‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin

While short stories can, of course, draw on anything the writer likes, there are certain subjects that writers seem to cluster around. And ever since F Scott Fitzgerald’s epoch-naming collection of 1922, The Jazz Age, the short story has enjoyed an especially intimate relationship with jazz.

‘Sonny’s Blues’ follows a rough script set down by Langston Hughes more than twenty years earlier in ‘The Blues I’m Playing’: an unconventional, but talented young jazz musician repairs a broken relationship through a moment of transformative performance (buried under this is an even older script, the script for the short story: an individual experiences something transformative that changes their relationship with those around them). But Baldwin does so much more than this simple template suggests. The story is a rich exploration of communication, storytelling, and the way communities are made and unmade. It is the jazz story and Baldwin at their keenest.

Collected in Going to Meet the Man, Dial, 1965, and available online here

‘What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us’ by Laura van den Berg

Laura van den Berg’s stories grip me. They leave vivid impressions on my mind—I find myself turning over details days after reading them—but also demand re-reading, calling for another look, a deeper plunge.  Her second collection, Isle of Youth, is a thing of beauty: seven stories that each work as perfect microcosms but, when read together, reverberate thematically, building layers of significance.

But the title story of her first collection, ‘What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us’, is my favourite of her works. It helps that the premise is instantly intriguing: a young woman who dreams of being an open-water swimmer travels to Madagascar where her mother is studying the collapsing lemur population. Where the story really shines, though, is in the way it unravels the complex interaction between mother and daughter—what Kazuo Ishiguro might call a ‘three dimensional relationship.’ The final shift in the story, projecting us forwards in time, is a killer.

First published in One Story 102, 2008; collected in What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us Scribe. 2011. Read the opening here

‘α-Crystallin’ by Sydney S Kim

It might seem rash to include a story in this anthology that was only published last week—it probably is, though Sydney S. Kim’s writing is superlative. This story brings together visceral bodily descriptions, the threat of an environment irreparably damaged by man, and the fraught dynamics of artistic creation and parental nurture, all through the image of tears transformed into abstract black and white photographs. The prose is, like the title, crystalline; moving and unsettling, it left me rubbing my own eyes in sympathy.

But more broadly, this story represents why I love the short story, and why it is so important now. Far from a midcentury relic, writers continue to push the limits of what the short story can do—there is a new, excellent story being published literally every week. And Kim’s story is not collected in a book (yet), but was published online, in a form perfect for consumption in our age of distraction, whether over lunch, on the train, or in the blue light of your phone between snatches of sleep.

Published in American Literary Review, Spring 2019. Read it online here

Introduction

Obviously twelve stories out of the world’s millions is a ridiculous ask, and there is nothing definitive about this list, but here are some stories that have stayed with me. Looking at them together, now, I see they’re pretty flashy, lurid in places, and I feel obliged to wave a small and compensatory flag for the quiet, subtle stories in the world – the wallflower stories that are nevertheless full of beauty and value and what-have-you. Still, they didn’t make it, and these did.

‘The Red Bow’ by George Saunders

As a shameless Saunders fangirl, I could pick a dozen of his as my anthology. I accept that perhaps he’s written one too many dysfunctional-theme-park stories, but to me he is The Master. Stumbling across ‘Sea Oak’ changed my writing life, while ‘My Flamboyant Grandson’ and ‘The 400lb CEO’ manage to feature exquisite moments of human feeling too complex to name… then there’s the perfect ‘Home’, so full of taut bitterness… Oh, George. After much agonising I’ve chosen ‘The Red Bow’ as the exemplar. It has everything: a just off-real scenario, perfect character motivation-action-reaction, fantastic dialogue, and that dark-tender humour he does like no one else.

First published in Esquire, September 2003 and available to read online here. Collected in In Persuasion Nation, Riverhead Books/Bloomsbury, 2006

‘End of the Line’ by Aimee Bender

Whenever I think of this story, I get a funny feeling. A bad, funny feeling that makes me want to go and read the story again and prolong that bad, funny feeling. A man buys a little man in a cage and keeps him like a pet, and Bender pushes this scenario to its extremes, exploring our darkness and our innocence at more or less the same time. I can’t tell you how much I love this story – and the reason I can’t tell you is because I worry about what that says about me.

First published in Tin House, Fall 2004. Collected in Willful Creatures, Doubleday, 2005/Windmill Books, 2013

‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid

Ah, the voice! The pace! The concision! A whole childhood and burgeoning adolescence, plus a mother-daughter relationship, plus all the eyes of the neighbourhood, plus the wider system, is packed into just a couple of pages. It’s a forerunner of so many of those “rules for” or “instructions for” stories, but without any of the coy fluff they often have. It just kicks arse.

First published in The New Yorker, 19 June 1978. Collected in At the Bottom of the River, FSG, 1983

‘The Doll’ by Daphne du Maurier

I can’t handle contemporary horror but I love du Maurier and her modernist Freudian-horror flavour. The Birdsis a masterpiece. Then there’s this hysterical shocker, which is the filthiest 1930s story I’ve read (though maybe I’ve been sheltered), which pre-empts contemporary angst about sex robots. It’s not just the luridness that’s great, though; the story also deploys that “found narrative” framing device that I find irresistible every time.

First published in The Doll and Other Stories, Virago Modern Classics, 2011 – you can read about how it was discovered here– and available to read online here

‘Agata’s Machine’ by Camilla Grudova

Transgressive, unboundaried female sexuality colours and textures everything about this story, so it feels like a kind of second cousin, though decades removed, to The Doll. It also recalls that horrible D H Lawrence story ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ so strongly that I wouldn’t be surprised if Grudova said this was a modern retelling, or more likely, a rebuff. It comes from a superb, dense collection published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, The Doll’s Alphabet, which name I take as further proof of du Maurier’s ghost looking over Grudova’s shoulder.

First published online in The White Review here. Collected in The Doll’s Alphabet, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017

‘Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice’ by Nam Le

I normally disdain stories about writers and writing, but this one is an exception. Well, is it a story, or is it non-fiction? The question becomes irrelevant – or, more accurately: it’s super-relevant, but inconsequential. The writing is beautiful: suffused with the weariness of the recently-young, by which I mean, a person who’s spent the first third of their life striving hard and harder, trying to beat life into simplicity, and who’s just realising that, actually, striving isn’t going to work. And it’s a father-son narrative, and an immigrant story that pushes against that label. Soft, sad and masterful.

First published in All-Story, Summer 2006, and available to read online here. Collected in The Boat, Canongate, 2008

‘Wild America’ by Wells Tower

When is Wells Tower’s next book coming out? Is what those of us who love his collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, have been asking for ten years. No pressure, Wells. But get on with it. His work is wildly funny, stylistically wide-ranging, and full of painful truths. I’m picking this story over other possibles in the book because of its opening description of a baby pigeon, mauled and dropped by a cat onto a pillowcase: “The thing was pink, nearly translucent, with magenta cheeks and lavender ovals around the eyes. It looked like a half-cooked eraser with dreams of some day becoming a prostitute.”

From the collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, FSG/Granta, 2009. Most of the story is at online here but it seems to cut off about a page and a half from the end…

‘Vertical Motion’ by Can Xue tr. Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping

“I was a little critter submerged in the desert.” The narrating critter – described in passing as an “insect”, but, to me, more of a spindly kind of mole – lives in darkness underground, among other smooth, wiggling creatures. She/he/it starts digging up towards the surface, driven by a species legend about an elder who dug upwards and disappeared. Humans on the surface are mentioned, but I don’t take this story as human allegory. Instead, I believe completely in the narrator’s “critter consciousness”. Why is it so delightful, this dark and wriggling world of creatures with beaks and atrophied fingers? I don’t know, but there’s something fantastic about the narrator whose consciousness treads the border between animal and human (“Hidden in me now was an obscure plan that even I couldn’t explain”) and who can’t help but burst up, fearfully, through layers of soil and sand toward the light.

Collected in Vertical Motion, Open Letter, 2011. Available to read online at The White Review here

‘Leckerdam of the Golden Hand’ by David Hayden

One of Hayden’s short-short stories of the fabula type. This one is so rich and glorious and terrible it’s like cracking open a cursed treasure chest and being blinded by the dazzling hoard within. The narrator is already dead, killed by his children in revenge for violences he’s done to them, though it takes a little while – and it takes the children beginning to “live outside my hate” – for his narrating consciousness to cease. Deep, dark psychodrama with ground-breaking special effects: always a winning combination.

First published in The Stinging Fly, Summer 2016 and available to subscribers online here. Collected in Darker With The Lights On, Little Island Press, 2017

‘Black Box’ by Jennifer Egan

Originally published in bits via 140-character Twitter, this is an 8,500-word super-story of a technologically-enhanced spy whose mission is to bring down the powerful head of a crime syndicate. But it’s really about the cost to her (and her undercover colleagues) of acting as a honeytrap, and the fragmented form is perfect for expressing the internal conflict, as well as cranking up the suspense and the pace. Hopefully we’ve realised by now that Twitter isn’t a decent fiction publishing medium (even with 280 characters), but at least the experiment produced this wonderful, gripping, Egan story.

First published on Twitter.com, Spring 2012, then in The New Yorker and available online here