‘Averroës’s Search’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley

Averroës spends the day struggling to translate Aristotle into Arabic, before going to a dinner with tiresome, poetry-spouting intellectuals. One guest, a traveller from an antic land, confuses the others with his reportage: there are foreigners who, instead of telling a story in a civilized manner, do a bewildering activity of many people pretending (like little kids) to be the different characters who feature in that story. They’re actors, in China, but the whole concept of what they’re doing is inconceivable to the scholars in Córdoba.

That’s what this main story is about: the incommunicability of ideas, over time, through languages, and into different cultures. But, suggests the narrator, “History will record few things lovelier and more moving than this Arab physician’s devotion to the thoughts of a man separated from him by a gulf of fourteen centuries.”

This understanding of another is what the narrator, too, is attempting, as he explains when he pops up, Beatrix Potter-like, at the end. But as in all of Borges, there are mirrors and stage-sets, perspective changes and reverse shots everywhere: he feels that “my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story.”

Originally published in Spanish as ‘La busca de Averroes’ in Sur, 1947. First collected in El Aleph, Editorial Losada, 1949. First published in English trs by Norman Thomas de Giovanni in The Aleph and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1971. This edition, Penguin, 2000

‘The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger’ by Arthur Conan Doyle

This is a late Holmes story (thirty-six years after the first magazine appearances), so it’s a bit self-aware. It starts with Watson warning off any miscreants who fancy they can interfere with the great detective’s records: “The source of these outrages is known, and if they are repeated I have Mr. Holmes’s authority for saying that the whole story concerning the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant will be given to the public. There is at least one reader who will understand.”

But it has the classic ingredients: a noble and trusting heroine, a lion, a fake lion, love affairs, cads, boardinghouse landladies, London, etc. What I also like about all the Holmeses is their model of story-creation as a way of solving a crime. A person comes into the study and tells them a story. Then through reading – reading the clues on the person, or in Holmes’ comprehensive archive, or in the evening papers, or by reading letters and telegrams that network across the country all through the day – through reading they create the resolution. By the end of each of Watson’s case notes, the crime is solved, society is re-levelled, and the case, like a disease or pathology, is cured.

First published in The Strand Magazine, February 1927. Collected in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, John Murray, 1927, and World’s Classics, 1999. Also online at Project Gutenberg here

‘The Curtain’ by Raymond Chandler

“The first time I ever saw Larry Batzel he was drunk outside Sardi’s in a secondhand Rolls-Royce.”

No no! you say, that isn’t right: Raymond Chandler’s 1953 The Long Goodbye starts, “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.”

But this isn’t the novel, it’s one of his earlier short stories that he reworked, spliced together, reconfigured into the better-known books. This one is mainly the germ of The Big Sleep, though its opening incident – the P.I. meets a damaged man who spins him a yarn – recurs in The Long Goodbye. This novel – about friendship, devotion (it’s way better than The Great Gatsby), coffee and booze – is brilliant, so it’s illuminating to see this way-stage in its creation.

Reading this Collected Stories, in a volume heavy enough that it could kill a man, is slightly disorientating, like walking through the back rooms of a cinema where films of all the Chandlers are showing on different screens at staggered times and the reels have got mixed up: the same noir images flicker, repeat, start again then veer off differently.

I like this fuzzy repetition, whether it was prompted by financial need, lack of new ideas, or, (I’d hope) a compulsion to keep telling parts of the same story again and again. Because it won’t leave you alone.

First published in Black Mask, 1936. Collected in Killer in the Rain, Houghton Mifflin / Riverside Press, 1964, and in Collected Stories, Everyman’s Library, 2002

‘I knew these people…’ by Sam Shepard

“I knew these people, these two people,” starts Travis, the main speaker in this short story told in the form of a dialogue. “The girl was very young, about seventeen or eighteen, I guess. And the guy was quite a bit older. He was kind of raggedy and wild. And she was very beautiful, you know?”

The other speaker doesn’t say very much, just an interjection or two, mainly at the start. It sounds like the man is telling her about two characters from the past. But by the end of the story, we can see what she, too, gradually understands – “I thought I recognized your voice for a minute” – that this story is about a woman and a man, and it’s now being told by that same man, to the very woman who features in it. He’s talking about them, their shared (disastrous) history, how he understands it now.

It’s a crushing piece of story-telling (admittedly in the film it is consummately delivered by actors Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski, with Ry Cooder on guitar), touching on the gap between how we first understand ourselves, and how we look back; about failure of love, about dreams and the limits of language; about loss. The narrative starts with the factual and historical, but turns sad, then horrific, then dream-like – she dreamed of escaping, Travis recounts, while he wanted to be far away, “Lost in a deep, vast country where nobody knew him. Somewhere without language or streets.”

It ends, in a way, inconclusively. But what story doesn’t? You can’t include everything in one text. And then it crumbles and decays (as Shelley’s desert traveller suggests); everything will have disappeared, except a fragment or a figment.

I close with this speech because it does so beautifully the thing I’m interested in throughout this selection: it’s by telling a story about somebody else that they both come to understand that it has actually been about them all along. The short story isn’t about someone else, or, it is, but it plays tricks, moves person, time, and place, so that by the time we’ve got back to the end, it’s also about someone different: you. And you’re not quite the same as you were at the start.

I met someone, they told me a story, and now I can’t get it out of my head. It was already in there.

First screened as part of Paris, Texas [dir. W. Wenders], 1984. First published in Paris, Texas: Screenplay Ecco Press, 1991. There’s a pdf of the working script here, pp. 175-180

Introduction

Some of these stories inspired and guided the style of my debut collection of short stories, Sinking Bell, and others have shown me the future of what is possible with the next sequence of stories that I’ll write. I grew up reading horror and hearing stories of the supernatural from my parents, grandmother, and extended family. As a personal practice, I resist seeing the elements of genre, though as a professor I often have to examine the criteria of genre with my students so that they know what “rules” to bend, reshape, or ignore all together. Ghosts, monsters, the inexplicable and unknown are all real to me and I approach them with a realist’s eye and practice. For what is more evil, disgusting, and detestable than the horrors of man.

‘Collections’ by Amber Wardzala-Blaeser

Wardzala-Blaeser is a writer to watch. This story, which was included in Never Whistle At Night: A Indigenous Anthology of Dark Fiction, is enthralling and fantastic. It hits my creative center while also reminding me of the tokenization that occurs in academic institutions, which have become hellholes for shortsighted bootlickers and incompetent cronies. An English major, who is Anishinaabe, attends a gathering at an “esteemed” professor’s house (because all these fools want to be esteemed) to ask if the professor will write a letter of recommendation. The professor’s walls are decorated with the heads of BIPOC students who she has helped, claiming these student’s successes as her own, as white supremacy does in institutions because these institutions were created out of white supremacy. Despite the horror of the walls of heads the character comes to a crossroads: run, and perhaps keep her life and integrity, or succumb to the professor’s blood and accolade lust and request the letter of recommendation for assured fame. This prompts me to reflect: does writer give readers what they want and desire, the trauma porn of struggle, or say, fuck the reader. Either way, there’s something to be lost?

Collected in Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Anthology of Dark Fiction, Vintage, 2023

‘The Missing Morningstar’ by Stacie Denet-Tsosie

Denet-Tsosie, a Diné writer, is another writer to watch and read. The first paragraph is exquisite, as is the rest of the writing in this story and throughout the collection by the same title. I love short stories that feel expansive and operate with depth. There are stories within stories within stories, each sentence a gift of sensory detail and description. The narration here is close, personable, like I’m sitting next to the narrator on the tailgate of a pick, and we’re maybe telling sheep stories, or “this one time” stories, and this tale of a missing girl unfolds, but the story isn’t simply about the missing girl, but everything leading up to that event and everyone, every being around that event. Everything has a presence in this story and agency. The story reciprocates, the ending a relief, a signal of hope and survival. A wonderful way to end a fantastic collection.

Collected in The Missing Morningstar: And Other Stories, Torrey House Press 2023

‘Cannibal’ by Natanya Ann Pulley

This story by Diné writer Natanya Ann Pulley is dark, ethereal, and violent. Three things I enjoy in literature, though this story, or the whole collection, doesn’t seek to capitalize or glorify those aspects. The narrator here has been consumed by a cannibal and plays observer to the emotional turmoil that her consumer goes through. I’m in it all the way, perhaps like the narrator. The setting is tone and mood driven, nothing stable or concrete. The uncertainty of all this makes the story feel mythic and revelatory.

First published in Split Lip, and available to read online here. Collected in With Teeth, New Rivers Press 2019

‘Brother’ by Chelsea T. Hicks

Hicks, a citizen of the Osage Nation, has written a kick-ass collection of fiction. The story details a night of dances and the sudden violence that occurs outside a three-star Ponca casino. This story expands and contracts, its use of time finely consolidated. I love how Hicks’s work interweaves the myriad aspects of Native life, specifically the Osage, but I can relate to the differing characters and cultural makeup of a community. The cousins/siblings who live off the reservation, the ones who stayed and try to ignore the people from high school, the troublemakers, gangsters, and drug dealers. Everyone enacting their mode of survival and existence. Violence is a part of life for a lot of Native people, for a lot of non-Native people, for people everywhere and it’s refreshing to see how it is survived in this wonderful story.

Collected in A Calm and Normal Heart: Stories, The Unnamed Press 2022

‘The Furies From Borås’ by Anders Fager, translated by Ian Lemke and Henning Koch

This story perplexed me at first for its entangled cast of characters and how they are placed and move about on the page. Entanglement is also enacted by way of the three intersecting towns of Vårnamo, Borås, and Jönköping; the lives of girls who frequent the Underryd Dance Hall and the Meat (boys) who are lured for sacrifice to the Black Goat; the tentacles and multiple eyes of the Black Goat monster and the entanglement of time because of the centuries that some of the girls of Borås have lived. There is almost no central character in this story because the characters exist as a community on the fringes of reality and as a ritual/sacrificial collective. The place and its history, its hunger, exist to feed the beast(s). Cosmic and earthly entanglements, and collision make this story wonderfully compelling.

Collected in Swedish Cults, Valancourt Books 2022

‘The Return’ by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews

Connection, connections, are at the core of this story. “Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac.” An eccentric, an artist, an outsider, a being seemingly ashamed of his body or his entire existence. We meet our narrator at the moment of his death in a Paris nightclub while he pursues the woman of his dreams. Hard drugs and a heart attack snatch him from the world of the living and we get to observe and listen to what sort of afterlife is in store for him. The narrator witnesses the transportation of his corpse from the morgue to Villeneuve’s remote house where it, his body, is used for Villeneuve’s sexual desire, even if tender. And here the story turns or progresses and the narrator becomes the ear for all of Villeneuve’s troubles, memories, and secrets. If allowed a voice from the afterlife might one’s existential loneliness become more bearable or all the more alienating, pulling one deeper into the void.

Collected in The Return, New Directions, 2010

‘Decent People’ by Garth Greenwell

This story is populated; the blurred street lights and indiscernible store fronts viewed from a taxi with a talkative and somewhat mysterious driver. Greenwell’s sentences bustle along with the atmosphere of a street protest and flashbacks of a first encounter with a former student, who the narrator finds an unlikely kinship with. I love Greenwell’s structure and style, the seamless and lyrical syntax set within lushish paragraphs. I don’t recall how I arrived at Greenwell’s work, but I do remember seeing a piece in One Story many years ago, ‘The Frog King,’ the title piquing my interest. Perhaps that is what stayed with me, the title and mystery of its contents. As I was completing edits for my debut story collection and frantically writing a new story to round out the collection at the suggestion of my editor this story, or chapter, entered my life. I had been searching for a form to harness the new voice that I was investigating, a voice and form that would propel me beyond the collection I was finishing, and which showed me the futurity of my work and practice.

First published in The Sewanee Review, Fall 2019, and available to read here. Collected in Cleanness, FSG 2020

‘This Is Paradise’ by Kristiana Kahakauwila

This story begins one of my all time favorite story collections by the same title. Dark, precise, and exhilarating. I’m fortunate and honored to count Kahakauwila as family, a friend, and source of inspiration. This collection was grossly overlooked, perhaps because it is hard, honest, and resists the white colonial gaze and violence perpetrated by American and European ideals of paradise and entitlement to an already inhabited vision of paradise. The narrator is that of a collective, a community of housekeepers for one of the many resorts along the beach in Waikiki who befriend a tourist. We get a glimpse into the private and collective lives until Susan vanishes with a man and meets her end; her death nothing more than a passing warning as more and more tourists flock to claim their little version of what they think is paradise.

Collected in This Is Paradise: Stories, Hogarth, 2013

‘This Is Not Miami’ by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes

Melchor knows brutality and how human fear can amplify those brutalities. Not a fictitious story but the testimony of a fellow human’s fearful experience with brutality. There is little introspection in this relato, this testament of experience. I’m a big fan of Melchor’s two novels, Hurricane Season and Paradise, for their depth and acute detail of human hatred, anger, and pain. Her style is wonderfully dense, lyrical, and unrelenting.

First published in Spanish in Aquí no es Miami, Almadía, 2013, and in English in This Is Not Miami, New Directions/Fitzcarraldo 2023