‘The Factory by The Sea’ by Joseph Fink

A pattern is made up of many parts. ‘Factory by the Sea’ lives in my head as a perfect stand-alone short story, despite being an early chapter of a longer audio drama. A truck driver (voiced by Jasika Nicole) makes a delivery to a strange ugly factory on a beach. She enters, but only sees one worker at any one time: the same worker, only progressively older as she moves through the rooms. Revelations about the factory (“machine after machine, Alice. Imagine the scale of them. Picture it for me”) – and the true nature of the trucker’s delivery and thus, complicity – are alternated with her memories of her missing wife, and their own rituals: more human, more colourful, more crafted with love. This story is all iterative process, parts into parts, an unthinking making. All themes which Fink introduces for us early using form: repetition and the juxtaposition of grey mundanity and red warning.

There was a young man there. Very young – 18, at the most. Probably less. Probably less. The kid was wearing this gray factory jumpsuit with the company’s logo on it in red. The logo was a dog cringing in pain.

The factory becomes its own symbol of unavoidable destiny: a process of self-created endings, and a final image which clicks into place with a terrible oh. Question upon question of what parts make a whole life, and a life whole.

Episode 4 of Alice Isn’t Dead, Night Vale Presents, 2016. Available here, and transcript here

‘Folk Noir’ by Helen McClory

 “Spies smile with fresh eggs held out in one hand, a pistol in the other.

Genre is created and sustained with careful choice of images: cues, views, intertextual nods. Yet the fiendishly talented Helen McClory toys with our constructed boundaries in this six paragraph story: her ‘hard-boiled’ detective narrator (“take a drink. It ain’t tea in that cup”) dropped into rural countryside to create an air-punchingly perfect ‘folk noir’.

“There was code here. It said always close the gate behind you. It said don’t trust anyone but yourself”.
McClory takes the symbols of stone and gates and fen and darkness and imbues them with a sly deviance, heavy with threat and guile. The final image focusses our threat into the danger of a liminal locale: “And nothing in this places flickers like a match struck”.

In Mayhem & Death, 404Ink, 2018

‘The Hares’ by Frederico Falco, translated by Jennifer Croft

For a different idea of how incongruence – or overlap – plays out, have a read of the opening story of this excellent collection, and how it uses shape.  The opening paragraphs suggest a strange place of myth: a ‘king of the hares’ finishing his coffee, moving through forest and meadow to an altar, upon which he places new offerings of feather and bones. Then the hares arrive and “[line] up in a half-circle”. It’s a fabulous little detail: in just a few words we have not only a suggestion of order imposed on an otherwise wild landscape, but the creation of a stage. What unfolds there is a curious and beautifully written (and translated) tale which moves further and further away from the tranquillity of the opening sentences.

Collected in A Perfect Cemetery’, Charco Press, 2021, and first published in Spanish in Un cementerio perfecto, Eterna Cadencia, 2016

‘Whose Upward Flight I Love’ by Nalo Hopkinson

In 2020, in the tributes for her award as 37th SFWA Damon Knight Grand Master (it’s a big deal), writer Curtis C. Chen noted how powerful Hopkinson’s visions were for him: the reality of modern Toronto now completely replaced in his mind with her magical realist cityscape. One great example of how that’s done for me is this small but mighty piece, set on a cold winter’s morning.  A kind of militarised municipal park workforce has the unfortunate job of going to wrestle down the city’s last panicked trees which are trying to fly away to freedom. The frustrated worker hanging on to the roots as one tree soars away –  as if clutching to the rope of an escaping balloon – is just perfect. 

Collected in Falling in Love with Hominids, Tachyon, 2015. Also collected in Skinfolk, Open Road, 2001. Originally published in Dark Planet Webzine, 2000

‘Grace Jones’ by Irenosen Okojie

And he’d never asked what a girl from Martinique with a degree in forensics was doing moonlighting as a Grace Jones impersonator, the translated versions of themselves staring at each other silently from the opposite sides of a revolving door.

What happens when the people who look at you see someone else? The lookalike is a fascinating thing to explore in a short form. If the reference point is well-known to the reader (this is Grace Jones for goodness’ sake) you can rely on ready recognition, and scoot along with your own original character; their foundations already laid in reference to their doppelganger. We know that they will move around your virtual world and interact with others within that particular filter. Expectations can be built on…or subverted.

Nudibranch is a stunning collection in so many ways. For me it will always be haunted by this image of Sidra/Grace as ‘translations’ of each other behind this spinning door, watching the violence of past and present flash over and over between them.

In Nudibranch, Dialogue Books, 2019

‘In the Light Being Cast from the Kitchen’ by Hamed Habibi, translated by Shahab Vaezzadeh

I like experimenting with using light in my fiction in different ways. To scour and bleach. To reveal. To distract. To warn. This story is from Comma Press’s excellent A City in Short Fiction series, and it has a lot of fun with this simple question of illumination.

A man sleeps next to his wife. He wakes in the night to feel someone else’s gaze upon him. He looks out through the open bedroom door to see – in the light from the kitchen – a strange man lounging around on their sofa. In moment by moment second-person prose, this one strange sight causes fear, shock, indignation, and eventually world-shattering confusion. For the protagonist, this “pompous” stranger dressed in a formal white suit, is a more terrifying vision than if he’d been “dressed in dark, tight-fitting clothing and a balaclava, holding a torch in one hand…” This story has no dialogue, minimal interaction between characters (there’s a sleepy wave at one point) and yet manages to challenge a lot of our assumptions about light and dark, glare and shadow, and what we’re truly afraid of losing.

Collected in The Book of Tehran, Comma Press, 2019, originally published in Fish Eyelid by Cheshmeh, 2016

‘Bear’ by Dana Leibelson

Did you see that?

Fiancées Ben and Sophie go on a trip to Montana shortly after the death of Sophie’s brother, Alexei. There is tension: uncertainty around Sophie’s behaviour, Ben’s ongoing envy of the strength of the siblings’ relationship. And something has been promised on the trip that Ben cannot bring himself to believe. This disbelieving of the reality before you is interesting. In this story, images are misinterpreted or misremembered from the start. Before he dies, Alexei (a journalist) curtly corrects Ben on his mistaken identification of a painting: “You’ve gotten the women confused, because you think they have something to do with you”. Ben’s ‘possession’ of Sophie begins to disintegrate as he faces symbols of loss and irrationality which he can no longer pretend not to see, not least of which is the reanimated corpse of a black bear. There’s also a phone-line to the afterlife (though you have to make reservations) and a life-changing bell. ‘Bear’ is a smart and surreal slow-burn gem, with fantastic dialogue, dry wit, and unexpected turns.

Published in Guernica Mag, 2021 available here

‘The Universal Story’ by Ali Smith

There was a viral tweet a while back about how people visualise things (or don’t). There was the command of ‘imagine an apple’ followed by a sliding scale from shiny red apple at ‘category 1’,  fading in colour and clarity through to a blank ‘category 5’ for those who don’t ‘see’ anything in their head that way (aphantasia). It led to some interesting chats about how different writers (and readers) see the images written on a page. For my part it was a head-scratcher. My apple was not only bright and clear but spinning: stop-motion chomps being bitten out of it to the core, then back again, bullet-time pivots, relocations of apple on tree/in bowl/on grass/in hand. The same when creating story structure and scene and time: zooming in, out, around, trying different permutations like a sort of textual Transformer in a tizz.

But it’s okay. I can always re-read this story from the great Ali Smith, with all its “no”, “wait”, “hang on” refocusing and re-establishing of its gaze, and I’ll feel very at home indeed.

In The Whole Story and other stories, Penguin 2003

Introduction

I’m grateful to Jonathan for asking me to contribute, though it was inevitably an agony choosing only twelve favourite stories, as much as it would be choosing twelve favourite films, albums or sandwiches. In the end, I went for some stories that have been important and inspirational to me during my life, and others that I’ve recently read and enjoyed.

‘A Painful Case’ by James Joyce

I first read Dubliners in school, so I must have been about 14 or 15; it was a cheap paperback with some chintzy illustrations in it, and every week we went through the stories in great detail. On reflection, this was one of my first proper experiences of close reading, and as the weeks went by, I got more and more absorbed in the lives of these characters. I latched on to that volta of disappointment that Joyce detonates in each story, often a depiction of the rising and falling of an evening which begins in hope and ends in the revelation of an unflinching reflection of oneself. I could have picked any of these stories, but I chose ‘A Painful Case’, a story of a man who lives at something of a distance from himself, because of its clarity and its ruthless pity. The opening sketch, which describes Mr Duffy’s “odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense”, is as perfect a distillation of character as I’ve read. But the real dynamite in this story is the closing sequence, in which Duffy stands purgatorial in the evening above Dublin, his lover abandoned and dead by his own neglect, the copulating couples below him wishing him gone, and the wormlike train winding its way out of his sight. Even then, in the nearest moment that he comes to realisation, he stands at a protective distance from himself; his thoughts remain behind the barrier of “he felt”; his epiphany is complete but abstract, on the other side of the glass. The final sentence – “He felt that he was alone” – is devastating.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914, now widely republished, including in Penguin Classics. Available to read online here

‘The Mother’ by Lydia Davis

The girl wrote a story. “But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel,” said her mother. The girl built a dollhouse. “But how much better if it were a real house,” her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. “But wouldn’t a quilt be more practical,” said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. “But how much better if you dug a large hole,” said her mother. The girl dug a hole and went to sleep in it. “But how much better if you slept forever,” said her mother.

I find that once I’ve read more than, say, five Lydia Davis stories in a row the effect is akin to eating an entire box of chocolates; this, for me, is testament to the complexity and intricacy of Davis’ craft. I’ve always pictured the tone of Davis’ stories as occupying a zone between a sort of humorist register – a sort of middlebrow unpacking of everyday foibles, best exemplified in the ‘letter’ stories – and an acidic shock of the kind that might accompany the downing of a shot of spirits. I come back to ‘The Mother’ again and again because of the vein of passive cruelty that culminates in that breathtaking final line, but the more I read and teach it, the more I’m aware of its strangeness. Why is she making a pillow for her father? What does the daughter’s muteness – or the muteness of everyone else in the story but the mother, for that matter – indicate? Is this a story about the perceived ‘uselessness’ of the art life? About the endpoint of practicality, as opposed to whim, as a life pursuit? And of course, being Davis, despite its brevity a whole world is conjured and dispelled in seconds.

Collected in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, FSG/Hamish Hamilton, 2009

‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann

Picking ‘The Metamorphosis’ out of Kafka’s stories feels a bit like saying your favourite Beatles album is The Best of the Beatles, but I chose it because I had a transformational experience on my second reading. I first read it in my teens, when I understood this to be the ne plus ultra of young alienation, and I didn’t like it. The story was too long, the central horror of the transformation felt somehow undetailed, and what seemed to be the most compelling element – Gregor’s transformation – became increasingly sidelined in favour of the family’s troubles, culminating in a final scene, in which Gregor’s sister Grete stands up on a tram, that seemed utterly inconsequential to me. Some years later, I returned to the story and it was a revelation. Some of my most enduring experiences with art have involved a work that I’ve disliked on first impression; the experience of understanding its complexity or tone on a second reading seems to double the pleasure. When reading again, I realised that it was a mistake to assume that Gregor was the centre of the story’s gravity, and that Kafka’s bone-dry humour is easily missed. The final scene – where Gregor’s pupal sacrifice precedes the butterfly-like opening up of Grete – clicked into place, and the beauty and sadness of the story came into focus. And then I read all the Kafka I could find.

First published in German, as ‘Die Verwandlung’, in Die Weißen Blätter, 1915. Widely translated in English. Hoffman’s translation is from Metamorphosis & Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2015

‘The Candidate’ by Kathryn Scanlan

One of the things I like about Scanlan’s stories is the permanently shifting ontologies of the central characters, be they animal or human. This is achieved within a broadly realist form, but those fuzzy edges bring an omnipresent sense of threat and contingency to her stories. I first read ‘The Candidate’ on a plane at night, and in the gloaming between sleep and waking at nothing o’clock in the morning I convinced myself that it was actually about a dog, whereas on the second reading it was clearly about a child. But I love that the story could make me think that, and I think that quality of uncertainty of being is there in all her work, similar to the way that, say, Joy Williams can set out a familiar scenario and then flip the table over. Scanlan’s stories are so short and sharp that they sting; they leave you spinning.

First published in The Daily Telegaph, May 2020, and available to subscribers to reader here. Collected in The Dominant Animal, MCD x FSG Originals/Daunt Books, 2020

‘Good Old Neon’ by David Foster Wallace

‘Good Old Neon’ might represent the apex of Wallace’s fiction for me. It’s perhaps the clearest distillation of what he was trying to do; to work within a register of generational irony in order to transcend its form. Wallace’s best work is affecting before it is smart, and ‘Good Old Neon’ holds the metafictional tricks at a distance, letting them percolate throughout the story before they emerge, finally, in a transformative way. The story is narrated by a dead man, a suicide, who considers how communication after death is not bound by time or space, but also how that transcendence cannot necessarily obviate a sense of failure. Many of Wallace’s hobby horses – Wittgenstein, Derrida – are here in some form, though the main influence on this story appears to be Buddhism; the protagonist, Neal, is so fixated on the binary of success or failure that he remains trapped in the bardo-like space of the story and needs someone to pull him out, which they (sort of) do in unexpected and quite beautiful fashion at the story’s climax.

First published in Conjunctions 37, Fall 2001, and collected in Oblivion, Little, Brown, 2004