‘It Happens Like This’ by James Tate

James Tate breaks that rule where you are supposed to show something in the middle of action rather than giving specific exposition. Almost every piece opens with a paraphrase of setting and person. Here: “I was outside St. Cecelia’s Rectory smoking a cigarette when a goat appeared beside me”. His stories cause me concern because they describe things that happen to all of us. We almost understand them, and he was the only one who could begin to begin talking about it.

Published in Lost River, Sarabande Books, 2003. You can read it on the poets.org website, here, and hear Tate read it here. I find it upsetting that people are laughing because I think he was serious

‘Do You Belong to Anybody?’ by Maya Binyam

A short story that comes dressed as a short story. It is quite long, actually, but look at the opening few lines:

“In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up. The radio announced traffic due to an accident involving a taxicab driver, a police officer, and a woman whose occupation the dispatcher did not care to identify. But there was no traffic. My ticket was in the breast pocket of my jacket, which was handed to me as I exited the passenger door”.

The story doesn’t graduate to anything more specific, and the first few times I read it I thought it was concerned more with the materials of a story than with the story itself. Who is this person, where are they, and why? What happens to the character is not really the point; the story is about their journey and the absence of a destination.

I’m pretty sure I’m missing some larger comment on dispossession, particularly because of one violent piece of dialogue around the middle. It happens and then moves on as if it didn’t. This bears careful re-reading.

First published in The Paris Review 241, Fall 2022, and available to subscribers to read here. I am told this is actually an excerpt from Binyam’s novel Hangman, published in 2023 by One

‘Seasonal Dresses’ by Jane Dabate

This is a story by a young writer named Jane Dabate. A lot of her work seems like poetry to me because it is drawn in by feelings and images:

“I found myself cold on the streets, in between brownstones, in between boyfriends, begging my favourite professor to be my guarantor in a series of emails that would go unacknowledged. It was cold in every sense. Summer had passed. Nobody was saying: stay for the weekend!”

Every new writer in London is American now but it turns out some of them are human.

Published in New Papers 2, 2025

‘Thank You’ by Alejandro Zambra

Alejandro Zambra is my favourite living writer. His short stories are all basically about the same thing, or at least use the same materials. Here, an Argentine woman and a Chilean man in an ambiguous relationship have an ambiguous experience in Mexico City. This has happened to all of us, or is going to.

First published in Spanish in Mis documentos in 2023, translated to English by Megan McDowell as My Documents, Fitzcarraldo Press, 2015. Available to read online here

‘The Woman on the Dunes’ by Anaïs Nin

Anais Nin is a pervert, and so is everyone else. In selecting ‘The Woman on the Dunes’ for this series Leone Ross commented she respected Nin “for her insistence on including the erotic in all things”, but I think Nin really recognised the erotic in all things.

I like this story because it diverts in the final third into another story, spoken by one of the characters. It is overwhelming and mildly evil, much like sex itself.

First published in Little Birds, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979

‘American Dreams’ by Peter Carey

The best paper I took at University was by an academic named Ragnhild Eikli on the Theory of the Short Story. It took Joyce’s Dubliners as a theoretical prayerbook for understanding the form, and I think that holds up: Eikli was able to show that in each of Joyce’s stories there is a moment of epiphany and a gesture towards a much larger unnatural tension.

Eikli put me on to this story by Peter Carey which can be read according to those same concerns. He is one of the better-known names in the unknown pantheon of Australian literature.

There is a genuine horror here. There is also much that has ‘aged well’ – hoarding property, building walls, and the intrigue of small transgressions in suburbia. But I think Carey in 1974 was realising something about art or Australia or both that remains unacknowledged: the only available pastime is building tiny models of our situation, then taking them apart.

Published in American Dreams, University of Queensland Press, 1974

‘Geometric Unity’ by Eric Weinstein

I have had a fetishistic preoccupation with the group of thinkers known as the “Intellectual Dark Web” for, I don’t know, around ten years now. A lot of people believe Douglas Murray or Jordan Peterson to be the cornerstone of that movement, but it is in fact disgraced physicist Eric Weinstein, disciple of Peter Theil, whose sole work is this self-published “Theory of Everything”.

Each member of the movement self-styles as an intellectual, but they are really just cranks. There is a delicious aesthetic to this paper, which almost imitates actual thought. Like everything from this circle it comes down to an attempt to justify fascism, though I genuinely don’t think they know that.

Is this a short story? Yes, a kind of narrative: see the concluding passage “Isolation”. I believe the crank is a strange and strangely contemporary figure. I teach at a University and often independent researchers send me their work unsolicited. Some are interesting but most are insane, and almost always claim to be the victim of a conspiracy (Weinstein’s is the ‘Distributed Ideas Suppression Complex’ or ‘DISC’).

I believe we can learn a great deal from them. Here’s Freud:

“Dreams, then, are often most profound when they seem most crazy. In every epoch of history those who have had something to say but could not say it without peril have eagerly assumed a fool’s cap. The audience at whom their forbidden speech was aimed tolerated it more easily if they could at the same time laugh and flatter themselves with the reflection that the unwelcome words were clearly nonsensical”.

Unlike Freud’s nonsense philosopher there is no abstract wisdom to be taken from the crank, but there is a kind of photonegative of learning and aspirational politics. I think Joyce used the term ‘Gnomon’ — a theory of everything that was never suppressed.

Published April 1 2021, available to read online here

Introduction

Animals might be considered, broadly, unsophisticated and unremarkable, while also being cosmically bananas, like the rest of the natural world. It’s interesting to compare how they are observed, presented and communed with in short story form. In this personal anthology, their purpose varies: they are metanarrative, character study, plot device, scene detail and more. The great auk, giant snails, a goldfinch, axolotls, a horse, a polar bear, ortolans, the missing link, the memory of a dog, angels (they count), an invisible creature (it also counts), and finally Lucia Berlin on devastating form (because people are animals too).

‘An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It’ by Jessie Greengrass

When you finish this story, you will feel fully culpable for the extinction of the great auk, even at the remove of 180 years, and not only because it is written in the fourth person. Weep, for the human condition – the violent, gnawing appetite for possession and consumption, and the mental maths of self-justification.

“Here is the truth: we blamed the birds for what we did to them.”

Collected in An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, JM Originals, 2015

‘The Quest for the “Blank Claveringi”’ by Patricia Highsmith

Like so much of Highsmith’s writing, ‘The Quest for the “Blank Claveringi”’ is dehydrating, claustrophobic and vertiginous. An idyllic tropical island becomes a hostile, threatening landscape, and a slow-moving, banal snail becomes a relentless predator for one supercilious professor.

“The professor walked on aimlessly in shallow water near the land. He was still going faster than the snail.”

The pace a man is walking as a gun on the mantelpiece.

Highsmith liked snails, took them to parties in her handbag, and also smuggled them into France in her bra, allegedly. Even if true, it’s not really relevant, although it feels like it is, somehow, incredibly relevant.

First published in Eleven, Heinemann, 1970 and, in the US, as The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories, Doubleday, 1970

‘The Goldfinch Is Fine’ by Giselle Leeb

I don’t read a lot of climate-related fiction, probably because I am a coward. In this story, a weatherman reports on an increasingly severe climate event (it’s very wet). He clings to the live stream of a lonely goldfinch in its nest high up on a glacier as the world drowns around him. You can expect to become increasingly anxious about the safety of this lonely goldfinch, and the equally lonely weatherman, as the world becomes utterly unpredictable.

“The weatherman excuses himself and goes to the toilets. He sits in a stall and gets out his laptop and watches the goldfinch. It has all come down to this: a small bird in nest of ice, alone. Unexpectedly, he starts to cry. Why is he still presenting the weather? It is becoming hard to predict anything.”

While it’s true we’re all lonely birds, or lonely weathermen – in a nest of ice, or an eighty-six-foot wave – when the storm hits, Leeb reminds us that’s not everything we are. I love this whole collection which is no better summarised than by its title Mammals, I Think We Are Called. A whole class of individuals, each one reaching out to connect with the whole.

First published in TSS Publishing, 2018, and Sunburnt Saints: An Anthology of Climate Fiction, Seventy2One, 2021. Collected in Mammals, I Think We Are Called, Salt, 2022