‘Work’ by Denis Johnson

Tense, and time. Johnson’s collection of stories is narrated by the same protagonist throughout. Studying sentences like “But now the river was flat and slow”, I learned (continue to learn) to manage tense in a story. Speaking in the past tense, within that speaking about something that happened further in the past, or is happening in the ‘present’ of your story, in the past tense, confused yet? Perspective rears its head again, where is your narrator telling the story from, what point in time? This will set the tone. If the character is talking to us about an event that took place a year previous, the rougher edges of what looks like a harrowing experience may have smoothed out somewhat, they know what happened next, compared to something that happened to the protagonist the day before. Just knowing this while you’re writing gives a better flow, the language will naturally follow from the awareness of perspective. And on to the language, there is definitely something that defies assimilation: “the air turned such a strange color I thought my life must be leaving me.” A hailstorm, such a description allowed me to see it as if for the first time. 

First published in The New Yorker, November 14, 1988 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Jesus’ Son, FSG, 1992, Granta, 2012. Also available to read here

‘The Distance of the Moon’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

To indulge completely in fantasy, and to risk. By risk I mean to avoid resting in comfort for long, always trying to expand the reaches of what you’re doing, never shying away from the new and untested. In the Cosmicomics Calvino uses scientific hypotheses of the day as jumping-off points, creating a new genre described as “a subspecies of science fiction” by Ursula K. Le Guin.

First published in Italian in 1965. First published in English translation in Cosmicomics, Harcourt Brace, 1968. Collected in The Complete Cosmicomics, Penguin Modern Classics, 2010. Available as an animation, in Hebrew with subtitles here

‘Solo Dance’ by Jayne Anne Philips

This story is less than a page, it’s all action and observation: daughter goes to see her father in hospital, he talks, he gets out of bed for a while, “she combs the back of his head with water and her fingers”. The finer details of their relationship, their past, his preoccupations, regrets, and pains are conveyed to us in a few spoken words, observations, “the skin on his legs was soft and pure like fine paper”. Phillips does not spell out the situation for the reader in any way, yet we understand. 

Collected in Black Tickets, Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1979/Allen Lane, 1980. Available to read on Phillips’s website, here

‘Smote (or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You In Front Of A Print By Bridget Riley)’ by Eley Williams

The line spacing in this story began for me an experiment with form, still ongoing. The form carries much of the weight of any story, in terms of its ‘meaning’ or ‘message’. The spacing around the word ‘But’ in this story lends the word its but-feeling, to borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein.

First published on The White Review website, April 2015. Collected in Attrib. And Other Stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘Pnin’ by Vladimir Nabokov

His complete surrender to his own merriment would prove irresistible…with abrupt barks of clockwork hilarity coming from Charles, and a dazzling flow of unsuspected lovely laughter transfiguring Josephine, who was not pretty, while Eileen, who was, dissolved in a jelly of unbecoming giggles.

These lines, in their richness, flow and descriptive sleight of hand, the laughter, along with the prettiness of one girl conservatively used to describe the lack-of of the other, became something to aspire to in the realm of imagery and description. The story as a whole presents a challenge to the usual narrative construction, in that the collusive ‘we’ narration at the beginning, becomes an ‘I’ around halfway through the story. This is discussed in the podcast.

First published as a short story in The New Yorker, 1953. Later published as the first chapter of the novel, Pnin. You can listen to the short story on The New Yorker podcast here

‘Tender Buttons’ by Gertrude Stein

There’s a sense of rhythm in reading these sentences aloud, given by her placement of words and use of punctuation. Many writers make use of the rhythm of words, of course, but the music in these phrases is all the more clear due to the language’s incomprehensibility. I will often know the rhythm of a sentence before I know what the words will be, so I’ll write down any words, so long as they have the correct number of syllables, to preserve the rhythm in my memory. I went back to Stein when I was writing a piece called At the Heart of Things, when I felt like I’d lost the music of the writing. And also I find refuge in all its nonsense.

First published in 1914 as Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms. Current available from Dodo Press, 2016. Read some of it here

‘The Watchful Toad’ by Lydia Cabrera, translated by Alberto Hernández-Chiroldes and Lauren Yoder

The stories in this collection are based mostly on Yoruba mythologies and folk tales exported to Cuba along the slave routes. They cross the line between the natural and the supernatural with a shrug of the shoulders, “no transition and no surprise”, borrowing from Cortazár’s ‘Axolotl’. This is a recent addition, and is opening up avenues in my thinking around narrative progression and the interaction of the mundane and the supernatural. This story, and the others in the book, don’t merely dwell in fantasy, for want of a better word, for its own sake, but they signify a much deeper understanding of the moral ambiguity a good story must be able to contain, and the redemptive unity of all things in nature.

First published in Spanish as ‘El sapo guadiero’, in Cuentos Negros de Cuba, Ediciones Universal, 2012. First published in English in Afro-Cuban Tales, University of Nebraska Press, 2004

‘The Aleph’ by Jorge Luis Borges

I have very little to say about this story. Only that this was one of the first short stories I read, years ago. It emptied my mind, is all I can say, and it’s what a writer, this writer, is aiming for, but is so rarely achieved. Talking about it only takes me further away from it, and is no substitute for reading it. Luckily, you can do that here, a 1945 translation by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni in collaboration with the author.

First published in the Argentine journal Sur in 1945. First published in English in The Aleph and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1971. Currently available in The Aleph, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000 and Collected Fictions, Viking, 1998

‘Date Night’ by Amelia Gray

There rises a rallying cry of mutual recognition. This is a celebration! Each piece of internal armor on each individual is so thick with shine that even light from the recent past and the future finds a way to burst forth, shattering across shattering glass, covering all in a blinding healing bleeding screaming LIGHT because that’s what LIFE is, you assholes! That’s what it means to be alive!

The crazed pitch of ‘Date Night’ is probably unsustainable beyond its three pages. A couple go on a date where their heightened anxieties ripple out and affect their view of the other diners – or is everyone in a mass hallucination? ‘A wild look enters all eyes’, ‘Another man flicks open his button fly. His pubic hair scatters like dandelion florets. The man howls and a woman rips his dick off and drops it into a bowl of soup. What’s the deal with soup!’ Is the hysterical narrator in the throes of a utopian vision where everyone is exposed at once and no one has anything to hide? Where people will no longer say inane things like ‘What’s the deal with soup!’ to end conversations? Is it utopian or a vision of hell? I don’t know, but you should read this story here and everything else ever written by Amelia Gray!

First published in Bomb Magazine, March 2012 and available to read online here. Collected in Gutshot, Fsg Originals, 2015

‘The Centre of the Story’ by Lydia Davis

This comes close to the end of the story as it is now, but she can’t really end with the devil and a train ride. So the end of the story is a problem, too, though less of a problem than the centre. There may be no centre. There may be no centre because she is afraid to put any one of these elements in the centre – the man, the religion, or the hurricane. Or – which is or is not the same thing – there is a centre but the centre is empty, either because she has not found what belongs there or because it is meant to be empty: there, but empty, in the same way that the man was sick but not dying, the hurricane approached but did not strike, and she had a religious calm but no faith.It was so hard to choose just one Lydia Davis story, because they have such an incredible cumulative effect. I chose this one because the ending of it – this paragraph – is taped above my desk. 

First published in Grand Street, Vol. 9, No. 1, Autumn, 1989. Collected in Almost No Memory, FSG, 1997/Picador, 2001. Also in the Collected Stories

‘Reaching Rose’ by James Purdy

James Purdy specialises in purgatories (purdy-gatories). Mr Sendal spends his evenings in a bar, going back and forth to make phone calls, although there is never anyone at the other end. One night, tired of the performance, he realises that “the people he really cared for were all dead”. Richard the bartender’s comment the following night – that he admires Mr Sendal’s liveliness, the fact that he keeps so busy – sparks off a crisis. The personal exchange, a rarity in Mr Sendal’s life, terrifies him, because if the bartender knew the phone calls were fake, there “would be nothing”: “his world was merely this bar, was Richard, and most important of all the telephone booth; but all of them went together, the booth and the bar and Richard could not be disassociated”. Forcing himself to maintain the act, he remembers his “most important telephone number” – that of a woman called Rose: “a thing happened then, as though a message had been written in letters of fire over the bar mirror”. When he goes to call her, the story reaches hallucinatory heights, in a very mid-century, melodramatic way. There are few writers less afraid than Purdy of confronting loneliness at its most eviscerating. 

First published as a standalone story individually in English and Dutch, by Avalon Press, 1994. Collected in The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy, Liveright, 2013