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

‘The Plague in Bergamo’ by Jens Peter Jacobsen

Such a clever story. I like clever stories. There is a timelessness to this tale. A plague wipes out a significant part of the population, and those left living rejoice with debauchery. What are the consequences of a life lived without a moral framework? Is the proper frame to live as if you could die at any moment? What do you help bring about as a result?

First published in Jyllands-Posten, 1889. Collected in The Plague in Bergamo, Gyldendal, 1890

‘Young Goodman Brown’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Another outstanding story that leaves you wondering. Real or imagined? Young Goodman Brown goes into the forest innocent and comes out suspicious, bitter, and forever changed. All around him, he sees duality and hypocrisy. Where is the forest in our daily lives? Who and what inhabitant it? How do we know that what we perceive is real?

First published in New England Magazine, 1835. Collected in Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846 and The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Doubleday, 1982

‘The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow’ by Gabriel García Márquez, trans Edith Grossman

Marquez is one in my holy literary trinity (along with N. Kazantzakis and L. Durrell). While there are many stories I could share, I selected this one because of bureaucracy – that which is excessively complex and hard, if not impossible, to engage with or tackle or overcome or… When do we give in to the feeling and thus idea of being powerless? And why?

First published as part of his collection Doce Cuentos Peregrinos, 1992, and in English in Strange Pilgrims, 1993, Jonathan Cape

‘The Book of Sand’ by Jorge Louis Borges

What if you found a mysterious book that contained infinite wisdom? What would you hope to find in the pages? I like to think that this is a simple treatise on the power of books, but it’s more than that. The story is about a man who acquires a book such as the one I’ve described. He becomes obsessed with it and spends all of his time with it. Until handling the book becomes too much to grasp.

First published in Spanish 1975 as part of a short story collection of the same name. The English translation first appeared in The New Yorker in 1976 and can be found here, and the entire collection was published in 1977.

Old Rosa: A Novel in Two Stories by Reinaldo Arenas

Old Rosa is a novel in two stories as the title states, so I’m counting this selection for two slots on my list. I recall being profoundly moved upon first reading this book. It was like putting my foot in the river and getting pulled in and rushed along with the current – hard to stop. The stories are harsh in their reality, and ultimately, they are dreamlike and disturbing. Another to reread over time.

Published by Grove Press, 1989

Introduction

This isn’t a scandalous selection, but outrage was my jumping off point for this personal anthology. I’m an editor at a publisher that produces textbooks for Spanish teens learning English. Because of our demographic, each time a famous person is mentioned in one of the books, part of the editorial process now includes searching the person’s name + ‘scandal’. Just to be sure.

This crossed my mind when thinking of which short stories to include here; should I employ the same editorial process as I do at work? I asked myself. And perhaps also because the first author that came to mind (literally, he appeared there without me actually having to think) was Vladimir Nabokov.

‘The Enchanter’ by Vladimir Nabokov

I fell in love with Lolita because of the way Nabokov uses language (This later developed into a full-blown fixation on multilingual authors and a particular use of English described as ‘native and foreign both’.) and also because obsession interests me greatly. When, many years later, the novel was included on a reading list for a creative writing master’s I was studying, I was genuinely surprised at people’s shock. Not that I didn’t notice the abuse, just that, to me, it wasn’t what most struck me about the novel. ‘The Enchanter’ preceded Lolita and they share the same brilliant, twisted premise: marry the ailing widowed mother of a young girl in order to later become her sole guardian. But what initially really fascinated me about this story, was how it came about. In Author’s Note One of ‘The Enchanter’, Nabokov writes: “As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” That this was where the idea for ‘The Enchanter’ and Lolita began, both makes a lot of sense and no sense, which is how the writing process feels a lot of the time, and also how the best ideas are born.

Included in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, Penguin, 1975