‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow’ by Conrad Aiken

“There were more important things. Miracles. Beyond the thoughts of trees, mere elms. Beyond the thoughts of sidewalks, mere stone, mere brick, mere cement. Beyond the thoughts even of his own shoes, which trod these sidewalks obediently, bearing a burden—far above—of elaborate mystery. He watched them. They were not very well polished; he had neglected them, for a very good reason: they were one of the many parts of the increasing difficulty of the daily return to daily life, the morning struggle. To get up, having at last opened one’s eyes, to go to the window, and discover no snow, to wash, to dress, to descend the curving stairs to breakfast.”

Conrad Aiken has for years seemed to me—much like the inner blizzard of this story’s young protagonist—a secret, preciously concealed, and to that very fact he owed an enormous part of his deliciousness. By the time I founded The Scofield, a literary magazine that focused on underappreciated authors, I felt duty-bound to forsake that secret deliciousness by building an issue around my favorite writer no one reads. If the luggage of consciousness is what I am stalking in the hunt for great literature, then Aiken belongs near the top of my list, as he is without doubt one of the most consciousness-obsessed men to have put pen to paper. Though he did not invent the “stream of consciousness” techniques, he was the first to wed these formal modernist experiments in consciousness to the psychoanalytic theories contemporaneously being developed by Sigmund Freud. In ‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow,’ Paul Hasleman, a school-age boy, grows distant from “the ordinary business of daily life” as he daydreams of snow. Only in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and Anna Kavan’s Ice, two other wintery masterpieces, does the snow possess such mythopoetic (and psychopoetic) heft.

First published in the August 1932 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review, included in The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, World Publishing Company, 1960, which had a new Kindle-only release from Open Road Media in 2015, and available online at VQR Online

‘Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car’ by Virginia Woolf

“Evening is kind to Sussex, for Sussex is no longer young, and she is grateful for the veil of evening as an elderly woman is glad when a shade is drawn over a lamp, and only the outline of her face remains. The outline of Sussex is still very fine. The cliffs stand out to sea, one behind another. All Eastbourne, all Bexhill, all St. Leonards, their parades and their lodging houses, their bead shops and their sweet shops and their placards and their invalids and chars–á-bancs, are all obliterated. What remains is what there was when William came over from France ten centuries ago: a line of cliffs running out to sea. Also the fields are redeemed. The freckle of red villas on the coast is washed over by a thin lucid lake of brown air, in which they and their redness are drowned. It was still too early for lamps; and too early for stars.”

Published in a posthumous essay collection, ‘Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car’ blurs the line between narrative essay and nonfiction short story. Though the gorgeous descriptions of Sussex are enough of a draw on their own, the real wonder here is Woolf’s evocation of technology’s ability to transform modes of perception and categories of aesthetic experience. In this case, the new technology explored is the automobile. Woolf’s “reflections” catalogue our anxious need to name and classify in the face of excessive beauty, though they also get at something very particular to my interests as an avid roadtripper, an aspect of driving that I’ve rarely seen discussed, but know all too well: the way the self proliferates, consciousness splits, while one drives on a lonely road. In the solitude of the car, we multiply. It’s not just that Woolf is the first writer I know of to describe this phenomenon, but that she remains its best chronicler in this brief, elegiac story/essay.

First published in Woolf’s collection The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays, 1942, Hogarth Press, available now in numerous print editions, and also available online at Berfois

‘Welcome, Bob’ by Juan Carlos Onetti, trans. Katherine Silver

“There’s no question that every day he’ll get older, farther away from when he was called Bob, from his blond hair hanging over his temples, from that smile and those sparkling eyes when he’d silently enter the room, murmuring a greeting or slightly moving his hand near his ear, and go sit down under the lamp near the piano with a book or simply motionless and separate, lost in thought, looking at us for an hour, his face expressionless, his fingers moving every once in a while to handle his cigarette or brush ash off the lapels of his light-colored suits.“

Onetti had the strange quality of being inimitable and at the same time creating an entire school of writing,” Carlos Fuentes once said of this poet of time and decay. The Uruguayan master has enjoyed a minor revival of late in the U.S., thanks in part to the publication of his collected stories in English, A Dream Come True (Archipelago, 2019). No title could better describe this brick of a book which abounds with memorable stories, perhaps none more memorable than the hilarious and bitter ‘Welcome, Bob.’ Here an unnamed narrator—envious of the titular character’s youth, looks, vigor, and ideals—expresses excitement in welcoming him into the world of adulthood, disappointment, failure, and cynicism.

First published in 1944. First published in English translation in 1963 in the Odyssey Review (translation by Hanna Ewards). The Silver translation first published in the Onetti collection A Dream Come True (2019, Archipelago). The only version online is a translation by Donald L. Shaw at the Short Story Project

‘The Hour After Westerly’ by Robert M. Coates

“It was as if he had been driving in a fog, and the one thing he did remember was an image as precise and as unrelated as something one might see through a sudden parting of fog—a group of small white houses grouped at an intersection, and a clock (was it on a steeple?) with the clock’s hands pointing to ten minutes to six. There was a faint suggestion of a dirt road, too, but even as he tried to consider it, it floated off into nothingness.“

There’s nothing more depressing to me than a writer worthy of a readership whose name seems, to borrow a phrase from John Keats, “writ in water.” I’m realizing that, even though it wasn’t one of the three rules I set forth in creating this personal anthology, part of what I’ve done here has been a meager attempt to save certain writers like Conrad Aiken and Robert McAlmon from the ash heaps of history. Another author I love from the List of Writers Whose Names Are Rarely Uttered is Robert M. Coates. Coates, if he is remembered at all, is remembered as the art critic who coined the term “abstract expressionism” to describe a group of painters in the 1940s that included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, and Arshile Gorky. But it is his fiction that has long enraptured me: the dadaist sci-fi novel Eater of Darkness, published with the help (and praises) of Gertrude Stein; Yesterday’s Burdens, in which Coates attempts “to reverse the usual method” of the novel, “and instead of trying to individualize [his protagonist] and pin him down to a story, to generalize more and more about him—to let him become like the figures in a crowd, and the crowd dispersing”; and his stories, which often appeared in The New Yorker, where he was resident art critic, including ‘The Hour After Westerly,’ about a man who loses an hour while driving home from work and can’t make sense of the lost time. Though it has the trappings of an unaired episode of The Twilight Zone, Coates’s story is much more than that: an atmospheric rumination on the ravages of time, the malleability of memory, the regrets of middle age, and our innate nostalgia for the possibilities of roads not taken.

First published in the November 1947 issue of The New Yorker, included in the collection The Hour After Westerly and Other Essays, 1957, Harcourt Brace & Company, and available online for those with access to The New Yorker archive

‘Ragtime’ by Anaïs Nin

“The ragpicker worked in silence and never looked at anything that was whole. His eyes sought the broken, the worn, the faded, the fragmented. A complete object made him sad. What could one do with a complete object? Put it in a museum. Not touch it. But a torn paper, a shoelace without its double, a cup without saucer, that was stirring. They could be transformed, melted into something else. A twisted piece of pipe. Wonderful, this basket without a handle. Wonderful, this bottle without a stopper. Wonderful, the box without a key. Wonderful, half a dress, the ribbon off a hat, a fan with a feather missing. Wonderful, the camera plate without the camera, the lone bicycle wheel, half a phonograph disk. Fragments, incomplete worlds, rags, detritus, the end of objects, and the beginning of transmutations.“

Of the pieces in Under a Glass Bell, the collection ‘Ragtime’ comes from, Nin explained: “These stories represent the moment when many like myself had found only one answer to the suffering of the world: to dream, to tell fairytales, to elaborate and to follow the labyrinth of fantasy. All this I see now was the passive poet’s only answer to the torments he witnessed…” Adrift in a mostly plotless story, Nin’s narrator visits a ragpickers’ camp on the outskirts of Paris and catalogues the detritus. I fell in love with this surreal, ephemeral dream as a teen, and unlike many of my other teenage loves, it has stayed with me. There is a certain melancholic romance in seeking the broken, the worn, the faded, the fragmented, in recognizing that “Nothing is lost but it changes.”

First published in Nin’s collection Under a Glass Bell, 1948, Swallow Press, and available in audio form, read by the author herself, on YouTube

‘An Irrelevant Death’ by Kōbō Abe, trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter

“Something about the corpse was vaguely irritating. Although perfectly still, it gave an impression of subtle but incessant movement, rather like the hands of a clock. Probably this was because of the way it was lying. It had an artificially posed look, like snapshots of dancers in midleap.“

Abe is up there with Kafka as one of the great writers of 20th-century existential horror. His work exists in that terrifying sweet spot where the mythic and the mysterious manifest absurdly in the modern world. David Remnick wrote of Abe’s writing, “There are no samurai warriors, as in Mishima, no tea ceremonies, as in Kawabata.” Abe told Remnick, “I get a little tired of hearing about tea ceremonies. I think tea ceremonies are for tourist brochures and the propaganda put out by Japan Air Lines.” Instead, Abe gives us ghosts and corpses, queer disappearances and Sisyphean tasks, metamorphosis and alienation, overwhelming bureaucracy and deteriorating ipseity. In ‘An Irrelevant Death,’ a man comes home from work to find a dead body in his apartment. The act of locking the door behind him sets off a series of thoughts and actions that progress naturally, if horrifyingly, toward a conclusion that may or may not actually be a conclusion.

First published in 1961 and collected in 1964, with the Carpenter translation first published in the Abe collection Beyond the Curve, 1991, Kodansha USA

‘The Haile Selassie Funeral Train’ by Guy Davenport

“Apollinaire could look so German from time to time that you could see the pickelhaube on his bandaged head, the swallow-wing moustache, the glint of disciplinary idiocy in his sweet eyes. He was Guillaume, Wilhelm. Forms deteriorate, transformation is not always growth, there is a hostage light in shadows, vagrom shadow in desert noon, burgundy in the green of a vine, green in the reddest wine.”

Taking place in a geography and a history of the imagination, riddled with the gaps and incongruities of such a setting, where figures from various eras converge for the funeral train of the last emperor of Ethiopia. As in much of Davenport’s idiosyncratic fiction, we find a consciousness foraging the tatterdemalion alleys of our collective culture for meaning, for understanding, for knowledge. He proceeds by daring synapses, and finds in them—if not the holy grails of meaning, understanding, knowledge—then at least the baubles of minor epiphany.

First published in Davenport’s collection Da Vinci’s Bicycle, 1979, New Directions, and available online in audio form, read by Miette, at Miette’s Bedtime Story Podcast

‘The Judgment of Psycho’ by John Haskell

“Janet Leigh was never completely naked during the filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, but she did have breasts. They’re hinted at and alluded to, never revealed exactly, but she did have them, and in a way it’s why she was killed. The movie begins with her, with a long shot of Phoenix, Arizona. The camera pans across the city to a building, to a window in the building, then under the venetian blinds of the window and into the room where Janet Leigh is lying half-naked on a bed. She’s wearing a white bra and a white slip, and the bra, sitting on top of her chest like two white pyramids, looks as if it ought to be enough protection.”

If ‘The Judgment of Psycho’ had not been published in Haskell’s collection of short stories, it could have been published as a piece of film criticism in some cinema magazine. The story braids together scenes (both real and imagined) from Alfred Hitchcock’s landmark horror film with retellings of the mythology surrounding the Trojan War and descriptions of a figure in the underpainting of a Jan Vermeer. There’s a lot going on here, but the story never feels overburdened, for Haskell’s sleight of hand is masterful. He willfully confuses Psycho’s actors with the characters they play—for example, attributing the desires of Norman Bates to Tony Perkins—which is, of course, exactly what the viewer does while watching a film, losing a sense of the separation between the real and the fantasy. We—like Tony Perkins, like John Haskell—wrestle with ghosts.

First published in Haskell’s collection I Am Not Jackson Pollock, 2003, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. You can hear an excerpt of it in audio form, read by the author himself, at WNYC’s Studio 360

Introduction

When I began writing the stories that eventually made up my debut collection, Each of Us Killers (Sep 2020; 7.13 Books), I had no grand theme or design in mind. I gravitated instinctually to writing about working life concerns because a) I’ve held different kinds of jobs since my teenage years and am interested in how we negotiate our work and personal identities; and b) more often than not, my way into a character’s life and identity is through the work they do.

That said, because I wasn’t conscious of this as the driving theme for most of my fiction, I didn’t look, at the time, for short story models focused on the working life. It was only after, when I was querying agents and publishers in 2017-2018, that I looked for comparison points. What I found was that, while there were a few story collections centered on work (see my reading list at The Rumpus) and definitely a lot of work-related novels (see my reading list at Electric Literature), there were very few story collections from writers of South Asian descent that focused on work. There are likely many reasons for this, not least of which is that the publishing industry likes books from our community to check off the usual tropes and stereotypes.

So, for this personal anthology, I went looking through some of my favorite literary magazines for stories by writers of South Asian descent about working lives. I also wanted to spotlight more writers who either don’t have books out yet or who aren’t known to the western world because their works are in regional South Asian languages. Putting these twelve stories together in this personal anthology reminded me, yet again, of the rich diversity of the South Asian region, even though the publishing industry prefers the usual stories of slums, terrorism, immigrantism, religious fundamentalism, and arranged marriage. South Asia is so much more than just those stories as, I hope, you’ll see from the selection below.

‘Sugra’ by Farah Ahmed

This is a story about a young Pakistani woman in Lahore whose job is that of a security checker at a tomb visited by tourists and sightseers. She was born with a bad leg, which has made even her parents see her as a burden. At her security checker job, she makes a new friend of sorts. He works at a small kiosk across the street. It’s an awkward, new relationship but she eventually trusts him enough to go inside the mausoleum with him. Ahmed layers subtle complications here but keeps the story grittily real. Her cinematic language helps us visualize each scene beautifully. And, even though we have a sense of foreboding as to what’s likely to happen, the ending is done so smoothly that it’s likely to make you take a deep breath like I did and reread it a couple of times.

First published in The Mechanics’ Institute Review, 2020 and available to read online here

‘Custodian of Rubble’ by Mohan Rakesh, translated from Hindi by Nirupama Dutt

Mohan Rakesh was one of the pioneers of the Nayi Kahani (modern story) literary movement of Hindi literature in the 1950s. It didn’t start out as a movement but their efforts to break away from literary traditions, especially with the short story form, to convey the restlessness and reality of the newly-independent India broke new ground. Like the first story, this one is also about a custodian of sorts, though a self-appointed one. In post-Partition Amritsar, Punjab (India), some men have just returned from Lahore, Pakistan. Rakesh takes us, wide-angle, through the changes in the streets and its people before zooming in with a particular old returnee. Ganni has come to see the house he’d left behind with a family that’s no longer there. He’s not the eponymous custodian to whom the story’s point-of-view eventually shifts in a stark, chilling manner. The ending leaves us restless and unfulfilled, which is exactly the effect the writer wanted here.

Available to read online here. Also available in a different translation in The Greatest Hindi Stories Ever Told, Aleph, 2020

‘A Body More Than Flesh and Bone’ by Nina Sudhakar

Moving from Partition-driven deserted ruins to another kind of deserted ruins: an archaeological excavation in India’s Deccan Plateau where, as Anika, our protagonist tells us, “there should have been no bones, where nearly everyone was cremated.” The prose here is languid and beautiful, drawing us into the dream-like world Anika lives in with her friend and coworker, Carine. They’re digging up ancient bones and tablets and piecing together the unique language and story of their female owners. Then, a male expert from “the institute” shows up and everything changes. Woven into the present-time story of these three characters, we have the myth-like narratives of that ancient community of women who lived in secret when they were meant to die. I hope this is part of a larger novel that we will soon get to read in its entirety because I want to live in this world longer than this piece allows.

First published in The Offing, 2019, and available to read online here

‘Talent’ by Niven Govinden

Where the previous story is about ancient women who lived in secret defiance, this story is about a contemporary woman who lives in open defiance . . . as an overweight (by the industry’s standards) lapdancer. Govinden’s flash piece here is stunning in its imagery. Over a span of five nights, we see the short-lived career of this unconventional and hugely talented dancer. Her artistry gets her further than her contemporaries. But everything has a flipside and the ending here shows us that reality. This story showcases the power of the flash form in many ways.

First published in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, October 2009. Read it online here

‘Amma’ by Sindya Bhanoo

Speaking of talented women performers, here’s a story based on a real-life actor-turned-politician in India. J. Jayalalitha served six times as the Chief Minister of the state of Tamil Nadu for over fourteen years between 1991 and 2016. This was after a successful film career from the 1960s onwards with over 140 movies to her name. At 43, she was the youngest to rise to that political office. And the most charismatic to date. People worshipped her like she was a living goddess. Despite the many legal cases against her for corruption and more, in the eyes of her people, she was always “Amma” or mother. Bhanoo imagines her average beginnings as a schoolgirl and then the quick rise to movie star and political legend. Told through the eyes of a former classmate, the narrative is about humanizing and finding some parts of ourselves in such a larger-than-life figure.

First published in Granta online, August 2020, and available to read here