‘The Age of Instagram Face’ by Jia Tolentino

Jia Tolentino, ex-editor of Jezebel and now staff writer for the New Yorker, as well as author of the brilliant collection Trick Mirror, tackles the identity warping effects of face-tune filters on Instagram, and more broadly points out the way in which beauty standards are increasingly being driven by digital software. So we no longer take our aesthetic cues from the real world, but from software which can distort the human face in all kinds of wrong ways. Her observations are kind of terrifying, as they are in Trick Mirror, too, what I like about her writing is that she is asking the ethical questions about the internet that we all should have been asking all along. She is a deeply moral writer in an age when it seems hard to define what morality might actually mean. 

First published in The New Yorker, December 2019 and available online here

‘I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Apart from the intense – and necessary – political observations about Kanye West’s identification with Trump, what moves me about this piece is Coates’ relationship with music – one of my favourite topics (of which more later). His memories of seeing Michael Jackson as a kid opens this piece with two beautiful rhythmic paragraphs which evoke childhood and that sense of wonder of seeing something culturally important for the first time. He also reflects on his own fame – post the publication of Between the World and Me, which became a bestseller. 

First published in The Atlantic, May 2018, and available online here

‘Auto Tune Gives You a Better Me’ by Jace Clayton

Jace Clayton works as a DJ (DJ Rupture) and as a writer. His collection Uproot: Travels in 21st Century Music and Culture reflects on the shift from the physical to the digital in music culture but also the effect that software has had on the actual making of music. My favourite piece from the whole collection – ‘Auto Tune Gives You a Better Me’ – goes from explaining Whitney Houston’s natural melisma, to Cher’s infamous use of autotune, to travelling to the Atlas mountains to meet musicians from the Berber communities, where auto tune has become the most widely used form of musical manipulation. Clayton has some examples on his website, but to read the essay you’ll need to buy the book. 

First published in Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture, FSG, 2016. Taster available here

‘Walking While Black’ by Garnette Cadogan

The idea of the flâneur – or flâneuse – is intrinsic to certain kinds of non-fiction writing: that notion of being, as Baudelaire described, ‘the botanist of the sidewalk’. One of the things which made me slightly jealous of Jace Clayton was his freedom to go places without needing a chaperone/veil. This difference is addressed in the book Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin – and is further complicated here by Garnette Cadogan, who finds the experience of walking around New Orleans very different and decidedly more dangerous than when he walks around Kingston, Jamaica. 

First published in Freeman’s: Arrival, Grove, 2015, and available to read on Lithub

‘Men Explain Things to Me’ by Rebecca Solnit

This coruscating piece by Rebecca Solnit, which indirectly gave us the word ‘mansplaining’, launched her from being a San Francisco poet and political writer to an internationally known one. The scenario she describes of having her own book explained – or mansplained – back at her is so commonly familiar that it went viral. Yes, Rebecca, in our own ways, we’ve all been there too.

First published on TomDispatch, April 2008 and available to read there. Collected in Men Explain Things to Me, Haymarket/Granta, 2014. Also available to read at Guernica Mag

‘The Old Man at Burning Man’ by Wells Tower

I’m not going to lie and pretend that the premise for this isn’t a bit of a cliché – the father/son bonding experience of taking a trip together. Except this is at Burning Man and is in turns very funny and very weird and surprising and entertaining and written in Tower’s cool, laconic prose which gained him such attention for his wonderful first collection of stories Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. It’s also a story about being embarrassed by one’s parents, and describes his singular, peculiar childhood with great tenderness. 

First published in GQ, February 2013, and available to read online here

‘The Communal Mind’ by Patricia Lockwood

Delivered as a lecture at the British Library and published in the LRB, this piece is an interesting take on The Internet and what it might be doing to our heads. Lockwood is a prose stylist – sometimes too much, which can make her a bit of a Marmite writer, but I really enjoyed this attempt to describe the felt experience of scrolling though the random stream of information on the web. She uses third person to speak about herself in an interesting way too (cf Annie Ernaux): “She opened the portal. ‘Are we all just going to keep doing this till we die?’”

First published in the London Review of Books, and available to read here

‘When the Sick Rule the World’ by Dodie Bellamy

I love Dodie Bellamy’s essays. They always have such serpentine structures, making a virtue of digression, which then turns out to be what the piece is about. They personify the disobedience and bloody mindedness of the wayward body and they detail what it means – in intimate physical detail – to live in the world of the sick. They are also very funny. One moment they are about giving a paper at the MLA, the next she has her arm in Eileen Myles’ toilet. In this, the title essay of the collection, she considers what it might mean when the ‘sick rule the world’ with a rhythm and an insistence that is both truthful and moving and drily funny. 

First published in When the Sick Rule the World, Semiotext(e), 2015. An extract is available online here

‘The Creaking Door’ by Tom Lee

Following on the theme of sickness, in this extraordinary piece, Tom Lee describes his experience of being in intensive care for fifty-one days, for twenty-two of them in a medically-induced coma. The struggle for life – and his sometimes horribly acute awareness of what was happening to him – is written in clear, unsentimental prose. It’s interesting to note to the effect that this experience had in his later fictions, where this trauma turns up in unexpected ways in the characters and subjects of his stories and his widely acclaimed first novel The Alarming Palsy of James Orr.

First published in The Dublin Review 51, 2013, and available to read online here

‘Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?’ by Amia Sirinivasan

This is probably a slight cheat, in that it’s less a personal essay, than a feminist critique/philosophical investigation into the INCEL phenomenon. In this fearsomely articulate and interesting piece Sirinivasan uses the case of Elilot Roger, who in a homicidal rampage murdered his housemates and two women from the college that he dropped out of, claiming that the world owed him sex and relationships. Sirinivasan cuts through a lot of crap to think about how these rigid gender norms are enforced by patriarchy and given rocket fuel by the dark corners of the internet. 

First published in the London Review of Books, March 2018, and available to read online here

‘The Balloon’ by Donald Barthelme

Chosen by Carolina Alvarado Molk
 
‘The Balloon’ is as understated as a love story can get. A balloon appears one morning, covering miles of the Manhattan skyline, and remains without explanation for twenty-two days. The narrator talks us through the city’s varied reactions to the balloon, its speculation over its purpose, before revealing, in the last paragraph, that the balloon is “a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure,” a response to a lover’s brief absence. The subdued affect of the writing gives way, finally, to the enormity of feeling the balloon represents. I love the element of mystery in this story, the unassuming tone, both the relish and the fear of the balloon. There’s something almost claustrophobic about its descriptions – “There were no situations, simply the balloon hanging there” – that feels just right. Sometimes you miss someone, and the missing them clouds and shades everything.

First published in The New Yorker, April 1966 and available online here. Collected in Sixty Stories, Putnams, 1981
 
Carolina Alvarado Molk writes essays and short fiction, often about loneliness, motherhood, and immigration. She tweets at @caro_molk

‘I Love Our Voices When We Sing Off-Key’ by Timothy Boudreau

Chosen by Gaynor Jones
 
This gorgeous flash piece outlines a loving, long-term relationship. Although it begins with the romantic cliché of a couple’s shared breakfast it soon becomes clear that this is no post-one night stand meal, but a well practised routine, ‘nothing fancy, but that’s the arrangement.’ Through references to ‘corny love songs’, it needing to be warm before the couple venture out and the ‘salt pepper and pepper spare tire dude.’ we learn that this a couple whose relationship has lasted through the years. And if we were any doubt, the following paragraph describes their sex life in humorous detail, swiftly followed by a section on knee surgery. Then we return to the prose which, for me, treads the line between corny and loving in such a way that you no longer care about the corniness – ‘Feel our same light, for we have light between us, I swear we do.’ I like this story because it gives me hope, and it’s refreshing to read a piece that delves way past the immediacy and urgency of first love.

Published on spelkfiction, July 2019
 
Gaynor Jones is an award-winning short fiction writer and spoken word performer based in Oldham. She is the recipient of the 2018 Mairtín Crawford Short Story Award and holds the title of Northern Soul’s 2018 Northern Writer of the Year. You can read her full Personal Anthology here.

‘A Woman Seldom Found’ by William Sansom

Chosen by Chris Greenhalgh.
 
Sansom’s story holds out the possibility of a perfect encounter on a romantic night in the streets of Rome. And everything seems to be going well for the narrator from its fairy tale opening – all too well, of course – until the final twist. The story is a bit of fun, but it is also a work of perfect scale, swiftly dispatched with a gut punch in just under two pages. Something of Hitchcock, Roald Dahl, with the compression of Kafka, or even Nabokov in gothic mode. 

First published in A Contest of Ladies and Other Stories, London: Hogarth Press, 1956. Available to read online here
 
Chris Greenhalgh is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. He has published three volumes of poetry, two novels, and wrote the screenplay for Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. You can read his full Personal Anthology here.

‘Wild Berry Blue’ by Rivka Galchen

Chosen by JL Bogenschneider

He was my first love, my first love in the way that first loves are usually second or third or fourth loves.

‘Wild Berry Blue’ is not a love story, although it is a story about love, the nine-year old unnamed narrator’s first. And being her first, she is adrift; lost in a labyrinth. She is drawn to Roy, a recovering heroin addict employed by a fast-food franchise. He has impossibly blue eyes and an impossible blue vein. He calls the narrator sexy and it doesn’t seem wrong but it’s not exactly right. Maybe she knows this and maybe she doesn’t. There are only three encounters with Roy, who the narrator likens to a beautiful monster. The first time is discombobulating, like being knocked over by a wave you never saw coming. The second is voyeuristically distant. But the third encounter is like being swept off your feet by the undercurrent whose total existence you were ignorant of. Pulled under, she blurts out that she will be at the Medieval Fair and Roy – unaware, not-even caring Roy – casually mentions how much he likes the wooden puppets they sell there.

Thinking about that puppet for Roy eclipsed all other thoughts … that puppet was going to solve everything.

The puppet is attained, but it is ugly, and cracked. No way can it be given to him under any circumstances. The narrator takes herself off to the bathroom to cry, and to let her love slough, and we arrive at the hopeless and defiant gut-punching last line:

‘I never got over him. I never get over anyone’

First published in Open City 25: High Wire. Collected in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009 and in American Innovations, FSG, 2014

JL Bogenschneider is a writer of short fiction, with work published in a number of print and online journals, including Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Island Review, 404 Ink, minor literature[s], Hobart, PANK and Ambit.