A frazzled, formerly alcoholic writer, frustrated by LIFE and her inability to work, tries to do a good deed, but in the process ruins a vintage dress, and. . . well, I don’t want to spoil the hilarious, horrifying final lines for you.
Anthologised in The Atmospheric Railway (Jonathan Cape, 2008). Also available via Vintage Digital, The Most Beautiful Dress in the World / Cardboard City (Storycuts), November 2011.
This is a sublime story about marriage, about gender roles, about disappointment. I adore the oh-so-precise description of his apartment in Murray Hill. It makes me wildly nostalgic for a Manhattan I missed out on knowing, since the story is set in 1950. That description’s followed me all my days, and I could walk through their home blindfolded. The story thrums with heartache and love.
Pause for sighs of appreciation. Anthologised in All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories of William Maxwell; First published in The New Yorker in 1976; available to read there and also here.
Oops, I’m noticing a theme. Spencer is American and southern, and the introduction to my edition of this collection is by Eudora Welty. The Adult Holiday is short, potent, and not a million miles away from the Maxwell, with its wise insights about the complicated business of love, marriage, regret, and passing time.
Available to read via this link, anthologised in The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer (US edition Doubleday, 1981, reissued by Penguin in the UK in 1983).
It’s worth remembering that Dorothy Parker left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr, whom she’d never met, with the proviso that, should anything happen to him, she’d like it turned over to the NAACP. Knowing that, read this scathing story (and clock when it was written).
First published in The New Yorker in 1927, available in their archives and also here.
Goyen said a short story was, “a rhythm, a charged movement, a chain of pulses or beats. To write out of life is to catch, in pace, this pulse that beats.” He wrote exquisitely. Here’s an appreciation piece I found from his centenary in 2015. I’ve chosen one of the silliest of the stories from his 1985 collection. In it, a woman struggles to explain how she inherited a Venetian palazzo, describing an improbable friend of hers — the titular figure — who had more money than taste, but a knack for ensuring everyone had a good time. Just as telling are the narrator’s self-interruptions and digressive asides.
Anthologised in Had I A Hundred Mouths, Clarkson N Potter, 1985. Available to read in the Triquarterly archive here.
This is the story of a sturdy young teacher, Brenda, en route to northern England to visit her sister. It’s a duty call; there’s no relish, and we sense that she’s fed up and stuck. On the train she meets five jolly publicans returning from a convention. The quieter one, a widower, engages her in conversation, and before the journey’s end, proposes. What she does, and why, is one of the deep pleasures of this brief tale. I see that Persephone has put out a new edition of Whitaker’s stories (which I must buy).
Widely anthologised. I read it in her collection entitled The Crystal Fountain, Carcanet Press, 1984.
Eisenberg’s one of the authors I discovered in the 80s, during that short story moment I mentioned earlier. This newish story is one I’d never read before — but will never forget. Her work gets under your skin. Like all the best writing, what it seems to be about is the iceberg’s tip. Yes, it’s about family, about love, about secrets. But really it’s about all of life in a life. It’s haunting and I predict I’ll read it several more times.
Published in The New York Review of Books in 2011, and available to read here
Post-Booker, when everyone was going on about The Gathering, I began my Anne Enright love affair in a roundabout fashion, via the short stories in this raw, funny, and take-no-prisoners collection. She knows all our secrets, and spills them.
First published in Taking Pictures (Jonathan Cape, 2008)
I told Jonathan Gibbs that I was the sort of person who walked around constructing anthologies in my head all the time any way, so, yes, I would like to put together a personal anthology for this project.
Like others who have contributed, I’m going to quote Jonathan quoting Borges: “My preferences have dictated this book. I should like to be judged by it.” I look for patterns in my choices. Some of the patterns don’t surprise me: stories set in places I have visited and written about, South Africa and Nicaragua. Some of the patterns do surprise me: the number of stories with teenage boys in them, the number of stories about fathers.
Mostly though, I figured I would wind up with an anthology focused on loss. As Kit Caless and Aki Schilz observed when they created LossLit, the digital writing project, much of literature is about loss.
I grew up in a neighbourhood in New York where the background noise was made up of the voices of those who had had to leave something behind. And thus, the adults always longed for what they’d lost when they were displaced in some way: the brilliant red sunsets and warm sea air of the Dominican Republic before Joaquin Balaguer made it impossible to stay, the neighbourliness and ease that existed alongside the poverty and brutal racism of the American Deep South, the German language childhoods and evaporated landscape remembered by the refugees from Germany.
The stories that I think of again and again, that I am haunted by, hounded by even– are almost always about those who can never return to a particular place or to a person who is gone somehow (often because they themselves did something that led to that person’s injury). I am comforted by these stories of loss, by they acknowledge that almost all of us are trying to find our way through a landscape we weren’t expect to find ourselves in.
Two women briefly cross paths. Marie lives in a big house, drives a Lexus, and indulges her three demanding children. Callie lives on the rough side of town and tries to keep her son off the behaviour- controlling medication doctors have advised him to take. The women meet when Marie and her children visit Callie to buy a puppy she is selling. “It was a nice pup,” thinks Callie, “White, with brown around one eye. Cute. If the lady showed up, she’d definitely want it.” But when Marie shows up, she misunderstands what is happening in the household, and, with the bravado of the privileged, initiates a staggering wave of destruction. Saunders often seeks out the absurdity of American social structures, makes something that is familiar laughable through a kind of exaggeration. ‘Puppy’ is from a collection that came out after America became involved in Afghanistan and Iraq though, after the no man’s land between different Americans became greater and deeper, and it is part of a body of work that is both darker and more illuminating than Saunder’s earlier fiction.
From Tenth of December (Random House), first published in The New Yorker, May 28, 2007 and available online here
A young good-looking lawyer in a three piece suit is sitting in a bar in Concord, New Hampshire when he is approached by a woman in a cowboy hat: Sarah Cole. She is the most unattractive woman he has ever seen, and she has come to talk to him because her friends dared her to. The lawyer and Sarah become friends, then become lovers. And then, the relationship flounders. “I was pretty, extremely so,” he explains, “and she was not, extremely so, and I knew it, and she knew it.” But it is the class divide that makes the man most uncomfortable; when she brings him to gatherings with her friends and family, notes the lawyer, he has nothing to say to anyone after he is introduced. ‘Sarah Cole, A Type of Love Story’ is about different kinds of longing – longing to connect with someone you think you do not have permission to connect with, and, after having destroyed the possibility of that connection, longing to revise past actions. The lawyer’s brutality doesn’t kill Sarah Cole, who we learn early on died in unrelated circumstances, but ten years after he last saw Sarah, he feels that he mortally wounded her and reckons with his own monstrousness.
From Success Stories (Harper Collins), first published in The Missouri Review, 1984. You can hear Russell Banks reading the story here
I knew Alison Moore as the author of a short story collection and two novels, one about the Orphan Train – a train that took unaccompanied children to homesteads when the American West was settled; many of the children never saw their home towns or siblings again. When I turned up in England, I was surprised to find another Alison Moore, celebrated for writing about quite different themes. The short story by US-based Alison Moore that has haunted me over the years is a story about a twelve year old girl named Matty who runs away to New York with a boy she has a crush on. Knowing all the dangers she faces, you hold your breath as she describes their journey. When the thing that you most feared happens, you lose your breath entirely – the adventure is devoured by an emotional violence that Matty will never speak about and will never fully recover from.
From Small Spaces Between Emergencies (Mercury House). You can find Alison Moore’s website here
I am usually not very interested in stories about writers are having trouble writing, guys from working class backgrounds who feel like outsiders in academia, or men who moan about having lost the woman in their life by behaving badly. Diaz’s story is all three of these things. Yunior – a character very much like Diaz whose life Diaz has tracked in other stories – has lost his long-time girlfriend when she discovers the breadth of his disloyalty. “She could have caught you with one sucia, she could have caught you with two, but because you’re a totally batshit cuero who never empties his e-mail trash can, she caught you with fifty!” His back is damaged from carrying heavy pool tables when he worked in a delivery service before he became a writer. Middle-aged and alone, he can’t see how he can find a relationship again. Why is that Yunior wins me over in this story? Is it that he has some sense of proportion and recognises that his problems, when compared to those of his friend Elvis, an Iraq war veteran, aren’t the worst? Is it that he’s not really all that precious about his misery? I sit the way he describes his “exile” in the racist and provincial city of Boston? “White people pull up alongside you at traffic lights and scream at you with a hideous rage, like you nearly ran over their mother,” Yunior explains. When he looks like he might find himself through, with grace and humour but no happy endings, I’m rooting for him.
From This is How You Lose Her (Riverhead Books), first published in The New July 23, 2012 and available online here
A 42 year old woman – Faith, Paley’s alter ego – leaves Manhattan and takes the subway out to her childhood neighbourhood in Brooklyn. It is the early 1970s and entirely African American now; Faith is the only white person on the street. The neighbourhood is run down, neglected, and rife with heroin addiction. Then, a preposterous exchange causes Faith to seek sanctuary in what is – literally – her childhood home, moving in with the family who now live there. Their interaction is both hilarious and touching – Faith tries to explain the place she knew and the family tries to explain the world they know. When Faith leaves after several weeks, she realises she both can and cannot return to the place she came from. Paley’s stories repeatedly confront the most serious of subjects (love, death, war) without ever taking themselves too seriously, and therein lies their power. The titles of her collections (this story is from Enormous Changes at the Last Minute) are playful, comforting, knowing, like she’s sitting in an all night diner and wants you to know that, in the end, That’s life, darling.
From Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), first published in Esquire, March 1974 and available online here
A Personal Anthology 