‘Break It Down’ by Lydia Davis

Some years ago, somebody broke my heart. Perhaps this has happened to you. Perhaps you can still bring to mind the wasted, hollow feeling and the paralysing urge both to run and to burrow. Heartbreak is hard because it is acutely paradoxical; your greatest joy is causing you inexpressible pain, and you cannot even bring yourself to wish the pain away. At such times we cleverly turn to art, which, like god, we invented to help us cope with paradox. ‘Break It Down’ is a break-up story. In my case, it is also a story I discovered and enjoyed together with the person who ended up breaking my heart. It is dear to both of us, which made it all the more comforting/excruciating to reread in those hollow and wasted days. Much could be inserted here about Davis’s technical genius, about the effect of shifting from third into first and then second person, or the many exquisite images, or the particular line that may be the only time a short story has ever single-handedly brought tears to my eyes. But there’s no time to go into that, because I have to tell you what happened next. What happened next was that some time went by, and I met my girlfriend, Madeleine. And in the weeks after we met, I discovered during one of our long conversations that ‘Break It Down’ was extremely dear to her, too. So the story became part of the stories we told each other as we gradually unlayered ourselves in that way you do when you get to know someone special. I guess what I’m saying is that if one can be hoisted on one’s own petard, the opposite must also be true.

First published in the Paris Review 88, Summer 1983, and available to subscribers to read there. Collected in Break It Down, FSG, 1986. You can also hear James Salter read the story on the Guardian podcast, here

‘When the Mice Failed to Arrive’ by Gerald Murnane

I once heard Ben Lerner say that an interesting thing about parenthood was a sort of mise en abyme aspect to observing your child. You were observing them, but you were also observing your own parents looking down at you at that age, and observing yourself at that age looking up at your parents, this time with an adult’s consciousness. Many of the best short stories allow us similarly multiple glimpses: because stories are often wilier than longer prose when it comes to evading the drudgery of chronology, they can put us in several places at once. Here, a father watches a storm break as he waits for his asthmatic son to arrive home from school. But the loving father is also a young boy himself, years earlier, terrified both of lightning and his mother’s death. He is also the obsessive young teacher, concealing things from his pupils, and the teenage boy discovering his capacity for cruelty. These leaps through life, together with echoing phrases and images, accumulate into an at times dark exploration of sexuality and an era-spanning sense of melancholy.

Collected in Collected Short Fiction, And Other Stories, 2020, and available to read online at And Other Stories

‘The Woman Who Looked Like Me’ by Felisberto Hernández, translated from Spanish by Luis Harss

It begins, “A few summers ago, I began to suspect that I had once been a horse.” The wonderful thing about Felisberto’s stories is that suspicions like that turn out to be well-founded. There is no line between memory and fantasy, or between the life of the mind and the territory of the story—why should there be? It turns out our equine hero was mistreated, escaped, got into scrapes, found love, was tickled in the most painful ways, committed murder, and so on. We spend the rest of the story firmly in the horse’s consciousness, but the opening line isn’t merely a framing device, an easy way to ease us into the fantastical. This remains an actual memory. As if to prove the point, the narrator pauses to inform us that, as a horse, he has just recalled eating some mints while he was still a man.

For anyone foolhardy enough to want to explain such a story, Piano Stories also contains the helpful ‘How Not to Explain My Stories’, in which Felisberto describes his work as being “on guard against the mind contemplating it when that mind suggests too many grand meanings or intentions.” If the story is true to itself, he writes, “it will give out a natural poetry it is unaware of.”

Collected in Piano Stories, New Directions, 2014

‘Conversation With My Father’ by Grace Paley

The first time I sent some of my own stories to my father, he messaged me excitedly about a week later, asking when we could talk. I went out into the library forecourt and untangled the white ear buds so I could pace around while we spoke, without having to hold the phone to my ear in that way that becomes uncomfortably warm after a while. This was the time in my life when I had happy access to the Eduroam wifi network. My father lived on a different continent, and it was already evening for him. He told me he had read my stories and that he had an idea about what to do with them. I would print them in a magazine, he said, and the magazine would run a competition among its readers to write endings for my stories. Because, he said, as it stood, my stories had no endings. The set-ups were fine, but then they just stopped. Plus, he hinted, the magazine competition could be a good money-making scheme. I think about that conversation with my father when I read this Grace Paley story, in which the narrator’s elderly dad asks his writer child to please, for god’s sake, write a simple story: “Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.” What makes the story interesting is that the narrator loves her father, and is willing to humour him, up to a point. The discussion that follows is about the nature of storytelling, filial and parental love, and whether people have the right to change, either inside or outside of fiction.

First published in the New American Review, 1972. Collected in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 1974, FSG, and Collected Stories, FSG/Virago, 1994. Hear Ali Smith read it on the Guardian podcast here

‘Train’ by Joy Williams

“Far away,” wrote railway enthusiast WG Sebald, “but from where?” And so it is with both trains and short stories. To be on a train is to be far from somewhere, a liminality that also lends itself to the story, whose ultimate concern is what takes place beyond its bounds, before it begins and after it ends.

Two ten-year-old girls, best friends, are travelling home to Florida after a summer in Maine. The journey takes place on an impossibly enchanting auto train, with bubble-topped observation cars, a car dedicated to board games, a bar-car in which parents can hasten the end of their marriage, and an all-violet interior, the girls’ favourite colour. Jane and Dan will likely not remain friends after the summer (and the story) ends. What will remain is Dan’s realisation that she is as good as alone in the world. Joy Williams’s stories portray life’s more desperate corners and I think the ones in her first collection, Taking Care, are among her best.

Collected in Taking Care, Random House, 1982)

‘Emergency’ by Denis Johnson

As with many of the stories in Jesus’ Son, this one seems so perfect that it could only have come into being by some sheer, incredible fluke. It spits on plenty of storytelling conventions, tricks you into thinking you can feel its contours, then it bursts through them, and you. Partly I think it’s the fact that Denis Johnson changes register with such alarming speed that I am always caught off guard no matter how many times I have read the story before, and that he puts such authority into his narrative voice that I will always willingly follow it. But partly it’s just some sort of magic.

Collected in Jesus’ Son, FSG, 1992, available to read in Narrative Magazine here

‘The Indian Uprising’ by Donald Barthelme

I love listening to stories. I love reading too, but to paraphrase Ishmael: Being read to,—oh, sweet friends! What will compare with it? My first audiobook was a cassette copy of The Railway Cat (1983), which I would listen to under a blanket, and I have been moving in that general direction ever since. I first came across Donald Barthelme’s stories when I heard ‘The School’ performed on a podcast. After that I listened to the several readings of his stories on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, before borrowing an old hardback copy of Sixty Stories from the library and trying to work out what the heck was going on. Every time I read (or listen to) ‘The Indian Uprising’ I discover something new. It’s an intricate web of images, allusions, lists, repetitions. Is it about love? The Vietnam War? Genocide? The cruelty of children? The baseness of men? All of these and maybe none. Another interesting thing about listening to stories is that every reading is an interpretation. To hear writers (especially writers) read stories they love is to hear what they love about them in every pause and every bit of cadence or emphasis. I think Chris Adrian’s reading of ‘The Indian Uprising’ argues for it as an essentially sad story, an interpretation I agree with. A few years ago I was tempted by an audiobook of Sixty Stories, read by an actor. I found it to be oozing with unfortunate comedy, nothing like the Barthelme I know.

First published in the New Yorker, March 1965. Collected in Sixty Stories, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1981, available to listen to on the New Yorker podcast here

‘Vor dem Gesetz’ (Before the Law) by Franz Kafka, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

One of the luckiest things that ever happened to me was that, at the age of eleven, I had the opportunity to learn German. One of the many ways in which learning a second language changed my life was that it introduced me to short stories, and German ones at that. As any language-learner knows, short stories are perfect classroom fodder: they’re brief enough to be assigned for homework and it’s usually easy enough to find one to suit a particular proficiency level. The stories I struggled through in high school, and later university, were probably the first short stories I ever read with care: Heinrich Böll’s ‘Du fährst zu oft nach Heidelberg’, Ben Witter’s ‘Das nächste Mal andere Blumen’, eventually Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist and Emine Sevgi Özdamar.

This six-inch Kafka parable was first published in 1915, and it went on to make a cameo in his novel The Trial. It’s so short that to give a precis would be to retell it. I don’t even have anything particularly insightful to say about it. I’m including it here because, after two decades of thinking about it, I’m still thinking about it.

Collected in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Penguin, 2008, and available widely online in translations of varying quality

Introduction

In July 2021, Susan Choi was awarded the 2021 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award for her story ‘Flashlight’. In 2020, the U.S.-based Story Prize was awarded to Edwidge Danticat for the second time since 2004, out of a shortlist consisting entirely of women with migrant backgrounds, including Zadie Smith and Kali Fajardo-Anstine. That same year, Souvankham Thammavongsa won the Canadian Scotiabank Giller Prize for her short story collection How to Pronounce Knife, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection was delivered to Mimi Lok (four out of the five finalists were migrant women).

These awards, and the recent buzz around Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties (2021), are indicative of the growing recognition of the wider cultural contributions of migrants to the short story in English. As I argue in my forthcoming book (tentatively entitled Migrant Women Writers and the Habitable Short Story in North America Since 1980), with the rare exception of authors such as Jhumpa Lahiri, migrant short story writers are very rarely represented in anthologies and short story theory. The focus tends to be on white, ‘unmarked’ writers, people who ‘belong’ to the ethno-racial and cultural understanding of the nation, people whose identities and stories fit the narrative requirements of the Western nation and literary canons. The Best American Short Stories yearly anthologies, for instance, have since 1978 only been guest edited by four migrant writers: Amy Tan, Salman Rushdie, Junot Díaz and Roxane Gay. In this regard, the Personal Anthology website is much more inclusive and international in scope.

For this personal anthology, I am bringing forward a selection of stories by migrant women writers which I particularly enjoyed. I came to the short story through migration. I grew up bilingual in a French-British family, and was an avid novel reader until I spent a year abroad at a liberal arts university in upstate New York as part of my MA. After years of having been taught at school in France that short stories were defined not only by their brevity, but by their O. Henry-style surprise ending or climax, I discovered the joys of the open-ended and unresolved fragment. From Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) and Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996), which I first encountered in a class on Latinx literature in the U.S., to all the subsequent collections and anthologies I read, I found myself falling in love with the form. As Tim Pears puts it, while “the novel was invented by and for a settled, sedentary society”, “with a short story we sneak across the border to steal what we can, return at dawn with images that tell more than we’d realised” – a reading experience which encapsulates and replicates some of the instability and precariousness of migration.

‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ by Jean Rhys

Selina, the Caribbean narrator, is part of the Windrush Generation, and trying to survive in London. The story opens with her being evicted from her flat and offered a new home in a richer neighbourhood where she is unable to find a job and spends her days drinking, singing and sleeping. Out of frustration with her white neighbours’ outright hostility, she throws a rock through their window and is sent for ten days to Holloway Prison, where she stops drinking and learns a tune sung by the other prisoners. Some time later, having found a job, she whistles that tune at a party at a colleague’s house, where a man “plays the tune, jazzing it up”. She thinks nothing of it until she gets a letter from him informing her has sold the song and containing £5 to thank her for her help. This short summary cannot do justice to the craft and rhythm of this tale of exploitation, this portrait of 1960s London, and the protagonist’s powerful presence.

First published in The London Magazine, 1962, and in Tigers Are Better-Looking, Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1968. Collected in The Collected Short Stories, W.W. Norton & Co, 1992, now Penguin Modern Classics. Also published as one of the Penguin 60s in 1995

‘Montreal 1962’ by Shauna Singh Baldwin

The premise is very simple: it is 1962, and a Sikh woman and her husband (to whom the text is addressed) have recently moved to Canada where his turban is proving to be a drawback, as no one will hire him because of it. Most of the story is taken up by her loving descriptions of delicately handwashing the colourful turbans in the bathtub, “working each one in a rhythm bone-deep, as [her] mother and hers must have done before [her]” before hanging them to dry on the curtain rod in their small flat. The turban is imbued with more symbolism than I can convey in this short summary – the link between past and present, ancestors and younger generations, there and here, wife and husband, etc. As the wife carefully and lovingly performs the chore of washing, she makes the promise that she will never let her husband “cut [his] strong rope of hair and go without a turban into this land of strangers”, in what is, ultimately, a love letter.

First published in English Lessons and Other Stories, Goose Lane Editions, 1996. Available to read on Commonlit.org

‘Out On Main Street’ by Shani Mootoo

This story, entirely written in Indo-Trinidadian dialect, is narrated by an Indo-Trinidadian (self-identified) butch lesbian living in Canada in the 1990s. Accompanied by her femme girlfriend Janet, she goes to an Indian sweet shop in Vancouver’s ‘Punjabi Market’. There, and through a series of interactions, her Indianness is challenged by her inability to name the sweets correctly (they carry different names in Trinidad) according to the waiters, and by her queer identity. With its ironic tone, the story questions rigid definitions of Indian identity and belonging in the diaspora.

First published in Out on Main Street, Press Gang Publishers, 1993

‘Greedy Choke Puppy’ by Nalo Hopkinson

I read this story from Nalo Hopkinson’s collection Skin Folk (2001) a long time ago, and though I don’t remember all the details as well as I would like to, it has stayed with me. The protagonist, Jacky, is a PhD student who lives with her grandmother. Her story is interspersed with the myth of the soucouyant, a vampire-like figure who leaves her skin at night to go and suck the life spirit from children, and a recurring character in Caribbean literature, from Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘My Mother’ (1983) and Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Nineteen-Thirty Seven’ (1995) to David Chariandy’s Soucouyant (2007).

First published in Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, Warner, 2000. Collected in Skin Folk, Aspect, 2001

‘Préférence Nationale’ by Fatou Diome, translated by Polly McLean

The contemporary musings of a Senegalese woman with a degree looking for a job in France. The title is an allusion to National Front discourse which favours French-born citizens in all aspects of public life. Having recently divorced her French, white, husband, the protagonist is quite literally a second-class citizen with very limited rights. First she is refused a job at a bakery in Strasbourg because her French is too standard and she can’t speak Alsatian, then a French woman looking for a tutor for her daughter changes her mind after seeing her skin colour. The job, unsurprisingly, goes to a white friend of the narrator, who suggests she work as a cleaner instead.

First published in French in La Préférence Nationale, Présence Africaine 2001. First published in translation in The Granta Book of the African Short Story, ed. Helon Habila, Granta, 2011