‘The Day Before New Year’s Eve, Manzanillo, Mexico’ by Austin Sanchez-Moran

In this story, the narrator recounts a journey home from a restaurant with his family. They spot a gathering by the side of the road, where some other families are playing music and dancing beside a life-sized nativity scene. The narrator’s mother gets out of their car and joins the revellers, who are celebrating the new year early. The narrator and his father follow, and they dance for a while on a ledge of land that overlooks the town and the ocean. That’s it. A simple vignette. And yet, and yet. First person narration in the past tense creates, without lengthy Proustian discourse, a subtle, delicate veil of nostalgia over the events. The wholesomeness of the scene is striking too for how rare it is in fiction of this type, which generally tends towards some moment of unsettling, or reflected poignancy or humour. This is just a moment of communion, of winter warmth in the desert.

(Published in the Denver Quareterly 50.4)

‘Sovetskoye Shampanskoye’ by Berit Ellingsen

This and the following flash, ‘Family’, come from Flash Fiction International, an anthology from Norton, but I’ve managed to source them online. Nine numbered paragraphs tell the life of a resident in Soviet Russia, from his childhood under the northern lights to the moments before his execution by firing squad on Glienicke bridge. In between childhood and death; the evocation of a cold, stirring world of gilded rooms, regional ‘Champagne’, and state secrets.

‘6 are the white tiles he spatters when they ask about his wife’s documents and microfilms, again and again. He tells them about her late hours in the committee building. They apprehend her and she doesn’t come back. Behind the gilded Regency doors, underneath the unlit crystal, he stands in silence while he considers the nature of truth. He takes up a new position.’

It’s one of those pieces you can read endlessly, or imagine as a full-length film or novel. But it isn’t either of those things. The author has chosen to give us slivers. In doing so, she is not denying her readers a longer more immersive work. She is distilling. She is passing us photographs and black-redacted snippets in a manila envelope; this much is enough risk, revelation.

(Read online at Smokelong Quarterly)

‘Family’ by Jensen Beach

Incident and witness, probability, truth, the past, anecdote. In this story, a family bicker about the possibility of lightning striking twice, then sit down to lunch. During that lunch, storm clouds gather and there is a flash of lightning, after which:

“Someone said to look out the window and someone else did, where they saw that someone was now lying on the grass near the house in a wet heap of someone. Someone said, did it happen? Someone said that it had and someone else said that it hadn’t…”

You will notice the immediate conceit of this piece, which is that the family members, an incalculable number, are all referred to as ‘someone’. This happens throughout, and, along with the story’s uncertainty over the truth of the incident, causes a thorough destabilisation of the ideas of characterisation and action. We don’t even know if lightning has struck ‘someone’ in the past, or whether the action has happened now (for either the first time, or at all). The story interrogates the idea of the family story – usually dateless, like this. We all have a ‘someone’ in our families, if we have families, who experienced something unusual and unlikely – or, according to other members of the family, someone is just making things up, or these events happened in a completely different way. It’s clever and startling to see that sense of communal narrative stripped down and made anonymous and strange.

(Read online at necessary fiction.com)

‘Anecdotes from the Life of Pushkin’ by Daniil Kharms

Kharms, the absurdist Russian grandfather of flash fiction, has many pieces that could be included in an anthology of the history of the form. For me, he can be too harmlessly gruesome (stories where one grandmother after another fall out of a window, for example). But this one I enjoy very much, because it does that charming, petty thing of taking a well-known figure and putting them in odd situations, rewriting what one might expect about their way of seeing the world and behaving in it. In these anecdotes, Kharms reforms Pushkin as a kind of benignly weird public nuisance:

‘6. Pushkin liked to throw stones. If he saw stones, then he would start throwing them. Sometimes he would fly into such a temper that he would stand there, red in the face, waving his arms and throwing stones. It really was rather awful!”

Pushkin, in Kharms’ narrative, also reacts badly to being teased by his friends (for having broken his legs and having to use a wheelchair), envies beard growth, and repeatedly falls out of chairs along with his ‘idiot sons’, none of whom know how to sit. What value does all of this have? Perhaps in the fact that it will forever alter your impression of Pushkin. Read Eugene Onegin, and imagine him leering over your shoulder, rock in hand. The world has been changed, just a little bit. For the better or worse is not the point.

(In Today I Wrote Nothing, Duckworth. Read online here)

‘Windfall’ by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Flash fiction or prose poem? The fact that this is in Pegeen Kelly’s poetry collection The Orchard would probably give weight to the argument for the latter. But I like to think it is possible to be both. In ‘Windfall’, the narrator relates the strange alterations of a madman to an otherwise natural woodland – sculptures, hidden gardens of eerie flowers now collapsing into neglect, and most hauntingly, an old, black water pond that has been left unattended for years:

‘Though the shapes took on weight and muscle and definite form, it took my mind a long time to accept what I saw. The pond was full of ornamental carp, and they were large, larger than the carp I have seen in museum pools, large as trumpets, and so gold they were almost yellow. In circles, wide and small, the plated fish moved, and there were so many of them they could not be counted, though for a long time I tried to count them.’

In the water, the fish appear in the dank rotten water as shifting layers of precious metals or ripe fruits, with one larger carp below, circling. The narrator feeds them bread, and ponders what she is seeing, the choices of the madman, the overlap of nature, creation, intent and the struggle between that intent and individual comprehension. It’s a lot. It is both poetry and prose, circling, feeding, standing in a dark wood waiting to be considered. I think I could read it endlessly, and still feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. That is how much we can ask from flash, and how much, in the hands of an excellent writer, it can give.

(from The Orchard, BOA Educators, Ltd., 1995. Read online here)

‘Heavy Weather’, by Helen Simpson

In a way this was the story that launched me into adulthood, that gave me, aged 21, an idea of what being a grown-up might be like. It’s as bald a piece of domestic fiction as you could imagine: a couple (Jonathan – ha! – and Frances) are on holiday in Dorset with their two young children. They, Frances especially, are battered by tiredness: tired through lack of sleep, tired with each other, and tired with the limitations placed on selfhood by the mere fact of having children. This all comes to a head when Frances discovers that Jonathan, sent out on a food shopping trip in the car, has pulled over in a layby to read a few pages of their beloved Hardy. “’You’ve been reading!’ said Frances accusingly. ‘When did you read?’” The story is funny and brutal about the trials of parenthood, but ends on a moment of affirmation that manages not to seem cheap. I now have three children, and have lived out pretty much everything that happens in this story. It’s just possible that Simpson, sublime proselytizer of the everyday, is to blame.

(first read in the second Granta Best of Young British Novelists. Also available in the collection Dear George and in Simpson’s selected stories, A Bunch of Fives. Available to Granta subscribers here)

‘Dance in America’, by Lorrie Moore

If I had to choose a favourite story – the one that is closest to my heart – then this would be it. I often set it for Creative Writing students, to see how they cope with its sentimentality, for although Moore majors in irony, she can also tip over into the whimsical. This story walks the line between the two with grace and ease. If ‘Heavy Weather’ is pro-family propaganda that would have made de Gaulle proud, then ‘Dance in America’ cheerleads for the virtue of art – although it takes an interesting route to get there. Its narrator is a dance teacher (single, no children) who drops in on an old friend, Cal, and his wife, and their son, Eugene, who has cystic fibrosis and is likely to die young. Moore gives precocious Eugene most of the best lines, though Cal has the best line of all. ‘“The arts are so nice and wonderful. But really: I say, let’s give all the money, every last fucking dime, to science.”’ Looking at the narrator, with her failing career, her chronic self-absorption and self-deprecation, it’s hard not to agree. But Moore shows how art – and art of the most homely and pedestrian kind – can pay its way, even if she can’t resist stealing the narrator’s happy ending out from under her.

(read in Moore’s collection Birds of America, also in her 2008 Collected Stories. You can hear Louise Erdrich read and discuss it on the New Yorker fiction podcast here)

‘Sredni Vashtar’, by Saki

If my first two stories were classic literary fiction, replete with the tropes and trappings of the genre, then this is different: short story as ritual incantation. It’s a dark little parcel of viciousness dressed up in the scantest narrative and characterisation. There is no weight to the set-up (sickly boy, living with his strict female older cousin, worships a pet polecat he keeps in the garden shed), no moral strength to the pay-off beyond its own pleasure in destruction. Another story I loved as a child was Kipling’s ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’ (brave mongoose saves human child) and this is its evil – and better – twin, a fever dream of violence and revenge.

(read in an old hardback Saki given me by my grandmother. Available in any number of editions and anthologies, and online, including here)

‘Loon Man’, by John Edgar Wideman

I read this story in a book of Wideman’s stories I was sent to review for my student newspaper. I’d never heard of Wideman, and his name isn’t much mentioned today. Although I eventually lost my copy, or gave it away, a couple of its stories have stayed with me over the years, especially one I remembered as ‘Loon Lake’: a haunting thing set somewhere in rural North America – the heart of the heart of the country – with the calls of loons (divers) echoing around remote shacks at night. I reunited myself with the collection via the internet, and although there are other stories in it I now think are better (‘Across the Wide Missouri’ for instance), it’s ‘Loon Man’ that belongs in my anthology, for the way it lodged in my consciousness and coloured my thoughts for more than twenty years. “On full moon nights the loons howl like crazed dogs.”

(first published in the U.S. in All Stories are True; the same title was used for his Picador UK collected stories, which is where I read it)

‘A Horse for the Sun’, by U.R. Anantha Murthy

I read this story when I was studying with Amit Chaudhuri – who edited the anthology it comes from – at the University of East Anglia, and I found it moving then, as I find it moving now. It’s an enquiry into modernity and authenticity, and into the possibility of ever ‘going back’. The narrator is an Indian writer, thoroughly urbanized, who visits his childhood village and bumps into an old schoolfriend, Venkata. Always a clown as a youngster, Venkata has grown into a holy fool, a village idiot who acts as a herbalist, amateur nurse to the ungrateful sick, and butt for his exasperated wife and volatile son. His forte is the oil bath, an intense Ayurvedic massage, which the narrator submits to with embarrassment. “Is he a madcap or a hypocrite or a scraggly-bearded saint?” he wonders, as Venkata dances around him, anointing him and drumming out intricate rhythms on his head and body. As with Simpson’s story, the epiphany is minor key, and doubtless temporary, but it is enough to make the reader squint anew at their own assumptions. The title refers to the Kannada name for a grasshopper.

(read in The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature, where it is translated from the Kannada by Manu Sherry and A.K. Ramanujan.)

‘The Cows’, by Lydia Davis

In which Davis (or her narrator, though it matters not a jot) presents a series of statements and questions about three cows that live in a field near her house. At times it seems like an exercise in Wittgensteinian philosophy, at times like a children’s book for adults, at times like the painful birth throes of nature writing. All three possibilities, devolve, of course to the simple, stringent testing of words against the world that is Davis’s stock-in-trade. Not a story by any of your usual parameters, but utterly beguiling.

(first printed as a chapbook, but I read it in Electric Literature Vol 2; also collected in Can’t and Won’t)

‘Caterpillars’, by James Lasdun

The figure of the Bad Dad turns up pretty frequently in literature, though often in the form of an apologia: it’s hard, being a Bad Dad; Bad Dads are misunderstood. Or else their badness is somehow resolved into comedy. Sometimes, however, you come across a Bad Dad story that you can’t look away from, that you have to read through your fingers. This is one of those. There is no redemption for Craig when, out on a walk with his mopey son and increasingly uncertain new girlfriend, he takes umbrage at a group of people who aren’t playing by his personal Countryside Code, and sets a trap for them that backfires horribly. The horror and punishment is so subdued you might not think much of it if you hadn’t already seen the like of it at close hand. At very close hand, if you see what I’m saying.

(First read in Granta 104: Fathers. Also collected in It’s Beginning to Hurt. Granta subscribers can read it here)

‘The Eggy Stone’, by Tessa Hadley

An exquisite short story – exquisite in its shortness, and its completeness. Hadley gives us the famous short-storian “glimpse” (c.f. VS Pritchett, David Miller), only here it is a glimpse into the past, a shutter opening onto childhood and then abruptly slamming shut again. A school camping trip to the seaside leads to a brief, intense friendship between the narrator and the Cool Girl of the class – a friendship entirely predicated on the Eggy Stone, picked up at random from the beach and turned by the two girls into a small-scale cult. They sing to it, sleep with it, and pass it between them like a talisman. There is something sinister in all this: the story, you think, could easily end up like ‘Shredni Vashtar’, with an act of terrible violence, but it doesn’t. The cult of the Eggy Stone ends as suddenly as it started, and the friendship melts away like snow in springtime, leaving nothing behind.

(in Sunstroke, also available on the Guardian website here)

‘Octet’, by David Foster Wallace

This is Wallace at his po-mo-est. It takes the form of a series of ‘Pop Quizzes’ sketching out scenarios for unrealized stories, complete with fatuous pop-psychology questions for the reader. It has footnotes. Sometimes very long footnotes. And it conducts a commentary on its own performance that takes up-its-own-arse-ness to a whole new level. But it shows what makes Wallace so essential as a writer: his immense psychological acuity – and I mean immense to the point of freakishness. No writer since Muriel Spark has been so adept at putting her characters on a skewer – the thinnest, sharpest, most surgically precise skewer imaginable – (and of course the author is just as much a character as anyone). That said, Wallace does it with more compassion than Spark. And he does it even when the characters have none of the heft and texture expected in literary fiction, or fiction of any kind. They don’t even have names. All they have is their problems. No, the pyrotechnics are smokescreen. The story is all about the pain and nausea inherent in self-consciousness.

(in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men)