‘The Fight’ by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Dmitri Nabokov

‘The Fight’ is a story from Nabokov’s Berlin period. Oddly structured, it begins with a lengthy description by the first-person narrator—an émigré in Berlin, presumably someone like Nabokov himself—of the excursions he regularly makes to a lake near the city, where he swims and lolls in the sun. There the narrator regularly sees an older man, with whom he can only haltingly converse, but who seems genial and pleasantly anarchic. Later, while strolling through an unfamiliar neighbourhood, he stops at a bar which, it turns out, the man, one Krause, owns. The narrator becomes a regular, and takes pleasure in watching the developing romance between Krause’s daughter and a young electrician named Otto. On a sultry day, with a storm about to break, the narrator watches as Krause and Otto argue over whether the latter, who thinks of himself as one of the family, should have to pay for his drinks. Matters escalate and in a matter of a sentence or two the men are fighting with bare fists on the street, to the glee of a crowd that has gathered from nowhere. Krause knocks the electrician out. The narrator vainly, rather heartlessly, attempts to comfort the girl with a kiss. And that’s it. The story’s over.
 
For me, ‘The Fight’ is a parody of the chart known to every high school student, Freytag’s Pyramid, the one that details initial exposition followed by gradually rising action leading to climax and descending to resolution. Instead of these hoary conventions, this story asks instead: In what way does a climactic action need to be prepared for? What happens if that action isn’t resolved?
 
There’s delight, too, in Nabokov’s language, nicely apparent in his son Dmitri’s translation: as a class, we always linger in wonder over the narrator’s description of a barfly with “appetizing folds of fat on his nape” and his offhanded revelation that the fight reminds him of “a splendid scuffle I had once had in a seaport-dive with a beetle-black Italian, during which my hand had somehow got into his mouth and I had fiercely tried to squeeze, to tear, the wet skin inside his cheek.” Beetle-black. Somehow. Decorous, mandarin Nabokov is, as always, unsettling and sordid.

First published in Russian in 1925. Published in English in The New Yorker, February 10, 1985. Collected in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Knopf 1995

‘Pet Milk’ by Stuart Dybek

Dybek’s ‘Pet Milk’ is another meandering story that proceeds by association and only reveals itself to have any kind of narrative through-line towards its end. It begins with the narrator “drinking instant coffee and Pet milk, and watching it snow.” The way the artificial milk swirls in the coffee reminds him of his grandmother, who served it to her friends, and of the radio in her kitchen tuned to the Polish station “at the staticky right end of the dial” along with stations in Greek, Spanish, and Ukrainian, a multicultural medley that reminds him of a little Czech restaurant, the Pilsen, which he and his first serious girlfriend, Kate, used to frequent, where their favourite waiter would prepare a drink called a King Alphonse, in which crème de cacao is blended with heavy cream. And that memory reminds him of their date at the Pilsen for his twenty-second birthday. The couple, fresh out of college and launched into the world, but anticipating futures that won’t involve each other, get drunk and horny on champagne and oysters. In a frenzy of lust, they look for somewhere private—but all efforts are foiled, leaving them no option but to take the express train to Kate’s place in Evanston. On the train, they make their way into an empty conductor’s compartment, where the acceleration of the train mimics their passion.

Yet as befits this meandering and mediated story, the narrator can’t lose himself in the moment—he finds himself caught up in the expressions of the people waiting at the stations the express speeds by, captivated most of all by a high school kid who grins and waves at them. Even now, years later, the narrator remembers how he couldn’t help but imagine himself as that onlooker: “It was as if I were standing on that platform, with my schoolbooks and a smoke, on one of those endlessly accumulated afternoons after school when I stood almost outside of time simply waiting for a train, and I thought how much I’d have loved seeing someone like us streaming by.”
 
‘Pet Milk’ is a melancholy, generous story that has something to say—I’ve yet to quite figure out what—about our subjective sense of time passing and the difficulty of inhabiting a moment. I first came to this story when I was looking for something to pair with Guy de Maupassant’s ‘An Idyll,’ another remarkable story about an intimate encounter on a train (seriously, check it out [the story was chosen by Kate Clanchy for her Personal Anthology; read her take here – Ed.]), but I’ve come to love ‘Pet Milk’ for its own merits. It doesn’t hurt that students love it too. Those on the cusp of graduation, in particular, find this story almost unbearably resonant. 

First published in The New Yorker August 5, 1984. Collected in The Coast of Chicago, Knopf, 1990). Read the story here

‘Binocular Vision’ by Edith Pearlman

Edith Pearlman’s ‘Binocular Vision’ is a perfect little story. An unnamed narrator, a ten-year-old child living with parents and sibling in Connecticut in the late 1950s, borrows her father’s binoculars one December vacation and starts spying on the Simons, the next-door neighbours. Mrs. Simon is at home all day without much to do beyond tidying, running errands, and cooking supper. The most exciting part of Mrs. Simon’s day, and, before long, the narrator’s, is Mr. Simon’s return home from unspecified work. The narrator can’t see their greeting; the door is blocked from her view. But after dinner, the child watches as Mr. Simon reads the newspaper with great deliberation and Mrs. Simon knits and talks and laughs without pause.

School starts again, the narrator has less time to watch the Simons, even loses interest a little. But it still comes as a shock when two policemen knock at the door one February morning to ask that her father, a doctor, accompany them next door. When he returns he explains to his wife and children that Mr. Simon has committed suicide in his car. There follows a revelation that forces the child to reconsider everything she’d thought about the couple. And because Pearlman has kept retrospection to a minimum and aligned us closely with the child’s perspective (it’s a great story for teaching point of view), we are thrown for a loop too.

The narrator sees only what she wants to see, doesn’t see what the story, in retrospect, allows us to recognize: she has confused real lives, presumably rather desperate ones, for a show. She has no television, but she has had the Simons. My students are always ready to condemn the child for her presumption and ignorance. But before we condemn the narrator too quickly, before we judge her for projecting her own expectations on to others, before we conclude that the difference between understanding and seeing is the difference between adults and children, and that this child has seen everything but understood nothing—before doing so, I warn the class, let’s think about ourselves. Let’s remember our experience of reading the text. Let’s be mindful that we too made assumptions and saw only what we wanted to see. We’re adults. Yet we read the story, we saw everything, and we didn’t understand a damn thing. 

First published in Boston Globe Magazine, 1993. Collected in Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, Lookout Books, 2011

‘The Kiss’ by Anton Chekhov, translated by Ronald Wilks

What would a class on the short story be without some Chekhov? I usually teach three favourites, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog,’ ‘The Darling,’ and the one I finally settled on for this list, ‘The Kiss.’ Coming as it does after Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’ and Kipling’s ‘Mrs. Bathurst’ (wonderful stories I cut from this list with regret), ‘The Kiss’ is a lesson in how nothing much needs to happen in a story. Balzac and Kipling’s melodramatic plottiness contrasts with Chekhov’s lassitude, boredom, and melancholy.

My students and I spend a lot of time on a single passage, in which the protagonist, the hapless Staff-Captain Ryabovich, whose “lynx-like side whiskers and spectacles seemed to be saying ‘I’m the shyest, most modest, and most insignificant officer in the whole brigade!’”, has what the narrator calls “a little adventure.” Along with some other officers, Ryabovich has been invited to a party at a country house near the town where six battalions have put up for the evening. Too shy to dance, too clumsy to play billiards, Ryabovich wanders the house until he gets lost. Opening a door at random, he finds himself in a dark room, where he is astonished to hear a voice whisper “At last!” before he is embraced: “a burning cheek pressed against his and at the same time there was the sound of a kiss.”

We parse this unusual, almost synaesthetic description (why the sound of a kiss rather than a feeling?), and reflect on what follows it: the woman utters a cry, shrinks back in what Ryabovich is convinced is disgust, and rushes from the room. The rest of the story is an extended depiction of how a non-event, or, at best, near-event, can expand in fantasy, to the point of consuming a life. The story is full of people who can’t imagine that others don’t think the way they do, don’t fancy the same types of women or men they do, don’t tell the same sort of lies they do.

The ending offers a classically Chekhovian irony: Ryabovich is disabused of his fantasies, realizes what a fool he’s made of himself, resigns himself to the stupidity of the human experience, as endless and aimless as the water in a river purling against the piles of a hut. Or, at least, it seems he does. At the very end, though, he’s still telling himself stories of “how fate had accidentally caressed him.” The moral of the story is that we can’t help but make our lives into stories.

First published in Russian in New Times in 1887. Published in English in The Steppe and Other Stories, 1887 – 1891, Penguin 2001. Read the Constance Garnett translation here

‘The Blind Man’ by D. H. Lawrence

Lawrence’s stories are among the glories of 20th century English prose literature. I always include one or two on the syllabus. ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums,’ ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,’ and ‘Fanny and Annie’ (also known as ‘The Last Straw’) are some of my favourites. But once I decided to limit myself to one for this list, I knew I had to choose ‘The Blind Man.’ 

Isabel Pervin (based on Lawrence’s friend, the novelist Catherine Carswell) lives in seclusion with her husband, Maurice, a giant of a man who has been blinded in WWI. In the rainy dusk of a November day, Isabel sits waiting for the sound of wheels on the drive. Her cousin and dear friend, Bertie Reid, a nervous and ironic Scots barrister whom she has not seen for some time as she sensed her husband did not like him, is coming to visit. Isabel may connect these men, but the story is about what happens between them. Over the course of the evening, they “become friends,” an experience solidified when Maurice runs his hands over Bertie’s head, and asks Bertie to do the same to him, to touch his scarred eyes. Bertie does so unwillingly—the preternaturally sensitive Maurice doesn’t know of the other’s man reluctance (it’s stronger than that actually, it’s revulsion), unless he does. Everything depends on whether we think his exultant cry that they “know” one another is misguided or domineering. This is a marvelous story about the cruelty of intimacy. It’s also as alive and vivid as only Lawrence can be. In one indelible scene, Isabel seeks out Maurice in the stable. Her light barely breaks the pitch black of the roaring night:

Nothing came from the darkness. She knew the rain and wind blew in upon the horses, the hot animal life. Feeling it wrong, she entered the stable, and drew the lower half of the door shut, holding the upper part close. She did not stir, because she was aware of the presence of the dark hind-quarters of the horses, though she could not see them, and she was afraid. Something wild stirred in her heart.

Feeling it wrong. Presumably the clause refers to Isabel’s sense of the situation, the way the storm is, but shouldn’t be, blowing into the stable thanks to an open door. But maybe it’s a description of how she—and anyone lucky enough to have all their senses—fails at feeling. For me, that’s the quintessential Lawrentian predicament.

First published in English Review in July 1920. Collected in England, My England and Other Stories, Thomas Seltzer, 1922 and then many times, including in Selected Stories, Penguin, 2007. Read the story here

‘A Spring Morning’ by Ida Fink, translated by Madeline Levine and Francine Prose

As I’m sure this list has suggested, I’m no expert on the short story. If I’m an expert at anything it’s Holocaust literature. But I don’t usually teach this material in my class on the short story. Students struggle to make sense of Holocaust fiction without a lot of context this course can’t provide. But in recent years I have added Ida Fink’s ‘A Spring Morning’ to the syllabus, with good results. Fink was born in Zbarahz (then Poland, now Ukraine) in 1921 to a secular and accomplished family (her mother had a doctorate in the sciences). Her studies at the conservatory in Lvov (Fink was a pianist) came to an end with the beginning of the war. She was interned in the Zbarazh ghetto until 1942, when she and her sister acquired false papers, smuggled themselves out of the ghetto, and began a dangerous life as Ukrainian volunteer workers in Germany. After the war she returned to Poland before emigrating to Israel in 1957. There she began writing stories, but for decades no one would publish them. Today she is considered one of the major writers of the Shoah, her beautiful, enigmatic, and often very short stories earning praise for their depiction of the devastation wrought by the Nazis’ invasion of the Soviet Union and the trauma of survival.

In teaching ‘A Spring Morning’ I am guided by the Holocaust scholar Sara Horowitz’s influential reading of the story as an example of how literature challenges history. The story tells the events of one morning in an unidentified town much like the one Fink grew up in. At first, we see events through the eyes of a bystander, a former town official who watches the Nazis march the local Jewish population over a bridge and into a nearby forest, where, as he both knows and doesn’t know, they will be murdered in a mass execution. Incredulously he tells his cronies at the bar about what he overheard one of the victims say as the terrible cortege made its way across the bridge: “The water is the color of beer.” Abruptly we shift perspective, experiencing events through the eyes of Aron, the man on the bridge. We see his last conversation with his wife and small daughter, his desperate attempt to save the child by pushing her into a crowd gathered on the steps of a church, and his remark, on seeing the river turbulent after a night of rain and made to no one in particular, that the water is the color of beer, a moment the story explains with great pathos: “He was gathering up the colors and smells of the world that he was losing forever.” ‘A Spring Morning,’ then, gives us two stories: one that is possible but incomplete, compromised by a terrible misunderstanding (the bystander’s), and another that is impossible but complete (the victim’s—impossible because it’s from someone who is not alive to tell it). Fiction, in other words, can contribute to testimony in ways history cannot. I love all the stories on my list, but I wish above all that Fink would have more readers.

First published in Polish in 1983. Published in English in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, Pantheon 1987. Read the story here

‘A Story of Stolen Salamis’ by Lydia Davis

On the first day of the semester I forego preliminaries like ice breakers and syllabus details and close read this wonderful little story, told in a brief paragraph. The narrator’s son’s Italian landlord in Brooklyn cures salamis in a shed behind the house. One night the salamis are stolen, but when the incident is written up in a magazine as a human-interest story, the article calls the salamis sausages. When shown the magazine, “the landlord was interested and pleased that the magazine had seen fit to report the incident, but he added, ‘They weren’t sausages. They were salamis.’” 

We consider the narrative use of indirection, the dual use of “story” in English to mean both fiction and fact, and the text’s shifting of emphasis away from what could have been a dramatic event to the nomenclature of what was stolen (less stolen and more salamis). But above all we consider precise and imprecise uses of language: the glib, almost clichéd language of the magazine writer against the landlord’s stoic integrity.

‘A Story of Stolen Salamis’ is a perfect way to get the class started because it’s such an elegant parable of interpretation, of how words matter, how we must always respect the specificity of whatever it is we’re interpreting. Like my other choices, this story helps me to undertake this daunting but—to me, and, sometimes, to my students—enlivening task.

First published at Five Dials. Collected in Can’t and Won’t, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014. Read the story here

Introduction

A fellow writer once advised me that writing short form prose was a helpful way of developing the craft necessary for writing lengthier narratives but novels and short stories are different forms, and therefore require a different craft, I think. I find short stories hardest and so it is with Wayne’s World-style ‘not worthy’ bowing and scraping that I assemble this personal anthology of tales that have given me a jolt and in some instances caused a change of direction in my very personhood.

I have left out lots of favourites – I’m appalled that Lucia Berlin, Anne Enright and Alice Munro, mistresses of the form, didn’t make my final list, and Angela Carter is an obvious omission. Lesley Nneka Arimah’s ‘Who Will Greet You at Home’ and Sophie Mackintosh’s ‘The Weak Spot’ were close contenders, find their stories here and here. A couple of short stories which stayed with me are by unpublished writers – shout out to Carol Farrelly and Chetna Maroo. Hopefully their stories won’t remain unpublished – they are too good not to share. In this selection I have included half a dozen current writers alongside half a dozen of their predecessors – dead writers whose stories provide the foundations for my own tentative constructions in this most exacting of forms.

‘The Burrow’ by Franz Kafka, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

The audacity of writing a story from the point of view of an unidentified rodent struck me as a young reader. The madness of the narrative voice and its utter relatability as it spirals into insanity and paranoia and then blooms with a kind of transcendent joy, seems to me an ideal structure for any piece of art. This story has shaped my understanding of reading and writing and I continue to appreciate it. I read it in Metamorphosis and other stories as a teenager and the volume also included ‘In the Penal Colony’, which I made the mistake of reading before bed. It continues to haunt me. 

First published in German in 1931. Widely available, including in The Complete Short Stories, Vintage 2005. Available online here

‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson

I stumbled across this one fairly recently and was unprepared for the sucker punch it delivered. I admire the queasiness of its atmosphere and the coolness with which the violence is handled. Like the Kafka and the O’Connor stories, this one made me gasp out loud. As a reader I am drawn to tenderness and restraint in a writer’s prose style. If a story can make me gasp out loud with shock at an action or a turn of events that is surprising yet inevitable and even signalled from the start, all the better.

First published in The New Yorker in June 1948 and available online to subscribers here. Widely collected, including in The Lottery and Other Stories, Penguin 2009

‘Cat Person’ by Kirsten Roupenian

Another story with gasp-out-loud impact. I was tempted to select Mary Gaitskill’s ‘An Affair, Edited’ or indeed any one of Gaitskill’s stories in Bad Behaviour, which are all brilliant but I chose to include ‘Cat Person’because it is such an important story in terms of its timing and its cultural impact. The reason the story went viral was because so many women recognised the equation of male-female relations it works out. The last word of the story says everything – with one word Roupenian sums up not just the narrative action but the entire sexual political conundrum.

First published in The New Yorker in December 2017 and available online here. Collected in You Know You Want This (Jonathan Cape 2019

‘101’ by May-Lan Tan

The romance of the central relationship in this story is a welcome antidote to the one described in Cat Personand the story’s eroticism contrasts powerfully with the horrible dysfunction of that relationship. In May-Lan Tan’s story a bride and groom’s brother and sister are thrown together during family wedding celebrations. The bride’s sister narrates the story, addressing the groom’s brother, recalling his “silken hair wound into a ballerina knot” and re-living the wedding (“our eyes locked as the minister described them man and wife. When they kissed, we turned away”) as well as subsequent encounters. Any potential awkwardness after they have sex (“you kissed me with the apple green taste of the pool on your tongue”) is dispelled by her saying to him “I hope it’s not going to be like this” and him assuring her “it’s not”. Of course, this being a short story, the relationship is delicately doomed and its ending slays me every time I read it.

First published in Things to Make and Break, CB Editions 2014. New edition from Sceptre, 2018

‘The Student’ by Anton Chekhov

Chekhov is surely the most compassionate writer there is. His worldview allows for all kinds of failures and he fully accepts human weaknesses, able to see the beauty in even the most ugly behaviour. I can’t find my copy of this story but I remember its contrasts – of dark night and harsh weather against the warmth of the women’s fire, their lack of education compared with the eponymous student’s. What stayed with me, strongly enough to feel as if my brain chemistry might  be altered by it, is the shape of the story and its movement from distance (the student’s observations of the “tall fat old woman in a man’s coat” and her daughter’s “stupid’ pock-marked face”) through emotion (the widow wipes her tears away with her sleeve), to catharsis (the student surveys his village from a hilltop and understands the meaning of life). The women are reminiscent of Macbeth’s witches as they wash up their cauldron and wipe away their tears and the student casts himself as St Peter as he warms himself by their fire. It isn’t lost on me that the women’s connection is human and small scale while the (male) student’s is epic, vast, historical, as he experiences connection with landscape and time. This is Chekhov’s point. I experience the catharsis he describes as I read his story, to such an extent that I feel physically transformed. This is also the effect of the Kafka and Welty stories I have chosen.

First published in Russian in Russkie Vedomosti, 1894. First translated by Constance Garnett in 1914. Available in various editions and translations since, including online here, no translator credited: boo!