‘An Astrologer’s Day’ by R. K. Narayan

R. K. Narayan’s short stories, simple and unpretentious on the surface and full of touches of gentle and absurd humor, reveal a mastery of literary technique that won him worldwide acclaim, placing him among the very greatest exponents of the form. Malgudi, a fictional town brought to life in a most whimsical and playful manner, is featured in many of Narayan’s novels and stories. Its marketplace provides the setting for ‘An Astrologer’s Day’. A man who has fled his distant village sets up shop at noon daily, duping people with astrological predictions based, as one might expect, on shrewd guesswork and a firm grasp of human psychology. One evening, after the other vendors have switched off their makeshift lighting and are packing up, a stranger shows up in the dark and demands a reading. Striking a match to light his cheroot, the stranger begins his consultation, with the astrologer managing to pinpoint astonishingly accurate details of the stranger’s narrow escape from an attempt on his life. The astrologer reassures the stranger, telling him that the fellow who tried to kill him has died. With the forecast done and money in hand, the astrologer returns home and upon retiring to bed, tells his wife that a great weight has been lifted: for years, he lived with the guilty feeling that he had blood on his hands. Yawning, he then falls asleep, while the reader absorbs the ramifications of his newly revealed relationship to the stranger.

The obvious irony in this classic ‘twist in the tail’ ending is that Fate, into which the astrologer so deceitfully claims insight, is what ultimately helps resolve the protagonists’ problematic relationship. Coming at the end of the astrologer’s day, the story’s dénouement draws the reader back to recap the marketplace setting, where as darkness falls, true insights into human relationships arrive in a flash of illumination. All in all, an 1800-word marvel that Maupassant himself may have endorsed.

First published in 1966. Included in Malgudi Days, Penguin Books, 2006. Available online here

‘Sunrise, Sunset’ by Edwidge Danticat

The Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat is one of the outstanding voices of contemporary American fiction, and over the years she has won numerous international awards. The title of her short story ‘Sunrise, Sunset’ is the name of a charming little game played by Carole, the grandmother in a Haitian-American family in Miami: “Carole likes to entertain Jude with whatever children’s songs and peekaboo games she can still remember, including one she calls Solèy Leve, Solèy Kouche—Sunrise, Sunset—which she used to play with her children. She drapes a black sheet over her grandson’s playpen and pronounces it ‘sunset,’ then takes the sheet off and calls it ‘sunrise.’ Her grandson does not seem to mind when she gets confused and reverses the order.”

Gathered together to celebrate new life at a christening, it is impending death that casts its shadow like a black sheet over Carole’s family, for she has been exhibiting the symptoms of dementia. The story revolves around Carole’s relationship with Jeanne, her daughter, who has post-partum depression, with each woman struggling to keep their footing in the midst of life changes. Carole wishes Jeanne would understand that she can’t afford to be sad. “Where would the family be if Carole had stayed sad when she arrived in this country? Sometimes you just have to shake the devil off you, whatever that devil is. Even if you don’t feel like living for yourself, you have to start living for your child…” There are flashbacks to Carole and her husband Victor’s life in Haiti, and the homesickness she felt in Miami when Victor left for work each day. “She was so lonely and homesick that she kept kissing her babies’ faces, as if their cheeks were plots of land in the country she’d left behind.” The relationships among multiple family members unfold like the petals of a flower, until a frightening moment involving the baby Jude that culminates in heartbreak. The tenderness that marks our finer moments and the impetus towards survival against all odds are themes that pervade Danticat’s beautiful writing.

First published in the New Yorker, September 18, 2017. Available online here

‘A Hunger Artist’ by Franz Kafka, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

‘A Hunger Artist’ was the only short story that Kafka deemed worthy of preservation, though history proved him wrong. The opening plunges the reader deep into the Kafka’s world: “During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management, but today that is quite impossible.” The narrator’s observations are factually true, for public displays of starvation by Giovanni Succi and others were popular sideshows in the 19^th Century. One of the great ironists of literature, Kafka turns the caged performer fasting in a freakshow into an artist. The spectators, children among them, initially marvel at his skill, while butchers stand guard to make sure he doesn’t break the rules. However, the public, being fickle, eventually loses interest and the artist joins a traveling circus, where his cage is soon ignored in favor of the animal attractions. The artist nevertheless continues with his craft, breaking all known fasting records while lying in the corner of his cage. He explains, in his defense, that he only fasted because he couldn’t find the food he liked. His corpse is at last discarded and replaced by a well-fed panther which attracts far more attention.

This story is a parable of the artist turning his struggle for spiritual sustenance into a spectacle that feeds the public’s savage hunger for entertainment. Even if he is lucky enough to be noticed for a while, the artist will be misunderstood, and in any case, it is only a matter of time. Walking in Kafka’s footsteps in Prague a few years ago, with exhibits of relentless brutality and renewed authoritarianism only a finger-tap away, I found it nevertheless reassuring to imagine him stepping beside me with his long, loping gait, a gentle ascetic racked by prophetic visions.

First published in 1922. Included in a translation by Willa and Edwin Muir in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, Schocken Books, 1988. Available online here

‘The Strange Story of the World’ by Chigozie Obioma

The young Nigerian novelist Chigozie Obioma has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. ‘The Strange Story of the World’ is a recent short story of his set in Nigeria that distills melodrama from family history and concocts a savory tragicomedy out of the melodrama. With themes reminiscent of Nigeria’s Nollywood movies, it is a son’s retrospective look at a father who loses his job, savings and status. The father is utterly devastated: “Papa’s view of lack became extreme. Poverty was the unblemished evil, an impenetrable darkness opposed to order. A person who becomes host to this evil spirit had only one option: to root it out and cast it into the outer dark.” When the father is wounded in a fight, his wife allows the doctor to seduce her in exchange for blood, and in turn she is banished from the house, taking the narrator’s younger brother with her. It is only when the father comes home with a goat one day, hoping to perform a magic ritual with it, that the family’s fortunes turn, entirely by accident.

Melodramas of the daytime soap variety revolve around exaggerated dramatic situations, a sensational plot, and stereotypical characters. A brilliant storyteller, Obioma takes some of these materials and embeds them in a realistic and well-developed setting that reflects the values and superstitions of the society, with a narrative voice that uses an easily-digestible Nigerian English that I find captivating. The story title itself is from a musical refrain that runs through the piece. The situations involving the father are cleverly foregrounded so as to deepen the exploration of his character and relationships. The world is indeed strange, the characters’ culture seems to say: you may lose badly before you gain, and there will be sacrifices and magic. Although I am not thrilled by its happy ending, the writing is of that engaging and apparently effortless quality that will continue to win the author many readers worldwide.

First published in Granta, November 28, 2019. Available online here

‘Hop-Frog’ by Edgar Allan Poe

The first time I read ‘Hop-Frog’ was in a collection of Poe’s complete works. It was a hardback with a yellow paper cover, and my older brother, a teenager at the time, had neatly inscribed his name on the frontispiece in green ink. The inventor of the genre of detective fiction, and an early exponent of science fiction and horror, Poe was also a formidable poet and literary critic. Knowing that most short stories could be read at a single sitting, he aimed to control the reader’s attention and emotions by focusing on a single effect or impression, including only those events and situations in the story that contributed to the totality of that effect. This deliberative, rational method is evident in the tale of the court jester Hop-Frog. A ‘cripple’ and ‘dwarf’ kidnapped from a remote province, Hop-Frog is forced to amuse a dissolute king. When Hop-Frog’s companion the fellow-midget Trippetta is brutally humiliated by His Majesty during the preparations for a masquerade, Hop-Frog takes revenge by inventing a diversion called ‘The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs’. Trust Poe, along with his detached narrator, to fill in the gory details in an impeccable manner. I am so glad my family considered this riveting story suitable material for young children!

First published in 1849. Included in numerous collections. Available online here

‘A Handful of Dates’ by Tayeb Salih, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies

The Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih is famous for his novel ‘Season of Migration to the North’, which received worldwide acclaim when it first appeared in English in 1969. A counter-narrative to ‘Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ (and involving a reverse Kurtz-like journey from Africa to Europe), this book on my shelf is widely regarded as being among the finest Arab novels of the 20th Century.

‘A Handful of Dates’ is a compact short story by Salih, set in a Sudanese village sketched with a few brushstrokes: a mosque, a river, a wood full of acacia trees, and fields with date palms. The boy who lives there adores his grandfather, regarding him as the embodiment of virtue. Their lives seem idyllic, until, while discussing their neighbor Masood, the grandfather explains that most of the fields with date palms that once belonged to Masood are now his. During the date harvest, the boy realizes that his beloved grandfather is not the person he thought he was. In a culture where usury is frowned upon, the grandfather has reduced Masood into a laborer indebted to him, forcing Masood to pay off his debt by tilling the land that he once owned. Simple in its elements, focused in its effect, ‘A Handful of Dates’ is a quiet coming-of-age story that gets at the costs of destroying the traditional decencies that hold a community together.

First published in 1964. Included in a translation by Denys Johnson-Davies in The Wedding of Zein, Penguin Random House NYRB Classics, 2011. Available online here

‘The Bridge of Dreams’ by Junichiro Tanizaki, translated by Howard Hibbett

The writings of Junichiro Tanizaki are exquisite though tinged with perversion and cruelty. His novel ‘The Makioka Sisters’, the story of the decline of an Osaka family at the onset of World War II, is among the great novels of the 20th Century.

Tanizaki’s ‘The Bridge of Dreams’ draws its title and theme from the final chapter of Lady Murasaki’s 11th Century classic ‘The Tale of Genji’, which Tanizaki translated into modern Japanese. The setting, reflecting the author’s nostalgia for ancient Japan, is a traditional Kyoto home called Heron’s Nest. “There were only some eight rooms, including the maids’ room and the smaller entrance hall; but the kitchen was a spacious one big enough for an average restaurant, and there was an artesian well next to the sink.” There is also a pavilion, and a tea-house, and beautiful walkways lined with carved statues and pillars, and the garden itself is idyllic, accessed via an old stone bridge over a stream that may or may not be the subject of an ancient poem, for everything is poetic about this place. Tadasu resides in this nest with his father and mother Chinu, the memory of her bosom still stirring him after all these years. When he is five, his mother dies, and his father marries a woman who is required to take the name Chinu and resemble her in every way possible, including taking the boy to her breast. Later, when Tadasu is in high school, the new Chinu becomes pregnant and bears a child, which the father spirits away immediately to a village, while Tadasu helps relieve Chinu’s milk-heavy breasts … and so it goes, even after the father dies and Tadasu marries the gardener’s daughter. Written in an imaginative style and full of perverse sensuality and ambiguity, this story of maternal obsession told by an unreliable narrator is an enduring work of literature.

First published in 1959. Included in a translation by Howard Hibbett in Seven Japanese Tales, Vintage, 1996

‘We All Know About Margo’ by Megan Pillow Davis

‘Margo’ is my go-to story for people who say they don’t read / don’t get / don’t like flash fiction (generally categorised as stories up to 1000 words). If ‘Cat Person’ by Kirsten Roupenian tapped into conversations about sexual consent and power in relationships, ‘Margo’ stripped those conversations right back to its beginnings. The title says it all, we did all know about a girl like Margot, someone we knew only by reputation, usually because of the way she looked as much as the actions she chose (or in this case did not choose) to take. I find it hard to read and recommend depictions of sexual assault in fiction but I make an exception for ‘Margo’. I urge you to read it, if nothing else on this list.

first published by Smokelong Quarterly, September 2018 and available to read online here

‘Jutland’ by Lucie McKnight Hardy

This is a restrained story – we follow a woman biting her tongue as she copes with uprooting her life (along with her new baby and mute child) in order to support her husband’s artistry. But in the gothic tradition, what is repressed finds a way out, and we are invited into the woman’s internal thoughts – “the port is nothing like she’d expected”, “it starts to bawl again, a screech that causes her skin to prickle,” and the glorious brutal honesty of “He paints shit. He paints like shit. He is shit.”

Tension continually builds throughout the story, both through the strained relationships and through a supernatural (or perhaps not) element. It has been said that short stories should leave us with more questions than answers, and in ‘Jutland’, McKnight Hardy leaves us in no doubt of this. The final piece of dialogue is a brutal, haunting, question repeated with a clarity and simplicity that belies the horror behind the words.

first published by NightJar Press, March 2019

‘If We Survive the Night’ by Charlie St George

It’s autumn, and all the dead girls are kneeling in the yard.

So begins the story of a group of horror movie ‘final girls’, trapped in a never-ending purgatory where they repeat their deaths again and again. Throughout the story the girls first try to survive, then turn on each other whilst a strange marble angel oversees the nightly carnage, forcing them to re-live their murders every night and repent their sins every day. A self-aware mix of postmodern commentary on slasher films, the limits of organised religion and a genuinely scary story in itself, ‘If We Survive the Night’ is like nothing I’ve read before or since.

first published by The Dark Magazine, March 2017 and available to read online here

‘The Sandwich Judge’ by Ben Slotky

This story consists of a rambling inner monologue about the merits of certain sandwiches – who gets to decide which is best, why is there so much lettuce in them, what is lettuce anyway? “You get mad at sandwiches because you think maybe that will make a difference even though it doesn’t, even thought it can’t.” And gradually, as we are told where the bickering couple are queuing, why they are focusing on sandwiches, we come to understand. For me ‘The Sandwich Judge’ is a really genuine portrait of someone falling apart – that urge to focus on the minute things that you can control, when utter tragedy comes into your life.

first published by The Forge Literary Magazine, December 2018 and available to read online here

‘The Other Lady of the Night’ by Clare Fisher

I love Fisher’s collection because it is deceptively simple. A series of very short pieces on light and darkness that uses plain language to navigate contemporary issues and human relationships. It’s a brilliant collection, often funny and relatable but then the hard-hitting stories hit so much more. When I first read ‘The Other Lady of the Night’ I had to physically stop and put the book down to cry. Even after the hopelessness and brutality experienced by the Lady, the light still tries to get in: I fixed my eye on the light until it grew to fill me. I didn’t know what I’d find there, but hope sparked all over my body.

first published in How the Light Gets In, Influx Press, 2018

‘The Less Said’ by Jolene McIlwain

This is a deeply disturbing story that brings to mind Stephen King, Quentin Tarantino and Twin Peaks. A rural community clashes with a small group of outsiders – with good reason. The title of this piece sums up the attitudes perfectly – the characters are frequently unwilling or unable to speak about the horrors in their community. “More you stir the shit, more it stinks was what everyone said.” But who needs words, when you have actions? ‘The Less Said’ is a brilliantly told story of hurt and revenge, that weaves a whole community consciousness into just a few hundred words.

first published by New Orleans Review, May 2018. Available to read online here

‘A Tired Person Can Sleep Anywhere’ by Peter Jordan

I’m a huge fan of Jordan’s writing – he creates worlds and characters with such ease that you feel you’ve slipped inside their lives and are observing up close rather than reading about them. This story from his debut collection is a great example of that – I looked up from the book surprised to find myself at home and not, in fact, seated at the diner that the story’s action rotates around. Not much happens in terms of narrative action – people working end of season holiday jobs come and go. They flirt, they talk, they argue a little. There’s no escaping these lives, no escaping the choices they’ve made. Reminiscent of Cannery Row, this story and its characters just got under my skin and stayed there.

First published in What Lies Beneath: A Selection of Short Stories from Kingston Writing School selected by Hilary Mantel and Bonnie Greer, 2015, Kingston University Press. Also in Calls to Distant Places, Kingston University Press, 2019 and available to read online here.