‘Ghosts, Cowboys’ by Claire Vaye Watkins

For a while I’ve been interested in the idea of personal mythologies—how we’re shaped by the family lore passed down from parents or grandparents. But what happens when your personal history collides with events of larger cultural significance? Here, Watkins weaves a tapestry of fiction, historical fact, and autobiography to merge her own origin story, including her father’s involvement with Charles Manson, with the larger history of the American West, which is, of course, a history of violence.

First published in The Hopkins Review, Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 2009, and available to read here. Collected in Battleborn: Stories, Riverhead Books, 2012

‘The Nature of the Miracle’ by Diane Williams

The work of Diane Williams is unexpected, enigmatic, often fraught with tension and anxiety. But reading her stories, I also feel the sheer joy of the creative act. Perhaps that’s because as a senior editor of her literary annual NOON, I’ve had an insight into her process over the years including her belief that any remarkable language can be saved and made use of, her determination to continue to surprise or frighten herself in her writing, and the way she stitches sentences together to make something unexpected and new. Many of her stories are barely longer than a page, but her body of work is extraordinary—her collected stories span 764 pages, and since it was published, she has already produced another collection, How High? — That High, and has yet another due out this year. How to select just one? I went back to the beginning, and chose ‘The Nature of the Miracle’ from Williams’s first book, This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, The World, Time, and Fate (how much I have learned from her about the way titles can bring gravity or resonance to a story!) Here, we can see the themes that have come to dominate her oeuvre—the possible collisions of sex and violence, the menace of seemingly ordinary domestic situations, and all the ways a woman might lose her grip. I also love the framing of unrequited love as a communicable disease that might pass from one woman to another by using the same shopping trolley, and the way the narrator’s disastrous circular logic repeats through the story like a refrain. It’s a masterclass in the art of brevity.

First published in This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, The World, Time, and Fate, Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. Collected in The Collected Stories of Diane Williams, Soho Press, 2018

‘Dog Heaven’ by Stephanie Vaughn

“Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again,” is another of my favourite opening lines, and maybe the best answer to that pesky question of narrative imperative i.e. Why is this story being told now? What follows is the narrator’s childhood memories—framed as a dead dog’s dream—of the last few months her family spent living on an army base in Fort Niagara in the before moving to another post in Oklahoma. As army brats, the narrator and her best friend Sparky are outcasts amongst the “civilian children” at school. It’s the 1980s, and their attempts to fit in by learning how to skate, wearing the right hats and gloves, and running for student government, are shadowed by the threat of nuclear war and their teacher’s pointed reminder that “in the whole history of the human species only one country had ever used the worst weapon ever invented.”

It’s Duke, that beloved long-dead dog, who gives her childhood a sense of innocence, earning a permanent place in the family mythology for his spectacular feats, including running fourteen miles through an ice storm to return home. I love a dog story, and one the things that makes Duke an unforgettable dog character is his voice, his barks translated by Vaughn into gleeful, urgent expressionist: “My name is Duke! My name is Duke! I’m your dog! I’m your dog!” People who love this story as much as I do often marvel at the fact that Vaughn has not published another book since her collection Sweet Talk in 1990. But I think of ‘Dog-Heaven’ and its note-perfect ending, and wonder if she simply said everything she wanted to say.

First published in The New Yorker, January 1, 1989 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Sweet Talk, Other Press, 2012

‘Miniatures’ by Sara Majka

I return to Sara Majka’s collection Cities I’ve Never Lived In at least once a year for their isolated landscapes and beautifully distilled truths. Like Majka’s narrator, who links these stories together, I moved around frequently when I was growing up. Reading these stories helped me understand the way transience shapes a person’s interior life, as well as the way they inhabit a place. I could have picked any story from this collection, but I am drawn to ‘Miniatures’ because of the subtle way Majka depicts a relationship between two adult siblings whose wounds share the same origins, but present in different ways.

First published in Cities I’ve Never Lived In, Graywolf Press, 2016

‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin

‘Sonny’s Blues’ reminds me of the capacity of short fiction to feel just as expansive as a novel. It tells the story of two estranged brothers, whose paths diverge after the death of their parents. While the narrator settles into family life in Harlem as a schoolteacher, the younger brother Sonny seeks a bohemian existence as a jazz musician in the Village until he is arrested for using and selling heroin. When Sonny is released from prison, they reconnect, but it’s only when the narrator agrees to watch Sonny perform that he sees his brother for who he really is for the first time. To me, the final scene of this story is one of the most moving testaments of the power of music—and art more broadly—to express what feels inexpressible, bridge seemingly impossible gulfs in understanding, and provide both an outlet and solace for our suffering.

First published in the Partisan Review, 1957, and widely collected, including in Going to Meet The Man, Dial Press, 1965, which was published as a Penguin Modern Classic in 1991. The story was also published as a Penguin 60 in 1995

‘Emergency’ by Denis Johnson

‘Emergency’ was my introduction to Denis Johnson. It came to me via The New Yorker’s fiction podcast, narrated by Tobias Wolff, who brilliantly delivers the heart and humor of this tale. It contains one of my favorite Johnson moments: his hero Fuckhead and another orderly, Georgie, high on pills stolen from the Catholic hospital where they work, stumble through a blizzard into an open field that they mistake for a military cemetery marked with rows of anonymous, identical grave markers. From above, the enormous faces of angels come bearing down on them through the clouds, “streaked with light and full of pity.” But then they realize that the angels are only actors in a movie projected on to an outdoor cinema in front of a row of plastic chairs, abandoned by the audience in the sudden spring storm. No one captures the absurdity, terror and fragile beauty of being alive quite like Johnson. Like the characters in ‘Emergency’, the cast of his linked collection Jesus’ Son are outcasts, drifters, addicts, but Johnson allows them a full range of experience—moments of tenderness, violence, grief, and revelation.

First published in The New Yorker, September 8, 1991 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Jesus’ Son, Picador, 1992, and widely anthologised, including in That Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the Finest Short Stories, ed. David Miller, Head of Zeus, 2014

‘Flames’ by Yūko Tsushima, translated by Geraldine Harcourt

I read Yūko Tsushima’s novel in stories, Territory of Light, during the early days of the pandemic and though it was originally published in Japan in the late ‘70s, the descriptions of the narrator’s circumscribed life alone in her apartment with her young daughter after leaving her husband seemed to speak to my own sense of isolation like nothing else at that moment. In ‘Flames’, the narrator finds herself frequently encountering funerals, and is haunted by a series of deaths in her community, which reach a climax when chemical factory explodes nearby, lighting up the night in surges of sparks and color. The story is infused with a sense of grief—including the narrator’s own feelings of loss over the end of her marriage, implicit but never directly stated—but it also includes surprising moments of tenderness, as when the little girl attempts to care for her mother when she comes down with a fever, delighting in this reversal of roles. ‘Flames’, to some, might be considered a “quiet” story because not much happens—or, rather, the dramatic events in the background are not what matters here. “Quiet” tends to be used as a pejorative—one that’s been directed at my own work many times—but I have always believed in the power of quiet fiction, and ‘Flames’ is proof that plot is not what gives a story gravity or meaning.

Included in Territory of Light, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018

Introduction to a Romanian Personal Anthology

I promised Jonathan this Romanian anthology a few years ago but soon found myself overwhelmed by the task, because so few of the truly formative Romanian authors have been translated into English, even less so their short stories. Occasionally, where I might have been able to present an extract from a novel, the translations were dated or poor.

The situation has not necessarily improved significantly in the intervening years, but I have managed to source a few additional translations, although I should warn you that some of them are my own, often done at short notice in a fit of pique because I was frustrated with not finding something suitable to share with you.

I also ran into a second problem: how should we even define ‘Romanian’ writers? We not only have a number of minority languages in the country itself, but many of our most recognisable names (Eugen Ionescu, Emil Cioran, Herta Müller, Paul Celan) did not write in Romanian. At some point I would love to edit a multilingual anthology of writers who could be loosely labelled as ‘from Romania’, but who write in German, Hungarian, Romany, Ukrainian, French, English, Tatar and so on. But we have to start somewhere, so here is my imperfect initial list of recommendations. I’ve attempted some rather vague system of classification, but those writers are slippery sods, who keep defying my attempts at organising them in themes, when the truth is that all of the different ‘schools’ could come under the umbrella of “haz de necaz” (Romanian expression = “making fun of trouble”).

‘The Baccalaureate’ by Ion Luca Caragiale, translated by Marina Sofia

Caragiale is one of Romania’s major literary figures, best known for his plays but also his sharp satirical sketches. His short stories paint a discomfiting picture of the pretentiousness of Romanian society in the late 19th Century, although one might argue that the targets of his sarcasm – corruption, snobbishness and self-serving hypocrisy – are universal subjects. Most Romanians can recite many of his catchphrases, but I chose a slightly less well-known short story about helicopter parenting and influencing exam outcomes, which still shows his talent for capturing human foibles and rhythms of speech.

“Let me give you just a few examples of what schools do to the younger generation. I’ve seen children with excellent academic abilities being forced to repeat a year because they didn’t have pass marks in music or PE… You do realise the injustice of that, to be a year behind because of not having musical or athletic aptitude?… You have to agree, this is in the same vein, equally as absurd, as letting a young man who wants to study Law repeat a year because his Ethics is not quite there yet… What does Ethics have to do with practising Law, anyway?… Wouldn’t you agree?”

First published in 1900, you can read a work-in-progress translation of it on my blog

Ciuleandra by Liviu Rebreanu, translated by Gabi Reigh

Rebreanu is one of the foremost Romanian novelists of the 20th Century, usually credited with the founding of both the ‘realist’ school of literature set in the rural environment (a bit like Thomas Hardy), as well as the psychological novel. The novella Ciuleandra, published in 1927, falls into the second category and is the story of a young aristocrat who strangles his beautiful and blameless wife (of peasant origin) on the night of the royal ball. His father arranges to have him committed to an asylum to avoid a public trial and thereby besmirching the family name – a more extreme and tragic example of helicopter parenting perhaps.

Cadmus Press, 2021

‘Kyra Kyralina’ by Panait Istrati, translated by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno

My third choice is also more of a novella than a short story, by a working-class writer who was quite fashionable in the 1930s-40s in France and Latin America, where he was often labelled ‘the Balkan Gorky’ (does anybody read Gorky nowadays though?). He was living in France when he wrote it and first published it in French, before completely reworking it and publishing it in Romanian. It was not well received in his homeland (one critic waspishly said “It was written by a docker in the port of Brăila and it shows”) but it remained one of the stories closest to his heart. The beautiful Kyra Kyralina of the title is being raised as a courtesan by her mother, and is later kidnapped and taken to a Turkish harem. Her younger brother sets off to find and rescue her, and this becomes a picaresque novella with a naïve protagonist who has to grow up very quickly. It has a Thousand-and-One-Nights quality to it, full of languorous prose and descriptions.

“I mounted guard near the window and munched cakes while the lovers, who seemed to have fairly decent manners, sat Turkish fashion on the floor, singing and playing Oriental tunes. There was a guitar, accompanied by castanets and a tambourine. My mother and Kyra adored it all and would often do the handkerchief dance which made them dizzy with its twistings and twirlings. Then with flaming cheeks they would throw themselves upon the cushions and lie there fanning themselves, with their legs drawn up under their long silk skirts. Fragrant herbs were burned and cordials were consumed.

The men were young and beautiful and always dark. They were elegantly turned out, with pointed moustaches, carefully trimmed beards and hair that exhaled a strong scent of almond oil and musk. There were Turks, Greeks, and sometimes Romanians. Nationality was of no importance provided they were young, beautiful, refined, discreet, and not too eager. My role was a thankless one. I have never told anyone until now what agonies I suffered. My duty was to keep watch, seated on the window-ledge, and to save the party from sudden interruptions.”

Talisman House, 2010

‘Daddy Wants TV on Saturday Night’ by Bogdan Suceavă, translated by the author

Finally, a contemporary story, although it describes life in the 1980s, when power cuts were becoming the norm. The narrator’s father resorts to all sorts of tricks to be able to watch his favourite TV programme. Funny and bizarre, this kind of story reminds you how ridiculous everyday reality under Communism could be – so strange, that it feels like surrealism.

Published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction: Writing from Postcommunist Romania, Spring 2010

‘A Little Bit of Metaphysics and Astronomy’ by Urmuz, translated by Marina Sofia

Urmuz is the pen name of one of the most unusual yet influential writers Romania has ever had, despite his brief literary career (he committed suicide in 1923) and his meagre output (he left behind at most sixty pages of writing in total). While some compare his flash fiction type of works to the tragic absurdity of Kafka, and others emphasise his comic tour de force à la Lewis Carroll, to me he is far more clearly linked to Tristan Tzara (also a Romanian) and the Dadaists.

“It’s not true – all the table companions agreed – that ‘in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. No – they affirmed with all their might – in the beginning, long before any word appeared, there must have been sign language, because it is highly unlikely that cosmic matter or heavenly bodies learnt to speak out from the very start. It was quite possible that they were incapable at first of even asking to go outside, or at the very least to say ‘papa’ or ‘mama’.”

Published in Firmament Vol. 3, No. 1, Sublunary Editions, 2023

The Chairs by Eugène Ionescu (Eugen Ionescu), translated by Martin Crimp

To continue in the absurdist vein, this one-act play by Eugène Ionesco from the 1950s breaks with all theatrical conventions. An elderly couple receive invisible guests and distract each other with stories, half-remembered memories and the occasional sharp dig at each other. Although theatre-goers could not quite agree about the message of the play, to me it represents the futility of all attempt to make sense of life and the perennial human longing for connection and to be understood.

First performed in French as Les Chaises in 1952. Published in translation by Faber & Faber, 1997