‘Control Negro’ by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

This story takes the topic of race in America and holds it up under floodlights. But under that runs a chorus of love and remembrance, of a father obsessively watching his son – setting their two lives side by side – and hoping that this time around it will be different: “I wanted to test my own beloved country: given the right conditions, could America extend her promise of Life and Liberty to me too, to someone like me?” I loved the structure Johnson chose for this piece. Having the father tell what happened back to the son gave it an energy I couldn’t look away from.

First published in Guernica, 2017, Collected in Best American Short Stories, 2018. Read online here

‘Half Woman’ by Khalida Hussain, translated from the Urdu by Haider Shahbaz

A woman wakes up one morning and finds that her right eye is not aligned with her left eye. Not much goes on to happen on the surface. In short simple sentences we follow the thought process of the woman as she tries to make sense of what may happened to cause the misalignment, but occasionally, and this happens so suddenly that I feel like I have been doused with cold water, the woman plunges towards what feels like the most truthful part of her consciousness before coming up again to the benign surface of her life. This is possibly the strangest, most mind boggling story I have read. A reminder of how many different ways there are for short stories to be.

This translation first published in Almost Island, 2020. Read online here

‘In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried’ by Amy Hempel

I read this story every day for an entire summer. I am not sure anymore what I was going through then but I am happy to report this story still makes me cry every time I read it. I love the first line: “Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,” she said, “Make it useless stuff or skip it.” I had not realized what an elegy could do until I read this piece. Hempel builds the story’s momentum by painstakingly bringing seemingly disparate details together. I also credit this with teaching me how much can be contained within a paragraph break.

First published in TriQuarterly Magazine, 1983, included in the collection Reasons To Live, 1985, Harper Collins. Read it online here

‘Demonology’ by Rick Moody

Another elegy, this time by Rick Moody for his sister who passed away when she was 37. The paragraph breaks feel like jagged breaths the writer needs to take to recover as he recounts losing his sister. What a few pages contain; the life of a much loved sister in all its minuteness, her children, her jokes, her photography, the sudden shock of her death. There is the sense in this piece that that writer must get everything down on paper before he begins to forget the details of this moment. In the end, Moody acknowledges that he should ‘fictionalize this more,’ the insertion of himself into the text brings his grief even further to the forefront, we are sorry for his loss, we are sorry for all the people who have ever lost anyone they have ever loved.

First published in Conjunctions 26, 1996 Collected in Demonology, Faber, 2000 / Little Brown & Company, 2001

‘I Stand Here Ironing’ by Tillie Olsen

The first and last lines of this story are always like a punch to the gut. In fact, I think the first line here is the greatest first line of a short story I have ever read, or in the top five at least: “I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.” A mother recounts the life of her now (almost) adult eldest daughter and in the telling, Olsen paints the picture of an era, of single motherhood and all the attendant guilt, poverty and, of sibling dynamics. It’s incredibly moving, and a masterclass in how to write monologues.

First published in Tell Me a Riddle, Dell, 1961/Virago 1980

‘Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying’ by Alice Sola Kim

This is an extremely funny and extremely terrifying story about friendship and warped mother-daughter relationships. It also does strange things with POV; the difference in who we think is speaking and who is actually speaking keeps shifting. There are many lessons of craft here, but actually every time I read this story, I am just in complete and total awe of Alice Sola Kim’s imagination.

First published by Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales, 2014, Republished by Tin House, 2018. Read online here

‘Found Things’ by Yewande Omotoso

This is the story I think of when I think of an elegant short story. A woman’s aunt dies, causing her to reflect on her relationships with her aunt, her long-deceased mother, her father, her cousins. In a way it is about the different ways women exist in the world. Quiet and moving, it still feels somehow joyful, as if all the life that has been lived by the characters has not been for nothing.

First published by Kalahari Review, 2015. Read online here

‘The Quantum Theory of Suffering or Why I Look at the Moon’ by Natalie Diaz

I read this piece and can never feel like I’ve quite grasped it, there is a through line of grief whose parameters feel just out of my reach – and then suddenly Diaz brings it all into startlingly clear focus with that last, perfect line.

First published by Guernica/Pen American Flash Series, 2015. Read online here

‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid

What I love about this short story is this whole short story. But also – the fact that Kincaid never once uses the word girl in the text, except for the title, and also that we can see past this list of instructions to touch the outline of the relationship between the two main characters – the speaker and the listener. Everyone should read everything by Kincaid.

First published in The New Yorker, June 26, 1978. Collected in At The Bottom Of The River, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983. Read it online here

‘Brulard’s Day’ by Marie Ndiaye, translated by Jordan Stump

Ndiaye’s long sentences, sometimes luxurious, sometimes incredulous, interrupted by abrupt or incomplete remarks—I’d read ‘Brulard’ again and again just for that, just to reexperience her beautiful prose arrhythmias. Brulard runs into acquaintances who aren’t where they should be. Strangers turn up out of nowhere to send tumbling off-course Brulard’s day of desperate waiting. Ndiaye gives you just enough to make you want to fill the gaps in Brulard’s experience without the author’s help. You sense, though, under the story’s restless current, an odd stasis, as if maybe all that’s really happening is nothing. So at the end, when you look back and say, ‘This is the story of Eve Brulard, an out-of-work actress whose precarious situation becomes so outrageous that it pushes her over the edge,’ you disbelieve yourself at once, saying instead – and seeming no less implausible – ‘ . . . out-of-work actress who’s received a terrible shock, after which everything that happens is hallucination as she tries to unknow the terrible thing that she’s just learned.’

Ndiaye says: “She understood, but, oh God, how she dreaded learning what it was that she understood.”

First published in French as ‘Une journée de Brulard’ in Tous mes amis, Minuit, 2004. First published in English in All My Friends, Two Lines Press, 2013

‘Kitchen Plays’ by Mieko Kanai, translated by Paul McCarthy

We’re in a maze which, arguably, Kanai never lets her readers leave even if her characters do manage to escape (not certain). The opening paragraph, such a paragraph that I wish I could memorize it, takes the form of a spiral within the larger spiral that’s the story’s overall shape: images like “spindle-tree hedges” and a “triangular stone” keep slipping into view as the narrator zigzags along a narrow path towards his childhood home. The maze, although I’m uncertain about this, could also be the maze of his own memory. Again and again he forgets the characteristics of the zigzag path, which he must have wandered many times: its upward incline, for example, towards a sandstone summit. Returns to the homeward-bound maze alternate in his account with reminiscences of a train journey away from home. His point of view alternates too; he is a child, an adult, a child, adult. He is alternately “I” and “he”. Each time he recalls his journey home or away from home, the details seem to spiral farther away from actual events, spiraling deeper into fantasy—and why?

With meandering and truncated phrasing, Kanai writes: “The abruptness with which one remembers that one has forgotten even the fact of having forgotten. At this rate, he’d probably forgotten that he’d forgotten many other things. So I think. In this weightless space of memory.”

First published in Japanese in Tangoshu, Chikuma Shobo, 1979. First published in English in The Word Book, Dalkey Archive Press, 2009

‘An Account of the Land of Witches’ by Sofia Samatar

Within Samatar’s ‘Account’, an ‘Account of the Land of Witches’ by the slave Arta prompts the ensuing ‘Refutation of the Account of Witches’ by Arta’s master, which incites ‘A Refutation of the Refutation of the Account of the Land of Witches’ by Sagal, a scholar trapped by bombings in her home country, and so on in a total of five accounts nesting each inside the other like those fabulous matryoshka dolls which make so lovable a metaphor. Samatar varies the vocabularies, styles, and prejudices of her narrators so deftly that they truly are different people living inside and beside her, their worlds as complete as those of novels even though the story is very short. It’s not until Sagal’s ‘Refutation’ that the Land of Witches begins to seem unreal, even though she is refuting the man who refuted Arta’s first-person account. Sagal’s ‘Refutation’ is so fearful, fragmented, frustrated—she must flee her war-torn country but can’t so much as leave her house—that I wonder whether the ensuing section, in which a band of travelers seeks the Land of Witches using Sagal’s writings as a guide, is but a fantasy of Sagal’s, so desperate is she (like Arta) for escape. That said, Arta’s account is so rich in detail, in immediacy, grounded in its own almost Borgesian metaphysics, that you cannot not imagine yourself right there beside her.

In the Land of Witches: “The smallest child can roll time into a ball and chase it down the stairs or fashion it into elaborate paper chains. In the pastry shops, they drizzle time over the cakes.”

First published in The Offing, 2017 and available to read here; collected in Tender, Small Beer, 2017

‘Death Customs’ by Constantia Soteriou, translated by Lina Protopapa

There are many stories here, even more stories than there are voices; and there are many voices. A whole chorus of voices in the ancient Greek dramatic style. Are they ghosts? Are they old women who, together with Spasoula, waited for their sons and husbands to be released from Turkish camps or identified in mass graves, waiting together with her now that she is dying?

– Is there anyone she hasn’t forgiven, so we can bring them to her to forgive?
– She must be guilty of many sins.
– Sins, sins.

The chorus’ chanting alternates with a narrator’s reminiscences, her lonely voice just as musical and even more eerie, her incantations forming invocations, flagellations: “I forgot the chest. You forgot the chest. I forgot the chest . . .” The translator’s footnote says Soteriou’s Greek text uses almost no punctuation and makes few explicit connections between ideas, making us seem to slide in and out of time, a vividly remembered past bleeding out into a hazy, offside kind of eternity which is also the purgatorial present. Why is the narrator so furious with Spasoula and so fond of her at the same time—this Spasoula who tends the graves of other people’s loved ones? That is one story within Soteriou’s story. There are also the murders of POWs committed by both sides of the Greek-Turkish wars, conflicts in which nobody is innocent. The old women who are left attend to funerary customs according to pantheistic, Islamic, Christian, and folk traditions. The mass graves of POWs are “a higgeldy-piggeldy of bones . . . nobody knew who was who . . . a well full of Greek and Turkish bones . . .”

First published in English Granta, June 2019, and available to read here

‘Zoya Andreyevna’ by Nina Berberova, translated by Marian Schwartz

Most disorienting in this story is Berberova’s subtle mirror, which she turns on the reader, the practice of reading, and the inhumaneness of humanity. Zoya arrives at a Ukrainian boardinghouse, fleeing the civil war that is slaughtering Bolshevik Russia. She must conceal everything that’s good about herself—her intelligence and education, her youth, her stockings—because such attributes are not trending in communist populism. But who is Zoya? Digging for clues, the landlady and her daughters examine Zoya’s unusual name. They rifle her suitcase, her underclothes, her wastepaper, her torn skirt. From the appearance of her things, they form no conclusions beyond the prejudicial: she’s a foreigner therefore diseased; she has good stockings therefore this penniless refugee must be loathsomely privileged. In real life I’d hardly condone such invasions of privacy or snap judgments based on outward appearances; but as the reader of Zoya’s story, do I not form my impressions of Zoya in exactly the same way as her landlady? Mustn’t I cobble together Zoya’s image based on Berberova’s inspections of her physiognomy, accent, underclothes, overclothes, private letters, table manners, and whatever symbolisms might be implicated by her name? Fiction, being fiction, protects its readers from moral culpability vis-à-vis its characters: the invasiveness of curiosity and the unfairness of appearance-based judgments ‘do not matter’ because Zoya isn’t ‘real.’ But what if she was? You’d like to think that, unlike Zoya’s landlady, you wouldn’t toss Zoya literally into the street if she appeared to contract a disease. ‘But these are exceptional times,’ you might say as you await your COVID vaccination, meanwhile glaring with horror at anyone who sneezes.

“These were fairy-tale times,” Berberova writes. The landlady and her daughters feel “that in the general displacement, the universal alarm, the time had come for them, too, to live and act . . . Something told them that there were not two or three or four of them but no end to the people, no counting them—whether they had a needle or a slotted spoon in hand—gripped by the general hatred and vindictiveness.”

First published in English in The Ladies from St. Petersburg, New Directions, 1998