‘The Haunted Boy’ by Carson McCullers

McCullers wrote misfits and weirdos with such heart and compassion, and her short stories are often as moving as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, probably my favourite book of all time.

In “The Haunted Boy”, a kid named Hugh (yikes) has been ostracized by his peers because his mother spent time in a psychiatric facility after a scary episode. Hugh’s trauma affects every aspect of his life. He tries to form a bond with John, and older kid who is taking care of him.

In her biography of McCullers, Mary V. Dearborn paints her as a bit naïve and childlike even as an adult, and perhaps this is why she wrote children so well. When Hugh finally confesses his fears to his mother, and his father validates him at the end, it’s impossible not to tear up.

Collected in The Ballad of the Sad Café: The Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers, Houghton Mifflin, 1951

‘Rewind’ by Erica McKeen

What Draws Us Near is one of the first books published by Little Ghosts, an independent publisher and horror bookshop in Toronto. In ‘Rewind’, a detached, maybe supernatural narrator describes a mysterious video, like a surveillance video of a crime scene. It describes the action in affectless prose, offering logical interpretations of things that are obviously much more sinister. It’s one of the creepiest and most gruesome stories I’ve ever read.

First published in What Draws Us Near, Little Ghosts, 2023

‘A Temporary Matter’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

This is the first story in Lahiri’s first collection. It’s a perfect distillation of what makes her a special writer: the language is spare and precise, filled with emotional tension. The story is quiet and subtle and devastating.

Shoba and Shukumar recently suffered a miscarriage, and they’re each in a deep depression. They barely speak to each other, and each day they just go through the motions. Because of some roadwork, they are told that their power would be off for one hour every night for a week. They pass the time dining by candlelight, revealing increasingly personal secrets to each other. For most of the story it feels like they’re reconnecting and finding each other again, but then devastation happens.

First published in The New Yorker in 1998 and available for subscribers to read here, and collected in Interpreter of Maladies, Houghton Mifflin, 1999

‘Headlights’ by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

Schweblin writes weird stories – her work has frequently been compared to David Lynch. In ‘Headlights’, newlywed Felicity and her husband stop at a roadside rest stop and he drives away while she’s in the washroom. A woman named Nené comes explains that this is the place where husbands abandon their wives when they decide to move on.

As another car pulls up to drop off a woman, Felicity and Nené manage to hijack it, leaving the man by the side of the road. As the horde of abandoned women fall on him like zombies, the road lights up with the other men’s cars – returning not for their abandoned wives, but for the one man left behind.

Schweblin’s stories often leave a lot of room for interpretation, but this ‘Headlights’ hits like a sledgehammer.

First published in English in Mouthful of Birds, Riverhead Books, 2019. Read in Hotel online here

‘Mani Pedi’ by Souvankham Thammavongsa

Thammavongsa came to Toronto as a refugee, and many of the stories in her collection How to Pronounce Knife feel like they could only take place there. “Mani Pedi” is about Raymond, a boxer who quits fighting and goes to work in his sister’s nail salon. He starts off working the phones but eventually becomes a nail technician himself.

Raymond is a dreamer, and his sister is a hilariously vulgar and cynical realist. His dreams of making it as a boxer didn’t work out, and at the nail salon he dreams of falling in love with his clients. At the end of the story, when his sister berates him for his dreams, he explains:

Raymond, not one to speak up to his sister, but this one time said, “Well, you know, maybe Miss Emily ain’t ever gonna be with a man like me but I want to dream it anyway. It’s a nice feeling and I ain’t had one of those things to myself in a long time. I know I don’t got a chance in hell and faced with that I wanna have that thought anyway. It’s to get by. It’s to get to the next hour, the next day. Don’t you go reminding me what dreams a man like me ought to have. That I can dream at all means something to me.”

First published 2013 in Ex-Puritan, and available to read here, collected in How to Pronounce Knife, McClelland & Stewart, 2020

‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ by Ray Bradbury

Bradbury was my sister’s favourite author (and still is, I just asked her). I didn’t get him when I was a kid, and then when I was 13 my sister moved out and took all her books with her. I only started reading him again in the past couple of years. He’s an easy top 5 for me now too.

‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ takes place on August 4, 2026. An automated house stands alone in a neighbourhood that has otherwise been wiped out by a nuclear bomb. The house goes through its routine to take care, preparing meals and performing daily tasks for the absent family. It’s eerie and haunting.

The title echoes from a poem by Sara Teasdale, written 1918, in the aftermath of the Spanish Flu and the beginning of WWI:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

First published 1950 in Collier’s, collected in The Martian Chronicles, Doubleday, 1950 and The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Everyman, 2010

‘Wheat Kings’ by The Tragically Hip

The Tragically Hip was a legendary Canadian band, and until lead singer Gord Downie’s death from brain cancer in 2017 at age 53, he was one of Canada’s greatest musical storytellers. Like an alt-rock Gordon Lightfoot.

One of their most beloved songs is about David Milgaard, a Saskatoon man who was given a life sentence for a rape and murder he didn’t commit. After 23 years in prison he was exonerated, and eventually the killer was found and convicted.

In Wheat Kings, he immortalizes Milgaard’s story. It’s a gorgeous and memorable song even without context.

In his Zippo lighter he sees the killer’s face
Maybe it’s someone standing in a killer’s place
Twenty years for nothing, well, that’s nothing new
Besides, no one’s interested in something you didn’t do

For millions of Canadians, Gord Downie’s songs with The Hip and as a solo artist were an entry point into Canadian history – Downie even dedicated a whole album to the story of Charlie Wenjack, to draw attention to the past and current mistreatment of Indigenous Canadians by the government.

They even played Saturday Night Live once, and it didn’t go well. The story behind that is a pretty good one in itself.

Fully Completely, MCA, 1992. Available to view here.

Introduction

I’ve noticed over the past decade that I am more interested in short stories and novellas than long epic novels. Nothing wrong with the latter (I recently finished Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle which racks up over 600 pages, and I loved it), but I have been drawn to the economy of thought and language in stories, which leads to an elimination of excessive description. For me, there’s a balance between what the writer sees and what I imagine reading. As I started compiling this list, I thought that there is no pattern to my weave, but I see now that there are certain themes that tug at me, and there are creative elements that appeal to me over and over. I share these stories in no particular order, and I must confess that I’ve never been good about saying what a story or a novel is about because I want the reader to make the discovery while reading. Here goes:

‘The Third Bank of the River’ by João Guimarães Rosa, trans. Barbara Shelby

I love stories with question marks. Ones that make me wonder what is happening, why, and if events are real or imagined. I love stories that me think about what the story is about. Really about. And then to leave me with a few more questions that will take time to untangle. ‘The Third Bank of the River’ is such a story. It is a haunting tale. A man leaves his family to live on a boat in the river. Told from the viewpoint of the son, who seeks to understand his father’s mysterious behavior, wanting to connect with him, hoping he’ll return. What causes people to withdraw? How do they sustain themselves?

First published in Primeiras Estórias, 1962. Translated into English in The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories, Knopf, 1968

‘Love’ by Clarice Lispector, trans. Katrina Dodson

This story has stayed with me since the first time I read it. A lasting impression. An image that I can see very clearly. It is the story of an ordinary life, an expected life, that fractures upon a chance encounter – while riding a bus, a woman sees a blind man, and her ability to ‘see’ things changes. What do you do once you know differently?

First published in Laços de Família, 1960. Translated into English in Family Ties, Avon, 1972, and The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector, New Directions, 2009. Available to read online here.

‘My Life with the Wave’ by Octavio Paz, trans. Eliot Weinberger

This story is about exactly what the title suggests – a man in a relationship with a wave. I was a bit skeptical at first that Paz wouldn’t be able to pull this off. But he did, and he did so brilliantly. It bears all the hallmarks of love and romance and how difficult it is to hold on to that which is wild.

First published in 1949 as part of his collection Águila o sol?. The English translation by Eliot Weinberger appeared in 1976 in the collection Eagle or Sun?, published by New Directions

‘Continuity of Parks’ by Julio Cortázar

I find this story to be perfection. All the elements work toward the desired effect of the story. It takes down the fourth wall and places the reader in the tale. It’s very tightly woven so I cannot say anything about the story without allowing the reader to feel the warmth surface from within as they come to the conclusion.

First published in Spanish in his collection titled Final del juego, 1964. It was translated into English in End of the Game and Other Stories, 1967 – later editions called Blow-Up and Other Stories; also in the Everyman’s Library Cortázar edition, 2014

‘The Adulterous Woman’ by Albert Camus

Another story about a woman and a life seemingly unfulfilled. She travels with her husband on a business trip into the desert and finds herself at the intersection of betrayal. This is another story that I absolutely adore. It nestled perfectly at the beginning of Camus’s collection Exile and the Kingdom. In my mind the worst part of an act of disloyalty is the compromise of self. The question is: When did that act actually occur?

First published in France in L’Exil et le Royaume, 1957. Collected in Exile and the Kingdom, Alfred A. Knopf, 1957; also available as a Penguin Mini Modern Classic, 2011

‘A Circus Attraction’ by Panos Karnezis

The entire collection of Little Infamies is a must read and a must re-read. Superbly crafted. Ingeniously imagined. It was difficult to select which to share in hopes that it will provoke a desire to read them all. Karnezis blends his Greek heritage, which I share, with mythology and magical realism and all things otherworldly. The best recipe in my opinion. And he’s sly and witty. When do we take on the characteristics of what we believe we are? And when are we what we believe we are?

First published in Little Infamies, Jonathan Cape, 2002