‘Amundsen’ by Alice Munro

Alice Munro is nearly everyone’s favourite short story writer, and she is mine too. I’ve tried to delay finishing everything she has written by limiting myself to a collection a year. I haven’t finished all of Dear Life yet, but I read ‘Amundsen’ some years ago, and now when someone asks me what Alice Munro story I would recommend, I say ‘Amundsen.’ For a while, I was not entirely sure why—it is hardly her best short story. Minutes later I will think—should’ve said ‘Runaway.’ Or ‘Miles City, Montana’.

I continue to say ‘Amundsen’, because it has all the thematic elements I love best in Alice Munro’s writing: the optimism of a young woman, arbitrary acts of kindness, characters who grow on you despite not appearing for a significant chunk of the story, and heartbreak. What is there to say, life presses on, heartbreak after heartbreak, and really, nothing is the same after the first heartbreak, but heartbreaks are always the same every single time. “It still seemed as if we would make our way out of that crowd, as if in just a moment we would be together,” writes Munro. “But it was just as certain, also, that we would carry on in the directions we were going, and so we did.”

First published in The New Yorker, August 27, 2012. Collected in Dear Life, Vintage, 2013. Read it online here

‘Who Will Greet You at Home’ by Lesley Nneka Arimah

Ever since I first read—and loved—this story, I have googled it at random moments just so I can be struck by the first line: The yarn baby lasted a good month, emitting dry, cotton-soft gurgles and pooping little balls of lint, before Ogechi snagged its thigh on a nail and it unravelled as she continued walking, mistaking its little huffs for the beginnings of hunger, not the cries of an infant being undone.What an opening, and what a world.

Nneka Arimah’s assurance with fantasy is frankly just delightful to witness, and part of that delight is at the sheer grace and ambition of the story in its centering of radical reproductive futures, storytelling-as-prophecy, and hair. Hair! I continue to marvel at the compactness and elegance of the story.

First published in The New Yorker, October 26, 2015. Collected in What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, Tinder Press, 2017. Read it online here

‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid

This is how to love a man, and if this doesn’t work there are other ways, and if they don’t work don’t feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn’t fall on you; this is how to make ends meet”Damn, how Ms. Kincaid swung this story about, and how each time I’ve read it I never see the end coming or know if it’s a monologue or not, but I always feel better about giving up on household chores immediately, and how this story never fails to feel like a warm breeze on the back of your neck when you’re speeding on a motorbike. ‘Girl’ is an adventure ride, and its boldness is in every semi-colon, every em-dash. Girl, this is how you live.

First published in The New Yorker, June 26, 1978. Collected in At The Bottom of the River, FSG, 1983. Read it here

‘Mott Street in July’ by Xuan Juliana Wang

The soft, fable-like quality of the narration of a loving but dysfunctional Chinese-American family in ‘Mott Street’ disappeared when I read these lines, a few paragraphs into the story: They had yet to question why the bones of a fish could look like the bones of a kite. They had not known to wonder how far to look back in history for the connection. Instead, the three children raced up the stairs to the window to count the black cars that lined Mosco Street for funerals four times a week, because Pinetree said that the more black cars there were, the more that dead person was loved.Xuan Juliana Wang tunes the once-ancient and untouchable aura of family life involving young children into a register that is at once more foreboding and astute in its detail. The rest of the story follows suit, and includes an unexpectedly poignant detour into the Asian Carp crisis.

Juliana Wang’s voice is unforgettable. If I ever made my own version of Sei Shonagon’s list of ‘things that quicken the heart’, I would include this story without a thought.

First published in Gulf Coast, Spring 2019. Collected in Home Remedies, Hogarth, May 2019. Read it online here

‘Rafe’s Coat’ by Deborah Eisenberg

Deborah Eisenberg has far too much fun writing short stories. I don’t mean that peevishly—it’s just that her investment on the paragraph and structure levels is admirable, and that her short stories are such comedies! They’re full of idiosyncratic sad people who treat each other carelessly but love each other very much. The gut punch in Eisenberg’s stories always lands reliably, and oh, what a comfort that is. Take ‘Rafe’s Coat’ for instance, a story for which I have much affection—it starts with the divorce proceedings of our narrator who is a close friend of Rafe’s, and includes long expositions on the intricate plot-twists of ‘This Brief Candle’, a fictitious show in which Rafe’s girlfriend stars. It’s a magnificent story. It’s a hell of a ride.

First published in Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Penguin, 1986. Collected in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, Picador, 2010

Introduction

Nothing here by Chekhov or Borges, but then I see these as the equivalent of the given Shakespeare and the Bible on Desert Island Discs. Chief among the stories I have excluded for lack of space are the meltwater-fresh ‘Indian Camp’ by Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett’s ‘Dante and the Lobster’, almost anything by Lorrie Moore, Raymond Carver’s ‘A Small Good Thing’ and Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’. The selections that follow are instinctive. These are the stories that have had both an immediate and lasting impact on me. I found them all instantly thrilling and they have rewarded repeated readings over the years. Seven of them are very short indeed, between half a page and two pages long; the remaining five are more conventional in length.

‘Unexpected Reunion’ by Johann Peter Hebel, translated by John Hibberd

Allegedly Kafka’s favourite short story, and lauded by Walter Benjamin and Elias Canetti, the tale shares the same subject matter as D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ as a mining disaster leaves a widow grieving, but the compression, historical sweep and fairy-tale quality make it very different in treatment, if no less affecting. Published in the same generation as Wuthering Heights, there is a shared fascination with a body miraculously preserved after death. I read the story around the time I also read J.M. Barrie’s account of his friend Captain Scott immortalised by ice in Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways,and the cryogenic fate of George Mallory chronicled by Wade Davis in his magisterial Into the Silence. This little nexus of texts made a powerful impression. Spooky and beautiful, Hebel manages to handle a local tragedy with a deep-time perspective, and lightness of touch, while capturing a wife’s feelings as she experiences extremes of love and loss. All in simple language, and just a couple of pages long.

First published in German in 1811. Collected in English in The Treasure Chest, Penguin Classics, 1994. Read the story online here

‘A Hanging’ by George Orwell

In a single paragraph within this beautifully paced story/essay, Orwell skewers the argument for capital punishment, and in broader terms mounts an oblique critique of colonialism. It is the uncannily eloquent yet baleful narrative of a man forced to supervise a hanging. The subject matter is grim but the effect is oddly life-affirming with its revelation of why human life is so precious. A local man walks barefoot on the way to the gallows for an unspecified offence. Confronted with a puddle, instinctively he steps around it. In this civilising impulse, Orwell detects the profoundly human spark that should never (willingly) be extinguished. I’d swap Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm for these few pages, which remind us what being alive really means.

First published in August 1931 in The Adelphi. Collected in Essays, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000. Read the story online here

‘The Blue Bouquet’ by Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger

A surreal tale. It appears in Paz’s Selected Poems, so definitionally it’s a prose poem. I ruled out Anne Carson’s ‘Merry Christmas from Hegel’ for this reason, so I feel I can indulge myself just once on this account. The very short story – only a couple of pages long – recounts the narrator’s walk at night when he is assaulted by a man looking to mollify his girlfriend with a bouquet of blue eyes. Does the narrator possess the prized eye-colour, or will he be spared the knife? Reminiscent of Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, but more conventionally structured. A model of how to use foreshadowing, employing the senses to anticipate the dramatic climax.

First published in Spanish in 1949. Collected in English in Selected Poems of Octavio Paz, New Directions, 1984. Read the story online here

‘First Love’ by Vladimir Nabokov

A stand-alone short story, but also a chapter later incorporated into the autobiographical Speak, Memory, this is a brilliant and knowingly Proustian evocation of adolescent love in Paris. The narrator recalls his ten-year-old self, so no middle-aged Humbert here. The innocence is two-fold: one related to young love, the other an unstated prelapsarian sense of the world set to experience the trauma of the Russian Revolution and the First World War. As always with Nabokov, it’s the details that make the story a success. The ending is precisely observed, its recollections accelerating in a cinematic montage. As a treatment of piercing memory, it echoes MacNeice’s poem ‘Soap Suds’ and the coda to Lytton Strachey’s memoir of Queen Victoria. Achingly beautiful.

First published in The New Yorker as ‘Colette’, July 1948. First collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, 1958. Most recently collected in Collected Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2017. Read it online here

‘One of These Days’ by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by J.S. Bernstein

It is a wonderful moment when you recognise in some minor sketch that a great surreal or abstract artist can draw classically and wow you with representational finesse. So it is here with Marquez’s chilly distillation of small-town corruption. None of the magical realist brushwork in this short tale. Instead, the style is spare, austere even, as Marquez relates the potential revenge of a dentist realising he has the slaughterer of his revolutionary friends in his chair and at his mercy. The accumulation of simple details mixes the human and the political, the barber wrestling with professional and filial duties. A great last line.

First published in Spanish in 1962, and in English in Collected Stories, Penguin, 1996. Read the story online here

‘The Wrong Stop’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

I’ve lived in Italy for several years, and always loved Calvino. Some of his work can be a little dry and systematic, but Marcovaldo, the central character of this tale, and the protagonist of a collection of Calvino’s stories, is his most human creation. I remember reading the stories on a plane and being delighted by them. Marcovaldo is the Italian neo-realist equivalent of Homer Simpson. Hapless, comic, but also affecting and poignant. The story reminds me of Cesare Pavese’s marvellous poem ‘Idleness’ in its mixture of foreground poverty and fantasy background. The ending is comic and sublime.

First published in Italian, 1963. Collected in English in Marcovaldo, Secker and Warburg, 1983, and in Vintage Classics, 2001

‘The School’ by Donald Barthelme

No one’s pan is more dead than Barthelme’s, and his humour is lethally brilliant here, though perhaps with less of the relentless whimsy that characterises the majority of his oeuvre. This recalls the scene in the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life, when the teacher must explain – and demonstrate – the act of human reproduction to a class of bewildered school children. It represents a great and original twist on the themes of eros and thanatos. Laugh-out-loud funny.

First published in The New Yorker, June 1974. Collected in Sixty Stories, Penguin Classics, 2003

‘Separating’ by John Updike

Only space for one of either Updike, Cheever or Alice Munro in this selection. Cheever’s ‘Country Husband’ was a strong contender, as was Munro’s ‘Wild Swans’, but in the end it had to be Updike – the superior stylist, with the greater amplitude, the more comprehensive chronicler of late twentieth century America. It was a toss-up between ‘Pigeon Feathers’, ‘Trust Me’, ‘Bech and the Bounty of Sweden’, ‘Short Easter’, and ‘Separating’. The latter won because it is the most affecting and the most memorable. The tears of the narrator as he cuts the lobster in the mocking sunshine while his family regroup for a final family meal is superb, while the question asked at the end by the narrator’s son cuts to the quick.

First published in The New Yorker, June 1975. First collected in Problems and Other Stories, Knopf, 1979, and most recently in The Maples Stories, Everyman, 2009. Read the story online here