‘Antarctica’ by Laura van den Berg

This story, not just about a sister searching for her brother’s remains and personal effects after he dies in an accident, but also about the impact of secrets in his life and hers, was my first introduction to Laura van den Berg’s beautiful work. I think a sense of the mysterious is what brings me back to this story – a bona fide sense of the mystery of other people, that is an earned mystery through a distinct level of alertness conveyed by the narration of the story, an alertness that is a characteristic of this writer’s other work also. I enjoy this mystery, cultivate it in my work. We are not fully knowable to each other, the story (and many other favorite stories) reminds us.

First published in Glimmer Train 88, Fall 2013, and collected in The Isle of Youth, FSG Originals, 2013

‘All Stories Are True’ by John Edgar Wideman

I think he is one of our greatest living writers and adore the way he has drawn fearlessly on autobiography, including devastating events (incarceration of loved ones, repeated losses) to write his fiction. I learn constantly from his transmutation of reality into fiction, his precise, original, utterly compelling calibration of how much truth to tell. Also, the lyricism of that first paragraph, in particular sentences like: “Footsteps, voices, a skein of life dragged bead by bead through a soft needle’s eye.” There is something in the scope of this first paragraph reminiscent of James Agee and yet completely original and specific to Pittsburgh, the natural world a respite rather than pervasive in this setting.

First published in The Stories of John Edgar Wideman, Pantheon, 1992, which was republished as All Stories Are True, Vintage Contemporaries/Picador, 1993

‘Every Time They Call You [The N-Word]’ by Chris Stuck

I believe strongly that non-Black reviewers should not use the full slur word here because that word is not a part of our earned history and not ours to just use as we please. (As Helen Oyeyemi reminds us in one of my favorite book titles, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours). I brace myself, however, for the people who talk about this story, and this collection, taking it as an opportunity to use the word. The story, though, opens out into a psychological terrain that is at once familiar, dazzlingly new, and operating wholly on its own terms. There is a real authority to how this story is told that made me love the collection as a whole. In terms of what I gained though, the main point for me was a reminder of what #OwnVoices means. Movements through time, selection of the most significant events, development of the ending and what constitutes an ending, what should be written as a story versus a novel – this story violates almost every implicit rule of the MFA workshop, and in doing so, completely soars.

First published in Meridian, Summer 2019, and collected in Give My Love to the Savages, Amistad, 2021

‘The Price of Eggs in China’ by Don Lee

I tell everyone I teach writing to about this story. It really has everything I love in short fiction – a completely gripping protagonist whose perspective is conveyed in a close, often sly third-person (Dean); a unique and wholly convincing take on race; a send-up of white publishing gatekeepers (who aren’t characters in the story, but figure in the tale indirectly); and (perhaps most importantly) a dissection of the frenemy status of women of the color, the tension between sisterhood and competition because of how publishing sets up the only one story model of ethnic literature that has so rightfully been criticized by writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Also – and this may be the key component – it has the right kind of, very smart happy ending and gets me with the little flavoring of sentiment I love (that I also look for when I read commercial fiction).

Published in Yellow, Norton, 2001

‘Delicate Edible Birds’ by Lauren Groff

I knew I had to include a story by Lauren Groff in this personal anthology because her level of narrative control and respect for her characters as people has stood out to me as I have read stories that influenced my own. But also, at the level of history as it impacts individuals, and for the way it dissects how much patriarchal perspectives survive even in the most extreme circumstances – this is just a great read. Lauren Groff never forgets the reader in how she writes, in terms of creating genuinely suspenseful stories even as her attention to language could not be more diligent or (often) lovely. I strive to have both these elements in my fiction – page-turning as well as crafted at the sentence level – and I was thrilled when some of the reviews of my collection called it compulsively readable. That sense of momentum for the reader is everything.

First published in Glimmer Train 70, Spring 2009. Collected in Delicate Edible Birds, Hyperion/Windmill Books, 2009

‘The Years of my Birth’ by Louise Erdrich

I first heard this story while driving and forgot to take the correct exit, I was so engrossed. It was read out loud on the New Yorker podcast by Tommy Orange, along with his commentary on the story and its characters, and I found this indelible. The story is about a woman who late in life encounters the family who gave her up for adoption. The rendering of their cruelty to her is vivid; their rejection of her not confined to a single act, but enacted over a protracted period and in evermore, newly cruel ways. The striking twist of the story is that she is white, adopted by a Native American family, and that her physical disability renders her Other to the white family of origin in ways not entirely dissimilar to how they regard Native Americans as Other and as inferior. The sensitively drawn comparisons between these ways of being Other are fascinating in the story, which taught me, as a writer, that no one gets to decide how much is too much for a story about marginalization and resistance. No one gets to cut down multiple identities to just a single one that a hegemonic white audience can somehow more easily deal with.

Published in The New Yorker, January 10 2011, and available for subscribers to read here

‘Hell-Heaven’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

She is such an important short story writer, really very dexterous and able with a few strokes to make a story feel perfectly polished and neat. Yet this was one of the first and few stories in first person, told by a narrator looking back in time, that I think I read of hers (it came out in the New Yorker before being included in the book, and I was immediately moved and affected by it). I love the way Jhumpa Lahiri can convey pain and suffering beneath surface elegance – the woman wearing a lilac raincoat (chic, carefully chosen, belted and fitted of course) while standing in her backyard about to immolate herself. The story also offers such an honest and unsparing look at some of the dynamics of pseudo-family, community as family, immigration as a bond. That felt really new at the time though I think a lot of writers since have taken this in different directions.

First published in The New Yorker, May 24, 2004, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Unaccustomed Earth, Knopf/Bloomsbury, 2009

‘Why I Live at the P.O.’ by Eudora Welty

This was the first short story I read in my first ever fiction workshop (as an undergrad, with the head of the creative writing program, who intimidated me at first but was ultimately such a nurturing influence on my work). We were assigned to read this to learn about the concept of the unreliable narrator and I know this is how most of us use this story to teach in workshops as well. And yet there is so much more than unreliability – there is orneriness, petulance, hope, jealousy, even a kind of greed, including greed for the comeuppance of other people. All within the small space of a family, and all started (the story behind the story goes) by Eudora Welty spying a photograph of a woman doing her ironing at a set-up behind a local post office.

First published in A Curtain Of Green, Harvest Books, 1941. Printed as a Penguin 60 in 1995, and currently available in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. You can hear the author read it here

‘The Lazy River’ by Zadie Smith

I read this right after breakfast during a MacDowell residency, and it blew my mind at the time. There is such skill in how the anger and moral outrage is contained, such a careful, precise and measured approach to how and when that anger is expressed – but it is there, I did feel it. Maybe in the lines:

Down below, the Lazy River runs, a neon blue, a crazy blue, a Facebook blue. In it stands a fully clothed man armed with a long mop—he is being held in place by another man, who grips him by the waist, so that the first man may angle his mop and position himself against the strong yet somniferous current and clean whatever scum we have left of ourselves off the sides.

From this story, I feel I really learned from how to keep the reader’s attention to submerged meanings, awareness of ostensibly peripheral experiences, actually right at the forefront – to keep the reader tense and vigilant. I also was more aware of the language of the story, its old-fashioned elocution and elegance, in comparison with a lot of other work I read, and was glad for it.

First published in The New Yorker, Dec 11 2017, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Grand Union, Hamish Hamilton, 2019

‘Our Language’ by Yohanca Delgado

I know the author from a writing group, so read this story with pride but was also uniquely moved by it – how I had met the author when she came to my reading in 2018 and then met her again at the writing group and now was reading this gorgeous story to emerge from all the hard work she did in between. She will be a Stegner fellow this year and I am looking forward very much to the collection this will be part of. Here is what I wrote to her about this story:

I LEGIT cannot get your story from A Public Space out of my head. It’s so incredibly sweet, deft, haunting, all the elements of mystery, suspense, legend, history, plus that person’s voice (a person, definitely. Not a “creature” except also a creature – the image of “sea grave”, the teeth, etc). Melancholy, loving. The intense magic of the voice that lives in between the strangeness of a creature and the authority (and love) of a grandmother. The self conscious “anthropology.” There is a layer of sophistication belied by the clarity/ simplicity of the language. It. Will. Last. I know it. What brings tears to my eyes is how reading it influenced me to cherish my own work in a different way. : )

first published in A Public Space #29 and available to read here)

‘The Husband Stitch’ by Carmen Maria Machado

I read this online when it appeared in Granta and immediately was charmed by it, though also so intrigued, because nearly all the stories mentioned within this story, as well as the frame story (a woman with a ribbon around her neck, no spoilers here!) were all literally taken from a book called Scary Stories that any parent of an elementary school or middle school child will know. I am so intrigued by that. None of these stories were original. Yet all are re-imagined in a completely original, literary, compelling way – i.e. like writing a story about Law And Order: SVU which this writer has also done. But it is not out of reach, for anyone, to be inspired by material like this. This is a talent that is besotting as well as making it clear that when we use material at hand, memorable and renowned stories can result. But literally. I know little kids for whom the story about the mother replaced by the stranger with a glass eye and wooden leg were unreasonably frightening. So deeply troubling and frightening. There is a way these Scary Stories and the other scary stories (the violent crimes against women portrayed in Law And Order: SVU) become new and unprecedented myths around which to build stories – no less powerful than myths about Circe, Medusa, Daphne, which several of Carmen Maria Machado’s stories also evoke.

First published online in Granta in 2014 and available to read here. Collected in Her Body And Other Parties, Graywolf/Serpent’s Tail, 2019)

‘The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother’ by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa

I think I was in high school when I first read this story and it seemed to speak in a language intended only for me, as an adolescent girl going through some of the same changes and reactions from others as the title character. What I think Gabriel García Márquez models so exquisitely – placing him alongside Isak Dinesen, Naguib Mahfouz, and a few writers who have also evoked this response from me – is a way to create books that do not really seem written; that have a strong point of view, sense of humor (especially in Love in the Time of Cholera)but that reach so far beyond the subjectivity and ambitions of one single writer that they seem to have pre-existed any specific writer. I believe this only comes with a completely immersive revision process in which lines like the below then feel earned rather than overly ambitious:

The house was far away from everything, in the heart of the desert, next to a settlement with miserable and burning streets where the goats committed suicide from desolation when the wind of misfortune blew.

It is not always possible to do what Gabriel García Márquez (including in his Paris Review interview, which I studied like a canonical text when I first realized I wanted to be a writer) says that he does (did) to create that immersion – writing for six hours a day without doing anything else (9:30 to 2:30 pm) and then using the afternoons for the business of writing. It is a gift of time and opportunity to be able to do that. But writing all this out and looking at both that story (which Esquire made free online for a time after the author died at the age of 87) – I am going to try the six-hour block thing whenever I can!!

First published in Spanish in 1972 as ‘La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada’. First publication in English in Esquire, 1973 and available to read to subscribers here. Collected in The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother, Harper, 1978. Currently available in the Collected Stories, Perennial Classics, 2005)

‘Royal Beatings’ by Alice Munro

There are so many things about Alice Munro that are worth celebrating, any given story of hers could fit into this entry – her gifts are always in evidence. A story like ‘Runaway’ is the sort of thing that threatens to become déclassé merely because it nails a thing so perfectly (in that case, use of an animal as locus of a sublime moment) that it becomes easy to imitate. Her later story ‘Dimension’ was the first of hers that I read. There was a specific character in that story – Maggie – who I so hoped would be a hero, and when she was revealed to be merely human, I knew Munro was going to be the living writer I most envied.

‘Royal Beatings’ has all the qualities of Munro’s writing that I love and could hold forth continually about. I chose it as a focus specifically because of the elements of ritual and meaning within it. Like the works of Márquez and Kono highlighted elsewhere on this list, there is a kind of ecosystem evident in the fiction that is darkly cast. In these stories, violence transforms the order of human relations rather than obliterating it, and the results are profoundly sad, strange, and compelling.

Rose, a girl in the past of the story and a woman in its present, lives with her stepmother Flo and her physically abusive father. The beatings that Rose’s father inflict upon her are so routine that they become essential to their relationship, accruing elements of performance, or litany. Violence becomes a means of affirmation and, obscurely, communication, while actual spoken language between them is denatured (“The person who spoke those words and the person who spoke to her as her father were not the same, though they seemed to occupy the same space.”)

The action of the story is illustrated in a move from past tense to present, the sort of simple trick that I will always imitate and never master. The vagueness with which the scene is set – a Saturday arbitrarily chosen, the ages of the characters in a range, the circumstances uncertain – lends the lead-up to Rose’s first royal beating the frayed character of actual memory. Rose’s climactic outburst is a linguistic surge of life in large part defined by the anticipation of violence (the moment of the outburst is both “dangerous” and “delightful”, Flo’s rage is “predictable”). Relations of power are articulated bluntly, the complete knowledge of what is to happen as it happens (“She calls him in a warning, summoning voice, as if against her will preparing him for bad news.”) When the violence arrives it is suffused with dread frisson and terrible clarity.

One of the things that Munro does so well is chart courses beyond the typical beats of plot – I can’t remember where I read it, but someone once observed that Munro, in her signature fluid approach to time in stories, will often set their beginnings after what we’d consider a point of narrative climax. Her stories aren’t anticlimactic but rather speak to a solidity of narrative outside the walled garden of Freytag’s Pyramid. Rather than the expected rising and falling actions, you get something like the rhythm of actual life, at turns gentle and turbulent, stubbornly refusing ease and simplicity. When the violence ends, as definite and singular as it seems, Munro intimates that it could be one of countless ritual scenes. “He has never managed really to injure her, though there are times, of course, when she prays that he will.”

A disquieting implication of the text is that certain thresholds of violence can be not only bearable, but digestible, mistakable as love. On the level of family it suggests truth in the axiom that the more dysfunctional a given system gets, the more resilient it becomes (“By stages, by arguing, they are being drawn back into themselves.”) The influence of southern gothic is evident, in the story’s matter-of-fact tone, and in ancillary characters like the polio-scarred Becky Tide, “a big-headed loud-voiced dwarf, with a mascot’s sexless swagger,” as grotesquely human a figure as anything dreamed by Flannery O’Connor or Harry Crews. The ghost of class and money, and their relationship to violence, hang unspoken. “…treachery,” as she writes, “is the other side of dailiness.”

I once attended a Carmen Maria Machado reading in which she opined on what she termed “mysterious vistas” in fiction. These were things in a story hinted at but not truly revealed to the reader – a cryptic message, a monument of unknown provenance, a locked door that never opens – which are particularly endemic to “world building” in genre fiction. When she defined this concept I immediately thought of a particular passage in ‘Royal Beatings’, wherein Rose, after her father has passed away, finds a trove of papers on which her violent father wrote both financial records and personal musings. One entry is excerpted:

Ate new potatoes 25th June. Record.
Dark Dary, 1880’s, nothing supernatural. Clouds of Ash from forest fires.
Aug 16, 1938. Giant thunderstorm in evng. Lightning str. Pres. Church, Turberry Twp. Will of God?
Scald strawberries to remove acid.
All things are alive. Spinoza

The journal entry, and the poetic asides overheard by Rose in her youth (“The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces”) turn the abusive father’s internal landscape into a mysterious vista of the story. It doesn’t make him sympathetic or complicate the violence he commits. His capacity for unexpected private thought does not make him rare. Neither does his capacity for violence make him especially monstrous. Rather it shows us the reel which ties Rose to her father, the palimpsest of a person she is refused access to.

From one angle, this might seem the sort of WASPy remove that makes the canon of contemporary realist literature difficult for so many readers to enjoy – not for nothing that this was Munro’s first published story, out of 60 plus total, in the New Yorker. But rather than cruelty, I think Munro’s mode of compassion is akin to agape, the distant love of a God toward Her creation. It’s a quality that she shares, in my mind, with Toni Morrison. It might be that such things are impolitic in 2021, or maybe it only feels like this kind of writing is scarce, beyond the Ferrantes of the world. It’s all exquisite pain, like biting down on a loose tooth, or the vital itch of a wound beneath its bandage.

First published in The New Yorker, March 1977, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Who Do You Think You Are? a.k.a. The Beggar Maid, Alfred A. Knopf 1978, and in the Selected Stories, McLelland and Stewart, 1996

‘White Angel’ by Michael Cunningham

Before I’d ever heard of Alice Munro, I was familiar enough with “literary fiction” (what I otherwise refer to as “contemporary realism”) to think quite dismally of it; when the waiting rooms I was compelled to inhabit in my youth didn’t carry TIME or even Sports Illustrated, they typically had The New Yorker, probably because it wasn’t stolen as often (except by me). Once I’d burned through the comics and the movie reviews, I would browse the fiction. My sense of what short stories were, outside the Philip K. Dick and Stephen King I sought deliberately, came from this experience.

I couldn’t get on their wavelength. All the cliches seemed to apply: They were all about upper middle-class professionals or academics, all dealing with alcoholism or impotence, in addition to the perennial quiet acrimony of marital conflict so deep that it felt like the characters were born into their resentful couplings. I was a kid, and I felt vaguely insulted that these were the things I was expected to find universal and compelling compared to, say, Paul Verhoeven movies.

I’d managed to avoid English comp and literature classes through high school (I was a consummate dirtbag), and it was only when I’d actually tried my hand at fiction that I came to appreciate the craft of it. Between that point and discovering Munro, craft – the dissection and analysis of the choices made by a writer – was the sole attraction bringing me to realism. If there’s inside baseball shoptalk to be had about anything, I love it.

‘White Angel’ was one of the first stories assigned to me as an analytic reader, and it got me on board with the program because, like the George Saunders stories I would later read, it builds to the unbearable, chilling intensity of a great suspense story. It follows the family of a young boy, Robert, in Cleveland. It’s the late 60s and Robert’s brother, Carlton, is a classic older brother figure – he is confident, cool, and plugged into the counterculture and psychedelics, which he shares with his kid brother (who he calls “Frisco”). Very much a black sheep boy, Carlton clashes with their frustrated mother. Naturally, Robert idolizes him, and comes to resent – in the way of young children – his brother’s girlfriend, who is deliberately unnamed.

We know, very early on, that Carlton is not long for this world – the story is told from Robert’s perspective, in retrospect, and he says openly that we’re seeing the last few months of Carlton’s life. Cunningham keeps that inevitability distant even so, until he brings it close.

To me, Cunningham’s key choice is made immediately before the climactic, shocking scene. There is a shift in perspective, somewhat akin to Munro’s shift from past to present tense in “Royal Beatings” but subtler. The entirety of “White Angel” is told in present tense with speckles of future perfect (itself a tricky maneuver that Cunningham doesn’t hesitate to show off), but in the paragraph immediately preceding the climax of the story, he introduces a new uncertainty. “Carlton must have jumped the back fence. He must have wanted to be there, alone, in case they decided to take somebody with them.”

The word “must”, here, is the primer on the scene that follows it. The flow of the story is interrupted; Robert grasps for something that isn’t there, something he missed, and it clues the reader in that we are presently rushing toward crisis.

Then the crisis comes.

The most significant thing that I read short fiction for – and read past things that I don’t like or find unpleasant – is what Alexander Lumans calls “the sublime moment”, after Edmund Burke. It is the passage, often present in long-form fiction but endemic to short form, in which the story shifts into unexpected registers. Elements that can characterize such a shift include the slowing of time, the use of elevated language, a startling visual, and a quality of ecstasy, awe, or otherworldly terror in the moment itself.

Carlton’s death, from the initial incident through the haunting final image, before time jumps forward again, is a perfect execution of sublimity in fiction on par with the Quint monologue in Jaws, a terrible memory trapped in amber.

First published as a short story in The New Yorker, July 1988, and available to subscribers to read here; then included as a chapter in A Home at The End of the World, Picador, 1998