‘A Stone Woman’ by A.S. Byatt

Ines’ beloved mother dies, then she suffers a health emergency requiring surgery, which leaves her with a nasty wound and reconstructed navel. (This reminded me of the character in Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’ who also loses his navel in an operation, which the protagonist sees as a severance from birth, “a breach in the succession.”) This double separation from her mother seems to manifest in an even more dramatic physical transformation. Ines’ incision fills with stone, a “glossy hardness” that quickly spreads. She is becoming something other than human — a creature out of legend, she learns, with the help of an Icelandic stonecutter who recognizes what is happening to her. Ultimately she must leave behind the world of people, but this is, unexpectedly, a joyous development. A beautifully eerie look at the way grief can force a metamorphosis.

First published in The New Yorker, October 13, 2003, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Little Black Book of Stories, Vintage, 2005)

‘The Five-Forty-Eight’ by John Cheever

The title refers to the commuter train from a gray and grimy New York to the sanctuary of the Westchester suburbs where the main character, Blake, resides (and torments his wife and son, we learn.) On this journey Blake will meet vengeance in the form of the pistol-wielding Miss Dent, an emotionally unstable former secretary of his who he has slept with and discarded. The narration sticks with Blake and reserves judgment, which serves to make his point of view all the more poisonous. The story ends with his face in the dirt, but it’s more than an easy tale of comeuppance, of justice served. Even as Blake seems to stand on the precipice of death, there are moments of strange transcendence, as when Miss Dent forces him off the train and onto the platform, and the surrounding commuters are oblivious to his plight, enmeshed in their own lives:

A few people got off from each of the other coaches; he recognized most of them, but none of them offered to give him a ride. They walked separately or in pairs—purposefully out of the rain to the shelter of the platform, where the car horns called to them. It was time to go home, time for a drink, time for love, time for supper, and he could see the lights on the hill—lights by which children were being bathed, meat cooked, dishes washed—shining in the rain. One by one, the cars picked up the heads of families, until there were only four left. Two of the stranded passengers drove off in the only taxi the village had. “I’m sorry, darling,” a woman said tenderly to her husband when she drove up a few minutes later. “All our clocks are slow.” The last man looked at his watch, looked at the rain, and then walked off into it, and Blake saw him go as if they had some reason to say goodbye—not as we say goodbye to friends after a party but as we say goodbye when we are faced with an inexorable and unwanted parting of the spirit and the heart. The man’s footsteps sounded as he crossed the parking lot to the sidewalk, and then they were lost. In the station, a telephone began to ring. The ringing was loud, plaintive, evenly spaced, and unanswered. Someone wanted to know about the next train to Albany, but Mr. Flannagan, the stationmaster, had gone home an hour ago. He had turned on all his lights before he went away. They burned in the empty waiting room. They burned, tin-shaded, at intervals up and down the platform, and with the peculiar sadness of dim and purposeless light.

First published in The New Yorker, April 10, 1954, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Stories of John Cheever, Vintage, 2000

‘Song for the Unraveling of the World’ by Brian Evenson

As a reader, I tear through Evenson’s stories with relish, finding enjoyment in being repeatedly unnerved—how will he get under my skin this time? And as a writer, I find his work offers valuable craft lessons, challenging, for instance, the notion that for fiction to be successful it must include a protagonist who undergoes some sort of change. In an interview with BOMB magazine, Evenson said, “It so rarely happens that people actually change in a meaningful way. I’ve always been a little skeptical of character development, but then what do you do with fiction? My sense is that maybe it’s about conveying mental states and changing the reader.” His characters may not evolve, but their situations often do, and for the worse; they dwell in realities whose troubling instability does seem to infect the reader, too, by the end. In this story, a missing daughter’s voice seems to emanate from the walls of a house. Her parents, no longer together, have radically different ideas about what’s behind her disappearance. The story gives us access only to the father’s interiority; according to him, he woke up that morning to find her gone. But as he searches for her, hearing her eerie singing but unable to pinpoint its source, we enter “Tell-Tale Heart” territory, and his account of events becomes suspect. Is he a frantic, devoted father or a monster? Why not both?

First published in Bourbon Penn #15, 2018 and collected in Song for the Unraveling of the World, Coffee House, 2019

‘Snowmen’ by Steven Millhauser

Many of Millhauser’s stories have this fascinating quality of accretion. Often, some sort of aesthetic endeavor is established, and then over the course of the tale becomes increasingly, impossibly intricate. Here, children awake to a snow day, and set out together to shape the snow into sculptures, but this is not playtime—this is serious business. As they explore their changed neighborhood, the group encounters snowmen so detailed that the narrator wonders whether “bands of feverish children, tormented by white dreams, had worked secretly through the night” to create them. He and his companions, too, become fevered in their attempts to match the works of snow art. This project extends into a second day, and the act of imagination takes a turn toward mania. Beholding their creations fills the narrator with “a sharp, troubled joy.” But like snow, this is not meant to last, and like art-making, the act of finishing a work only satisfies for so long before the compulsion to make one’s mark rises again.

First published in Grand Street, Winter 1984, and collected in In the Penny Arcade, Dalkey Archive Press, 1986

‘Mongolia’ by David Mitchell

Perhaps cheating – this is a chapter from Mitchell’s debut novel, Ghostwritten, but it works as a standalone story, I think, as do all the chapters in this book, each of which takes place in a different setting, with meaningful links between them. I’m drawn to fiction that deploys fantastical elements to explore big questions – what is the self, e.g., and are we capable of true transformation – and this piece does that and is also just a great adventure story. Its narrator, a “non-corporeal entity” that can transmigrate from one host to another, read their thoughts, learn their language, and sometimes manipulate their behavior, allows Mitchell access to a range of minds, from that of a Danish backpacker to a Mongolian KGB agent to a fetus about to be born. The entity relishes its powers but longs to understand its origins. Was it once human? Could it be human again? Would it even want to trade its freedom and immortality to be embodied as a living person? These questions are resolved movingly by the end.

from Ghostwritten, Hodder & Stoughton, 1999

‘UFO in Kushiro’ by Haruki Murakami

A writing lesson I’ve taken from Murakami is that of withholding—not playing coy, but allowing certain mysteries in a story to remain so. I read this in a class taught by Samantha Hunt called “Surrounding the Ghost,” in which we explored the use of seemingly unrelated events to write the unwriteable. ‘UFO in Kushiro’ contains a literal mystery box, one that protagonist Komura is asked by a colleague to hand-deliver to a woman in a town in Hokkaido. At the same time as he carries this package, whose contents we never discover, Komura tries to come to terms with a larger mystery. In the wake of the 1995 Kobe earthquake, his wife abruptly left him. In her goodbye note, she wrote, “you have nothing inside you that you can give me. You are good and kind and handsome, but living with you is like living with a chunk of air.”

The recipient of the package, a young woman, tells Komura a story about a UFO sighting and another wife who left her husband following this inexplicable event. “I wonder if things like that aren’t connected somehow,” she muses. But the deepest mystery of this story, to me, is not the box, the missing wife (that Murakami standby), or the UFO. It’s the fleeting moment, toward the end, when Komura suddenly finds himself “on the verge of committing an act of incredible violence.” That act is not realized —but what was the passing impulse? Where did it come from inside him, that supposedly empty place?

First published in The New Yorker, March 19, 2001, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in After the Quake, Vintage, 2003

‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’ by Katherine Anne Porter

I’ve never agreed with the idea that it’s tedious to hear about other people’s dreams. What could be more interesting than a view into someone’s unconscious? Much of this story, from Porter’s three-part meditation on mortality, comes from the fever dreams of Miranda, a theater critic for a newspaper who nearly dies of Spanish influenza. There’s nothing dull about the way Porter takes us deep into Miranda’s psyche as it brushes up against oblivion. And it’s no wonder Miranda is tempted to remain there, motionless and truly at peace, when the world outside churns with the chaos and grief of dual crises: a world war and a plague.

From Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Harcourt Brace, 1939

‘Orange World’ by Karen Russell

Becoming a mother forces you into confrontation with parts of yourself you’d rather leave buried—childhood wounds, feelings of ineptitude, intrusive worries about worst-case scenarios. In Operating Instructions, a diary of the first year of her son’s life, Anne Lamott recalls praying, “Please, just let him outlive me.” Karen Russell dives into that dark territory here, in which Rae, a new mother, makes a deal with a demon living in the sewer across from her house. After she finishes nursing her own baby, she’ll lie in the gutter and breastfeed the devil in exchange for a guarantee of her son’s safety:

It lays its triangular head on her collarbone, using its thin-fingered paws to squeeze milk from her left breast into its hairy snout. Its tail curls around her waist. Unlike her son, the devil has dozens of irregular teeth, fanged and broken, in three rows; some lie flat against the gums, like bright arrowheads in green mud. Its lips make a cold collar around her nipple.

This nightmarish vision of breastfeeding is all the more unsettling for the way it also contains a whisper of tenderness—that tail curling familiarly around her like an embrace. Having recently become a mother—my seven-week-old son is napping as I write this—Russell’s story now seems to me decidedly un-fantastical in how it portrays birth and mothering as an undoing of all the old rules. Rae’s love for her son “scares her with its annihilating force. It’s loosening the corset strings of her history, the incarcerated fat of ‘personality.’”

First published in The New Yorker, May 28, 2018, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Orange World, Knopf, 2019

‘Ashes of Love’ by Joan Silber

I first read this, from Silber’s book of linked stories, Ideas of Heaven, as a young student of hers at Sarah Lawrence College. Narrated by a former world traveler reflecting on decades of life, the story brims with the kind of wisdom and perspective that can only come from experience. At 22, I knew such prose, powered by hindsight, was way out of reach for me. It made me yearn to survive the kinds of both joys and losses captured here, and to achieve the capacity to write about them with grace Silber does. The narrator recalls his romance with Peggy, a charismatic, difficult woman, who continually upends the equanimity he is seeking. This is one of those short stories that somehow manages to contain a lifetime without feeling crowded. We follow the main characters’ adventures, their peaks and valleys, and the coming of age of the son they share. Amid all the memories the narrator sifts through here, the mystery of what draws people together and wrenches them apart remains.

From Ideas of Heaven, Norton, 2005

Introduction

There’s a technique used by short story writers which involves picking a few words or phrases at random and then conjuring up a narrative that somehow connects them. The idea is that the connections found by the subconscious will reveal some underlying truth that the writer hadn’t previously considered and will therefore lead to something new and interesting.

All of which is by way of saying that I’ve basically applied the same technique to this piece, in that there isn’t any conscious overarching theme. It’s just a collection of stories that I happen to like, and any connections that emerge will purely be a matter of luck. There are some old favourites in here plus one or two slightly obscure ones. I doubt that what I have to say will be particularly new but I hope some of it might be interesting.

‘A Little Place Off the Edgware Road’ by Graham Greene

I think the first time I ever realised that short stories were a thing that grown-ups wrote was when our English teacher read us a couple of Graham Greene stories: ‘The Destructors’ and ‘A Little Place Off the Edgware Road’. I was about 14 at the time and they made such an impact on me that I went out and bought a copy of the collection for myself and devoured it from cover to cover.

‘A Little Place Off the Edgware Road’, written in 1939, is the story of a troubled man who goes into a seedy cinema to shelter from the rain and gets into a strange and unsettling conversation with the occupant of the seat next to him. I think the first thing that appealed to me about the story was the gloriously macabre twist that comes at the end of it, causing the protagonist to re-evaluate everything he has learnt up to that point.

Twists are tricky things to handle in stories. It’s very tempting to lift the hat with a flourish to reveal the rabbit and raise your hands in anticipation of your readers’ applause at your clever trick. Green’s genius, however, is to follow the big reveal with these final few short sentences, pulling the camera back to view the developing chaos:

He began to scream, ‘I won’t go mad. I won’t go mad. I’m sane. I won’t go mad.’ Presently a little crowd began to collect, and soon a policeman came.

That ending haunts me to this day.

First published in 1939. Collected in Nineteen Stories, Heinemann 1947, Twenty-One Stories, Penguin, 1970, and The Complete Short Stories, Penguin Classics, 2005

‘Death and the Compass’ by Jorge Luis Borges

I’m not sure how I first came across Borges, although it may have been the striking cover of the King Penguin edition of this book that drew me in. However, as soon as I started reading, I felt that if ever there was a collection that had been constructed with me in mind as the reader, this was it.

Borges is essentially two very different writers. First of all, he is a philosopher. Every story absolutely fizzes with original and unusual theories and ideas – more so even than any science fiction writer, with the possible exception of Stanislaw Lem, who we’ll come along to in a minute. On the other hand, he is a wonderfully lyrical writer, full of poetry and magical imagery. But the extraordinary thing is that the two aspects are somehow completely intertwined, so that only Borges the poet could present the ideas of Borges the theorist.

I could have picked almost any one out of this set, but I’ve gone for ‘Death and the Compass’, a detective story that goes off at something of a tangent. The central conceit was borrowed by Peter Greenaway in the somewhat Borgesian film The Draughtsman’s Contract, and also by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose, where he even went so far as naming one of his characters Jorge de Burgos. (For what it’s worth, I tried to pull the same trick off myself in my first Mathematical Mystery The Truth About Archie and Pye, but sadly no-one noticed, even though the first murder victim was called George Burgess. Well, there you go.)

First published in Sur in May 1942 and collected in Labyrinths, various editions

‘Gigamesh by Patrick Hannahan’ by Stanisław Lem, translated by Michael Kandel

I’m not sure if this is a short story at all, although God knows what it is if it isn’t. Basically, A Perfect Vacuum is a collection of reviews of imaginary books. Some of them are intriguing, some of them are preposterous and some are quite clearly impossible. ‘Gigamesh’ is one of the impossible ones.

I first came across A Perfect Vacuum when it was packaged along with the novels Solaris and The Chain of Chance in a King Penguin edition back in the eighties. Obviously it was Solaris that I was mainly after and the utter madness of A Perfect Vacuum came as a complete and delightful surprise extra.

As with Borges, I could have picked any one of the ‘stories’ in A Perfect Vacuum, because they’re all equally entertaining and intellectually challenging in their own way. The novel ‘Gigamesh’ purports to be an attempt to out-Joyce Ulysses by describing the final thirty-six minutes in the life of the gangster ‘GI Joe’ Maesch in bizarre and allusive detail. In the course of it, the novel – plus copious notes that run to twice the length of the original text – supposedly explores all the various hidden meanings implied by the name.

I think the following quote gives a flavour of Lem’s ‘review’:

To continue, Gigamesh is a GIGantic MESS; the hero is in a mess indeed, one hell of a mess, with a death sentence hanging over his head. The word also contains: GIG, a kind of rowboat (Maesch would drown his victims in a gig, after pouring cement on them); GIGgle (Maesch’s diabolical giggle is a reference – reference No 1 – to the musical leitmotif of the descent to hell in Klage Dr Fausti [more on this later]); GIGA, which is (a) in Italian, ‘fiddle’, again tying in with the musical substrates of the novel, and (b) a prefix signifying the magnitude of a billion (as in GIGAwatts), but here the magnitude of evil in a technological civilization. Geegh is Old Celtic for ‘avaunt’ or ‘scram’. From the Italian giga through the French gigue we arrive at geigen, a slang expression in German for copulation. A different partitioning of the name, in the form Gi-GAME-sh, foreshadows other aspects of the work: GAME is a game played, but also the quarry of a hunt (in Maesch’s case, we have a manhunt). This is not all. In his youth Maesch was a GIGolo; AME suggests the Old German Amme, a wet nurse; and MESH, in turn, is a net – for instance, the one in which Mars caught his goddess wife with her lover – and therefore a gin, a snare, a trap (under the scaffold), and, moreover, the engagement of gear teeth (e.g., ‘synchroMESH’).

If that kind of thing takes your fancy, I would thoroughly recommend A Perfect Vacuum. It’s genuinely unlike anything else I’ve encountered.

First published in English in A Perfect Vacuum, Secker and Warburg, 1979

‘Flora’ by David Rose

I read this story when it was the opener in Nicholas Royle’s very first Best British Short Stories anthology and I was absolutely transfixed. Rose can be quite a tricky writer to get your head around sometimes, but this is one of his more approachable stories.

‘Flora’ is the story of the odd and frankly unhealthy obsession that develops when an older man invites a young female botany student to use his library and then his garden to work in. He begins to watch her, observing how she dresses and speculating on what might be going on with the young man who accompanies her from time to time. After a while, he digs out his old Zeiss birdwatching binoculars and if this were a McEwan story, you feel it might go down a rather unpleasant path. But then, just before the end, Rose pulls off the most elegant ninety-degree turn that takes the story in a completely different direction and you wonder who was really watching whom.

I believe Rose is still around, despite the title of his collection, but he doesn’t seem to be writing any more, which is a pity. I wish there were more David Rose stories around.

First published in The London Magazine, April/May 2010 and collected in Best British Short Stories 2011, Salt, 2012, and Posthumous Stories, Salt 2013