‘Like a Pariah’ by Margarita Garcia Robayo, translated by Charlotte Coombe

Maybe it’s the old trope that novels tell the story of a community, short stories an individual. Maybe it is the way the brevity of a short story throws small details into greater focus. Whatever the reason, I’m always surprised by how bodily so many short stories are. Margarita Garcia Robayo takes this tendency towards the haptic and corporeal, and amplifies it: the bodies in her short stories and novellas are disobedient, abject, and frequently unpleasant. She is a master at tracing how we are undone by ourselves, how bodily cravings and rebellions thwart our plans and ideals. But through an alchemy she seems to have perfected, her stories transmute these flawed bodies into things beautiful and dignified. I could have chosen any of the pieces from her first collection in English, but ‘Like a Pariah’ always stays with me, thanks to its final line, rendered Carver-esque by Coombe’s excellent translation: “I’m perfectly alright.”

Collected in Fish Soup, Charco Press 2018

‘The Diving Pool’ by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

A short story is not a tableau or static image; by definition, it tells us a story. It goes somewhere. But because the short story is defined by its brevity, the most powerful stories often gravitate around a single, dominating image that gives the rest of the events their structure and meaning. Yoko Ogawa’s ‘The Diving Pool’ is a twisted and complex story about Aya, the only girl in a house of orphans who is not an orphan. It traces her relationship with her parents, the orphaned children they raise, and with the house—the Light House—in which they live.

At the same time, the story revolves around a single, recurring image: Aya sitting in the bleachers beside the local pool, watching her foster-brother Jun climb the ten-metre board and dive, again and again. Ogawa is a virtuosic writer, and not all of her fiction is so creepy or emotionally murky, but it is in stories like this, where the possibility of danger or imminent collapse is always present, where every turned page threatens new cruelty, that she really excels.

First published in Zoetrope 11.2, 2007. Collected in The Diving Pool, Picador, 2008

‘The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt’ by Mary McCarthy

The mid-twentieth century was a turning point for the short story, particularly in America. The decade from 1940 to 1950 saw more single author collections of short stories published than the previous twenty years, while at the same time, the form lost its critical status, apparently never to be regarded as highly by critics again. From this wealth of writing, though, I could easily furnish a dozen anthologies: Richard Yates, John Cheever, Katherine Ann Porter, Truman Capote—but in my view, no story better captures the mid-century sensibility than Mary McCarthy’s ‘Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt’.

This story was the ‘Cat Person’ of 1941: a scandalous tale of embarrassingly bad sex on a Pullman train, and the desultory affair that follows. Frank and self-deprecating, no-one is spared here, least of all her protagonist (whom many saw as a thinly-veiled self portrait). When the story was published, McCarthy was already well-known in New York circles for the acerbic wit of her theatre reviews, but this story catapulted her into the spotlight as a leading writer and cultural critic, opened up a space for a new discourse around female sexuality, and led to a rush of imitative stories in Harper’s Bazaar and the New Yorker.

First published in Partisan Review, 1941. Collected in The Company She Keeps, Simon and Schuster, 1942; Harcourt, 1970

‘Pen in Parentheses’ by Prabda Yoon, translated by Mui Poopoksakul

In anglophone countries, the short story has sometimes been regarded as a training form; it rewards experimentation, allowing writers to play with voices or structures that would not hold up if stretched out to novel-length. The downside is that many short stories end up being just that: pure experimentation. Prabda Yoon’s stories are endlessly inventive—he is often described as the postmodern master of Thai literature—but, in my view, his stories never sacrifice a compelling narrative for the sake of a stylistic trick.

Take ‘Pen in Parentheses’. The story is in, essence, a single sentence: “The sheet of paper fell (…) so I bent down and picked it up.” But the real story (the story of the narrator’s growth, of his eccentric grandfather, his relationship with his aging grandmother, of the way life changes us, regardless of whether we want it to or not) unfolds between those parentheses, so that the narrator’s life becomes one long aside suspended in a single action. In Yoon’s hands, experimentation is a way to enhance, not replace, a good story.

Collected in The Sad Part Was, Tilted Axis, 2017. Read it online here

‘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