‘The Wavemaker Falters’ by George Saunders

Eventually, I got tired of Saunders’ schtick. By the time Tenth of December came out, I was thoroughly bored with the weird amusement parks, the experimental prisons and labs, the coy ad-speak. It was as though every story fit one of four moulds, that Saunders kept re-iterating again, and again. It’s sometimes hard to remember, then, just how much I loved his first collection, when this was all new to me, when I couldn’t yet see the seams of what he was doing and instead was weeping at all the lost souls. Perhaps nobody’s life broke me harder than the narrator of ‘The Wavemaker Falters’, a man in charge of a wavemaker at a weird amusement park (check) whose negligence leads to the death of a young boy, and of his attempts at living with what he had done. (His love-life mirrors that of the character in the Söderberg story as well, I note now that I am writing this.)

Re-reading the story for the first time in over a decade in preparation for this Personal Anthology, I feel as though I’d found a long-lost love letter from someone with whom it ended in tears. George and I may be through, but we will always have Civilwarland.

First published in Witness, November 1993. Collected in Civilwarland in Bad Decline, Random House, 1996

‘A Real Doll’, by A.M. Homes

I spent the summer of 1998 in Iraqi Kurdistan, after having suffered a sort of teen meltdown that made me need to get away from everything and everyone I knew. So I went to stay with family for the summer, ostensibly to “improve my Kurdish”. At the time there was no way to communicate with the outside world other than madly expensive satellite telephones, and the TV channels at my disposal consisted of news in Arabic and not much else. That short, three-month absence from European pop culture led to me returning to school the following fall, having completely missed the weird euro-bubblegum pop phenomenon that was Aqua. I could not believe that ‘Barbie Girl’ was a real song, that people were actually listening to, and felt a little unmoored at the vast radio-wave conquering assault of this ridiculous tune, as though the world I had returned to after three months was not the same world I had left.

When I read A.M. Homes’s ‘A Real Doll’ during a bed-ridden Christmas in 2008, the same feeling of disconcertedness re-appeared, but where the sexualisation of Barbie in the Aqua song was just a silly gimmick, in Homes’s fiction it is deadly serious, a thorough look at an adolescent boy’s psycho-sexual attraction to his sister’s Barbie, whom he dates, three times a week, while the sister is at dance class. He later also has a homoerotic moment with Ken, much to Barbie’s imagined dismay.

After having read it I texted my sister, saying that I had a vague recollection of torturing her dolls, charring their plastic against a spinning bicycle wheel. Homes’s story brought a memory to the fore that I had suppressed, and doubted the veracity of even as it was too specific to be anything but true. The three dots indicating a response in the making pulsated on my phone’s screen for a moment. Then the reply: “Not sure tbh.”

Collected in The Safety of Objects, Daedalus Books, 1990. Can be read online here

‘A Romantic Weekend’ by Mary Gaitskill

There’s something so human about the brutality in Gaitskill’s short fiction. It’s never cruel for cruelty’s sake, but rather manages to touch at something vulnerable, easily bruised. ‘A Romantic Weekend’ tends to get the short shrift when compared to the collection’s other BDSM-themed story, ‘Secretary’ which was made into a so-so movie with Maggie Gyllenhaal, but it’s ‘Weekend’ that gets to the heart of how we try to please one another, without really knowing why we want them in the first place.

I remember this bit of dialogue so vividly, when the pair are still on the plane, yet to commence the weekend that will be everything but romantic:

“Some old people are beautiful in an unearthly way,” she continued. “I saw this old lady in the drugstore the other day who must’ve been in her nineties. She was so fragile and pretty, she was like a little elf.”

He looked at her and said, “Are you going to start being fun to be around or are you going to be a big drag?”

She didn’t answer right away. She didn’t see how this followed her comment about the old lady. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t think you’re very sexual,” he said. “You’re not the way I thought you were when I first met you.”

She was so hurt by this that she had difficulty answering. Finally, she said, “I can be very sexual or unsexual depending on who I’m with an in what situation. It has to be the right kind of thing. I’m sort of a cerebral person. I think I respond to things in a cerebral way, mostly.”

“That’s what I mean.”

Collected in Bad Behavior, Simon & Schuster, 1998

‘White Square’ by Brian Evenson

The story begins: “The black square on the table is meant to represent Gahern’s estranged wife; it is presented as such at Gahern’s request. The gray square beside it stands in for the black square’s new husband, also presented as such at Gahern’s request. Though Hauser has offered him the full gamut of shapes and colors, Gahern insists upon remaining unrepresented. Nothing stands in for him.”

I can’t even begin to describe where it goes from there: it’s absurd and philosophical at the same time, a murder-mystery reduced to two-dimensional shapes. It both destroys and reaffirms any faith that you have in fiction’s ability to have purpose. I missed a train because I was so engrossed in this book, costing me over $80 to catch the next one. It was worth it.

First published in Post Road Magazine, F/W 2001. Collected in The Wavering Knife, University of Alabama Press, 2004. Can be read online here.

‘A Thousand and one Knives’, by Hassan Blasim, translated by Jonathan Wright

It’s a miracle that we have Blasim: an Iraqi writer who cannot get published in his native Arabic (there was an attempt in Lebanon, but the book was banned very quickly thereafter), but instead posted his stories online which we now have in excellent translations courtesy of Jonathan Wright. His stories are absurd mishmashes of Kafka, Borges and Bolaño, but incorporating both ancient Arabic culture (this story owes more than a little to the Arabian Nights, as the title makes clear) and contemporary Iraq. These are some violent, brutal short stories.

In ‘A Thousand and One Knives’ a paraplegic has the magical ability to make knives disappear. He is then captured by terrorist. It does not end happily. The bleakness of Blasim’s stories doesn’t seem nihilistic, however, as much as it demonstrates the dark realities of war, where happy endings are few and far between.

(Other stories that I read fairly recently but which may in time become as important to me as the above include: ‘Virgin’ by April Ayers Lawson, ‘Spins’ by Eley Williams, ‘Track‘ by Nicole Flattery and ‘Femme Maison’ by Joanna Walsh.)

First published in The Iraqi Christ, Comma Press, 2004

Introduction

While much has been written about the short story (though far less than about its show-off younger sibling, the novel) – and this fine series marks an excellent addition to that literature – what many have so far missed is a genuine guiding principle as to the form’s genius. I hope, reader, that you may find one in this list of humble recommendations, which, I trust, will go on to form the basis of a great canon.

‘The Signalman’ by Charles Dickens

Void of Dickens’s occasional lapses into sentimentality, this perfectly-structured piece is filled with other stories: the twisted nature of time, the uncanny effects of telegraphy, the hints of mental illness, the dissipation of a fixed narrative viewpoint, and spectrality and hauntology in all their forms run through it.

First published in All The Year Round, 1866. Read it online here

‘The Adventure of a Traveler’ by Italo Calvino, trans. William Weaver

Federico, who lives in the north of Italy, makes occasional long-distance train journeys to visit his lover Cinzia, who lives in Rome. He travels by night as it’s cheaper, and he is almost always guaranteed an entire compartment to himself. Each time, he undresses carefully and allows himself the pleasure of the enclosed space and precisely-allotted timespan to anticipate his arrival in Rome.  But this night, his solitude is interrupted.

First published in English in Difficult Loves, 1983

‘A Second Story’ by Georgi Gospodinov, trans. Alexis Levitin and Magdalena Levy

This story, for me, shows the value of the anecdote, a tittle-tattle tale overheard, misremembered or stolen, then worked into genius. The anecdote is one of the sources from which short stories derive their wonderful disreputableness. As we know, the greatest short stories have been written by women in faded print dresses drinking neat gin from chipped teacups, and by men possessing little more than a shabby overcoat and a hangover. They are the best of us. Gospodinov tells us about history, translation, love, and memory in a couple of pages. On a train.

First published in And Other Stories, Northwestern Universit Press, 2007

‘The Magic of the Train’ by Lydia Davis

The USA is a country which has largely turned its back on the train as a form of transport, which perhaps accounts for the paucity of the train story (the apotheosis, after all, of the short form) in the North American tradition. Davis (the most reassuringly European of American writers) knows about trains, and the strange effect they have on time. This story is an Einsteinian thought experiment, rendered comprehensible.

First published in Can’t And Won’t, 2014. Read it online here