‘And How Much of these Hills Is Gold’ by C Pam Zhang

C Pam Zhang wrote this piece as a short story and put it aside. It was only later that she decided to expand it into a novel. So, I am counting it as a short story. To me, it is perfect.

The story is set in the American West at the end of the Gold Rush. But, unlike the rugged cowboy heroes of classic Westerns, Zhang’s protagonists are two girls of Chinese descent, 12-year-old Lucy and her 10-year-old sister Sam. The story opens with the two girls standing over the corpse of their Ba, a failed gold prospector and a brute of a man, made all the harder by poverty and drink. Their Ma is long dead. Penniless and destitute, their mission is to survive in this inhospitable land and to find somewhere to call home.

Zhang’s landscape is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s frontierland: harsh, arid and violent. “Noon sucks them dry. Street stretched shimmering and dusty as snakeskin. End of the dry season, rain a distant memory. They kept quiet, saving spit. The clapboard buildings loomed gray now that heat’s flaked the paint away. People lounge in shadow like dragon lizards. Like lizards, only their eyes move.” By centring of the experience of two Asian American girls, Zhang broadens the quintessentially male territory of the classic Western, allowing her to explore gender, gender identity and race, and their intersection with poverty.

The epigraph in the full novel is This land is not your land, a play on the title of the famous Woodie Guthrie song. The antipathy felt in that slightly changed lyric sums up the story of migration for so many people.

The writer Daisy Johnson describes Zhang’s talent as ‘dazzling’. I cannot think of a better word. Each word shimmers; each sentence sings. If I ever reach the stage where I can write as well as C Pam Zhang, my work in this world will be done.

First published as a short story in The Missouri Review, July 2017. Available online here. Later published as the first chapter of the novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Riverhead Press/Virago, 2020

‘The Match’ by Colson Whitehead

I include this short story, despite the fact it is also part of a novel, because I couldn’t curate an anthology without including a piece of writing by Colson Whitehead. Also, by any objective measure, this story stands by itself.

Whitehead is one of my literary heroes, The Underground Railroad among the best books I’ve ever read. Whitehead writes the brutality of racial violence with unflinching directness. I called on his writing when recreating scenes of real-life brutality in my own novel.

The Nickel Academy, in which the story is set, is based on the Dozier School for Boys, also known as the Florida School for Boys, a juvenile reform school that was a hothouse of abuse, rape, torture and murder.

Its inmates – I call them that though many had not committed any real crime – were separated within the institution by race. ‘The Match’ is about the annual boxing match between the best black boxer and the best white boxer within the school. This year’s favourite is Griff, the prize fighter on the black boys’ side. He’s roundly disliked because he’s a bully, but “no matter what he did the rest of the year, the day of the fight he would be all of them in one black body and he was going to knock the white boy out.”

The white superintendent tells Griff that he must “take a dive” and let the white boy win. However, Griff, who has “stones in his fists and rocks in his head”, miscounts the rounds and ends up winning by mistake. Griff’s ‘punishment’ is to be dragged outside in the middle of the night, strung between two oak trees, hands tethered to iron rings hammered into each of their trunks, and beaten to death.

“When the state of Florida dug him up, fifty years later, the forensic examiner noted the fractures in the wrists and speculated that he’d been restrained before he died, in addition to the other violence attested to by the broken bones.

“Most of those who know the story of the rings in the trees are dead by now. The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep in the heartwood. Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.”

Testifying to anyone who cares to listen. It strikes me that that is the point of all writing. And no one does it better than Colson Whitehead.

First published in The New Yorker on 26 March 2019 and available to subscribers here. It is an adapted version of a chapter in Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Nickel Boys, Fleet, 2019

‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan

The cruelty meted out to children by adults in the Florida School for Boys is reminiscent of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, as described by Claire Keegan in Small Things Like These. Though that novella is among the finest I’ve read, it’s Keegan’s short story ‘Foster’ that has had the most impact on me.

‘Foster’ is narrated by a young unnamed Irish girl who is sent away to live with relatives she doesn’t know because her mother is pregnant and her parents have too many mouths to feed. From the outset, it’s clear that John and Edna Kinsella care for the girl more than her parents ever have. “‘God help you, child,’ Edna whispers. ‘If you were mine, I’d never leave you in a house with strangers.’”

Edna bathes the girl and clothes her, cleans out her ears and brushes her hair. John talks to her kindly, holds her hand, and gives her money for choc-ices in town. These are the parents you wish the girl had. The Kinsellas have their own reasons for wanting to pour out their love; we discover that the couple lost their own child in an accident.

Keegan writes about the small kindnesses people show each other and the quiet powerplay between people who do not much like each other. Her writing is spare; it’s as much about what people don’t say as what they do, what doesn’t happen as what does: “My father takes rhubarb from her, but it is awkward as a baby in his arms. A stalk falls to the floor and then another. He waits for her to pick it up, to hand it to him. She waits for him to do it. Neither one of them will budge. In the end, it’s Kinsella who stoops to lift it.”

Keegan has a way of making you ache with longing for her characters. The ending of ‘Foster’ is enough to hollow you out. The first time I read it, I cried and cried. Keegan has said that, for her, the girl ends up back with her parents. However, she’s also said that it’s for the reader to end the story for themself. For me, the final sentences offer ambiguity. When the child utters the word ‘Daddy’, so clearly intended for Kinsella as she grasps him tight, I find myself willing her back into his arms and choose to feel hope.   

First published in The New Yorker in February 2010, and available to subscribers here. Published in book form by Faber and Faber, 2010. Revised paperback Faber and Faber, 2022

‘The Republic of Motherhood’ by Liz Berry

I had my first baby a long way from home. I missed the support network of family and old friends. My son was a terrible sleeper, and the sleep deprivation nearly broke me. I don’t think the difficulties of adjusting to life with a newborn baby are well enough discussed.

In my current role, I have a fantastic mentor, Professor Abi Curtis at York St John University. I discovered Liz Berry’s poetry in an anthology Curtis edited about early parenthood called Blood and Cord, which contains poetry and short stories about love, loss, grief and loneliness. I liked Berry’s poems so much that I bought The Republic of Motherhood to read more. The titular poem sums up the time in my life when I felt the most untethered:

“In snowfall, I haunted Motherhood’s cemeteries, / the sweet fallen beneath my feet – / Our Lady of Birth Trauma, Our Lady of Psychosis. / I wanted to speak to them, tell them I understood, / but the words came out scrambled, so I knelt instead / and prayed in the chapel of Motherhood, prayed / that the whole wild fucking queendom, / its sorrow, its unbearable skinless beauty, / and all the souls that were in it. I prayed and prayed / until my voice was a nightcry, / sunlight pixelating my face like a kaleidoscope.”

The novel I have enjoyed reading most this year is Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor, which is also about how hard early motherhood is, another work of genius as far as I’m concerned.

First published online in Granta and available to read here. Collected in The Republic of Motherhood, Chatto and Windus, 2018

‘Shit Life Syndrome’ by Stu Hennigan

The project I’m currently working on is run by the writing development agency for the North of England, New Writing North. A Writing Chance aims to open access to the writing industries for new and aspiring writers from working-class and lower-income backgrounds, and for those who face barriers due to intersecting challenges. I met Stu Hennigan, a working-class writer living and working as a senior librarian in Leeds, through this project.

Hennigan is known for non-fiction. However, I think it’s his fiction that people should read. He writes about working-class lives in the North in the vernacular with beautiful Douglas Stuart-like phrasing.

In this story, Jonny meets up with his childhood friend Nat, who he hasn’t seen in months because she disappeared leaving a note asking him not to try and find her.

“In another world they’d have been childhood sweethearts. They were spawned at opposite ends of a scruffbag terrace where what passed for gardens sprouted fucked fridges instead of flowers and every other house had at least one gaffertaped binbag where a window should’ve been. Devonshire Street, it was called. Folk said it was named after a Duke or summat, whatever one of them was.”

When Nat eventually contacts Jonny from Brighton, he saves up and makes his way there. We sit with them on a beach near the charred remnants of a burnt-out West Pier as they get drunk and high.

Though Hennigan lays out rusty, unshiny lives, his characters do not seek pity. He refuses to sugarcoat his stories or make them redemptive to appeal to middle-class readers, saying he’s against “reductive, stereotypical crap”. Hennigan believes that the best endings are ambiguous, which I happen to think too; good writing should make people think.

At the end of this story, Nat flings off her clothes, completely wasted, and heads out into the sea, even though she can’t swim. Jonny, who can’t swim either, has no choice but to follow her. The scene brings to mind one of my favourite songs, The Cure’s ‘Just Like Heaven’: “He saw her shoulders go under and threw himself forward but she was just out of reach, his fingers grasping empty air and as a fuck-off wave rolled up, crested, poised, a heartbeat from shrouding the tranquilized gaze of the bored, uncaring sky.”

‘Shit Life Syndrome’ was praised by an editor at The New Yorker as a “work of evident merit”. I suspect it’s too peculiarly British to strike a chord in the States, but a publisher here should pick it up. We need more stories like this, and work of this merit should be published.

Awaiting publication

‘The Things We Ate’ by Kit de Waal

Kit de Waal was involved in a previous iteration of the project I’m working on, which resulted in this collection of short stories and essays.

Food is one of the things we associate most strongly with home. De Waal’s shortest of short stories is a list of the food that she grew up with:

“Sliceable, fry-able, pink and trembly Spam, steak and kidney pies cooked in a tin that opened with an exciting key. Tinned pork in see-through jelly. Red, molten corned-beef hash, sardines – skin, flesh and vertebrae – and six pigs’ trotters in lemony water, the lungs of a chicken, the neck of a lamb. Ribs.”

The list is full of nostalgia, longing, familial happiness; reading it is like being wrapped up in a warm coat:

“And cocoa with sugar and unexpected, unaccountable heart-lifting chocolate shortbread biscuits after a winter’s night shift from a silent father who thought of his children on his long walk home.”

Collected in Common People: An Anthology of Working-class Writers, edited by Kit de Waal, Unbound, 2019

‘Dart’ by Alice Oswald

Oswald spent three years recording conversations with people along the length of the River Dart in Devon. Her poem ‘Dart’ is a polyphonic log of these voices, from a walker and chambermaid to fishermen and poachers to tin-miners and wool mill workers to a canoeist who drowned. We also hear the mystical forms of nymphs and ancient kings. It’s so much more than a poem: sociological research, documentary, creative non-fiction in vignette.

Here we have the ferryman near the mouth of the river as it approaches the sea: “Dartmouth and Kingsweir – / two worlds, like two foxes in a wood, / and each one can hear the wind-fractured / closeness of the other.”

The wind-fractured closeness of the other. Isn’t that beautiful?

We tend to see the other in almost exclusively human terms, but the other also exists in the nature around us. Oswald has said that she likes the “unfixity” of water, the impossibility of pinning it down to one time and place, “a whole millennium going by in the form of a wave.” A reminder that human life is ephemeral, however hard we try to tether ourselves to physical places.

One of the things that has horrified me most about moving back to the UK after a long time away is the state of our rivers. It is nothing short of a tragedy. Oswald wrote Dartin 2002. I wonder what condition the Dart is in now. I live in York, by the River Ouse, which is frequently pumped full of sewage. My granny lived in Hay-on-Wye. I swam in and canoed on the Wye all through my childhood; now it is full of algae blooms caused by phosphates from the shit of 20 million chickens farmed in its catchment.

Through my current work, I’ve met the brilliant writer Tom Bullough, who is currently recording the stories of more than a hundred people along the course of the Wye, from the Wales-England border to its source in the Cambrian Mountains. The result will be an installation that, much like Oswald’s Dart, “will represent multiple communities – their histories, hopes and concerns – but also, centrally, reflect upon the Wye itself: a river which, due to agricultural pollution and the impacts of climate change, has become infamous for its poor condition.” I’m so interested to see the work that he produces.

From Dart, Faber and Faber, 2002

‘The Man Who Planted Trees’ by Jean Giono, translated by Barbara Bray

I want to end my anthology on a hopeful note.

This allegorical tale is about a young man who encounters Elzéard Bouffier, a shepherd, while walking in a denuded valley in the foothills of the Alps in 1913. Our narrator stops to chat with the shepherd, who takes him back to his hut. After a simple meal, Bouffier takes him out and shows him what he is up to, which is planting acorns. Over the course of three years, the shepherd has planted a hundred thousand trees, of which about ten thousand have grown.

“Because I was young I naturally thought of the future in terms of myself, and assumed everyone sought the same happiness. So I remarked how magnificent his ten thousand oak trees would be in thirty years’ time. He answered quite simply that, if God spared him, he’d have planted so many trees in those thirty years, the ten thousand would be just a drop in the ocean.”

The young man returns at the end of the First World War to find the deserted valley is now covered with native trees. He continues to go back each year, and each time there are more and more. The addition of so many trees has changed the environment completely; streams that were once dry flow again, and the deserted valley is attracting families.

A government delegation, in complete ignorance of the shepherd’s work, declares the area a “natural forest” and protects it. One year, our narrator takes a friend, who says of the shepherd: “He’s the wisest man in the world! He’s discovered a perfect recipe for happiness.” When the shepherd dies in his late 80s, he leaves behind an invigorated land.

The tale became a touchstone for the environmental movement in France and beyond. Jean Giono never took any royalties; he allowed the story to be distributed for free. My copy contains an afterward by Giono’s daughter Aline, who mentions other titles the story has had over the years, one of which is ‘The Man who Planted Hope and Reaped Happiness’. I prefer that title.

Bouffier’s active citizenship is quiet and plodding; it binds him to the land in the best possible way. The story serves as a reminder that amid all the loud, shouty voices, and all the bad we find in the world, there is also good.

First published in French as ‘L’Homme qui plantait des arbres’ in 1953. First published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, 1996

Introduction

This is a selection of stories (and one song) that have lived in my memory since reading them, in some cases for twenty years or more, in others for a few months. They’re almost all funny in one way or another – dryly witty, outlandish, outrageous, laughter in the dark – and almost all concern that critical moment in their central characters’ lives when everything has shifted, or is about to. My novel Test Kitchen, set in the kitchen and dining room of a high-end restaurant, includes short stories of a sort – the narratives of the diners at each table – and each springs from a similar instant of recent, impending or concurrent change: a transformative realisation, an impetuous decision, a long-planned trap finally sprung. I can trace these in some way back to the stories I’ve chosen below.

Some of the authors here were certainties from the moment I decided to put together a personal anthology (and what a pleasure it was to reread swathes of their work in search of the story that spoke to me most). In other cases – among them John McGahern, Camilla Grudova, David Means, Lucia Berlin, Bora Chung, Petina Gappah, Timothy J. Jarvis, Lorrie Moore and Dennis Cooper – selecting just one story to represent their work felt impossible and I reluctantly had to omit them.

‘Honored Guest’ by Joy Williams

I could nominate any number of Joy Williams’s sere, steely, dryly mordant stories – overall she may be my favourite writer of the form (and her The Quick and the Dead is an all-time top ten novel for me). In ‘Honored Guest’, Lemore and her teenaged daughter Helen are coming to terms – or not – with the prospect of Lenore’s imminent death. This gleefully merciless story opens with Helen’s dismayed realisation that she can’t even threaten suicide, the teenager’s operatic gambit: “Suicide was so corny and you had to be careful in this milieu which was eleventh grade because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke.” The double whammy of “corny” and “milieu” shows us Helen precisely. William’s stories grow distorted and weird, cacti in the desert; what I love most are their surreal touches, hinting at other kinds of consciousness that run alongside the everyday and sometimes jump tracks: here, the family dog has developed a special growl directed solely at Lenore when it cannot be overheard; the mother herself has an unexpectedly heartbreaking habit of calling her own name at times of stress or panic, as if ventriloquising the fear Helen is too transfixed to articulate.

First published in Honored Guest, Knopf, 2004; collected in The Visiting Privilege, Tuskar Rock, 2016; you can read an extract of the story here

‘Some Other, Better Otto’ by Deborah Eisenberg

‘“We’re not people – we’re family.”’ What had stuck in my mind from previous readings of ‘Some Other, Better Otto’ was its central set piece, a fraught family Thanksgiving. I hadn’t previously read it, however, as an investigation – glimpsed amid glittering, razor-sharp jokes that distract and deflect – of the wound of internalised homophobia. As he braces himself for the dreaded celebration, we come to understand that the vulnerable, cynical Otto has learned a sense of unworthiness in which the microaggressions of his family, unintended through they may be, have played a part. Deeply insecure about his deserving of love, he spends much of this story trying to drive away his almost saintly partner: “Why had lovely William stayed with disagreeable old him for all this time?” Eisenberg gives Otto a counterweight, another satellite sibling trying to avoid the rest of the family: his sister Sharon, a brilliant scientist with mental health issues (an early line that made me bark with laughter – when she supplies a swift and confident answer to a question he considers abstruse, Otto is moved to question expertise: “Strange, you really couldn’t tell, half the time, whether someone was knowledgeable or insane” – becomes poignant as Sharon’s story is revealed). You can’t pick your relatives, as they say, but you can choose how you deal with them and you can construct a new kind of family – lovers, allies, those others with whom you have shared experiences, and fears, and injuries.

First published in The Yale Review, January 2003, and available to read here; Collected in Twilight of the Superheroes, Picador, 2006

‘Civilization and its Discontents’ by Helen Garner

A man and a woman; a hotel room in a foreign city; an affair maybe at an end, certainly winding down; a flight home; a reunion with an adult child. In some ways nothing much happens in this story, but in the neat witticisms the lovers exchange – because it’s too late for the big conversations – and the touching banter between mother and son, as well as the careful shapelessness with which Helen Garner allows it to unspool, one thing after another, it flows like life. I vividly remember reading this story over breakfast in St Kilda, Melbourne, putting the book down on the table and having that rare thought that arrives as a complete sentence: “That’s how you do it.” Garner’s stories are close and intimate: they are a friend who sits down beside you, slightly overfills a wine glass for each of you and says, “You won’t believe what he did next.” But it might be the self-ironising smirk of its title that makes this story so great.

Collected in Postcards from Surfers, McPhee-Gribble/Penguin, 1985

‘The Last Mohican’ by Bernard Malamud

I love when a writer falls for their own character and brings them back in multiple short stories. Here’s the debut of Fidelman, a “self-confessed failure as a painter” who arrives in Rome to work on a monograph on Giotto. Almost immediately, he’s targeted by Susskind, a Jewish-Italian scrounger who wangles a few bucks from the scholar – although not the “spare suit” he hopes for as he eyes Fidelman’s suitcase. This first encounter is not to be their last, and Fidelman’s project is about to go very far wrong. The two are intractable opposites, as signified in their initial exchange, in which Fidelman’s lofty false modesty (“He coughed a little … ‘I’ve given a great deal of time and study to his [Giotto’s] work’”) is brought low by Susskind’s ambiguous but wonderfully skewering response: “‘So I know him too.’” Fidelman is the classic Malamud mensch who, believing himself well-meaning, is about to discover the limits to his good humour; Susskind is his mirror image, his tormentor, but maybe also his conscience, and his educator. When Fidelman’s briefcase, containing the invaluable first chapter of his manuscript, goes missing, he immediately suspects the several times denied Susskind and, abandoning his wallowing in classical history, pursues his quarry through signifiers of a much more recent history: the ghetto, its synagogue, Rome’s Jewish cemetery. What the two men reach is not an accord or mutual respect, maybe not even an understanding, but something more complex and nuanced, a kind of merging.

First published in the Paris Review, 1958 and  collected in The Magic Barrel, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1958 and The Stories of Bernard Malamud, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983

‘Nachman from Los Angeles’ by Leonard Michaels

Leonard Michaels is what they call “a writers’ writer”, by which I mean that I only know of two other people who’ve read him, both of them fellow authors, and one of them only because I pressed a copy of Michaels’s Nachman Stories into his hands myself. Like Malamud’s Fidelman, Nachman is a character who recurs in multiple stories – a somewhat unworldly academic whom his creator drops into a succession of ethical and moral dilemmas to see what happens. Despite his insistence that he wants nothing more than to “do mathematics”, “problems so difficult that [he] sometimes cried”, Nachman is just as capable of significant moral equivocation as those around him, of allowing himself to be manipulated, and of tying himself in entertainingly hypocritical knots. In ‘Nachman from Los Angeles’ the mathematician recalls a time two decades earlier when he was prevailed upon to write a college paper on Bergsonian metaphysics – not his forte – for Prince Ali Massid, a very wealthy, very charming overseas student who is not merely handsome, Nachman notices, but “perfect”. Despite recognising that it is not “strictly correct to write a paper for someone else”, Nachman collects the books he’ll need, begins the required reading, even comes to enjoy the unfamiliar material – and then stalls. As the deadline approaches, Ali showers the mathematicians with gifts, bribes, beseeches him, sends his cheerleader girlfriend to Nachman’s apartment in a wretched attempt at entrapment – but Nachman is stuck because he has put himself in the impossible position of contravening a moral code he only tells himself he possesses. He cannot write the paper and compromise himself; nor can he definitively back out of the agreement he made with Ali and show himself to be dishonourable. What to do? To write the paper or not? Twenty years on, he is still turning the question over in his mind.

First published in The New Yorker, January 2001 and available to read here; collected in The Collected Stories, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007 and The Nachman Stories, Daunt Books, 2017