‘Jamesie’ by J. F. Powers

In this dreamt-up anthology of mine, ‘Jamesie’ is shouldering a lot of weight. It’s the story of a small-town kid, obsessed with baseball, who hero-worships Leftie (“the Local Pitcher Most Likely to Succeed”) only to watch as he throws a crucial game.

I want to tell you why this is a great story, but that\s like listening to a solo on the piccolo while the orchestra’’ butting in, heavy on the brass, screaming AMERICANA!

So I’ll come clean.

First, Powers’s ‘Jamesie’ is standing in for every Ray Bradbury protagonist I couldn’t otherwise squeeze into this letter (and throw in the youthful creations of Kotzwinkle and Toole while you’re at it).

Second (and here I have no excuse, because I’m no longer even talking about short stories) the baseball sequences in ‘Jamesie’ are emblematic of the sports commentary sequences that rise in a delirium-inducing tide over the narrative of Americana, my all-time favourite (Don DeLillo) novel.

(I am, incidentally, completely ignorant about American sports. I’m almost afraid of learning about them, for fear that suddenly Don DeLillo, Powers and the rest will, at the height of their Shamanic display, suddenly start to make practical sense. Wouldn’t that be a bust? Picture me as Maria Schneider, terminally disenchanted by Marlon Brando’s account of his ordinary midwestern life at the end of Last Tango in Paris…)

Okay, one last try: Only American writers write well about children in a condition of freedom, and Powers is the best of them at describing ordinary human disappointment.

“‘Why don’t you get out of my room and go and be with them! you’re on their side! and uncle Pat drinks near beer!’”

One other thing to like about Powers, before I end. Like Kipling, he operates in a lucid (Christian) moral universe. If any writer here thinks that would be a limitation on their art, may I humbly suggest that they grow up?

First published in The New Yorker on June 19, 1943, and collected in Prince of Darkness and Other Stories, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y, 1947

‘A Guatemalan Idyll’ by Jane Bowles

I’ve read a lot of Paul. I’m new to Jane. And I don’t know how else to put this: Jane Bowles and her writer-composer husband Paul Bowles shared a brain. There’s no point asking who fed from whom. Two subtly distinct sensibilities, at a formative period in their lives, shared a space that I suspect bore a more than passing resemblance to Gerald Kersh’s “abominable little furnished room” — only in their case it was situated abroad, in a world that the traveller in Jane’s story “had always imagined as a little boy to be inhabited by assassins and orphans, and children whose mothers went to work.”

A North American traveller arrives in a one-horse town in central America and makes exactly the mistake Kipling’s “Boy” makes in the story ‘Thrown Away’. He takes everyone there far too seriously, falls in love, gets into pointless arguments about money — the full nine yards.

Here, though, we see his behaviour through the eyes of the people who live here, and for whom “not taking things seriously” turns out to be a code of behaviour more strange, arcane and violent than any our Traveller, bless him, could ever imagine.

Paul and Jane’s work is gendered in a way that is at once welcome and enriching. Where Paul reaches for the knife, the hammer and the nail in the ear, Jane contents herself with a slap — only it’s a slap turned up to a sort of Bad News Tour 11, “a terrible blow in the face, using the hand which held the pills, and thus leaving them sticking to the child’s moist skin and in her hair”. (If slaps are your thing, incidentally, go straight to ‘Camp Cataract’.) Paul’s alter egos caper and rattle off-stage toward their Shakespearean catharsis. Jane’s Traveller stays pinned, squirming, to the surface of things, beaten into submission by “a formless but militant sounding piece” of dance music (he’s dancing! with a woman! he’s having an idyll!) “which came to many climaxes without ending,” rather like this story, which is not so much a trap for its character (though it is that) so much as it is a test of strength for the reader, because I ask you, just how much anxiety can a body take?

First appeared in Mademoiselle, April 1949, and collected in Plain Pleasures, Peter Owen, London, 1946

‘The Station’ by H. E. Bates

M. John Harrison (who wrote the story ‘Small Heirlooms’, included here) once lent me Seven by Five, a chronologically organised selection of Bates’s short stories. “Your mission,” he told me: “show me the point beyond which everything he touches goes rotten.”

You see, at some point (and long after ‘The Station’ was first written) Bates worked out what it was he was good at, and it killed him stone dead. He stopped exploring his preoccupations and he started fetishizing them. How else could it have happened, that the author of Love for Lydia ended his career wearing the clown nose and big shoes of the “Pop Larkin” series?

In ‘The Station’, a lorry driver and his mate park up at a service station that the new road has forgotten. (You’re right to do a double-take: James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice puts almost exactly the same material through the engine of pulp fiction.)

The waitress is alone. She’s young, beautiful, snapped up at nineteen; her husband is away. (See what I mean about The Postman…?)

There’s a plum orchard out the back and the waitress goes and picks some plums so the drivers can have something sweet to eat. Then the lorry drivers pick some for themselves. They may as well, the plums are ripe, they won’t last long.

The drivers eat the plums. They drink their coffee. They pay and leave, and glancing back, they can see nothing of the station

“but the red sign flashing everlastingly out and on, scarlet to darkness, The Station to nothing at all.”

It’s the single most erotically charged story I have ever encountered. And I’m not talking about a moment in the story, or two, or three, or a special glance, or a particular word — I’m talking about the eroticism infusing the entire story.

What a feat this is probably doesn’t need going over. The erotic is slippy — we slide off it, again and again, into something else: power, politics, pornography, farce–

Farce is interesting: the English found a way of nailing the erotic in place with farce, and called it bawdy. If you want to know what the anima looks like, go look up a beach-shot of Barbara Windsor circa 1969.

But I digress. (You see? Slippy…)

‘The Station’ is what Bates could achieve when his talents had reached their full ripeness. And just like that, the season turned, the plums rotted, and the waitress grew disappointed, or frustrated, or bitter…

Or maybe none of those things! How about she was happy, and contented, and fulfilled, and — God help her — what if she just lived a long time?

That’d do it. That would be enough. Scarlet to darkness. Bates-as-Eros to Bates-as-silage. Genius to nothing at all.

First published in Argosy, January 1935, and collected in Cut and Come Again, Jonathan Cape, London, 1935

‘Goodbye, My Brother’ by John Cheever

Yes, this is the first short story in my Vintage paperback edition of Cheever’s Collected Stories.

Yes, I did only read it last week.

Yes, it was the first of Cheever I’ve ever read. (I’m paid to write books, not read ’em, as somebody else said — another somebody I clearly haven’t read.)

But, since we’re coming to the end: In our inveterate pursuit of small heirlooms — stories that distort us, so we may distort them — it seems to me that the trick, is to read well, but not too seriously. To come at letters like life, not exactly “thoughtlessly, like the animals”, but rather with some necessary and healthful modesty, because the world does not stay still: it’s a helter-skelter, not a viewing platform.

Anyway: ‘Goodbye, My Brother’.

One of the most written-about stories in American letters. Here it is, in unorthodox company, pressing all kinds of buttons (especially the ones marked “Kipling”, “Powers” and “Bowles”), as the Pommeroy family emotionally reject their most conspicuously virtuous member, not because he’s virtuous (and he really is) but because — well, put it this way: were an old man to slip on a banana peel and fall down an open manhole, and then were the manhole to teeter and then fall down on top of him, it would never once occur to Lawrence to split his sides laughing.

“Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do?”

If Neddy Merrill in ‘The Swimmer’ is too big for the world that contains him (yes, I’ve been picking the plums), brother Lawrence is too small. There are people on this good green earth that you must disregard. Are they good people? Doesn’t matter. Virtue counts. But so does scale.

First pulished in The New Yorker, August 25, 1951, and collected in The Enormous Radio and Other Stories, Berkley Publishing Corp., New York, 1952, and now in The Stories of John Cheever, Vintage, 1990

‘Fingers and Toes’ by Leonard Michaels

Whenever Channel 4 beamed a pair of naked buttocks into our living room (and that was way more often than you may remember), my mother would jump from her chair as at a point of order and declare (in a voice that might easily have been a model for late-period Margaret Thatcher at the dispatch box) “THAT’S UNNECESSARY!”

Every time I read a Leonard Michaels story, I find myself leaping out of my chair, and biting down on my lower lip so as not to let Harold Bloom catch me summoning the strong dead.

This is the story of one of those New York loft parties that you never get invited to (and by “you” of course I mean “me”) — a “love?!” triangle, working itself out with mind-numbing absurdity and viciousness in a dance of jammed doors and tangled underwear, literary quotations and dead-eyed confessions.

“‘My feet are like seashells, Henry.”
‘No.’
‘Seashells. Curled, hard. I walk bonky, bonky”

Michaels was one of those wilful, leering, permanent adolescents who garnered plaudits and patrons now and again, much as Baal garnered virgins in the Brecht musical, and for the same reason: people’s well-intentioned cloth-earedness. (How often must we be confusing “protean” with “unwashed”?)

His writing is like an accident in a firework factory — all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. A spew of me-me-me and hee-hee-hee.

Ah, but who am I kidding? It’s all so compelling, catching and fixing everyday human hate in an eruption of verbiage the way Weegee caught fucks in his news-camera flashlight on the shores of Coney Island.

And as it was with Arthur ‘Weegee’ Fellig, so it will be with Michaels: in fifty years time he’ll be hailed a genius.

“I reread the note, chucked up laughs like the clap of big buttocks.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake man, was that really NECESSARY?

First published in Going Places, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1969; also in The Collected Stories, FSG, 2007

Introduction

This isn’t my attempt to establish a personal canon, nor is it necessarily a list of my personal favorites — if so, we’d see a few repeat offenders here. Rather, here are twelve stories that, when I look back, stand out to me as signposts in my literary journey, schooling me in style and guiding me toward themes that would later resurface in my own work. Reading each one of them brought about a revelation—a moment where I realized, “Oh, so you can do that?”

‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ by J. D. Salinger

I reread this one nearly every month. It’s hard to talk about it without falling into hyperbole; I already called it “the Great American Novel” in another interview, even though it’s just seven pages long. What I’ll say is this: in those seven pages, Salinger offers a strikingly comprehensive portrait of living—and loving someone—with mental health struggles, precisely PTSD in this case. Despite the intense subject matter (and tragic ending), it’s not all doom and gloom: Salinger gives us some amusing zingers like “Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948” and “Sex Is Fun—Or Hell.” (Obligatory fun fact, since this is where two of my worlds collide: the band Blur, an oft-cited inspiration of mine, originally wanted to name themselves Seymour after this story’s protagonist.)

First published in The New Yorker, January 1948. Anthologized in 55 Short Stories from the New Yorker, Simon & Schuster 1949 and collected in Salinger’s Nine Stories, Little, Brown 1953

‘The Library of Babel’ by Jorge Luis Borges

‘The Library of Babel’ may not be Borges’ most riveting story from a narrative perspective, but I find it most compelling conceptually. I spent hours exploring every corner of my college library stacks, so the thought of a library that contains every combination of letters in the human language is just too thrilling. There’s something exciting and reassuring about the idea that the perfect words are out there; you just have to claim them as yours. (Bonus: a curious soul programmed a virtual version of the library. Check it out here… the potential for writing prompts is endless.)

First published in Spanish as ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ in El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan, Sur, 1941. First published in English in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962, and Fictions, Grove Press, 1962

‘Uncontrollable, Irrelevant’ by Avigayl Sharp

Most of us had “that one weird teacher.” I had two: a publicly outed Neo-Nazi organizer and an alleged sexual predator. Maybe that’s why Avigayl Sharp’s “Uncontrollable, Irrelevant” struck a chord with me. You’ve got to give it to the Paris Review for opening their Winter 2022 issue with this whammy: two old chums pay a friendly visit to a high school teacher who was canceled for pedophilia. (He’s no Humbert Humbert figure: this guy was preying on young boys.) Beneath the dark humor lurks an urgent question: What are we willing to excuse in exchange for affection?

Published in The Paris Review, Winter 2022

‘Secretary’ by Mary Gaitskill

I recently witnessed a bizarre dogpile in the comments of an Instagram post. A teenage girl had admitted that she didn’t entirely hate being catcalled; adult women pounced on her as if she were a reactionary sleeper agent. Mary Gaitskill would never. ‘Secretary’ recognizes that all too often, young women are forced to reckon with sexuality and subjectivity under less than ideal circumstances. The plot is simple, even archetypal: a lawyer makes advances upon his young secretary; she responds with alternating desire and disgust. While the 2002 film adaptation concludes with a wish fulfilment fantasy, Gaitskill refuses to give her teen protagonist a happy ending; yet she treats her kindly by refusing to castigate or categorize her. James Spader’s movie-star smirk is nowhere to be seen here; we hear more about the lawyer’s hands than we do his face.

Published in Bad Behavior, Simon & Schuster, 1988

‘Cat World’ by Elle Nash

Elle Nash is one of my favorite contemporary writers reckoning with the untraditional ways we seek out and experience intimacy. Stumbling upon ‘Cat World’ was a revelation for me—not only were Internet lingo and strange subcultures suitable subjects for a short story; publications like Guernica were excited to read them. If you’ve ever engaged with a hyper-specific message board or chatroom (as I did in my day, active in the Nancy Drew PC Game community as well as the American Girl Doll fandom), this will resonate with you. If you need further convincing: much of the story consists of dialogue between users named “ExxonMobil6” and “dErAnGeDkItTy69.”

Published in Guernica, October 2020

‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the wake of all the opulent parties that the 2013 Great Gatsby film inspired, I think we’ve collectively forgotten how hilarious F. Scott Fitzgerald could be. A rich little schoolboy named Percy invites a different friend over for spring break each year. At the end of his trip, he’s put to death to keep him from revealing that Percy’s family gets its wealth from… you can probably take a guess. Our protagonist, one of Percy’s victims-to-be, tries to evade his fated demise. This one’s a good reminder that you can make an absurd premise work, as long as you commit to the bit.

First published in The Smart Set, June 2022. Collected in Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922

‘Adrien Brody’ by Marie Calloway

The original wave of alt-lit is often considered male-focused, but Marie Calloway is one of its most iconic authors, proving that even mundane topics can make for insightful writing if penned with brutal honesty and an eye for style. Today’s autofiction scribes should know that they’re walking down a path she bravely paved—when her book what purpose did I serve in your life was released, her diaristic introspection was considered frivolous by some critics. ‘Adrien Brody’ describes a dalliance between two writers—Calloway as autofictionalized narrator and a blogger/essayist assigned the actor’s name as a pseudonym. Not only does it brilliantly capture the inner monologue of a young woman dissecting how her appearance influences others’ perceptions of her—it’s a window into the way curious, hyper-online writers communicate with each other. Reading it as a teen, I dreamed of corresponding with my literary objects of affection the way she did. Revisiting it, the frissons of excitement she feels reading their work and exchanging messages with them are pleasantly familiar.

First self-published in 2011. Anthologized in what purpose did I serve in your life, Tyrant Books, 2013

‘The Bloody Chamber’ by Angela Carter

At this point, fairytale retellings are themselves a tale as old as time. Carter’s forays into feminist horror are enchanting and ever-relevant. While each chapter in The Bloody Chamber is brilliant, the titular story is a personal favorite, as it riffs off my beloved Bluebeard legend. Rather than punish our heroine with some disturbing fate to make the story more “adult” or “modern,” Carter gives her a happy ending, although she does bear the mark of her past trauma (quite literally). (For another, more recent spin on Bluebeard, check out Bluebeard’s Castle by Anna Biller, director of The Love Witch.)

Published in The Bloody Chamber, Gollancz, 1979