‘Simple Recipes’ by Madeleine Thien

Like many authors, Madeleine Thien is best-known for her novels, but her debut collection, Simple Recipes(2001) is well worth the detour. Most of the stories concentrate on young Malaysian Canadians and their relationships with their parents. In the opening (and title) story, for instance, an adult narrator looks back fondly at memories of her father cooking dinner, memories that are also tinted with violence. As the story reveals, her father, who could “transform […] orange peels into swans”, make a sprig of green onion bloom like a flower by placing it in water, sit “for an hour mining a watermelon with a circular spoon [and] carve […] the rind into a castle”, was also capable of killing a fish for dinner in the kitchen sink, and striking her brother. The tensions between the father’s creativity, his frustration and powerlessness in a new land, and his children’s own grappling with their identities, are wonderfully captured in this contained and seemingly straightforward but dense story. I couldn’t agree more with Alice Munro’s praise for the collection: “This is surely the debut of a splendid writer. I am astonished by the clarity and ease of the writing, and a kind of emotional purity”.

First published in Simple Recipes, McClelland and Stewart, 2001. Also published in Trek, Fall 2002 and available to read here in pdf form

‘Exmatriates’ by Igiaba Scego, translated by Hugh Shankland

In this story, the narrator, a young Somali-Italian woman, asks her drag queen friend Angelique to accompany her to brunch at her conservative mother’s, specifically to distract her attention from a big announcement the narrator is about to make. While the narrator’s Somali family has been living in Italy for as long as she can remember, her mother refuses to buy a house, or even to acquire wardrobes or cupboards, as they would give a certain finality to their resettlement. Instead, the (rented) family house is overflowing with suitcases packed with books, CDs, clothes, souvenirs, ready to pick up and go if need be. But the protagonist, who has long been pining for a big, sturdy, cupboard, needs to tell her mother that she has decided to buy a house, in a symbolic ‘coming out’ as Italian. While touching upon complex generational differences and the pain of exile, the narrator’s confessional, anxious, and slightly annoyed tone make for a very amusing and powerful story.

Like her protagonist, Igiaba Scego was born in Italy in 1974, after her Somalian parents fled Siad Barre’s dictatorship. Aside from her novels (which have been translated into English), she champions the voices of migrant and minority Italian authors through edited publications such as the recent Future (2020) and Africana (2021).

First published as ‘Dismatria’ in Pecore Nere: Racconti, Contromano 2005. First published in translation in Rome Tales, Oxford University Press, 2011

‘The President Always Dies in January’ by Petina Gappah

Fortune Mpande is a political refugee living and unable to return home as it would disqualify his status. He works at a care home in Luton in the UK, where he is much appreciated by his colleagues and the patients. In his free time, his “attention moves between four screens: an iPad, a 40-inch Philips TV screen playing a football match, a Sony Vimeo laptop and Samsung Galaxy phone”. His favourite hobby, though, is to troll online forums, where he has several alter egos, who have very little in common apart from their shared hate for the Zimbabwean president. One of them has in fact become so famous that he has created a blog for her in which “she” describes her sexual exploits. So, when the president makes “caustic comments about how all people who had fled Zimbabwe were nothing but British Bottom Cleaners”, Fortune uses his forum aliases to start off an online rumour that the president has died, a rumour that rapidly gains international attention.

This collection’s format makes it difficult to pick just one story and discuss it separately from the others that surround it. After the success of her unlinked debut collection, An Elegy for Easterly (2010), Petina Gappah returned to the short story form in 2016 with Rotten Row, a collection of interlinked stories with recurring characters, in which all the stories relate to the criminal courts found in Rotten Row, a road in Harare that was given its name by the Cecil John Rhodes’ British South Africa Company. The name of the street is a homage to an avenue in London called Rotten Row, itself a corruption of “Route du Roi” (King’s road), and established to provide access to Kensington Palace. Drawing on her own background in law, the stories are concerned with justice and law, and some, like ‘In the Matter Between Goto and Goto’ and ‘In Sad Cypress’ are written in legal forms. The polyphony of voices and stories makes for a bustling collection, and some stories such as ‘The President Always Dies in January’ are both bittersweet and very funny.

First published in Rotten Row, Faber & Faber Limited, 2016

‘The Boundary’ by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by the author

In 2015, Jhumpa Lahiri took the radical decision to no longer write in English, and to choose Italian instead – a language she had been studying since her undergraduate years and in which she believes to be “a tougher, freer writer”. Following the publication of her 2015 language memoir, In Altre Parole (In Other Words), she wrote a novel entitled Dove Mi Trovo which she translated as Whereabouts in May 2021. Leaving behind detailed descriptions of Bengali American life, Lahiri’s Italian texts are more impressionistic and meditative. They contain nameless and wandering characters and take place in unidentified locations. And yet, the themes of identity and otherness continue to dominate her writing, as ‘The Boundary’, her latest Italian short story, demonstrates. The story, which she translated herself for the New Yorker, and which will be contained in her upcoming collection of Italian stories, is narrated by a teenager whose immigrant parents are the caretakers for a holiday house in Italy.

First Published The New Yorker, January 2018, and available to read to subscribers here

‘Let’s Tell This Story Properly’ by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

The story opens with Nnam clearing her house in Manchester of her dead husband’s smell and memories. She and Kayita had been together for over five years and had two sons together. At his funeral, she finds out that he had been living a double life the whole time. He was still married to his first wife in Uganda, and he passed on to her their rented house in Uganda, having secretly fathered two more daughters. Nnam and her sons are treated as his illegitimate family. A group of middle-aged women arrive at the mourning ceremony and start retelling the story, from Nnam’s perspective. This story, which was the Overall Winner of the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, is included in Manchester Happened (2019), a collection that focuses on the experiences of Ugandans in Manchester and even draws on some of Jennifer Makumbi’s memories of when she worked at Airport Security. It carries many resonances with Sam Selvon’s canonical The Lonely Londoners(1956), with whom the child of the protagonist in Makumbi’s ‘Our Allies the Colonies’ shares the same name.

First published in Granta, June 2014, and available to read here. Collected in a Commonwealth collection of best winning stories Let’s Tell This Story Properly, Dundurn Press, 2015, and in Jennifer Makumbi’s Manchester Happened, Oneworld Publications, 2019

‘Zikora’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie hardly needs an introduction, but (controversial statements aside) her stories collected in The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) and elsewhere have long been favourites of mine. Her latest story, ‘Zikora’, was released by Amazon Kindle Singles, with the hope that high-speed publishing would permit the narrative to “join the cultural conversation ahead of the US election”.

The story opens with an Igbo DC lawyer (Zikora) awaiting an epidural while she is giving birth in an American hospital. As she experiences the trauma of childbirth as a single mother with her own demanding mother by her side, old memories resurface: her pregnancy, her being abandoned by the father of her child, her parents’ fraught relationship during her childhood, her abortion as a teenager. The story’s very down-to-earth tone, its attention to small details and the complex and layered mother-child relationship at its heart are very relatable and moving.

First published on Amazon Kindle Singles, 2021

Introduction

A list of short stories that spun my expectations, some that I revisit to tighten my writing eye and some that bring me right back to a certain shade of mood. Some of these stories (such as the Octavia E. Butler one) formed an early part of my reading life and research back when I was doing my MA in literature and posthumanism. Others I’ve discovered through questing for stories that reinvigorate architectural plains, from Jayant Kaikini’s explorations of spatial idenitities in Mumbai to YZ Chin’s KFC vistas. Seeing all of them together has given me some excitement, similar to gathering up personalities with a broom.

‘Opera House’ by Jayant Kaikini, translated by Tejaswini Niranjana

The way that Kaikini writes is beautiful to me because he always shows the ways that other lives touch the tips of others, like a leaf at the brow. In ‘Opera House’ we get to see how after midnight, there is no such thing as age. It is a story I return to.

Collected in No Presents Please, Tilted Axis Press, 2020

‘At the Heart of Things’ by Vanessa Onwuemezi

One of Vanessa’s strengths are in the meticulous ways that she writes about the varying pressures upon us. There’s this great line, “The city demands a certain kind of contact only. It demands suspicions.” There are so many layers in her writing and she isn’t afraid to take risks. Her debut short story collection Dark Neighbourhood is about to be published in October 2021.

First published in The White Review and collected in Dark Neighbourhood, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021

‘Kong’s Garden’ by Hwang Jungeun, translated by Jeon Seung-He

From the author of one of my favourite novels, One Hundred Shadows (2010), Hwang takes us into a socially bleak alternate Korea where education no longer holds utmost value and the markers that society are measured by begin to take a U-Turn. There is something matter-of-fact and gripping about the way we read about bored clerks, girls getting refused cigarettes and men going missing.

Part of a collection of pamphlets called YEOYU, Strangers Press, 2019

‘I’d Love You To Want Me’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen

This is a moving story. We meet a character who struggles with their memories ‘gradually stealing away’. Mr and Mrs. Khahn know a lot about each other, but there are huge gaps between them too.

First published – as ‘The Other Woman’ – in Gulf Coast 20.1, Winter/Spring 2008, and collected in The Refugees, Little Brown, 2017

‘Bloodchild’ by Octavia E. Butler

I was always intrigued by Octavia E. Butler’s exploration of the posthuman. Something that makes ‘Bloodchild’ really great is the way that it doesn’t shy away from anatomical language and the intricacies of new species being made. I think Octavia’s writing is a master class in writing about the complications and potential of motherhood too.

First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 1984. Collected in Bloodchild and Other Stories, Seven Stories Press 1995, and numerous anthologies

‘The Running Man’ by Jorje Consiglio, translated by Cherilyn Elston

I think that there is an abrasive quality to the narrator in ‘The Running Man’ that makes me think twice. An intentional discomfort. There’s a fascinating line in the story about a man who dedicates his life to communication. Small details like that remain with me. A great way to start on your journey into ‘the Consiglian logic of story-telling’ – part of a collection of near imperceptibly linked stories.

Collected in Southerly, Charco Press, 2016

‘A Bet Is Placed’ by YZ Chin

I love the vantage point of this story. It opens with an old man looking at young people ordering munch in KFC. There’s such a cinematic quality to YZ Chin’s writing. This story lingers on the idea of growing into modernity.

First published on LitHub in April 2018 and available to read here, and collected in Though I Get Home, Feminist Press, 2018