Introduction

Twelve stories. Only twelve? At first I wondered whether it would be possible to limit myself to twelve, but as it turns out stories are such recursive things that almost every time I started writing about one in particular, it led me to another, and instead of suppressing that urge I embraced it. Each story, after all, contains an anthology of its own, consisting of all the stories that influenced it and all the stories it has gone on to influence in turn. If all those links were to be explored twelve stories wouldn’t be too few at all. In fact it would be too many.

But still, it’s hard to pick twelve. With all the material available to us, as long as we keep on reading then any list of favourites has the potential to change. To reflect that, I’ve decided to divide this list in two: six stories I’ve been reading for a long time, and six I have discovered in the last two years. I hope you enjoy them.

‘Chablis’ by Donald Barthelme

In the summer of 1993, when I was 18, I stayed in a timeshare apartment in Lanzarote with some friends. The apartment had cable TV, which none of us had back in England, so for hours each day we sat around watching MTV Europe, curtains closed against the permanent sun as our hangovers ebbed.

We heard a handful of songs a host of times: ‘Numb’ by U2, ‘Plush’ by Stone Temple Pilots and Soul Asylum’s ’Runaway Train’ were all in heavy rotation, but it wasn’t the music that made a lasting impression. In 1991 MTV made a series of public information broadcasts called Books: Feed Your Head, designed to get teenagers reading. Two years later, these short films had either only just made it onto MTV Europe or were still playing. Either way, they changed my life. Sherilyn Fenn reading a passage from Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus was fine, as was Aidan Quinn hamming up Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but the one that really sunk its hooks into me was Timothy Hutton, standing at a barbecue in a hot, windy yard perched above a freeway, performing what I later found out was the opening paragraph of a story called ‘Chablis’ by someone called Donald Barthelme.

The extract struck me as being perfect: characterful, unexpected, and honed with the precision of a really fine piece of comedy (watching it again I don’t enjoy Hutton’s delivery as much; I remember it being more deadpan). As soon as I got home I tracked down 40 Stories, found ‘Chablis’ right at the front of it, and started a love affair with Barthelme’s work that continues to this day (although ‘Chablis’, it’s worth noting, is something of a realist outlier for him). To be honest, falling in love with Donald Barthleme probably set my writing back a few years, because there is nothing so disastrous as a bad version of his writing, and any attempt to emulate his writing is bad, or at least inferior. You can see George Saunders struggling with this influence – far better than most, but still struggling – in his first collection, Civilwarland in Bad Decline.

That same summer of 1993, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son was published in the UK, a book that quickly became my other pole star and which also led me down many treacherous and frustrating paths as a writer. Almost any of the stories in Jesus’ Son could fill both of the old and new halves of this list, because they have lived with me for 25 years but I also re-read the collection so often, and each time find so much in it, that the stories can feel like new discoveries, too.

In his 1981 Paris Review ‘Art of Fiction’ interview, Barthelme was asked about his influences. “They come in assorted pairs”, he said: “Perelman and Hemingway. Kierkegaard and Sabatini. Kafka and Kleist. Kleist was clearly one of Kafka’s fathers”. Robert Musil, when he first read Kafka, described him as “a peculiar case of the Walser type”. Which brings us to…

From 40 Stories, Penguin 1989, first published in the New Yorker December 1983. Hear Etgar Keret read and discuss the story here, and see the MTV short film here

’Kleist in Thun’ by Robert Walser, translated by Christopher Middleton

There are few stories that make me feel as unstable as ‘Kleist in Thun’. Describing a visit by the great German writer Heinrich von Kleist to the Swiss town of Thun, the text lurches between descriptions of natural beauty and nightmarish fears. At one moment Kleist’s surroundings are “like one vast embrace”, the next, “terribly cold and void”. Sentences suddenly drop into darkness, as if the ground has opened under our feet. “Around Thun”, one begins, “the fields are thick with flowers, fragrance everywhere, hum of bees, work, sounds fall, one idles about; in the heat of the sun” – and here we lose our footing – “you could go mad”.

In the first part of the story Kleist wanders the district. He goes boating on Lake Thun, visits the market, and sits on a churchyard wall as the evening grows damp and sultry. Some of Walser’s greatest writing is found here, such as when the distant Alps “come to life and dip with fabulous gestures their foreheads into the water. His swans down there circle his quiet island, and the crests of trees in dark, chanting, fragrant joy float over – over what? Nothing, nothing.”

In the story’s final section Kleist grows frustrated with his writing. “He wants the highest mastery, good, good. What’s that? Not sure? Tear it up. Something new, wilder, more beautiful”. But what he writes “makes him grimace: his creations miscarry”. He “wants to abandon himself to the entire catastrophe of being a poet” – a line that sounds to me like one of Frank O’Hara’s brilliant exclamations – but all that his frenzy leads to are his manuscripts lying scattered on the floor, “like children horribly forsaken by father and mother”.

On the last page, as Kleist and his sister leave Thun in a stagecoach and return to Germany, Walser steps into the foreground, snapping us into the story’s present day. The tempestuous emotions of the story recede, replaced instead with desultory chat about trade fairs and the Bernese Oberland. The shift is surprising and even feels gratuitous, but it can be understood if we consider the ways in which Walser’s life echoed Kleist’s, only in a minor key: Kleist became a national poet, Walser a literary curiosity; Kleist killed himself after shooting his terminally ill lover, Henriette Vogel, while Walser’s suicide attempt ended in failure – “I couldn’t even make a proper noose”, he later noted. In Thun, Kleist wrestled with genius and madness, while Walser, according to the story’s brilliant and unexpected closing lines, “worked as a clerk in a brewery there”. Yet Walser’s story, a unique blend of humour and horror, is also a defiant act: in the minds of those who fall under its influence, it unites these two unalike men forever.

From The Walk, Serpent’s Tail 1992, first published in I think 1913 although some sources claim 1907 – an uncertainty that’s entirely fitting

‘Gusev’ by Anton Chekhov, translated by Rosamund Bartlett

This story, written in 1890, describes a period of days in a stifling sickbay aboard a ship in the Pacific, returning to Russia from the Far East. Gusev, a batman, is baffled by the complaints of his educated companion, Pavel Ivanych, and dreams feverishly of his home village, longing to hurtle into its cold snowdrifts and to see his niece and nephew again. Gusev and Pavel Ivanych, and the soldiers and sailors sharing their cabin, are dying of tuberculosis. They are members of a crop of characters that contracted the disease in the stories Chekhov wrote in this period: a year earlier TB had killed his brother, the artist Nikolai Chekhov, at the age of 31, and in response Chekov had written ‘A Boring Story’ (sometimes translated as ‘A Dreary Story’), a lengthy and depressing account of the illness and death of a scientist. And since 1884 Chekhov had known that he too had TB, and that it would probably be the cause of his death (which it was, in a Black Forest hotel room in 1904, when he was just 44, an event Raymond Carver describes in his 1987 story ‘Errand’).

‘Gusev’ is desolate but also very beautiful, which makes it a notable counterpoint to the unremittingly bleak ‘A Boring Story’. Gusev’s death arrives starkly: “He sleeps for two days, and on the third, at noon, two sailors come down to the sick bay and carry him out”. In plain language Chekhov describes the preparation of the body for burial at sea, with Gusev’s body sewn up in his sailcloth shroud looking “like a carrot or a radish”. Just before the board is lifted and his corpse slides into the water, the soldiers and sailors on deck “look out towards the waves. It is strange to think that a person has been sewn up in a sailcloth and is about to go headlong into the waves. Could that really happen to anyone?”

This question works in tandem with a passage found a couple of pages earlier, when Gusev asks one of his surviving companions to take him up on deck for some air. They stand beside the rail at the bow,

looking silently up above and then down below. Up above is deep sky, clear stars, and silence, exactly like at home in the village, but down below there is darkness and disorder. For no fathomable reason the huge waves are making a lot of noise. Whichever wave you look at, each one tries to go higher than all the others, chasing after and pounding the one before it; a third, just as ferocious and wild, will fall upon it noisily, with its white mane shimmering.

The passage seems to describe the hopelessness of life, its “darkness and disorder”, and reading it makes me think of something similar in Maupassant, when the miserable, abandoned patrons of a temporarily closed bordello in the story ‘Madame Tellier’s Establishment’, stand on a Normandy beach halfway around the world and watch as the “foam on the crest of the waves made bright patches of white in the darkness which disappeared as quickly as they came, and the monotonous sound of the sea breaking on the rocks echoed through the night all along the cliffs” (translated by Roger Colet).

For all the preceding sombreness, the conclusion of ‘Gusev’ is one of the most remarkable and beautiful things in all Chekhov’s work: his focus becomes more expansive as he follows the corpse into the sea, past a shoal of pilot fish and into the path of a shark. Above the water, he continues this movement away from the tight confines of the sickbay, and eventually away from any kind of human concern: the sun is rising and lighting up clouds that resemble “a triumphal arch, another like a lion, and a third like scissors”. The sky takes on rich colours, and the ocean “frowns at first as it looks at this magnificent, mesmerising sky, but it too then takes on those tender, radiant, passionate colours which are difficult to describe in human terms”. It is beautiful, but it is vertiginous, too. It’s a piece of writing I sometimes find consoling and sometimes horrifying. It is a story I find I must return to, but I never do so lightly.

From About Love and Other Stories, Oxford World’s Classics 2004. Read a version from a 1944 collection of Chekhov stories – translator unknown, but it’s not Constance Garnett – here

‘No Place for You, My Love’ by Eudora Welty

A man and a woman meet at a lunch party on a summer’s day in New Orleans. Both are married, but appear to be interested in each other. The man suggests a drive, and Welty’s story follows them south, out of the city and into…what, exactly? A rural, semi-aquatic zone where the roads are made of shell and busy with crayfish, but also, it feels like, some kind of place where the usual way of things is suspended. They race on, this man and woman, and we race on behind them: who are they? What are they looking for? Welty doesn’t ever let the narrative settle long enough for us to find out. When the woman asks a direct question – what’s your wife like? – the man simply lifts his hand to her face to block it, and Welty lifts hers to us in a similar way. The viewpoint of the story is a close third that alternates between both characters, but we never penetrate their thoughts to any real depth; the technique is used to accentuate the distance between them, not dissolve it.

Describing a story by Elizabeth Bowen (a writer who appears later in this anthology), Welty wrote about the “turmoil” of the characters’ “passionate drives, private energies that in their own directions touch yet never can merge or become one together”. The description serves her own story well. These people meet and depart as strangers: “They were strangers to each other” is the first line of the story, and sixteen pages later it could also serve as the last. As we follow them, disorientating sentences appear – “Like a misplaced sunrise, the light of the river flowed up” – and are gone, as car and language pull us on, on, on. Because the story denies us the familiar handholds of character, because of its abrupt beginning and the hallucinatory quality of its description, I can never remember it well. Each time I return its mystery has been replenished, and I read it again almost as if for the first time.

From The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1980. Read the story in the 20 September 1952 issue of the New Yorker ($)

‘The Terminal Beach’ by JG Ballard

‘The Terminal Beach’ marks a watershed in Ballard’s writing. It’s the first story he wrote in which the events it describes are separated out and then studied from various angles in what he described as a “very abstract, almost cubist way”. This style, in which fiction becomes a kind of report on itself, proved fruitful for him throughout the late-1960s, reaching its apogee in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). In the story, Traven, who is also the protagonist of that later work, finds himself on the deserted Pacific atoll of Eniwetok, an H-bomb test site. It is a landscape of manmade blocks – a “minimal concrete city” – designed to help measure the force of the explosion, an airstrip, submarine pens, and dozens of B-29 bombers lying across one another “like dead reptile birds”.

Traven’s wife and son are dead, and he has come to Eniwetok to conduct some kind of irrational hunt for them. ‘“This island is a state of mind’”, he is told at one point, which gets to the heart of things: “if primitive man felt the need to assimilate events in the external world to events in his own psyche”, Traven thinks, “20th century man had reversed this process; by this Cartesian yardstick, the island at least existed, in a sense true of few other places”. So Eniwetok is an extension or projection of Traven, and in this way for me it becomes paired with the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, the setting of Ernest Hemingway’s story about a fishing trip, ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ (1925), in which Nick Adams’s physical journey through the landscape also becomes a psychic one, the enactment of his struggle to come to terms with his experiences in the First World War.

This idea of the space of the story being the physical expression of a mental state is integral to a significant number of short stories, or perhaps it’s more true to say that I read a significant number of short stories in this way. Grace Paley said that every story consists of “two events or two characters…bumping against each other”, and in his ‘Theses on the Short Story’, Ricardo Piglia writes, “a short story always tells two stories… the point where they intersect are the foundations of the story’s construction”. And what is the subconscious if not a constant second story, set to a lesser or greater extent askew from consensus reality? I like Ballard’s stories for the directness with which they use this doubleness as their material. One almost always feels, reading him, that the setting and the events are projections of a protagonist’s inner life – which is perhaps why those protagonists are themselves relatively blank: all their inside is thrown outside.

Traven begins spending more and more time within the network of concrete blocks scattered across the island. The more lost he gets, the calmer he feels. “Somewhere in the centre of the maze”, Ballard writes, “he sat with his back against one of the concrete flanks, his eyes raised to the sun. Around him the lines of cubes formed the horizon of his world. At times they would appear to advance towards him, looming over him like cliffs, the intervals between them narrowing so that they were little more than an arm’s length apart, a labyrinth of corridors running between them”. That “advance towards him” links ‘The Terminal Beach’ with Kipling’s ‘The Gardener’ (also 1925, like the Hemingway), in which Helen Turrell travels to Hagenzeele to visit the grave of her nephew. Climbing the steps to the cemetery, she meets “the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath. She did not know that Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her”.

The moment is one of horror. Helen, like Traven, is searching for a dead loved one. She, like him, is perhaps mad with grief: she has a vision of Jesus, while Traven sees his wife and child across a lake, “beckoning to him” (a step too far, probably, to think here of the first sighting of Miss Jessel beside the lake in The Turn of the Screw, but you can’t deny the mind its associations, least of all when reading Ballard). Like Nick Adams, who puts off fishing the swamp, the locations in which these characters are situated reflect and express their internal condition. Traven’s bombed and deserted island, on which tall palms reach “into the dim air like the symbols of a cryptic alphabet”, is a landscape encoded with trauma and grief.

From The Terminal Beach, Gollancz 1964

‘Enrique Martín’ by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews

“A poet can endure anything”, Bolaño’s story begins, but one of the two poets at its centre, Enrique Martín, fails first at poetry, and then at life. Along the way, as Bolaño’s alter ego Arturo Belano relates in this mysterious, melancholy story, we get UFOs, paranoia, squabbles over appearances in small literary magazines, and a Frank O’Hara namecheck. Martín, despised by Belano, is a pathetic figure, a man who “wanted to be a poet, and…threw himself into this endeavour with all his energy and willpower” (which nods back to Walser’s line about Kleist: “he wants to abandon himself to the entire catastrophe of being a poet” – a line that reminds me of O’Hara, and so round and round it goes).

Another association. Something about Belano and Martín’s relationship makes me think of ‘William Wilson’, my favourite Edgar Allan Poe story. Wilson is antagonised by his doppelgänger, and for Belano also, Martín represents an unwelcome reflection, a reminder of the possibility and misery of failure: Belano’s success could easily have resembled Martín’s lack of it.

Bolaño loved Poe, writing in his ‘Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories’ that “The honest truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe, we would all have more than enough good material to read”, a statement I rank alongside his ridiculous and beautiful claim that “I could live under a table reading Borges”.

From Last Evenings on Earth, Harvill Secker 2007

‘A Dark and Winding Road’ by Ottessa Moshfegh

I have a major crush on Ottessa Moshfegh’s writing right now. First I read ‘An Honest Woman’, then I heard her read ‘A Dark and Winding Road’, then I binged on her brilliant collection Homesick for Another World. She says she’s done with the short story, which is a shame, but has already written more good ones than a lot of people manage so it’s hard to begrudge her decision. Her characters are borderline if not full-blown grotesques, her vision of the world is bleak – transactional, treacherous, comfortless – but my god, what a stylist. She’s like a secular Flannery O’Connor. The first 14 lines of ‘A Dark and Winding Road’ are flawless, themselves a winding route to the story’s dark heart: the narrator’s “one last weekend to myself before the baby was born and my life as I’d known it was forever ruined”.

From Homesick for Another World, Jonathan Cape 2017, first published in the Paris Review Winter 2013. Hear Ottessa Moshfegh read the story in Episode 7 of the Paris Review podcast, here

‘How to Read a Picture Book’ by David Hayden

A cigar-smoking squirrel gives a gang of kids in Central Park a lecture on picture books. Or a man daydreams the same. Whether he’s a figment or real, Sorry the Squirrel exists for the length of time it takes us to read Hayden’s wonderful story, and the wisdom and beauty of what he says persists long after we finish it. Some of the books he talks about – Amos and Boris, Ulysses – are real, and some are tantalisingly not:

how about that book Tiger Night where the baby tiger can’t sleep and the daddy tiger has to keep reading him stories until they both fall asleep at the end. Now, if you take the first letter of each line and put them together it spells: “SAMSAMCALLMEPLEASE”. On the last page there’s the picture of the tigers asleep on the sofa in the living room and on the wall there’s a mirror and in it you can just make out a telephone number.

Sorry moves through words, pictures, point of view, setting and time. “There’s plenty you can’t say with words,” he says. “You can fall through words down into a seething belly world of billions of objects and notions, all shrieking or hiding”. Denis Johnson says something similar, from a writer’s perspective, in his story ‘Triumph Over the Grave’, the narrator of which shares something of his pedagogical delivery with Sorry the Squirrel:

Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie – although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.

Yes, the writing of words can take years and take you along all manner of strange routes, and the reading of them can contain years, too. In his discussion of time, Hayden gives Sorry some of my favourite lines from the past year of reading:

In Amos and Boris months go by as the mouse sails his homemade boat out into the ocean, hours pass as he floats in the swell slowly drowning. He’s rescued by the whale in an instant and their friendship endures for years. The book takes only ten minutes to read but it has all this time packed inside, and when you remember reading it that time returns to you adding to your own small portion. Reading can slow time to a drip, drip, or push it on in a rushing, sinewy torrent like a snow-fed river in spring. Books let you circle around time, find the root of time, lose time, recover time. People will tell you that reading – especially stories – is a waste of time. Don’t believe them for a second.

The time one story can give back to you can also unlock that of other stories, as the reading of one triggers the memory of another: one door leading to another and another, like the doors in the cement blocks on Traven’s island (“As he walked from the perimeter line into the centre of the massif, line upon line of the small metal doors appeared and receded”). ‘How to Read a Picture Book’, and Hayden’s work generally, teaches us to read more attentively and more thoughtfully. It’s a lesson I often forget and never tire of being retaught, whether by man or by squirrel.

From Darker With the Lights On, Little Island 2017

‘Marie’ by Edward P. Jones

Edward P. Jones’s collection Lost in the City sat unread on my shelves for years before I finally picked it up. I don’t know why it took me so long, particularly when I had heard so much praise for it from so many (American) writers. But maybe that’s why: praise fatigue. You can hear so much about a book that it comes to seem familiar to you, although of course when you read it you realise that whatever you have read about a book is never the same as reading the book for yourself; an obvious thing to say, but yet another thing I constantly forget (perhaps usefully, because the thought that there’s no replacement for reading a book grows proportionally more terrifying according to the size of your to-read pile).

Jones’s book is a kind of Dubliners for African American Washington D.C. between the 1950s and 1980s, and in that respect – and because the stories are brilliant – it is better to read them together rather than apart. I’ve chosen ‘Marie’, the final story in the collection, because its 86-year-old title character “had learned that life was all chaos and painful uncertainty”, and that line works as one of the main lessons taught by the entire collection. It hits you hard to read it because Jones gets inside his characters’ lives with such skill and power that your empathy is complete. Reading one story, ‘The Store’, I actually gasped when the narrator merely says that he shows up late for his job, because of the sense you have by that stage of the book that these lives have everything stacked against them, they are just barely holding together, and that something as minor as losing a job might send them off the rails forever.

From Lost in the City, William Morrow 1992. If you have a Paris Review subscription you can read Marie in full here (or in part if you don’t)

‘Mysterious Kôr’ by Elizabeth Bowen

’Mysterious Kôr’ describes two lovers wandering blacked-out London during the Blitz. The blasted city is “drenched” in moonlight and looks like “the moon’s capital – shallow, cratered, extinct”. The lovers have nowhere to go. Pepita lives with virginal Callie, who has offered to share her bed with her roommate so that Arthur, a soldier on leave, can sleep on the sitting-room divan that usually serves as Pepita’s bed. Unimpressed by the prospect, they stay out on the streets pretending the city is ‘Mysterious Kôr’, from H Rider Haggard’s novel She, by way of an Andrew Lang poem (“Mysterious Kôr thy walls forsaken stand / Thy lonely towers beneath a lonely moon”).

There are many things to admire about Bowen’s 1944 story, but the thing I love most about it is what Pepita says when Arthur challenges her interpretation of Lang’s poem. “What it tries to say doesn’t matter: I see what it makes me see”. There is so much truth about the relationship between reader and text in these two lines (just as there is so much truth about the relationship between women and men in the way Arthur quibbles in the middle of a game of make-believe). At the end of the story, wrapped in dreams, Pepita returns to Kôr alone as Callie and Arthur talk in the pre-dawn darkness. This story, like most of the stories in this anthology, contains a good deal of ambiguity, and different readers will emerge from it with different impressions. Is that frustrating to some people? It seems to be, although I can’t understand why. Ambiguity is the space in a story into which we readers can insert ourselves and interpret, interrogate, interact.

From The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, Penguin 1983. Read it, possibly illegally, here

‘The White Cattle of Uppington’ by Gerald Murnane

If you have never read any of Gerald Murnane’s writing before, the opening lines of ‘The White Cattle of Uppington’ will give you an idea of what it is like:

The following is a list of descriptions of some of the details of some of the images in some of the sequences of images that the chief character of this piece of fiction foresaw as appearing in his mind whenever during a certain year in the late 1970s he foresaw himself as preparing to write a certain piece of fiction. Each description is followed by a passage explaining some of the details of some of the images.

And so the story proceeds, with Murnane describing and analysing a young man reading Ulysses on a commuter train into Melbourne in the late-1950s; the same young man masturbating in a bedroom; the same person, slightly older, trying to inveigle himself with a rural artistic community, and later taking creative writing classes. The prose, like all of Murnane’s prose, is methodical, plain in the sense of vocabulary although sometimes baroque in terms of sentence structure, and completely unlike anything else I’ve ever read. Beckett is the closest comparison to be made, because of that shared ability to transform straightforward explanation into something bewilderingly complex, like the description of the sucking stones that runs to nearly 1500 words in Molloy.

I have only begun reading Murnane in the last couple of years; in fact I only read this story after I had almost finished compiling this anthology. But as far as I can tell from my limited knowledge, Murnane’s project is all of a piece: his novels, short fiction, memoir (I don’t think he writes poems) are all part of a larger investigation into the makeup of memory: why do we remember what we remember, and in the way we remember it? Elsewhere in the collected short fiction, in a story called ‘In Far Fields’, he describes telling a creative writing student that “I had studied my mind for many years and had found in it nothing but images and feelings…a diagram of my mind would resemble a vast and intricate map with images for its small towns and with feelings for the roads through the grassy countryside between the towns”. On and on his methodical description goes, as he attempts to understand why his mind should work like this, and what it means that it does.

I find Murnane’s approach completely addictive. I can understand why some find it chilly at best, if not utterly infuriating, but when I pick up his books I find them very difficult to put down again, whether he is spending four pages recounting everything he can remember from several decades spent reading the TLS, or returning once again to a recurring and haunting vision of grasslands spreading all around him to the horizon. These grasslands are both his Victorian home turf and, to return to ground we covered with Ballard, an inner landscape that says something about the nature of his mind. And on top of this we as readers bring our own associations: “I see what it makes me see”, as Pepita says, although Murnane’s style is largely about getting us as readers to see exactly what he sees. He is also someone who buys into interconnectivity. “If you write about something for long enough”, he said in a 2013 interview, “you’ll find that it is connected to something else”. As a statement that is banal. As a lifelong artistic method, it seems profound.

Murnane almost certainly won’t find any answers to the questions he’s asking, but as Donald Barthelme noted, “the task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions”. I think Murnane really does want an answer, but like Ned, the protagonist of the last story in this anthology, he’s going to have to do without.

From Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018

‘If I Vanished’ by Stuart Dybek

Ned’s wife has left him. He remembers a question she asked him once a couple of years before: “What if I were to vanish?” She says she heard the line in a film, some Kevin Costner western she can’t remember the name of. Thinking the film might contains some clue to why she’s gone, Ned tracks it down: Open Range. A review he reads online mentions something about its “‘defence of the values of a vanishing lifestyle’”, and it’s here that the story within Dybek’s story reveals itself: Ned has embarked on a journey for meaning, but all the leads he follows will turn out to be false.

It’s an exaggeration to say that in the best short stories not a single word is out of place, but it’s true that the words in a short story do tend to be more constantly freighted with meaning. That’s just the way they have to work if you have anything you really want to explore within their constrained length. There is a Vladimir Nabokov story called ‘Signs and Symbols’ (‘Symbols and Signs’ in its original 1948 appearance in the New Yorker; you can and should read it here) that plays a game with how attuned the skilled short story reader is to hidden meaning. An elderly husband and wife return home from an unsuccessful visit to a mental institution, where their son has made another suicide attempt. He suffers from “referential mania”, a condition that means he “imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence…Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him…Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept”. The story ends with three phone calls. The first two are a woman dialling the wrong number, but as the phone rings for a third time both parents and reader are certain it’s the hospital calling to tell them their son is dead. That is the meaning that our experience of stories, our own referential mania, has taught us to anticipate. Point made, Nabokov ends the story with the phone unanswered.

Ned is similarly attuned to his surroundings on the night described in ‘If I Vanished’: a performance of Pictures at an Exhibition playing on the car radio as he ventures into the snowy night to track down a rental copy of Open Range; an encounter at a donut shop where the woman serving him mistakes him for someone else; the film itself, plucked off the shelf and taken home to be analysed. Alongside Ned we are eager for some answer to be found, although all of us – reader, author, character – know that sometimes things just don’t work out that way, not even in stories.

From Paper Lantern, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2014. Read the story in the 9 July 2007 issue of the New Yorker:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/07/09/if-i-vanished