‘On Discovery’ by Maxine Hong Kingston

A comic assault on male power and a tale of female revenge, putting one in mind of Fellini’s carnivalesque City of Women, in which Marcello Mastroianni is seduced into a city where women rule and use him as their slave. Kingston’s story plots a similarly vindictive act as a man is captured and taken to the Valley of Women. The protagonist is ritually humiliated, but notes of local Chinese colour grace the tale. Just over a page in length, it has the lightness and sexiness but also the underlying seriousness of the best metamorphosis narratives. This one just edged out Angela Carter’s vengeful, feminist twist on the Pygmalion myth, ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’. Also, in a way I’ve had my quota of lushness with Nabokov – but it was close.

First published in China Men, Knopf, 1980

‘Barn Burning’ by Haruki Murakami

Cryptic, elliptical, with unanticipatable details such as the girl who mimes peeling a tangerine. (There is a separate anthology to be compiled on works using tangerines.) Unlike the swollen folly of Murakami’s later works, this is a breathy, beautiful and mysterious tale, exemplifying in some ways the Japanese philosophy of wabi sabi. A masterful performance, doing what every story should – keep you turning the pages, wondering what happens next.

First published in The New Yorker, October 1992. Collected in The Elephant Vanishes, Vintage, 1994. Adapted for a 2018 South Korean movie, Burning. Read the story online here

‘Oral History (with Hiccups)’ by Lydia Davis

Less than a page in length, this little gem illustrates the ability of a great writer to communicate the uncommunicable. The prose mimetically – and hilariously – reflects someone speaking with hiccups. Virtuoso story-telling. Perfectly judged sense of scale. Given that Davis was translating Proust around the time this story was composed, it is also a feat of aesthetic self-discipline.

First published in Samuel Johnson is Indignant, McSweeney’s, 2001; more recently assembled in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009

‘Incarnations of Burned Children’ by David Foster Wallace

Just a couple of pages in length, but it feels like the molten product of some golden imaginative moment. Similar in subject matter, though very different in tone to Carver’s ‘A Small Good Thing’ – and even better. If I had to rescue just one story of all those represented here from the flames, it would probably be this one. It is emotionally devastating, articulating the unthinkable. Simply brilliant and terrifying all at the same time. It shows that the author, famous for his sprawl, could also work in miniature. Don’t read it if you’ve just had a baby. Otherwise this is my pick for the finest story I know.

First published in Esquire, April 2009. Collected in Oblivion: Stories, Abacus, 2005 and now The David Foster Wallace Reader, Penguin, 2018. Read the story online here

Introduction

As a child, I was drawn to stories, especially to the voice of a good storyteller and to the rhythm of a well-crafted story. I was captivated by all sorts of stories—be it by my Nigerian father who preached from a pulpit on Sundays, knowing how best to sprinkle his sermons with engaging anecdotes, or my English grandmother who told her grandchildren dramatic World War II stories at bedtime. Listening to those around me inspires me as a writer, and often fragments of an overheard story form the basis of one of my own short stories. When I write, I’m constantly reading my stories aloud, listening closely for how they sound. It is because the sound of a story is so important that I’ve included in this list a story from film and music. A few years ago, when I had the unique opportunity of meeting and interviewing one of my favorite writers, Toni Morrison, I was thrilled to hear her say: “I like the act of reading my works because I measure their value in terms of how they sound.” This is how I think about writing, too. Morrison was the master storyteller and a wonderful reader of her own work. Here are twelve of my favourite short stories that I particularly loved hearing read aloud and enjoy revisiting.

‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ by Eric Carle

I remember my mother’s soothing voice as she read this story to me as I sat on her lap, one summer holiday, in the garden of her childhood home in York. A few sentences in: “One Sunday morning the warm sun came up and—pop!—out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar.” This caterpillar proceeds to chomp its way through a variety of foods that fascinated me—chocolate cake, ice-cream, and cupcakes that I knew to be delicious while other foods like pears, plums, pickles, Swiss cheese, salami, and cherry pie were foreign to me at the time (coming, as I did, from Nigeria in the 1970s) yet sounded so good. Years later I would read this story to my child and to other people’s children, fingering the cutouts in the pages—my version of the Proustian madeleine.

First published by the World Publishing Company, 1969 and widely reprinted. Hear it read by the author online here

‘Concerning the Bodyguard’ by Donald Barthelme

Imagine a story told almost entirely as a series of questions. Here is one such story in which we learn, indirectly, about a bodyguard’s life and the life of his employer, “the principal”. Plot is subtly interwoven into this story. Salman Rushdie was the writer from whom I first heard of this story when he read it for The New Yorker podcast. Years earlier, in the 1990s, one of my first jobs after leaving university was with Penguin Books, publishers of many authors including, as it happens, Eric Carle, Donald Barthelme and Salman Rushdie. While I never met Carle or Barthelme, I did occasionally see Salman Rushdie. This was at the time when Rushdie lived under the death threats of his fatwa. Rushdie had to have bodyguards and there was extra security at our offices which made Rushdie’s reading of the story particularly poignant.

First published in The New Yorker, October 1978, and available to read online there. Collected in Forty Stories, Putnam, 1987, and by Penguin, 1989. Hear Salman Rushdie read it online here

‘Mrs. Sen’s’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

The story of Mrs. Sen centers around a lonely woman, known to most as the “professor’s wife”. She relies on letters from home and on food preparation to feel at home in a foreign land. Mrs. Sen doesn’t have a child of her own but she looks after someone else’s child and, perhaps because I was pregnant at the time of reading it, I felt the character’s loneliness quite viscerally. It was the summer of 1999, while on a holiday in Kingston, Jamaica that I read this story as well as the others in Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies. I was so enthralled by the stories that I began reading them out loud. Food in ‘Mrs Sen’s’ serves as a metaphor for the condition of migration and diaspora and the culinary descriptions were what struck me the most as I rolled the words around on my tongue. Mrs. Sen “… took whole vegetables between her hands and hacked them apart: cauliflower, cabbage, butternut squash. She split things in half, then quarters, speedily producing florets, cubes, slices, and shreds. She could peel a potato in seconds. At times she sat cross-legged, at times with legs splayed, surrounded by an array of colanders and shallow bowls of water in which she immersed her chopped ingredients.”

First published in Salamander magazine. Collected in Interpreter of Maladies, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999/Flamingo, 2000

‘The Red Carpet’ by Lavanya Sankaran

I had just begun my first novel, InDependence, when I found this gem of a story which would later become the title story of the author’s debut collection of short stories. I was so taken by the depiction of character, setting, and social class in this story of a young man, Raju, who works as a driver for the rich Mrs. Choudhary in Bangalore, that I read it aloud to myself, pausing at various points trying to figure out the magic that went into crafting the story. Years later I included this story in literature classes that I taught to undergraduates. Ever an advocate for the joy of reading aloud, I would read parts of this story to my students.

First published in The Atlantic, and available to read online here. Collected in The Red Carpet, Dial, 2005, and more recently in digitlal form by Tinder Press, 2016

‘The Shawl’ by Cynthia Ozick

When I began writing, I looked to other texts for guidance. I wanted, amongst other things, to know how best to write about history in the context of fiction and ‘The Shawl’ became one of my teachers. This harrowing story, told in very few words, is about a mother, her baby, and her niece who live through the horrors of the Holocaust. Rosa, too starved to produce milk, feeds her child on her shawl:Magda took Rosa’s nipple, and Rosa never stopped walking, a walking cradle. There was not enough milk; sometimes Magda sucked air; then she screamed. Stella was ravenous. Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones.This is one story that I have never actually heard read aloud yet it feels as though I have, as both silence and sound lie at its heart.

First published in The New Yorker, May 1980, and available to read online here. Collected, together with a companion novella, ‘Rosa’, in The Shawl, Knopf, 1989

‘Without a Shadow of Doubt: My First Lesson in Art and Film’ by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

The question of “race” comes up in much of my work and this story I found to be a brilliant take on the subject. Two young Kenyan boys set off to discover whether everybody’s shadow is black like theirs, or whether, as they suspect, white people have white shadows. This is a beautifully written story— both touchingly funny and profound in its insights on childhood and on race. To hear and see the author read this story aloud with a twinkle in his eye (as I did recently in San Francisco) was one of the most enjoyable author readings I’ve ever had the pleasure of attending.

Collected in Minutes of Glory, The New Press, 2019

‘Black Girl’ by Ousmane Sembène

Another guide for me in terms of thinking about writing history and exploring the impact of colonialism and racism through fiction came in the classic film based on the short story La Noire de (Black Girl) directed by its author. It’s the story of a domestic worker who leaves Dakar, Senegal, dreaming of a new life in France, only to arrive on the Côte d’Azur to find that her life is not at all what she’d expected. There are lines from the story that I will always remember due to the power of the main actor’s voice. One example being when she cries with excitement at the prospect of working abroad: “J’ai du travail chez les blancs!” she exclaims, only to later find that it is misery that awaits her as she is exploited by her employers.

Based on a short story first published in Voltaique, Présence Africaine, 1962. In the translated collection, Tribal Scars, Inscape, 1975, the story is translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy as ‘The Promised Land’

‘Healthy Start’ by Etgar Keret, translated by Miriam Schlesinger

Humour combined with deep seriousness is not easy to write, but one writer that does it well is Etgar Keret. While I usually prefer listening to Keret read his own stories in his distinctive Israeli accent, I first heard this story read by the actor John Conlee who reads it well. ‘Healthy Start’ is a story about the pleasure of pretending to be someone else, which is a story that particularly appeals to me as a writer. What if you went to a cafe every morning and pretended to be that person that another has come to meet— anything from a business acquaintance to a lover. This is the premise of a wonderfully imaginative and at times very funny story. The fact that the author was once mistaken to be somebody else in a cafe and considered playing along, is an interesting meta story to this story.

First published in English in Tin House, Vol 8, No. 2, 2008. Available to read online at Litro magazine. Collected in Pitʹom Dfika Ba-Delet, Zmora-Bitan, 2010, and in translation in Suddenly, a Knock at the Door, FSG, 2012. Hear it read online here.

‘Hitting Budapest’ by NoViolet Bulawayo

Just read the first line of this story out loud and listen for the jazz in the variety of names that Bulawayo uses: “We are on our way to Budapest: Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me.” Darling, the child protagonist of this story, and her aforementioned friends are struggling to survive in a desolate land. Innovative in its language and tone— the characters of this Caine Prize-winning story leap from the page in prose that walks a tightrope between comedy and tragedy. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing the author read from this story on several occasions, perhaps most memorably at a sold-out reading in San Francisco where Bulawayo and I began our conversation about this story (which would ultimately become the first chapter in the novel We Need New Names) with music and dancing.

First published in The Boston Review, November 2010 and incorporated into We Need New Names, Chatto & Windus, 2013. Read it online here