‘Head in the Floor’ by Kate Folk

This is another story that I’ve thieved writing advice from, this strange short piece about a woman who finds a human head growing in her bedroom floor. I hate to admit this, but there are very few writers who I will drop everything to read new work from – but Kate Folk is one of those writers. She has such a range of voice, command of language, and imagination of narrative. This story is no different – one of the aspects I love is how the conversational quality of the narrative voice builds a wildly flavorful approach to storytelling. It’s kind of terse, but charming and funny. There are points where it feels like the narrator doesn’t actually feel like telling their own story – ”I figured maybe you know the floor was rotting. I didn’t know. What do I know about floors” – which further builds my own investment in reading on. As I’m compiling this list, I’m realizing commonalities between stories, and aspects of storytelling I enjoy. The protagonist in ‘Head in the Floor’ places a towel over the head as she figures out what to do about it. “The towel helps. I’m not going to sit here and tell you the towel does nothing,” she asserts to the reader, sounding remarkably similar to the soup-loving protagonist in Shane Jones’ ‘Off Days.’ Sometimes, when I read this story, I think about that scene in Jumanji where the floor turns to quicksand and then back into floor and Robin Williams gets stuck in it with just his face protruding and then spiders crawl on him. Both have been influential in my development as a writer and human, but maybe for different reasons.

First published in Tupelo Quarterly, collected in Out There, Penguin Random House 2022. Read the story here)

‘It’s All a Circus’ By Ana María Shua, translated by Steven Stewart

I am massaging the rules a bit here and, instead of a single story, am acknowledging a brief handful of stories from Ana María Shua’s circus-themed short story collection Without a Net. The book is split into sections: there are sections about performers, the history of circuses, the animals. One section, entitled It’s All a Circus, is about varieties of circuses. The stories have names like ‘Dubious Circus,’ ‘The Ghost Circus,’ ‘The Poor Circus,’ ‘The Poorest Circus’ – in some ways, it feels like a Mad Lib, each story born of a prompt from the title’s adjective. ‘The Poor Circus’ is about an event where the performers enact multiple roles due to budget restrictions, while ‘The Poorest Circus’ is about a circus so poor that spectators have to sit and imagine the show. Each is playful yet hauntingly resonant. The stories are lovely – they build a multilayered story of what is, by nature, a multilayered show. There are stories as risk-taking as trapeze artists, as awe-evoking as the Big Top itself.

Published in Without a Net, Hanging Loose Press 2012

‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ by Gabriel García Márquez

I think it’s fair to say: I do not know magical realism if I do not know this story. There is so much humor, heart, and grief buried in its pages. It is a very short story with a novel’s worth of imagination, and honors the short story as the novel’s equal. By that I mean; if I’d imagined this story’s conceit, in all its richness, I might have said this isn’t just a short story, it’s a novel. And it would’ve failed. I cannot sing a praise about Gabriel García Márquez that isn’t a cover song, so I’ll just tell you a few things I love about this story. There is so much joy in the worldbuilding–it is a tremendous example of how the examined anatomy of a concept can drive the story forward. Every paragraph is surprising and powerful, and is a joy to read to see what invention Márquez will derive from his character next. The Angel’s “consolation miracles” is one of my favorite moments in all of literature:

“Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers.”

I am always grateful to share this story with new writers, because it is one of those stories that almost always illuminates – brings joy to the reader, shows them the possibilities within fiction, gives them space to build a concept and let it spread its enormous wings.

First published in La Hojarasca, Ediciones SLB 1955. First published in English in Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories, Harper & Row, 1978. Also in Collected Stories, Penguin, 1996. Available online here

‘The Stolen Party’ by Liliana Heker, translated by Alberto Manguel

As I compile this list, I realize how much I gravitate towards stories of childhood and class. ‘The Stolen Party’ is a story about Rosaura, the daughter of a rich family’s maid who is invited to a birthday party for the family’s daughter. Rosaura, who goes to work with her mom and does homework with the family’s daughter, wants to attend because she believes she is friends with the rich girl and wants to celebrate. The mother is skeptical, even discourages her from going, calling it a rich people’s party. Rosaura is insistent that she is a friend and not a servant, both to her mother and eventually, another child at the party. I will spare you a full synopsis of the story, but I will say that this story depletes me in a powerful way. It is short, six pages or so, but it is cinematic in its movement through the birthday party, the expansive sensory details and childlike wonder at the events – events that might be mundane told from an adult’s point of view. This is a story not just of class, but of class straddling – the way oppressive structures are imposed even in the quietest of moments, the happiest of birthdays, and onto the youngest and gentlest of hearts.

Published in The Stolen Party and Other Stories, Passport Books, 1994

‘Draft’ by Deb Olin Unferth

I knew I was choosing a story from Deb Olin Unferth, but wasn’t sure which one. There are so many stories to choose from. I could just list Deb Olin Unferth stories for the entirety of this paragraph like a Table of Contents. This is a Personal Anthology, after all, and building an anthology of Unferth stories would be intensely satisfying. But I settled on ‘Draft’ for the sake of playing by the rules. I love tight, single-paragraph stories that are fun to read aloud. I love stories that swell, and build into something tremendous. I love stories that resist order, stories that initiate their own order, stories that build a moat around themselves. I love stories that extend a hand to a friend, stories that run a lap around a swimming pool without slipping, stories that play piano and swing on tire swings. I love stories that look in the mirror without groaning at their bodies and stories that clink together with other stories like champagne flutes and pull their heads back and pour the liquid down in a single, gratifying gulp.

Published in Wait Till You See Me Dance, Graywolf Press 2017. Read the story online here

‘Other Babies’ by Meredith Alling

Sometimes I wonder if Meredith Alling has Google alerts for herself set up, and groans when she sees I’ve written about her and this story again. I received Sing the Song in a mystery box from Spork Press a few years ago, and have been enamored ever since. Much like Deb Olin Unferth, there are so many stories I could’ve selected in place of the one I’ve chosen – I think Alling’s work is best read in conversation. What is the food that you can’t eat just one? Lay’s Chips? Pringles? Her stories are Pringles in that way. But her stories are also unlike Pringles. Her stories are absurdist and heartfelt and so, so lovable. The deep admiration and love she has for her characters is immeasurable, and should be aspirational for every writer. We must love our characters, even when we put them through tribulation. This story (and collection) is one I turn towards when I want to feel excited about writing. ‘Other Babies’ has a tremendous rhythm to it; the perfect opener to a book entitled Sing the Song, because there is music in this prose, and I love to belt it out.

Published in Sing the Song, Future Tense Books 2016. Read the story online here

‘Remedies’ by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

When I first read this story, I felt a joy that was hard to explain. It was easy to put into words, but very hard to explain. Here it is: I have been long-searching for a story about lice. Lice, to me, is the ultimate lived experience of tension. Lice are always traversing you, moving about your hair and neckline, falling from head onto the table or desk you’re sitting at. You are always acutely aware of how close other people are to you, how they might react should they notice. When people know, they avoid you. When you’re a child, nothing feels worse than exclusion. My chapbook title, Maybe This Is What I Deserve, is pulled from a story I wrote called ‘Toddy’s Got Lice Again’, about the impact poverty has on a child with lice. When I was a kid, I wondered if there was a direct line between family income and longevity of a lice infestation. If you had lice, you were a kid; but if you had lice for a long time, you were a poor kid. I identified with Fajardo-Anstine’s character Harrison, the impoverished half-brother that the protagonist didn’t know she had, the living representation of her mother’s failed relationship and the man she’d like to never see again. There is a lot happening in this story–family dynamics, shame, the tradition of herbal remedies, but Harrison is who I gravitate towards, the child who doesn’t know what he represents. Who he looks like and what that means for those around him. Yet, for all his shame, for the grotesque display of his body, his smells, the apartment he lives in, I thought of the moment of grace he receives at the end of the story, when the protagonist sees him years later through the window at a punk club, sporting a blue mohawk, and compliments his hair – hair intended to draw attention to itself, to draw people close and not away, no longer the source of shame.

Published in Sabrina & Corina, One World, 2019. Read the story online here

‘The Captives’ by Shivani Mehta

I have bent the rules again here, because Shivani Mehta’s poetry has done as much for my fiction as many other fiction writers, and it would feel unfair to disregard that. This poem, almost written as a historical blurb, tells of a (made-up) historical practice of burying the dying just before they died, capturing their final breaths and sealing them. She describes the sound of a final breath as a sparrow sighing when squeezed in the palm of a hand; a gentle, efficient description that toppled me on my first (and every subsequent) read. In an interview with Ben Niespodziany, Mehta describes her poetry as “images, one after another, that involve a little girl growing up in a swirl of language,” which feels like a wonderful description of much of this collection of poems. There is wonder and rhythm amongst her work. The last line of this poem has always moved me – the way she captures hundreds of years of relief, the final gasps of the ancestors held hostage. I do not want to write the final line here, because I want you to read it in context. You can hold your breath until then.

Published in Useful Information for the Soon-to-Be Beheaded, Press 53, 2013. Read the prose poem online here

Introduction

The stories we love create us. This is even truer for writers, whose words exist in relation to their literary lineage. Like Nabokov, I can’t fathom the value of writing something that hasn’t actually “happened” or existed in some shape or another. One can despise metaphysics but still acknowledge that incredible stories become events in our lives. They become things that happened to us. I remember the places (airport bars, park benches, a tree in the yard, etc.) I sat when first meeting each of these stories. I cannot separate the reading from the being-alive in that moment. To drag this logic to its appropriate end, the selected fictions persist asevents in my life, things which took place, worlds that continued to exist long after the reading ended. They remain my tutors, my interlocutors, my imagined subjects, my partners in the crime of imagining. Everything I know about writing comes from having lived in them.

‘The Austrian State Prize for Literature’ by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Carol Brown Janeway

First published posthumously, in accordance with the author’s arrangement, My Prizescompiles various rants, speeches, financial lamentations, and indictments of various literary prizes Bernhard received. I did it for the money, he says again and again, glaring at the reader (who may be a writer) — and you, too, will do anything for the money, the platform, the stage, the power.

Fury, indignation, and humiliation are the chords Bernhard strikes repeatedly in ‘The Austrian State Prize for Literature,’ a story formatted in his characteristic breathlessness— the endless paragraph lacking quotation marks. Playing on Austria’s small-nation complex, he rages against newspapers for talking up his win “as if it were the Big Prize while it was the to-me-humiliating Small Prize.” Embodying the incoherence of post-Nazi Austria, Bernhard speaks for the nation against the nation with the wrecking-ball of his mouth:

“Yes, I said, every year new assholes are selected for the Senate that calls itself a Cultural Senate and is an indestructible evil and a perverse absurdity in our country. It’s a collection of the biggest washouts and bastards, I always said. … the Small State Prize is a so-called Nurturing of Talent and so many people have already won it … and now I’m one of them, I said, for I’ve been given the Small State Prize as a punishment.”

Nothing is left standing as Bernhard razes the cultural landscape. He mocks the official ceremony, the stupidity of the cultural elite gathered to award one another social status, the conventions of politeness wherein “the sheep were applauding the God that fed them,” the notion of honor, a “dirty trick” played by the state that hides its crimes behind the nouveau-illusion of meritocracy. “No prizes are an honor,” Bernhard insists in his self-masticating sentences, in the pitiless self-cannibalism and the nausea of the vomited clauses which are then used to grow the next sentence.

In the partner-piece, ‘Speech on the Occasion of the Awarding of the Austrian State Prize,’ Bernhard tells the audience: “What we think is secondhand, what we experience is chaotic, what we are is unclear.” This torment where the 21st century writer must begin.

I am fond of Bernhard; I am lulled by his scalpel-tongue. Taped to the back of a bedroom shelf, a line from ”Austrian State Prize…’: “Now you’ve made yourself one of them.” — A reminder that we write about the world we live in, and the present conveniences will be the future’s indictments against us.

First published in Meine Preise, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2009. First published in English translation in My Prizes: An Accounting, Knopf, 2010/Notting Hill Editions, 2011; also collected in A Memoir: Gathering Evidence, Random House Second International Vintage Edition, 2011

‘The Revenge’ by Diane Williams

I’m interested in the distance between accidents and intention. A thoughtless act occurs without actual consideration, but an urge is something more derivative: it is intentional, sought, desirous, unclumsy. The urge drives the human to do something that changes the story’s texture. Diane Williams knows this. ‘Revenge’ is composed of ten brief sentences, the first of which is bracingly banal: “She sat in the chair and looked out a window to think sad thoughts and to weep.” Cliché is a tourniquet in Williams’ hands. Idiom is used to disorient and obfuscate—to make humans less intelligible to each other through repetition of platitudes and received wisdom— superlatives are dizzyingly stacked: “Everything she saw out the window was either richly gleaming or glittering, owing to a supernatural effect.”

There is something neo-Kierkegaardian in the way Williams scandalizes the entire color spectrum in order to defamiliarize a scene. One is conscious of how colors do things to verbs, or act upon verbs in uncanny ways. Black obfuscates. White starches and over-irons; it envisions; it entitles angels and light and epiphanic acts. Red scandalizes; it vexes and manifests; it scalds just as surely as scarlet scolds and crimson crushes and red food coloring blushes. Alas, now I’m thinking of “Yellower” and how one assumes the subject is connected to the title only to find, while reading, that superlatives gain their own momentum, acquire their own speed and valence in the mind. Everything is bigger, sicker, messier—and so nothing is actual.

Many of Williams’ stories play these language games that look back at the language and reveal how we misuse it. In an interview, Williams described infidelity as “an inescapable subject”: “The fantasy of security is difficult to relinquish, as are the notions of invincibility and recklessness.”

Ending a sentence with the same article that opens the following sentence is anathema in writing workshops, but notice how gorgeously Williams accomplishes it in ‘Revenge’:

“Her mind was not changing. Her mind had not changed in years. Somebody’s headlights were blinding her. Her idea of a pilgrimage or promenade excited her.”

Enormous and tiny, ‘Revenge’ demolishes the interior monologue by destabilizing it. The repetition strategy wrecks the speaker. I love Williams for her profanation of expectation. I love her mockery of rationality. I love the thumbscrew she makes of the familiar by employing uncanny juxtapositions. One must read her exemplary brutality, her relentless brilliance.

Published in The Collected Stories of Diane Williams, Soho Press, 2018

‘Mary Magdalene; or Salvation’ by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Dori Katz in collaboration with the author

Collected in Fires, a series of dramatic monologues retelling ancient Greek stories or myths, Marguerite Yourcenar’s ‘Mary Magdalene; or Salvation’ came to her while studying St. John the Evangelist’s fiancée, as depicted in The Golden Legend (a.k.a. Legenda sanctorum: Readings of the Saints), an illuminated hagiographical manuscript authored by Jacobus de Varagine around 1260 C.E.

The problem with passion is greed: it desires too much. It craves the epiphanic, the heroic, the eternal. Like a god, the hero lavishes the salvific on his admirers. Rescue is the stallion’s white horse, but the price of salvation is possession. Yourcenar’s iconography of ancient thought-crimes is interspersed with italicized, lyrical notes that depict a personal fire in the author’s life. Each note resembles a Station of the Cross. Each is marked with a small torch at the top, as if to suggest that the author’s personal confessions occupy an illuminated space: “Burned with more fires… a hot whip lashes my back. I rediscovered the true meaning of the poetic metaphors. I wake up each night with my own blood ablaze.”

Mary Magdalene is the scripture’s most captivating character. Kneeling to wash a man’s feet with her hair is eros stripped bare; the act partakes of ecstasy’s shamelessness. Yourcenar uses hagiographic form for ‘Mary Magdalene; or Salvation’ to paint eros as the insatiable desire to be consumed by an unknowable Otherness. In first-person, Mary tells us how she rejected the Roman centurion’s proposition after falling in love with Saint John the Evangelist. “Loving his innocence was my first sin,” Mary admits. They become a couple. Temptation divides them when John is lured away by “the Ravishing One,” the man named Christ, the “Seducer who makes renunciation as sweet as sin.” Ultimately, John’s impotence damns the consummation of their marriage. It seems that unrevolutionary carnal love has nothing on God’s kinky neon.

John is gone. Mary is ostracized. She sleeps with the Roman centurion (among others). Eventually, she finds this man named Christ, John’s passion. “Placed in front of the Passion, I forgot love,” Mary says. “I accepted purity, like a worse perversion.” Conceptualizing purity as perversion in the Aristotelian sense, as a destruction of the mean, Yourcenar suggests salvation fails to redeem. What draws Mary to the Savior is their shared lack of fidelity: “Like me, he agreed to the terrible lot of belonging to all,” Mary says of Christ. “All we ever do is change enslavements: at the exact moment the devils left me, I became possessed by God.” Belonging to Him is the ultimate ecstasy. But the Passion doesn’t alter eternity. The crucifixion only teaches men that they can “get rid of God.”

After witnessing the resurrection, Mary finally understands “the full meaning of God’s atrocity”: the bride of Christ must share her husband with the entire world. Despite this abandonment, Mary regrets nothing. The Lord did not save her from her crimes, her sins, her death—it is “through them that one is saved.” The wrong we have done liberates us. Suffering continues. Salvation is freedom from loving John. As for the Messiah, Mary says, “He saved me from happiness.”

First published in French in Feux, 1936. Published in translation in Fires, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1981

‘Nadirs’ by Herta Müller, translated by Sieglinde Lug

When reading Romanian-born German writer Herta Müller, I am eleven again—a child crouched on the floor, listening to Romanian whispers behind closed doors. Müller won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature for her stark depiction of life under the Romanian communist regime. In rejecting emotional self-reflexivity and therapy-soaked discourse, Müller created a harrowing oeuvre that objectifies humans and anoints objects to carry the affective register of subjectivity. The narration is blank, immature, concretized. A self-erasing child-like voice records the world, drawing attention to how humans use language to describe it. Plots are sparse. Juxtaposition drives events in circles, in pauses, in seasons. Small details depict the abyss between life as it is lived, or performed, under a totalitarian system, and language, which must be continuously translated.

This refusal to offer plot, or to link actions to consequences, is symptomatic of trauma. To speak of one’s feelings was unacceptable in Ceausescu’s Romania. Your feelings simply did not matter. Your self, as separate from the national, did not exist. Your safety was a joke. Nationalist communism made life unlivable for ethnic and religious minorities. The double-alienation demands a sort of literary aphasia, a counterpoint to the continuous disputations over language. The unspeakable infects various silences while the speaker shuffles back and forth between what an object is called in the village, and what it is called in the official language (often equated with the city). Proximity to the official makes the city seem more developed and progressive than the village. (Village vs. the city asserts an ongoing tension in Müller’s work.)

It is easier for an acorn to soliloquy than for a person to speak clearly when the dictator plants his eyes everywhere. Müller’s novella-length story, ‘Nadirs,’ ordains ordinary objects to describe a Swabian village haunted by violence and war. Even loss is communicated through things. “I saw mother lying naked and frozen in Russia, with scraped legs and green lips from the turnips,” she writes, revealing how the mother’s memories of camps in Siberia are carried by the child in images and objects, in the lowlands of the bogs and village marshes whose frogs are “croaking from all the living and the dead of this village.”

The frogs, like the dead, are inescapable: “Everybody brought a frog along with them when they immigrated.” The frog follows the villagers. Each carries a frog in their throat when they leave. Müller uses a non-mammalian creature to posit this colonizing silence—a strategy she repeats with landscapes, trees, glasses, tables—the solid is a vehicle for the unspeakable. Describing the storm outside, nature enables the speaker to communicate her feelings: “At night the trees outside were lashing at each other. I saw them through the walls. Grandmother’s house had become like a house of glass.” The characters are helpless. Thunder (or fear) closes the blinds. Telephone wires argue, trees lash out at each other, even the boxes are tormented by Grandmother’s silence. No one arm-wrestles ghosts in unnamed cenotaphs like Müller. No one’s plums rot more profusely in my head.

First published in Niederungen, Kriterion, 1982. Published in translation in Nadirs, University of Nebraska Press, 1999

‘Innocence’ by Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey’s barococo ‘Innocence’ portrays a college girlfriend, Orra, as seen by her lover, Wiley. Both the narrator and his object of desire emerge in parts, in pieces, in pleasures sought. The first-person speaker deifies Orra: she is the monument, the mystery, the god, and the court. “Any attempted act confers vulnerability since only she could judge it,” Wiley explains. Pleasure and pleasing reveal their kinship, since Wiley’s desire to pleasure Orra is inseparable from his hunger to please her. The seamless swerve from interior monologue to omniscient description is Brodkey’s high-wire act.

The meticulous inventory of sexual sighs, moans, and tremblings seduces the reader into the scene: we look back and forth between their faces, trying to interpret their expressions. Like Wiley, we are mired in the tension of sexual pleasure Brodkey accomplishes this simultaneity by sexing-up the syntax, using paragraph-length sentences punctuated by nothing except semicolons; drawing slow trains of commas ruptured by interjections across the page; employing diction that shifts from the sensitive to the obscene and then back. The frantic lens narrows and widens, enacting the disorienting effect of earnest sexual encounter.

‘Innocence’ deploys the semicolon as texturizing agent in the paragraph. Like flour and oil, semicolons thicken the mix and build stickiness when stacked; they intensify the list with their rich, gooey stitch. Proust would not exist without his semicolon suave— that distinct baroque swerve of accretive syntax—nor would sex in Brodkey. His semicolons implicate us in the lustrous tangling and indulgent all-at-once-ness of sex.

As a low-status punctuation mark, more ornamental than necessary, the semicolon asserts itself aesthetically, like a gold earring or a faux mink coat. This cloying extravagance is amenable to risking kitsch. The semicolon is the acrobat of the line – it gushes, and then withdraws, leaving us to feel the world changed by its effusion. Brodkey uses it to establish rhythm that builds towards sexual climax, and then shortens his syntax to designate withdrawal. What Wiley wants evolves from simple sexual pleasure to self-discovery: “It was the feeling she aroused in me, a feeling that was, to be honest, made up of tenderness and concern and a kind of mere affection, a brotherliness as if she were my brother, not different from me at all.”

As Wiley identifies with Orra, she becomes his counterpart, his sibling, his co-innocent. The seducer is replaced by the astonished child, as the sex goes on, there is “an increasing failure … of one kind of sophistication—of worldly sophistication—and by the increase in me of another kind, of a childish sophistication, a growth of innocence: Orra said, or exclaimed, in half-harried, half-amazed voice, in a hugely admiring, gratuitous way, as she clutched at me in approval, “Wiley, I never had feelings like these before!”

A coming-of-age story, ‘Innocence’ centers the chasing of mutual orgasm, and the discovery of a self driven entirely by the desire to give them pleasure. Loyalty grows from this carnal communion — intimacy is disinhibited, shameless, and guilty of nothing apart from trying to crawl inside the Other.

Collected in Stories in an Almost Classical Mode,Vintage Books, 1989. Available online here