two protagonists – Shotwell and the Narrator – are bored and restless, armed with pistols and rocking each other to sleep at night. The story feels as suffocating and airless as the bunker they live in. They are frustrated and strange, and in charge of possibly releasing a missile that could destroy a city. Power to destroy is always in the wrong hands, ‘Game’ suggests, because that degree of power can warp a soul.

First published in The New Yorker, July, 1965, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968, and Sixty Stories, GP Putnam’s Sons, 1981

‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ by Raymond Carver

So many Carver stories could have been on this list, but I chose this one because – in only 1600 words or so and set entirely on a driveway where a garage sale is being held by the alcoholic narrator – we see the broken remains of a life, and how important connection is, however minimal that may be. 

A young couple scope out the furniture pieces, possibly to buy for their own apartment, but there are no price tags on any of the items. As the girl is looking through his record collection, they put a song on and dance together.

There is no traditional ‘plot’ and the reader is only drip fed certain tiny, but crucial, elements of information. Nothing is resolved, everything is implied. 

First published in Quarterly West, 1978. This version first published in the Paris Review, 1981. Collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981, and Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic, 1988

‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ by Ray Bradbury

The title is from an anti-war poem by Sara Teasdale. The story is about a lone house that remains intact in a city obliterated by a nuclear bomb. There is no dialogue, other than the chilling automated pre-recorded devices within the house, giving the illusion that these objects are alive. The only things alive. The shock of the shadows of the family on the wall, frozen in time, is an eerie, emotionally annihilating, and starkly relevant, image.

First published in Collier’s Weekly, 1950, and collected in The Martian Chronicles, 1997

‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking’ by Denis Johnson

Reasons that I knew I would adore Denis Johnson.

1. He named his short story collection Jesus’ Son, after a line from ‘Heroin’ by The Velvet Underground.

2. After reading about twenty words of this story I felt the ground fall away from my feet and had to stop to take a breath.

Fuckhead is the narrator, and we are complicit in his story immediately, we’ve been sucked us into his world and dragged along with him in this nightmarish premonition of an accident on a rainy night. Life is senseless, redemption is wonderful but fleeting.

There are some people that you meet, complete strangers, and yet after only a few minutes, you bristle, and instantly feel uncomfortable around them. Sometimes, you trust them implicitly. There’s no rhyme or reason for this, other than an instinct, our primal lizard brain kicking in, sensing who the good guys are. The genuine ones.

Denis Johnson writes the truth. He is the truth. And I trust him completely. 

From ‘Jesus’ Son’, 1992, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Introduction

I don’t have an academic approach to short stories; I simply love them, as a reader, as a writer, and always have done. I can’t really pinpoint why in an intelligent way. The ones I love the most are quite simple. I don’t know why I like them so much. I don’t think it’s as easily explained as having a short attention span; it can’t be, because you need to pay attention to short stories, because they are dotted with clues and every little word can be loaded. I think it’s more that I’m attracted to the idea that short stories are scenes, moments in time, and in a way that seems like a true reflection to me of the way that life is; a series of moments, collected; little stories, scattered together. The opportunity to create my own imaginary anthology is a rather lovely one, and a real indulgence (thank you, Jonathan). I suppose seeing my choices here altogether makes it obvious, what sorts of themes I’m interested in, which are the themes I explore in my own stories in Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love. I make no apology for the stories I’ve gathered here, that are almost all about longing, and intimacy; love, in all its messiness.

‘How to Give the Wrong Impression’ by Katherine Heiny

I adore this gorgeous, gorgeous story of a young woman secretly in love with her flatmate. Written in second person, it captures the torment and tenderness of longing in such a simple yet moving, and also funny but not too funny, way. Every now and again, while telling some sort of potentially humorous anecdote, like going to buy a bed with the flatmate (“This is a great activity for you, it’s almost like being engaged”) she lets slip these lines which are so beautiful and lovingly-written that I can’t help but feel my heart break a little. Like: “Wonder if you feel too comfortable with him to truly be in love. But then he licks the fudge off his thumb and smiles at you, his hair still ruffled from the wind outside. He is the love of your life, no question about it.” I mean: doesn’t it just do something to you? 

First published in the New Yorker, September 1992 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Single, Carefree, Mellow, Fourth Estate, 2015

‘Parental Fade’ by Polly Rosenwaike

I have lost count of how many times I’ve read Polly Rosenwaike’s collection. I love the way she writes so beautifully and so tenderly about the interior lives of women and love; it speaks to me very much. It’s hard to choose between my two favourites – ‘Tanglewood’, about a woman meeting the unrequited love of her student days many years later, and ‘Parental Fade’. But I’ve gone for ‘Parental Fade’, because it’s just timeless and pitch perfect. It’s written in the first-person plural, about a couple trying to sleep train their newborn baby. In her beautiful, spare prose, Rosenwaike captures all the exhaustion and magic of that sleep-deprived newborn baby time in such a poignant way, as the couple takes it in turns to sit by the baby’s crib, thinking about the future and a time when all this will have faded, like “jeans and hair dye. Paper and summer. Music, clapping, laughter.” The ending of this story is just so, so beautiful, it truly did bring tears to my eyes.

First published in the New Delta Review, 2013, and available to read here. Collected in Look How Happy I’m Making You, Doubleday 2019

‘The Evolution of My Brother’ by Jenny Zhang

Jenny Zhang’s stories in Sour Heart are connected by the theme of familial love, but a particular kind of familial love when your parents are immigrants; a sort of fierce protectiveness that you both want to run from but also can’t live without. ‘The Evolution of My Brother’ is about just this. The narrator is frequently mean to her little brother, who has a stammer and can’t say her name right; at the same time, she is sad when he grows out of the stammer, because in a way, she is no longer his, or he is no longer hers, and it means he is growing up: “I didn’t want my brother to grow up, just like my mother hadn’t wanted me to grow up nine years ago. I was the same as her–someone who nurtured my pain as if it could stop things from changing.” This weird, at times gross, story left me feeling like I wanted to call my own brothers up and tell them how much they mean to me. 

First published in Rookie magazine, 2011 and available to read here; collected in Sour Heart, Bloomsbury, 2017