‘Homecoming’ by Ray Bradbury

From the Dust Returned is, in a lot of ways, the book of my heart. I’ve written about my love for it before and probably will again after this, too. It’s a fix-up featuring some stories that Bradbury originally wrote to—get this—pair with illustrations by none other than Charles Addams, about a strange and wondrous family. That project fell apart but I find it very charming that the two men went on to create their own iterations of the idea. This particular story is the centerpiece of the book and I think it is also one of Bradbury’s very best, managing to capture the excitement and slight terror of being a child looking at the magical world of grown-ups. It’s a story that I’m always, in one way or another, writing towards.

First published in Mademoiselle, October 1946. Collected in From the Dust Returned, William Morrow, 2001

‘Skullpocket’ by Nathan Ballingrud

This story was my introduction to Nathan Ballingrud and I come back to it about once a year. It certainly wasn’t the first “strange town” story I read, but it came into my life around the time I was starting to get serious about writing—and so I credit it with being The One that planted the seed in my head of wanting to create a strange town of my own. There are rumors that Ballingrud plans to return to Hob’s Landing someday with either a series of novellas or a collection of stories or something else altogether; whatever the form, I certainly hope he does it, as I’ll be waiting eagerly until then.

First published in Nightmare Carnival, Dark Horse Books 2014. Collected in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2014, HMH, 2014, and in Wounds, Saga Press, 2019. Read it online here

‘The Transformation of Martin Lake’ by Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer is probably my favorite living writer and I’m hard-pressed to choose favorites from his work, but stories set in the city of Ambergris will always have a soft spot in my heart. (See above, re: my live of strange towns.) ‘Transformation’ builds out aspects of the most important and too-often overlooked part of a fictional city: the arts scene. I read this story for the first time when I was 18 years old and it felt like grabbing lightning; I’ve not been the same since. Jeff has also been a friend to me over the years and while very little of what I write feels like his work, I don’t think I’d be a writer without his example to follow.

First published in Palace Corbie Eight, 1999. Collected in City of Saints and Madmen, Wildside Press, 2001. Listen to it here

‘Magic for Beginners’ by Kelly Link

Kelly Link’s stories never go where you think they’re going to go, which is a true magic trick to me. They’re always a little longer or shorter than you think they’ll be, or their plots turn from one kind of story into another, or the voice warps in some ineffable way to leave you wondering just what it was you’ve been reading this whole time. I can picture each of them in my mind like physical objects, a cross between a LeMarchand’s Box and a Fabergé egg, dazzling and a little unsettling. ‘Magic for Beginners’ is the one that’s had the biggest impact on my writing, in the way it offers up glimpses of a larger universe that never feel teasing but instead like offers to the reader’s imagination—as though she’s saying ‘go forth and see what it creates in your own mind, if you so desire.’

First published in Magic for Beginners, Small Beer Press, 2005. Read it online here

‘The Three Golden Nails’ by Stephen Graham Jones

This one is a special one because I commissioned it. Over the last few years, I’ve had the privilege of serving as podcasts editor for Literary Hub and while that mostly means managing (and occasionally producing or even hosting) a stable of interview shows, this two-year collaboration with Aesop was a fun experiment in commissioning new writing. The brief was to write short ‘new’ fables a la Aesop’s classics—and while I enjoyed all ten that came out of the project, I think SGJ’s is my favorite. He’s a generous and kind man, beloved in the horror community for all the right reasons, and I was tickled that he not only wanted to do this project but that he delivered such a pitch-perfect fable to boot.

First published as part of Literary Hub and Aesop’s “Future Fables” podcast series, 2023. Listen to it here

‘The Sleep Consultant’ by Robin Sloan

Another inspiration for my sending-things-in-the-mail project came from Robin Sloan, an author whose experiments are an inspiration for anyone trying to put more play into their creative practice. He’s a novelist and one of some renown, but his willingness to cross forms and mediums and to show his work across its stages of development feels radical to me. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but the point is that he’s willing to Do A Thing and that, to me, is the best part. In 2019, he did a year-long newsletter project that included printing and mailing an intermittent series of riosgraphed zines—this one was the first (or at least that’s what my memory tells me) and the sheer wonder of opening up my mailbox to discover something unknown and new inside is the feeling I’m chasing when I send stories to my friends.

First published by Robin Sloan, 2019. Read it on his website

‘The Story of Of’ by Samantha Hunt

I think about this story all the damn time. It is really the second part of a story, in that it is best to read ‘The Story of’ from the same collection first—but, then, you really have to as it is the story that opens this collection and ‘The Story of Of’ is the one that closes it. The stories both deal with a character named Norma, but where the first is a story that functions as a closed ecosystem, the latter is a story that continues to move and branch and shift in thrillingly meta-textual ways. As the Normas of this story become aware of their existence inside of a story, the text is indented farther and farther across the page, a great example of a writer pushing against the boundaries of what can happen on a page and the possibility of what might happen if you could jump off of it.

First published in The Dark Dark, FSG Originals, 2017

‘The Family Arcana’ by Jedediah Berry

I’ve long been fascinated by the Oulipo movement, founded in the 1960s by a group of French artists whose work all incorporates some kind of playful game-like constraint. Sometimes I find it infuriating, like the experience of reading Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, but I really like the idea of constrained writing as a way to have essentially structured play. I don’t know if Jedediah Berry would consider this project Oulipo, or if Oulipo would consider it so, but it sort of doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks—to me, it’s a short story built into a deck of playing cards, endlessly shuffleable. I was so taken by this project that I wrote my own story-in-cards for my wife for our first wedding anniversary. I think I’ll always find myself coming back to a shuffleable story in my own writing practice; it’s just such a fun constraint. 

First published by Ninepin Press, 2015

‘Where We Must Be’ by Laura van den Berg

Sometimes, you read a story and go “oh, shit, I’ll read this person forever” and so it was for me with this story of Laura van den Berg’s. It’s about a woman who performs, if that’s the right word, as a Bigfoot impersonator and it has this remarkable strangeness to it that is also utterly rooted in compelling reality. In that way, her stories feel somehow more like life than life? I don’t know how else to explain it: there’s something about van den Berg’s writing that captures the compelling strangeness of the world as I experience it, or maybe as I’d like to experience it, or maybe as it could be experienced.

First published by The Indiana Review, 2008. Collected in What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, Dzanc Books, 2009. Read it online at Electric Literature

‘Choking Victim’ by Alexandra Kleeman

Something I love about Alexandra Kleeman’s work is how she delivers surreal strangeness with a cool remove that never once feels performative or gimmicky. I know that she’s an enormous Twin Peaks fan and her writing might be the closest thing, for me, to watching a David Lynch joint: dreamy, eerie, and functioning under its own internal logic that might not match our world but certainly doesn’t cheat or operate without logic. She’s also the only writer I’ve ever immediately re-read more than once—both of her novels, I re-started immediately on completing them. Her writing strikes some powerfully resonating chord in me, building to a crescendo that also somehow loops back to stillness without ever ending. 

First published by The New Yorker, 2016. Collected in Intimations, Harper, 2016. Read it online here

‘Viola in Midwinter’ by Marie-Helene Bertino

A thing I know I need to work on in my own writing is warmth. It’s not to say that I’m not an emotive writer or not capable of deep emotion in my work, but that stuff takes work for me whereas the ideas stuff—the structure, the setting, the plot—spills out of me with gleeful speed. When I need to remember how to tap into the heart of emotions, I return to Marie-Helene Bertino’s work because she is so good at doing both the ideas stuff and the feelings stuff. Her latest novel Beautyland is an exceptionally good example of that but her short fiction is so weird and funny and loving towards its characters and its worlds that I always find my writing stronger for having revisited her prose. Plus, this one is a great example of how to do genre stuff (vampire story!) in new and exciting ways that might even convince non-genre readers to read it.

First published in The Bennington Review, 2023. Read it online here

‘Books and Roses’ by Helen Oyeyemi

I’ll close with the best kind of story, the kind that tangibly changes something in your life. I love Oyeyemi’s magical realism for all sorts of reasons but this story stays with me because it brought me my favorite holiday: St. Jordi Day. The story is not actually about the holiday but the simple description of a lover telling their new partner about this real holiday where Catalonians exchange books and roses on April 23rd inspired me to suggest it to my then-new girlfriend. A decade later, we’re still married and we’ve got a decade’s worth of surprising books to show for the ongoing exchange. What could be better than that?

First published in Granta, 2014. Collected in What is Not Yours is Not Yours, Riverhead Books, 2016. Read it online here

Introduction

Two years ago, I moved back to the UK with my family after living abroad for many years in Hong Kong and Sydney. The experience of starting all over again has made me think about the concepts of home and belonging. I keep coming back to the word ‘tether’. What is it that ties us to people and places? When does a place start to feel like a home? What makes us feel like we belong? The texts I’ve chosen address these questions in one way or other. Some speak directly to the places I’ve lived in; others speak more generally to this theme. Some are short stories in the traditional sense of the word, while others push that boundary through being poetry, essay, novella; I hope you’ll bear with me for that.

‘Blueback’ by Tim Winton

Tim Winton is one of Australia’s best-loved writers. Cloudstreet is frequently voted Australia’s favourite novel. Winton wrote ‘Blueback’ for children; however, the novella is as worthy of adult attention. (If you’re in any doubt about that, please read Katherine Rundell’s brilliant essay ‘Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise’.) Like Cloudstreet, ‘Blueback’ deals with concepts of home, the fierce pull of a place.

10-year-old Abel Jackson lives in Longboat Bay on the Australian coastline. His father, a pearl diver, was killed by a tiger shark when Abel was young. He lives with his mother Dora, subsisting off the land and the sea. Diving for abalone, Abel comes across an enormous blue groper; he names the fish Blueback and thus starts a lifelong companionship.  

Like many children in rural Australia, Abel has to go away for secondary school, but his heart remains in the bay: “I’ll wither up and die away from this place, he thought as they bumped off down the gravel road. This is my place. This is where I belong.”

Dora and Abel battle to save their bay from the rapaciousness of mankind: divers strip the reef bare; developers want to turn the bay into a holiday resort. Abel fears for Blueback’s safety: “That summer he learnt that there was nothing in nature as cruel and savage as a greedy human being.”

Dora is the hero of the tale. Through years of dogged campaigning, she succeeds in getting the bay declared a marine sanctuary. Abel grows up, becomes a marine biologist, and travels the world with his wife Stella. But all the while, he yearns for Longboat Bay. Stella suggests they move back: “Do you want to be homesick or to be home?”

Tim Winton is an environmentalist, and this book is a clear cry for conservation. For me though, it’s also the story of how our hearts have a way of pulling us home.

First published in Australia, Pan Macmillan, 1997. Now available Penguin Group, Australia, 2014