‘Twin Beds in Rome’ by John Updike

This story, one of a series which charts the relationship between a married couple, Richard and Joan Maple, makes me weep every time I read it. Like Chekhov, Updike dares to bring an epic, historical quality to the most banal of life events: ‘their bodies collapsed together as two mute armies might gratefully mingle, released from the absurd hostilities decreed by two mad kings. Bleeding, mangled, reverently laid in its tomb a dozen times, their marriage could not die. Burning to leave one another, they left, out of married habit, together. They took a trip to Rome.’ Some folk aren’t fans of Updike and perhaps he’s not as forgiving as Chekhov but he is similarly observant and humane and I find his writing incredibly tender. It is his forensic eye, especially where marriage and male/female relations concerned that has earned him the reputation of woman hater but I don’t think Updike hates anyone. His sensitivity to the ways in which this couple negotiate ‘degrading intimacy’ finds expression in a number of very moving details, such as the way Joan offers to carry her husband’s shoe box when he is ill and the way in which Richard construes his illness once he has recovered. The epithets they use for one another (“sweetie”, “darley”) clearly demonstrate the reluctance mentioned at the end of the story. Updike’s writing allows valuable insight into how a certain generation of men view their female companions and relatives and since we all continue to labour under these opinions and we inhabit a society they have shaped, I find his work of interest.

First published in The New Yorker, February, 1964, and available to subscribers here. Collected in The Music School, 1966, Too Far to Go, 1979 and The Maples Stories, 2009

‘Men and Women’ by Claire Keegan

There is a timelessness to Claire Keegan’s stories which makes them reminiscent of fable. I find the mythological feel to her work surprising, given the specificity of her prose and its attention to detail. She writes very powerfully of the gap separating children and adults and the lack of understanding between men and women. Her awareness of these gaping openings and where they occur, how they are made manifest, is what distinguishes this story. It is narrated by a young girl who wants to be big. ‘Big’ means licking the nibs of special pencils and sitting behind the wheel of a car while someone else opens the farm gate. For now, though, she is the one opening gates. At a dance at the local village hall she watches her father slow dancing with a neighbour “like slowness is what he wants” and she struggles to understand the strange atmosphere that gathers between her parents as a result – “like when a cow dies and the truck comes to take it away”. By the end of the evening she is not the one opening the gate and she is one step closer to being ‘big’.

First published in Antarctica, Faber, 1999)

‘Once in a Lifetime’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

Like Keegan’s work, Lahiri’s elegant prose often describes the chasm that exists between parents and children and between men and women. Her stories frequently examine this disconnect as it occurs among Bengali parents and their Bengali-American offspring. The span of her inter-generational stories and the sense they convey of this chasm of understanding is pure heartbreak. I find the attention she brings to bodies in relation to one another and in relation to space very moving and her use of physical detail (the way a spray of perfume temporarily darkens the narrator’s clothing at the beginning of this story, for example) is extremely evocative. There’s a beautiful coda to ‘Once in a Lifetime’ in the final story in this collection.

First published in The New Yorker in April, 2006, and available online here. Collected in Unaccustomed Earth, Bloomsbury, 2008

‘The Bride of the Innisfallen’ by Eudora Welty

Claire Keegan introduced me to Welty’s writing but not to this particular story of hers, which I love on account of its human comedy. There’s a wild energy to the description of a train journey from Paddington to Fishguard, which vividly conveys an atmosphere of good humour among damp passengers in a busy train carriage on a wet day. The economic prose style (“a small passionate-looking man”… a red haired baby “with queenly jowls”) creates pace, while the confines of the compartment and the sway of the rattling train are apparent in the minute observations.

The palette of the story is strong – the woman’s “bright stained lap” and “flirtatious” hair “pulled out of its confines […] into two auburn and gray pomegranates along her cheeks” contrasts with black eyes, black suits, the “black of London [that] swam like a cinder in the eye” and “a black four o’clock in the afternoon of that spring that refused to flower”. Welty uses two greyhounds rushing in and out of the train corridor in plaid blankets “like dangerously ecstatic old ladies hoping no-one would see them” to illuminate the rain and dark. The mix of animals and strangers singing, reading, gossiping and eating fill this reader with joy.

First published in The New Yorker, December, 1921, and available to subscribers here collected in The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, Harvest/HBJ 1955

‘The Sad Tale of the Sconce’ by Camilla Grudova

The atmosphere, characters, humour and aesthetic of each story in Grudova’s The Doll’s Alphabet are so consistent that the collection could almost be read as a jumbled novel occurring in some weird universe where women unstitch themselves and mate with sewing machines and keep tuber-like babies in the fridge. Short form allows not only the writer but the reader, too, breathing space which perhaps wouldn’t be possible in a novel, and sometimes we need a breather – these stories are pretty intense. I love the wit and imagination they display – the world they describe is characterised by a craziness and an exuberance worthy of Kafka and ‘The Sad Tale of the Sconce’ is possibly the most beautifully exuberant of them all.

First published in Eleven Eleven Journal, 2016 and collected in The Doll’s Alphabet, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019

‘The Surrogate’ by Tessa Hadley

As a reader I appreciate it when a writer seems to deliver a secret message, underneath the words of the story, to me, their reader. That’s what I get from Hadley’s tale of sexual fantasy and its outcomes. This story seems above all an account of the act of writing and the act of reading. All the stories I have chosen for this personal anthology could be interpreted as such, I think – in one way or another they all describe the relationship between writer and reader, a relationship which serves as surrogate for the relationship between any fellow humans in the act of making sense of our existence. Hadley may explore this relationship in a very different way to Kafka or Grudova, say, but underneath all these writers’ contortions, the same issues burn below the surface.

First published in The New Yorker, September 2003, and available to read online here, or hear Curtis Sittenfield read it here. Collected in Sunstroke and other stories, Jonathan Cape, 2007

Introduction

My personal anthology has twelve short stories by women. So many of the stories on this list emerged from me trying to make a snap-decision list about the short story writers I love, and seeing which stories emerged organically. I didn’t plan on making a women-focussed list initially, but it’s fair to say that the decision to harden that—as all canons are hardened eventually!—is reflective of my reading patterns. And as Joanna Russ says, “There is much, much more good literature by women in existence than anyone knows.”

‘Boats on Land’ by Janice Pariat

Janice Pariat is an observant and gifted writer, in particular of landscapes and the unique forms of loneliness evoked in them. ‘Boats on Land’ is set on a tea estate in Assam. Between the dragonflies, silver-grey birches, the fading evening light and fishermen’s boats on the Brahmaputra, a portrait emerges of two lonely women, who learn in their own ways the quiet devastations that are invariably cultivated by intimacy.

Between 2012 and 2013, which is probably when I first read this story, I spent many evenings reading on a thin, worn mattress in the living room of a flat I shared with two others in Delhi. I loved living there—our building didn’t have a door, and the balconies scratched up so close that we could easily climb into the neighbouring buildings. But the walls were painted an incredible aquamarine, there was always a kite fluttering if you looked skywards, and a steaming plate of momos was never far away. I read this story at least six years ago, and have done so several times since, but even just thinking about it now takes me instantly to the rose-hued skies of Delhi, and the driftwood and lanterns of Kaziranga from Pariat’s story. Somehow, all these landscapes seem to be inseparable, and a part of the same memory lining those slow Delhi evenings.

First published in The Caravan, September 2012. Collected in Boats on Land, Random House India, 2012. It is available to be read online here

‘Amor’ (‘Love’) by Clarice Lispector, translated by Katrina Dodson

I’ve only ever read Clarice Lispector’s novels in moments of absolute joy or despair: her work sits on a spectrum that slips between those extremes without hesitation. This does mean, though, that while her novels continue to take me years to complete, her short stories are a wonderful alternative. ‘Amor’ is a very troubling, tempestuous story about a woman named Ana, who finds herself crumbling at the very limits of the world she knows—one that involves looking after her family and children—one afternoon on a train. Ana’s character has resonances with the wretched loneliness of the narrator in Elena Ferrante’s novel Days of Abandonment, but Lispector’s story is, as ever, more surreal and dissonant. I simultaneously find several bits of the story distressing, including how the blind man becomes the figure who incites her upheaval, but I am also swept by the chilling accuracy of Ana’s alienation. There’s a forest. A spider. A knit mesh bag stuck with broken egg yolks. How “her heart had filled with the worst desire to live.”

First published in Laços de Família, Francisco Alves Editóra, 1960. Collected in English in The Complete Stories, New Directions, 2015. It can be read online here

‘Lihaaf’ (‘The Quilt’) by Ismat Chughtai, translated by M. Asaduddin

I read ‘Lihaaf’ at the start of this decade, or thereabouts, and was frightened. The story felt like a giant wink, and I couldn’t cope with it. Its power is not just in the controversy that followed—a hilariously recounted obscenity trial in Lahore Court by Chughtai herself—but also in how it oozed female sexual desire, and captured the clammy desperation of a lonely woman wanting to be touched, in the most private spaces of a feudal household.

But I read the story again last year before I taught it to some third-year English Literature students, and I was surprised to be frightened again. This time, I saw the abuse, the horror of the slippery narration, and how Chughtai’s wordplay emphasises rather than elides the unknowability of life under the quilt. I had never quite appreciated how dark and funny the story was.

What I’m trying to say is: this story yields an enormous sly pleasure, both on a first read and re-reads. Enjoy it.

First published in Adab-e Latif, 1942. Collected in The Quilt: Stories, Penguin, 2011. Read it online here

‘Eight Bites’ by Carmen Maria Machado

I’m obsessed with writing about eating disorders. The narrative reliance on measurements, the questions about self-image, the illustrations of control and the literary gymnastics required to circumvent all of these characteristics and, of course, tired writing about women’s bodies—all of this fascinates me. The sub-genre of the ED short story though (inasmuch it can be said to be one) involves some degree of tight creative self-awareness about the tropes that plague the disorders themselves. And so when I read ‘Eight Bites’, I went very quiet and happy and immediately re-read it, because Machado’s story is a tender ghost story about having to live in a body and having to live with what we put into them and wreck out of them. I don’t know if it’s a short story about eating disorders or not, but what I can say is that it is a story about desire. I think about it constantly, and in particular this scene in a restaurant involving a bucket of cold, stirring oysters. I have never eaten oysters, but it makes me want to.

First published in Gulf Coast, Summer/Fall 2017. Collected in Her Body and Other Parties. It’s online—read it here

‘Ezekiel Solomon’s Shoe’ by Kuzhali Manickavel

This is the funniest and saddest story I’ve ever read, and it’s by a writer I have adored for years, not least because no one else I know does hilarity and distress in short fiction with such alchemy. The brevity is devastating, but the story is not devastating merely because it is brief. This story ostensibly centres on a single shoe, the very eccentric and unassuming Ezekiel Solomon’s shoe—and tie, and watch, and a banana spider, come to think of it—which shows up outside our man Seshadri’s bakery in Chennai. Seshadri recognises his friend’s shoe, and tries to get rid of it, but cannot, as it reappears every time he tries. There are so many ghostly stories in my personal anthology, but Manickavel’s remains a sparkling little gem amidst them all.

First published in Insects are Just Like You and Me Except Some of them Have Wings: Short Fiction, Blaft Publications, 2008

‘Lifelines’ by Kathleen Collins

The real pleasure of reading a Kathleen Collins story is encountering the raw sheen of her filmmaker’s eye. Her sentences are as tightly wound as a montage skip, and this is despite the exclamation marks and ellipses. It’s fantastic! It makes me laugh! ‘Lifelines’ is the story of a woman who is trying to leave behind the nagging epistolary presence of her—occasional—husband. The story is almost episodic, but so lightly touched by a sadness that remains in the aftermath like a warm scent. But really, it’s the story of a birdlike hairdresser who gifts this woman a dream. I love it.

First published in Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, Ecco, 2016

‘Let me See you Smile’ by Lucia Berlin

This was the first ever Lucia Berlin story I read, and for a long while after, I didn’t read another. This story is a smooth cinematic saga, about three characters—Maggie, her boyfriend Jesse who is disconcertingly younger than her, and their lawyer Jon Cohen whose own marriage fades when he witnesses and becomes embroiled in the dangerously magnetic pulse of Maggie and Jesse’s love. The story is a saga in the coffee and long drives and cigarettes and drugs and cops and hot searching love sort of way, and reading it gave me a long arc to dwell in; long enough to feel sorrowed by the splinters of Berlin’s carefully plotted mixed-voices narrative, and long enough to thrill at the light-headed rush acquired by following lives lived to their fullest bloom.

First published in Where I Live Now, Black Sparrow Press, 1999