‘The Single Reader’ by Louis Auchincloss

Auchincloss was incredibly prolific, writing novels, short story collections, biographies, histories, and criticism, but when you come down to it, his preferred format, and the one he based much of his work on, was the character sketch. Powers of Attorney, which ‘The Single Reader’ comes from, is a collection of stories about the partners and associates of a New York City law firm. Auchincloss himself was a New York lawyer and dedicated the book to his partner Lawrence Morris.

Morris Madison, one of the partners in Tower, Tilney & Webb, begins to keep a diary after his wife leaves him. At first, it’s merely an outlet for his anger against his wife and his clients, but soon its focus shifts from his thoughts and emotions to his observations of the workings of the firm and the ways of New York society. Soon, it becomes the centre of his existence:

It not only demanded its daily addition; it demanded footnotes, appendices, even illustrations. Madison found that he spent as much time editing it as he did writing it, but the former task had the advantage of requiring a constant rereading of his work, a constant reabsorbing of his own glowing, crowded, changing picture of the city, now a Bruegel, now a Hogarth, now a quiet, still Vermeer.

By the time Madison is in his fifties, his shelves are lined with dozens of the red morocco-bound volumes of his diary. When he considers marrying an heiress to raise his position in the firm and society, however, he finds himself unable to choose between her reality and that of the world he’s created – or rather, recreated – in the diary. It’s effectively a Borgesian tale set in the wainscoted world of Wall Street.

Included in Powers of Attorney, Houghton Mifflin, 1963

‘The Minnesota Multiphastic Personality: A Diagnostic Test in Two Parts’ by A. B. Paulson

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is a widely used examination tool for assessing personality and psychological profiles by asking for responses to 500-some statements such as, ‘I have often been called a strong personality’ or ‘I have seen things that others thought weren’t really there’.

In this story, Paulson uses the MMPI as a structure into which he insinuates a character sketch. Companies used to give the MMPI to prospective employees as a way of screening out undesirables, and in this case, we realize that Paulson is telling us a story about a very unhappy man struggling with feelings of inadequacy and hatred of his boss:

He said, “What are you doing here?”
I didn’t know the right answer.
He said, “I was testing you and I knew that you followed me here.”
I thought I had been testing him.
He and the lady had been drinking together.
He said, “You are a man now.”
I said, “I wish you were dead.”
I have hidden a fugitive and protected him with half- truths.
Sometimes I wish all this weren’t happening.

I don’t claim that this story ranks on a par with the best of Chekhov or Cheever, but I’d recommend any writer who’s serious about working in the short story form give it a read because it demonstrates what’s possible if you set aside the notion that, short stories have to be prose narratives like something by, well, Chekhov or Cheever.

First published in Triquarterly 29, 1974; included in Extreme Fiction: Fabulists and Formalists, selected and introduced by Robin Hemley and Michael Martone, Pearson Educational, 2004

‘Headline Harry’ by Evelyn Shuler

This is just a throw-away two-page one-joke story, but it’s also a play on how a medium can shape our perceptions. In this case, Harry is a headline writer for a newspaper who has fallen into the habit of turning every experience into a headline. ‘FIRST SNOW FLURRIES WHITEN CITY STREETS’, he thinks as he leaves his office one evening. When he observes a well-dressed young man flirting with a shop clerk, he plays with how to frame the story, rejecting ‘YOUNG HEIR WOOS CLERK AT 5 AND 10’ and trying to come up with something suggestive but not lurid, catchy but not hackneyed.

When he gets home, his wife keeps interrupting these reveries and he begins to imagine turning their marriage into a series of scandals. ‘NAGGING WIFE DEMANDS REPLY’ leads to thoughts of leaving, a fantasy of her taking a lover, and, finally, his jealous retribution. ‘HUSBAND IN FURY KILLS WIFE WITH HAMMER’, he thinks. Except that this headline wouldn’t work in what would inevitably be just a one-column story. HAMMER is too long. It has to be something short: AXE? Yes, ‘HUSBAND IN FURY KILLS WIFE WITH AXE’. Except he doesn’t own an axe, so he just has to hang in there.

First published in Redbook magazine, November 1934

‘The Ball’ by Virgilio Piñera, translated by Mark Schaefer

Virgilio Piñera’s name ought to be as familiar as that of García Márquez or Borges. His short stories, a sample of which are collected in Cold Tales (ably translated by Mark Schaefer), are all, in some way, variations on the theme of taking things to extremes, on the inevitable collision of the ideal with the real.

In this story, a countess decides to recreate a lavish ball she’s read about in a historical account. But soon after mailing out the invitations, she realizes that she has at least seven different balls to consider:

First: the ball as it was actually held one century ago.
Second: the ball as described by the chronicler of the day.
Third: the ball as the countess imagines it, based on the chronicler’s description.
Fourth: the ball as the countess imagines it, without the chronicler’s description.
Fifth: the ball as she imagines holding it.
Sixth: the ball as it is actually held.
Seventh: the ball as it is conceived based on the memory of the ball as it is actually held.

As she contemplates these different realities, her life becomes “a perpetual game of the solitaire of possibilities”. Her husband, the count, insists that a ball must be held. She protests that to do so would not only require choosing one of the seven balls as a starting point but inevitably lead the resulting ball to be seen as one or more of the others, causing a potentially infinite number of combinations.

Included in Cold Tales, Eridanos Press, 1988

‘The Dilemma of Matty the Goat’ by Seumas O’Brien

After Matty the Goat’s first wife runs off and disappears, he marries again. Then his first wife returns and he faces a quandary: Stay and be guilty of bigamy? Leave and be guilty of desertion? The safest thing, he thinks, is to commit suicide. But it’s “too weighty a problem for a poor man like myself” to decide, and so he travels to Madrid to seek the advice of the King of Spain.

“What in the name of all the cockroaches in Carrigmacross brought you here?” the King asks when Matty the Goat shows up on the palace doorstep in Madrid. The two men converse for many days, covering many subjects: “about old times and the price of potatoes, ladies’ hats, and fancy petticoats.” “Old talk like this,” ses the King,

… leads nowhere, because no matter how much we may know about art, literature, and music, the very best of us can only be reasonable and sensible when we have nothing to upset us. A hungry man is always angry, and an angry man is never sensible. On the other hand, a man will make a lot of foolish promises and resolutions after a good dinner, and when he begins to get hungry again, he will think that he was a fool for having entertained such decent sentiments.

Though the story takes Matty on through consultations with the Gaekwar of Persia, the Czar of Russia, and the King of Greece, it’s really just an excuse for a series of conversations that twist and turn and inevitably wrap back upon themselves like a Moebius strip. It’s as absurd and sublime as Waiting for Godot.

At the time it was published, The Whale and the Grasshopper was packaged like Auld Sod nostalgia, but I’d argue it’s the Ur-text for Beckett and Flann O’Brien. It’s a prime example of the gems you can find if you go digging into the forgotten books of the past.

Included in The Whale and the Grasshopper and Other Fables, Little, Brown, 1916 and available on Project Gutenberg here

‘Reality as Port Huntlady’ by Laura Riding

People either love or hate Laura Riding’s fiction, and you probably only need to read ‘Reality as Port Huntlady’ to figure out which side you’re on. It opens innocently: “Dan the Dog came to the town of Port Huntlady with two friends, Baby and Slick.” OK, no problem there. And, in fact, Riding’s prose style is neither intricate nor adorned.

The problem is where Riding’s simple declarative statements lead us. “We are all aware,” she acknowledges, “that there is no such place as Port Huntlady. It may well be that there is a place to which Port Huntlady stands as a lie stands to the truth.” Indeed, as she relates the story of Port Huntlady and its odd inhabitants, she also reflects on the act of storytelling as a futile attempt to create something that matches reality, that storytelling is both limited and infinite in its possibilities:

a story may go on indefinitely unless there is perfect understanding at the start of the limitations that keep a story from being anything but a story.

I once compared reading Riding to looking at a Magic Eye picture, where you can feel your visual perception of the image switching back and forth between what seems like noise and then, a moment later, becomes coherent. It’s both disorienting and, in a way, almost thrilling. I’m not sure she actually pulled off the reinvention of fiction she seems to have been attempting, though. If I had to choose among Moebius strip-like metafictions, I’d probably go with ‘Matty the Goat’ instead.

Included in Progress of Stories, Constable & Co., 1935

‘Antarctica’ by Laura van den Berg

This story, not just about a sister searching for her brother’s remains and personal effects after he dies in an accident, but also about the impact of secrets in his life and hers, was my first introduction to Laura van den Berg’s beautiful work. I think a sense of the mysterious is what brings me back to this story – a bona fide sense of the mystery of other people, that is an earned mystery through a distinct level of alertness conveyed by the narration of the story, an alertness that is a characteristic of this writer’s other work also. I enjoy this mystery, cultivate it in my work. We are not fully knowable to each other, the story (and many other favorite stories) reminds us.

First published in Glimmer Train 88, Fall 2013, and collected in The Isle of Youth, FSG Originals, 2013

‘All Stories Are True’ by John Edgar Wideman

I think he is one of our greatest living writers and adore the way he has drawn fearlessly on autobiography, including devastating events (incarceration of loved ones, repeated losses) to write his fiction. I learn constantly from his transmutation of reality into fiction, his precise, original, utterly compelling calibration of how much truth to tell. Also, the lyricism of that first paragraph, in particular sentences like: “Footsteps, voices, a skein of life dragged bead by bead through a soft needle’s eye.” There is something in the scope of this first paragraph reminiscent of James Agee and yet completely original and specific to Pittsburgh, the natural world a respite rather than pervasive in this setting.

First published in The Stories of John Edgar Wideman, Pantheon, 1992, which was republished as All Stories Are True, Vintage Contemporaries/Picador, 1993

‘Every Time They Call You [The N-Word]’ by Chris Stuck

I believe strongly that non-Black reviewers should not use the full slur word here because that word is not a part of our earned history and not ours to just use as we please. (As Helen Oyeyemi reminds us in one of my favorite book titles, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours). I brace myself, however, for the people who talk about this story, and this collection, taking it as an opportunity to use the word. The story, though, opens out into a psychological terrain that is at once familiar, dazzlingly new, and operating wholly on its own terms. There is a real authority to how this story is told that made me love the collection as a whole. In terms of what I gained though, the main point for me was a reminder of what #OwnVoices means. Movements through time, selection of the most significant events, development of the ending and what constitutes an ending, what should be written as a story versus a novel – this story violates almost every implicit rule of the MFA workshop, and in doing so, completely soars.

First published in Meridian, Summer 2019, and collected in Give My Love to the Savages, Amistad, 2021

‘The Price of Eggs in China’ by Don Lee

I tell everyone I teach writing to about this story. It really has everything I love in short fiction – a completely gripping protagonist whose perspective is conveyed in a close, often sly third-person (Dean); a unique and wholly convincing take on race; a send-up of white publishing gatekeepers (who aren’t characters in the story, but figure in the tale indirectly); and (perhaps most importantly) a dissection of the frenemy status of women of the color, the tension between sisterhood and competition because of how publishing sets up the only one story model of ethnic literature that has so rightfully been criticized by writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Also – and this may be the key component – it has the right kind of, very smart happy ending and gets me with the little flavoring of sentiment I love (that I also look for when I read commercial fiction).

Published in Yellow, Norton, 2001

‘Delicate Edible Birds’ by Lauren Groff

I knew I had to include a story by Lauren Groff in this personal anthology because her level of narrative control and respect for her characters as people has stood out to me as I have read stories that influenced my own. But also, at the level of history as it impacts individuals, and for the way it dissects how much patriarchal perspectives survive even in the most extreme circumstances – this is just a great read. Lauren Groff never forgets the reader in how she writes, in terms of creating genuinely suspenseful stories even as her attention to language could not be more diligent or (often) lovely. I strive to have both these elements in my fiction – page-turning as well as crafted at the sentence level – and I was thrilled when some of the reviews of my collection called it compulsively readable. That sense of momentum for the reader is everything.

First published in Glimmer Train 70, Spring 2009. Collected in Delicate Edible Birds, Hyperion/Windmill Books, 2009

‘The Years of my Birth’ by Louise Erdrich

I first heard this story while driving and forgot to take the correct exit, I was so engrossed. It was read out loud on the New Yorker podcast by Tommy Orange, along with his commentary on the story and its characters, and I found this indelible. The story is about a woman who late in life encounters the family who gave her up for adoption. The rendering of their cruelty to her is vivid; their rejection of her not confined to a single act, but enacted over a protracted period and in evermore, newly cruel ways. The striking twist of the story is that she is white, adopted by a Native American family, and that her physical disability renders her Other to the white family of origin in ways not entirely dissimilar to how they regard Native Americans as Other and as inferior. The sensitively drawn comparisons between these ways of being Other are fascinating in the story, which taught me, as a writer, that no one gets to decide how much is too much for a story about marginalization and resistance. No one gets to cut down multiple identities to just a single one that a hegemonic white audience can somehow more easily deal with.

Published in The New Yorker, January 10 2011, and available for subscribers to read here

‘Hell-Heaven’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

She is such an important short story writer, really very dexterous and able with a few strokes to make a story feel perfectly polished and neat. Yet this was one of the first and few stories in first person, told by a narrator looking back in time, that I think I read of hers (it came out in the New Yorker before being included in the book, and I was immediately moved and affected by it). I love the way Jhumpa Lahiri can convey pain and suffering beneath surface elegance – the woman wearing a lilac raincoat (chic, carefully chosen, belted and fitted of course) while standing in her backyard about to immolate herself. The story also offers such an honest and unsparing look at some of the dynamics of pseudo-family, community as family, immigration as a bond. That felt really new at the time though I think a lot of writers since have taken this in different directions.

First published in The New Yorker, May 24, 2004, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Unaccustomed Earth, Knopf/Bloomsbury, 2009

‘Why I Live at the P.O.’ by Eudora Welty

This was the first short story I read in my first ever fiction workshop (as an undergrad, with the head of the creative writing program, who intimidated me at first but was ultimately such a nurturing influence on my work). We were assigned to read this to learn about the concept of the unreliable narrator and I know this is how most of us use this story to teach in workshops as well. And yet there is so much more than unreliability – there is orneriness, petulance, hope, jealousy, even a kind of greed, including greed for the comeuppance of other people. All within the small space of a family, and all started (the story behind the story goes) by Eudora Welty spying a photograph of a woman doing her ironing at a set-up behind a local post office.

First published in A Curtain Of Green, Harvest Books, 1941. Printed as a Penguin 60 in 1995, and currently available in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. You can hear the author read it here