‘Extra’ by Yiyun Li

As a nervous student of creative writing, I stumbled upon a conversation in Aysmptote between Claire Wigfall and Yiyun Li, both of whose stories I came to love. In that conversation, Yiyun Li discusses her literary relationship with William Trevor and the ways in which her stories form dialogues with his. This kind of writerly kinship seemed so liberating and hopeful to me. Almost all the stories I’ve written attempt a dialogue with another literary object. Among these is ‘Extra’, a particularly quiet and affecting example of Li’s work.

First published in The New Yorker, 2003. Read online

‘Last Night’, by James Salter

A spooky, sexy, not-quite ghost story, this one exemplifies many of the literary features traditionally associated with short fiction, particularly in terms of what it is that makes a good ending. For me, the tingliest moments of it come through the almost-whispered details: ‘They sat together in the living room as if they had come from a big party but were not quite ready for bed. Walter was thinking of what lay ahead, the light that would come on in the refrigerator when the door was opened.’ It’s a story I’d like someone to read to me in a darkened room.

First published in The New Yorker, 2002 and collected in Last Night: Stories (Picador) Read online.

‘Helen’ by Can Xue, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping

This translation was first published in Conjunctions: 40, 2003

Can Xue’s fiction has much in common with Kafka’s: there’s a flat, dreamlike quality, and a sense of vast imaginative possibility, even within systems of impenetrable illogic. One of her stories begins: ‘My mother has melted into a basin of soap bubbles.’ ‘Helin’ is about a girl made to live in a glass cabinet. Expect permeable realities, impermeable truths, exuberance and humour, all washed down with illiberal quantities of exclamation marks. Not for everyone, but if Freud had read this instead of Shakespeare and Sophocles, pop culture would be adrift with mother-bubble complexes and glass cabinet syndromes, such is the archetypal heft of Can Xue’s ideas.

‘True short story’ by Ali Smith

I discovered Ali Smith in my early twenties and wasted a good deal of time attempting to write stories in her ‘style’, an act of mimicry I now understand to be impossible (at least, for me). Style, form and genre are notions Smith treats with elastic generosity. This story is part-anecdote, part-joke, part-myth, part-memoir, part-essay and part-speculation on what a short story is at all. With Ali Smith, there’s always voice in an intimate, embodied sense — the feeling that a good and trusted person is sitting with you, reading the story very quickly and quite close to your ear.

First published in Prospect Magazine, 2005 and collected in The First Person and Other Stories, Hamish Hamilton, 2008. Read online.

‘A Hope’ by Clarice Lispector, translated by Katrina Dodson

Part of what I enjoy about Kafka and Can Xue is that I don’t get a sense from within their work that it desires to be read in a certain way. It’s wide open. To a certain extent, it doesn’t care. Clarice Lispector’s stories have something of this as well. ‘A Hope’ is a pithy little pun of a tale, playing on the fact that, in Portuguese, ‘uma esperança’ means both ‘a hope’ and ‘a cricket’, as in the spindly green creature. Lispector’s playfulness and Katrina Dodson’s artful translation bring to life all kinds of ideas, without ever losing sight of what it is to be a person among these theoretical shapes. If this were a desert island anthology, I think I’d be glad of that.

This translation was first published in The Complete Stories, London: Penguin Classics, 2015.

‘Some Kind of Safety’ by Jessie Greengrass

This story has something of Lispector in it — a playfulness and a willingness to move between question, conjecture, statement and back again. There’s much of contemporary life in here — cat videos, cheese slices, sad lamps — but these recognisable phenomena arise in an uncanny, not-quite-as-we-know-them way. I think this story has something to say about attention and the magic of looking at things till they’re strange. For that reason, I find myself going back to it, time and again.

First published in An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw it, London: John Murray, 2015.

‘DD/MM/YY’ by May-Lan Tan

From the patently mind-blowing, world-consuming collection Things to Make and Break, ‘DD/MM/YY’ is a story of doubles and disguises. There are twins, replays and could-have-beens, like a hot, high and heavy kind of Plato’s cave. Amid the sex and the drugs, there’s humour and a lot of real human feeling. The writing is luminous and the simplest turn can break your heart: ‘When I was little, I could always feel the promise of it, like a tooth. A germ that would develop into something no-one in the world has ever seen before. It’s not there anymore.’

First published in Things to Make and Break, London: CB Editions, 2014

‘The Bird Thing’ by Julianne Pachico

This is story is not overtly surreal, magical or supernatural, at least not in the manner of Kafka or Can Xue, but it shares something with these writers — a sense of real-life being lived as science fiction. ‘The Bird Thing’ is full of suggestion and possibility, built through texture, light and colour: ‘The bird thing has just left. You can tell even before you open the door. The pot has boiled over; the stovetop is covered with a strange white crust, the egg cracked open and cooked away into a frothy grey mist.’ I ought to add that Pachico is my friend, but when you read this story you’ll know it’s earned its place.

(First published in The White Review, 2015. Read online.)

End note

Another great short fiction writer, Philip Langeskov, once said that to read a short story collection from start to finish is ‘to do yourself a mischief’. With that in mind, I recommend one a day. Think of it as medication. Take it before or after food, perhaps huddled under a blanket, perhaps hiding under your desk. If someone happens to disturb you, hold up the book. Offer a corner of the blanket. Like cigarettes, poems and unwanted advice, short stories belong to a different economy.

Introduction

I grew up in an American suburb, reading short stories. In the 1980s I worked in trade publishing in New York. If you remember the publishing scene then, short stories were having a moment. Recreationally, I read them in the New Yorker, in The Atlantic, and Harper’s. I participated in multi-week story workshops run by Madison Smartt Bell, Susan Minot, and Christopher Reeves’ father. My home contains several long, overstocked shelves filled with single author and group anthologies. Long story short (ahem), the form is a vital part of my reading DNA.

Being a woman of taste and discernment, I love every short story writer you’d expect me to love. I still cherish the hug I got from Lorrie Moore. I bow before Donald Barthelme, Mavis Gallant, Tessa Hadley, Damon Runyon, the Elizabeths — Taylor and McCracken — not to mention Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, and oh gosh, many more.

One of the delights of subscribing to these letters is hearing about authors I’m unfamiliar with, or who’d slipped from immediate memory. I thought I’d try to choose 12 who’d have that effect on you. Then I thought I’d follow a clever theme. Then I decided I’d just choose any 12 and maybe one day, return to choose another 12, and later, another 12. I could do this once a month for a year without repetitions.

‘Why I Live at the PO’ by Eudora Welty

Families are mad, maddening organisms. Though I can’t remember why — we’d probably had a row — I know my mother made me read Eudora Welty’s much-anthologised masterpiece when I was a teenager. It knocked me sideways, and took me two goes to understand. It was the first time, textbooks aside, that I recall being stymied by something difficult to read, and was probably my introduction to the baroque cadences of Southern writing, which I instantly adored.

First published in A Curtain of Green (1941). You can read it online here

‘Tiger Bites’ by Lucia Berlin

Berlin is a new favourite of mine. The anthology is chock full of wonders, but when I think of the book and all it contains, my mind’s eye conjures the image of a beautiful woman standing up inside a convertible. Revisiting Tiger Bites, I see it’s a cousin to Welty’s story. The pace is as hectic, the characters as engagingly off the wall. Here, too, a woman without resources is forced to return to her family, child in tow, following the collapse of her marriage. Events go off — wildly so — in unexpected directions. It’s the matter-of-factness of Berlin’s characters, and their ability to accept one another (in circumstances that would drive others into therapy), that catches me every time.

Available in A Manual for Cleaning Women, published by Picador in 2015

‘Love and Death in Brighams’ by John L’Heureux

I discovered L’Heureux by accident, via his story ‘The Comedian’, in The Atlantic Monthly. Many years later, I found out he’d taught David Vann, and we bonded over our mutual appreciation. L’Heureux’s written often about marriage. This one, though, is about the process of writing, as much as it’s the tale of a married couple and a feisty old bat. I’m a sucker for stories that heckle themselves, and this is full of asides about the decision-making process that is writing. It’s fabulous.

Published in Desires (US edition is Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1981). The collection is available to borrow here

‘Your Borders, Your Rivers, Your Tiny Villages’ by Amy Bloom

Rejoice! Amy Bloom has a new novel coming this spring. She’s a hero of mine. Until then, try this story, which is a snapshot of a middle aged couple — not beautiful, not thin, not mocked for this — surprised to find themselves rewriting the scripts for four lives. It’s about companionable love and sex. It is a story for grown ups.

Published in Ploughshares in Fall 2002; anthologised in Where the God of Love Hangs Out, published by Granta, 2010.