‘Redfish’ by Rick Bass

Bass’s voice is so good. Two friends are fishing. There’s the narrator and Kirby.  A 10-dollar garage sale couch out on the beach. Diet cokes, rum, lime—Cuba Libres the narrator calls them. It’s cold. Winter on the gulf. Before Kirby and the narrator went on this trip, Kirby and Tricia, his significant other, got into a tiff over feeding the dogs and work. And what happens? The narrator and Kirby are doing everything but catching the elusive redfish. They try for a bit, wading out, casting lines baited with live shrimp. But then there’s everything else they do on the beach like getting a generationally/demographically cliched car stuck in the sand. Burning a lifeguard’s tower. Starting another fire. Running around with the couch. Calling Tricia on a payphone? Riding a horse out into water. Love and friendship. Friendship and love. And fishing?

First published in Esquire in 1988; Collected in The Watch, W.W. Norton, 1989; also in For A Little While, Little Brown, 2016

‘Cowboy Overflow of the Heart’ by David Berman and The Avalanches

David Berman words on an Avalanche’s track. Perfectly strung together sentiments and images. Writing about being banged up. Writing about seeing her for the first time, a sneaky address to a you near the end after a perfectly corny rhymed couplet—sad and rad. Bookended by some wise words about how “you can live a long, long time on the love of a dog.” A story about searching, love, loneliness. All the big themes wrapped up in the americana simplicity of Berman’s immense talent as a writer.

First released for download at The Avalanches website. Now widely available via youtube

‘Bobby Cigarette’ by Greg Mulcahy

One of the first NOON Annual stories I ever read. NOON published my first stories and because of that, introduced me to Mulcahy’s writing. I can’t thank Diane Williams enough for publishing me that first time and for, and so, putting Greg Mulcahy’s work in front of me. Here, in ‘Bobby Cigarette’, a narrator builds a shrine to losertown. Mulcahy’s stories are always funny and frustrated. He’s completely underread, Mulcahy’s one of the best.

First published in NOON Annual, ed. Diane Williams, in 2017

The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul de Angelis

This is a very short novel/novella. An afternoon read. It’s extremely readable. Full of weird feelings and anticipation. Before I read this, I’d heard this book described as a story about a guy who doesn’t or can’t leave his bathroom. And the way all those recommenders said it, made it seem like the book took place there, in the bathroom, like Baker’s Mezzanine takes place on an escalator. The narrator of The Bathroom does leave the bathroom pretty early in the book after having made a habit of spending a lot of time there. He’s as strange as can be, inept and confused, I think.

First published in French as La Salle de Bain, Editions de Minuit, 1985, and in English from Dalkey Archive, 2006

‘Let Him Roll’ by Guy Clark

Short story as a song. Story about a story. A story about a wino who starts to tell his story about a “Dallas whore” he fell in love with. They never got a chance to be together. And then, through the circumstances of the story, he can’t tell the end. So our troubadour-narrator tells the rest. Love, regret, sadness. A true country classic. All good old country singers were the best storytellers.

First appeared on Old No. 1, RCA Studios, 1975. ‘Let Him Roll’ has been widely covered by artists including such as Johnny Cash and John Townes van Zandt II

‘Stream System’ by Gerald Murnane

Murnane’s a genius. I think best taken in doses. But his stories, fictions as he calls them, turn in on themselves constantly. Landscapes, objects, people, memories prompting him to spend time in mental landscapes. Here we get Murnane walking along a stream that on a map appears blue. But it wasn’t always there. And, in real life, standing next to it, the water looks more brown than anything. We follow Murnane along the stream into his mental landscapes. Similar to Fosse’s slow prose. It’s sweet, it keeps splitting, no one else could bite what Murnane does without immediately making one think of Murnane. He’s too sweetly, beautifully, boringly (in the best way) original.

First written ‘to be be read aloud at a gathering in the Department of English at La Trobe University in 1988’. Collected in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, Giramondo, 2005/And Other Stories, 2020, and in Stream System, FSG, 2018

‘In The Heart of The Heart of the Country’ by William H. Gass

This is what got me into Gass. Pure love of writing—even though in some interview he said he wrote from hate. I mentioned a few Lish people in this list. Love of language, even if it’s silly sometimes. I always sought out a Lish/Gass essay. Never found one to my satisfaction. If someone wants to pay me I’ll try. There’s a clear love of language in both of them—Gass’s writing and in the writing of the writer’s edited by Lish. I don’t love much of Lish’s writing. But I’ll stop and get back to Gass: ‘In The Heart of the Heart of the Country’. It’s a story about place. A short story in chapters/sections. Section titles include: A Place, Weather, My House, A Person, Politics, The Church. And there are others. Many repeated. List heavy—see sections having to do with Vital Data. I like this guy Billy who shows up in the story. He stomps around the high grass and weeds around his house. His head bobs, he counts sticks and logs, collects coal, he bends down to pick up something shiny. 

First published in New American Review, 1967, and collected in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, Harper & Row, 1968, which was republished by NYRB, 2014. Also in The William H. Gass Reader, Knopf, 2018

‘The Breeze / My Baby Cries’ by Kath Bloom and Loren Connors

Not trying to cop-out here, but just go listen to it. End on a song. I was happy to try to put into words a little bit of something about the other stories. Not like, “Oh I’m good enough to write about Gass, Murnane, etc,” I too, like many of the characters in these picks, am inept. But this song—I don’t know. I’m not saying anything, I’m writing nothing just to fill the space. Here are a couple lines: Well my baby cries when he’s tired / My puppy howls with the moon / You can never be sure of the people that you know / They don’t want to show you their sadness…” I don’t think it’s a sad song. It’s touching. To steal a little from Murnane. This song makes me think of a kind of mental landscape, of lying down in endless, rolling, dusty-green fields. A lightly cool breeze blowing waves in the grass. Warm sun. Not a cloud in the sky—a blue to match the green of the field.

First released on vinyl on Moonlight, on the label St. Joan, 1984. Rereleased on vinyl in 2016 on the label Chapter Music. Available here

‘Rentafoil’ by Émile Zola, translated by Douglas Parmée

I’m so perplexed by this story’s comparative obscurity that I’m half-inclined to propose cultural-psychological conspiracy theories to explain it. Like, is there something in this story that people just desperately don’t want to think about? If there is, that’s perhaps part of why it feels so fantastically fresh and inventive, even 160 odd years after it was written. 

I’ll give you the premise, as it was hearing of this story’s premise (in, if I remember rightly, Edward Said’s Reith Lectures) that propelled me to seek it out. A business entrepreneur in Paris establishes an agency from which women can hire other women who are less attractive than they are to keep them company and so make them appear, in the eyes of men they encounter, more attractive themselves.

What follows is a delightful skewering of the ‘stupidity’ of the male gaze, the beauty industry, capitalist enterprise, Great Man-based media coverage… but it’s more than that… It’s of course utterly tragic. And it gets at something unbearable, the fundamental inaneness of frequently determining factors in even matters so great as love.

First published in French, with the title ‘Les Repoussoirs’, in Zola’s collection Esquisses parisiennes in 1866. Douglas Parmée’s English translation first appeared in 1984 in his Zola collection The Attack on the Mill and Other Stories. The original French text is available on Wikisource

‘The Postmaster’ by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by Utsa Bose

For many years, literally all I knew of Tagore were those beautiful lines of poetry, “Those who speak to me do not know that my heart is full with your unspoken words / Those who crowd in my path do not know that I am walking alone with you”. Then I spent a while in Bangladesh, and I got the sense that Tagore means something to people there in a way I’m not sure any writer does to people in the UK or Western Europe. Also while there, I heard and really liked some of his songs. ‘Phagun Haway Haway’ jumps to mind (the Arnob version). 

So when I at last got round, about a year and a half ago, to reading a story of Tagore’s, I had high expectations. Nevertheless, I was completely blown away by it. 

I don’t want to reveal anything about the plot. I’ll just say this story somehow has a strong connection for me with a sculpture in this little garden right in the centre of Regent’s Park, where, in a previous life, I would sometimes go for my lunch breaks; this sculpture was of, as I remember it, a small girl standing defensively over a lamb; it had an inscription, announcing that the garden was dedicated to the protectors of the vulnerable. The story also makes me think of two other short or shortish stories I really love, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s ‘The Little Prince’ and Andrey Platonov’s ‘The Return’.

I’ve read a few more Tagore stories since, all good, none this good. By the way, did you know Freaky Friday is essentially a Tagore story? Called ‘Wishes Granted’. Crazy times.

First published in Bengali in 1891. Utsa Bose’s English translation was first published in Asymptote Journal in 2020 and is available to read here

‘The Town Manager’ by Thomas Ligotti


I’m a little obsessed by this story right now. And I think there are several reasons for that. First, it gives me a thrill similar in nature and, more remarkably, extremity to that I felt during my first encounters, in my late teens, with Borges, Kafka, Beckett, Marquez, Calvino, Ionesco… these writers who blew my mind – it really doesn’t seem an exaggerative expression here – with their stories so far off the tracks of anything I’d thought up to then. Other stories have had that kind of effect on me since, but rarely to such an extent.

Then also, I feel that in every little twist of this story’s plot there is great political acuity. I feel that, in its poetic, dream-like way, it captures so well elements of how the political dimension of our lives really feels and even is at this point in history. 

Finally, the figure of Ligotti causes me to do a bit of a double take… This is a man who has written, as well as these wonderfully intense philosophical horror stories, a non-fiction book exploring and basically advocating strong pessimist, nihilist and antinatalist views, and containing the claim that “the world is a malignantly useless potato-mashing network”*. Part of me wonders if he’s for real. Part of me feels very sorry for him. Part of me wonders if he’s essentially entirely right. I’d so love to talk to him. Also I’d so love to take part in a multidisciplinary symposium where we’d consider side-by-side – and with a focus on any overlapping or corresponding themes and subjects and ideas we could find – the stories of Ligotti and of, say, Wodehouse.

*Yes, it makes more sense in context, but still!

First published in Weird Tales magazine in 2003, and then collected in Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco in 2006)

‘The story of the married couple’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

Some time ago now, before I’d realised how much this story means to me, I was at my cousin’s wedding reception, and the guest book was being handed round the tables and suddenly it was in front of me and I was at a loss as to what to write, and then I found myself just writing ‘Calvino’ and the title of this story. 

I love love stories, but I feel they’re just about the hardest type of stories to do a good job of. If they indeed are, I think that one reason for that – and probably there are several – is that, as Jean Valjean and co sing, “to love another person is to see the face of God”, and capturing the face of God is no easy task – let alone two of the damn things. I think more elemental approaches get round that difficulty to some extent, and this story is a model in that respect.

So far as I can gather from cursory research: First published, in Italian, in 1958 in the third section of Calvino’s collection I racconti. That third section, titled ‘Gli amori difficili’, was then expanded into a collection of the same name, published in 1970. William Weaver’s English translation of the latter collection then came out in 1983, with a couple of other added stories – and this was the first of at least two translated collections of Calvino stories, somewhat different in content, with the English title Difficult Loves. I have the Vintage edition of that first translated collection

‘Friend of My Youth’ by Alice Munro

How virtue slips into the weaponisation of virtue, how storytelling slips into the weaponisation of storytelling. It’s one I’d do well to pay a lot of attention to, I feel. It’s also just a great story, quite unusually and yet, I think, very naturally framed.

Makes me think of another one I’ve long loved, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s ‘In a Bamboo Grove’.

First published in The New Yorker in 1990, and collected in the book of the same name that same year. It’s available to New Yorker subscribers, and non-subscribers who haven’t used up their monthly free quota, on their website. Also collected in Selected Stories, McLelland and Stewart, 1996 and Alice Munro’s Best: Selected Stories, Everyman, 2008

‘Town of Cats’ by Sakutarō Hagiwara, translated by Jeffrey Angles

I might say that there’s a neat little idea or observation here, eloquently and yet conversationally related. But then that neat little idea or observation easily starts to seem to me close to all-important, or at least it’s extremely resonant for me.

Meaning to expand on what I’ve just said, I started writing a list of to-my-mind fascinating questions and arguments that I’ve encountered over the years, all of which came to mind upon re-reading this story in preparation for possibly including it here. The list was fast becoming a treatise, so I deleted it. But you get the point. This story functions for me like a perfect little gateway to a series of connected topics that I’ve never properly thought about but am now, what with the steady build-up of related material at the back of my mind, absolutely primed to think about. I imagine this is a common kind of appeal that stories have for people. 

Quite apart from all that, this story has a special charm for me, as I’m sure it does for others, as a kind of urtext of the great Japanese cat obsession, with the plot here blending seamlessly into classic Ghibli and Murakami territory, for instance.

First published in Japanese in 1935 in, according to the Internet Speculative Fiction database, the magazine「セルバン」(“Seruban”). Jeffrey Angles’ English translation first appeared in Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938, edited by William J. Tyler. This translation has since also featured in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories and The Big Book of Classic Fantasy: The Ultimate Collection, both edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer