‘This Is Paradise’ by Kristiana Kahakauwila

This story begins one of my all time favorite story collections by the same title. Dark, precise, and exhilarating. I’m fortunate and honored to count Kahakauwila as family, a friend, and source of inspiration. This collection was grossly overlooked, perhaps because it is hard, honest, and resists the white colonial gaze and violence perpetrated by American and European ideals of paradise and entitlement to an already inhabited vision of paradise. The narrator is that of a collective, a community of housekeepers for one of the many resorts along the beach in Waikiki who befriend a tourist. We get a glimpse into the private and collective lives until Susan vanishes with a man and meets her end; her death nothing more than a passing warning as more and more tourists flock to claim their little version of what they think is paradise.

Collected in This Is Paradise: Stories, Hogarth, 2013

‘This Is Not Miami’ by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes

Melchor knows brutality and how human fear can amplify those brutalities. Not a fictitious story but the testimony of a fellow human’s fearful experience with brutality. There is little introspection in this relato, this testament of experience. I’m a big fan of Melchor’s two novels, Hurricane Season and Paradise, for their depth and acute detail of human hatred, anger, and pain. Her style is wonderfully dense, lyrical, and unrelenting.

First published in Spanish in Aquí no es Miami, Almadía, 2013, and in English in This Is Not Miami, New Directions/Fitzcarraldo 2023

‘Florida Lives’ by Dionne Irving

Sometimes it can be difficult to determine when a story, or an occurrence, becomes fiction, and perhaps when it is considered nonfiction, or memoir. A straightforward way of thinking about this might be that nonfiction seeks to maintain truth, accuracy, and facts while fiction bends the rules; the borders of trust, truth, and self awareness blurred and distorted like the crumbling relationship of the characters in ‘Florida Lives’ and the encroaching and “tacky” neighbors. Though in both fiction and nonfiction, we, or our characters, can become the thing we have come to judge or detest. A former mentor and professor of mine, Simon J. Ortiz, had the saying: “If it’s fiction, it better be true.” Which I’ve taken to mean that the emotional resonance of any piece of writing should ring true with regard to human emotion and experience. Often, when we write, we write from our own experiences and can use the form of fiction to examine what could have been or what went wrong or what went right, blurring the lines between reality and imagination. Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño, has said: “In fiction, anything is possible.”

First published in The Missouri Review, September 2010. Collected in The Islands: Stories, Catapult 2022

‘Susto’ by Manuel Muñoz

Atmosphere. Or, a story’s ability to create a certain mood, maintain tension, and create an emotional setting. Manuel Muñoz’s story “Susto” can be translated as “fright” in English, but in a Mexican context it can imply a deeper, stronger trauma. The story centers around a working class community and a foreman who lives in the town who comes across the body of a dead man who has materialized. A fairly straightforward plot line or narrative, but what draws the reader in and creates the atmosphere or mood of the story is Muñoz’s style: elegant and lucid, existing in a liminal space between hyperreality and gothic superstitions. This is a story crafted with patience and attention to detail, not a single word is wasted or extraneous. Atmosphere can be closely related and effect genre, but when considered and crafted with attention to style the story can transcend genre and become something more unique and, in the case of ‘Susto,’ more haunting.

First published in Freeman’s, California, 2019. Collected in The Consequences, Graywolf Press 2022

‘The Head’ by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur

Chung’s work is new to me. A talking head made of clay, hair, fecal matter, and any other bodily waste put into the toilet by the main character. This creation calling out, “Mother!” It took me a few false starts to read through the story because each time I started I kept saying, “What?” And being both baffled and excited by the unknown, the story gave me pause. I admire how Chung handles the passing of time in the story, how it flies by for the character because of her choices and circumstances, and how the head at the end of story becomes the main character with a new future.

First published in Samovar, September 2019, and available to read online here; collected in Cursed Bunny, Honford Star, 2021

Introduction

I have been teaching teenagers English for almost 40 years, and my selection here is of short stories which work well in the classroom. There are few more unforgiving audiences than schoolchildren, and so you can be sure these stories have survived that test. I have read all of them out loud: no-one is too old to close their eyes and listen, and a live audience really tests the quality of the writing.

Teachers are also actors, and stories provide such great performance opportunities, as long as your reading is servant to the story rather than drawing attention to itself. When you read a story out loud repeatedly over the years, you learn its shape intimately. Its rhythms become pleasurably familiar.

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

Of course I first came to Salinger’s stories via The Catcher in the Rye, but whereas I have long stopped teaching that novel (it feels worn down now – overfamiliarity, or are there weaknesses in its DNA?), the stories are still fresh and often edgy. ‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor’ is a heartbreaker. In the same collection ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ always grips a class. It provides lots of opportunities for voices when I’m reading it, especially the little girl Sibyl as she responds to the young man’s strange story of the fish who eat so many bananas they can’t get out of the ‘banana hole’. The shocking ending needs careful preparation in advance.

First published in The New Yorker, January 1948. Collected in Nine Stories, Little Brown 1953, sometimes titled For Esmé – with Love and Squalor, and Other Stories

‘The Piano Tuner’s Wives’ by William Trevor

William Trevor’s considerable output is extraordinary: such controlled writing, such understanding of the form. By coincidence he went to the school I teach in (under his real name, Trevor Cox), and I wrote a piece about his relationship with that school, a place which often appears in his writing, though not in this masterpiece. ‘The Piano Tuner’s Wives’ has all Trevor’s greatest strengths: such tenderness for the characters and their frailties, such skill in ranging across so many years in so few pages. What elevates it to greatness is the moment near the end when the second wife realises what direction she can go in, and the piano tuner tacitly lets her do this, with understanding, grace and generosity. You can see the realisation dawn in the classroom.

First published in The New Yorker, October 1995, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in After Rain, Viking, 1996

‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan

Is ‘Foster’ a short story or a novella? Claire Keegan doesn’t care, and nor should we. I have taught it many times, and it never fails. For several years before, pleasingly, she gained a lot of notice, I thought that Keegan was one of the very best writers in Ireland. In ‘Foster’, pupils get a masterclass in careful writing and subtlety. Here too is a portrait of decency in a man, Mr Kinsella, like Furlong in the later short novel Small Things Like These. Irish literature has more than enough dreadful men. Indeed, in her recent short story ‘So Late in the Day’ Keegan presented one such horrendous misogynist. A favourite line from the novel, which we could apply more often in contemporary life:

‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’

A bonus with ‘Foster’: the Irish language film An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) is a wonderful adaptation.

First published in The New Yorker in February 2010, and available to subscribers to read here; subsequently published in book form by Faber and Faber, 2010

‘Recitatif’ by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s only short story is fascinating: pupils are truly engaged in the voices of Twyla and Roberta: which is white, which black? What is particularly impressive about Morrison’s writing is that the conceit is never tricksy – it justifies itself again and again as the story deepens, and like all the best short stories it has the amplitude of a novel. In the end the narrative turns out to be about us as much as the characters.

First published in Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, ed. Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka, Morrow, 1983. Published in book form with an introductory essay by Zadie Smith, Chatto and Windus, 2022

‘The Selfish Giant’ by Oscar Wilde

Every two or three years I read this out to 350 pupils in our school Chapel, usually coming up to Christmas. Our Chaplain reserves Wednesday mornings for talks and musical recitals rather than the standard service, and when I tell the school they are about to hear a children’s story I can see their scepticism. But then the simple and compelling narrative starts, and even the 18-year-olds succumb to its magic.

Published in The Happy Prince and other tales,1888

‘Daughters of the Late Colonel’ by Katherine Mansfield

As a teacher reading this out loud in class, my job is to get across the delicate atmosphere in the house of Constantia and Josephine in the aftermath of their domineering father’s death. They are very different characters, but both it seems are simultaneously aging and childlike. The story is funny and tender, and a perfect demonstration of Mansfield’s delicate touch.

First published in the London Mercury, May 1921. Collected in The Garden Party and other stories, Constable, 1922

‘Aliens’ by David Leavitt

I started reading ‘Aliens’ to classes shortly after Family Dancing was published in the UK by King Penguin in 1986. I have received so many melodramatic stories over the years set in hospitals, especially about catastrophic injuries to characters. Pupils often assume sensational equals interesting. Leavitt’s story does indeed start in a hospital, as the narrator visits her damaged husband Alden while he undergoes rehabilitation after a car accident. But here the coolness of the narrative voice carries the distressing material easily. I also read it out to show how effectively the present tense can be used.

First published in Family Dancing, Knopf, 1984

‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ by Geoffrey Chaucer

Perhaps it is cheating to include the Wife of Bath’s Prologue as a conventional short story, but I have read it so often in class (in Neville Coghill’s translation: Middle English is a little too challenging for 16-year-olds), and it prompts delight and discussion. “What is it that women most desire?” is bound to generate classroom energy, especially if you teach both boys and girls as I do. Another opportunity to try out accents too, especially the old crone who, naturally, transforms into the gorgeous woman of every boy’s dreams. I’m determined to keep on teaching Chaucer, even if he slips off the school curriculum, and this story is a good entry point.

From The Canterbury Tales, c. 1386. Translation by Neville Coghill, Penguin, 1952