‘Kings: An account of Books 1 and 2 of Homer’s Iliad’ by Christopher Logue

Logue’s style is fast-paced, poetic, graphic, and shocking as he brings Achilles’ extreme form of rage to the forefront in just a few words. Logue captures the spirit, the essence and the central concepts of the first two chapters of Homer’s war poem, The Iliad, and he does it with his own unique poetic style that, at times, is quite startling. An example is Logue’s handling of Agamemnon’s character with a focus on Agamemnon’s mouth. “Mouth, King Mouth,” Achilles shouts to Agamemnon when they are fighting over Agamemnon’s unacceptable and dangerous behavior. The king listens to no one, he is brash, and he is all mouth. By contrast Nestor says about Achilles: “Your voice is honey and your words are winged.”

Originally published by Faber & Faber, 1991. Collected in various editions of War Music, Jonathan Cape, 1981; University of Chicago Press, 2003; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017

‘Achilleid’ by Statius

Writing during the reign of the Emperor Domitian, Statius composed two epics on lofty, ambitious topics: the Thebaid, which describes the violent war between Oedipus’s sons (or brothers) and the Achilleid, which fills in the early years of the Homeric hero Achilles. The Achilleid is tragic without being overwrought, balanced and even playful at times. Unfortunately the epic is unfinished and contains only two of the four books that Statius had intended to write but what we do have is a very important part of the tradition of the Trojan cycle. For instance, the story of Achilles being anointed in the river Styx by his mother who holds him by the heel which is the only vulnerable part of his body, is first mentioned by Statius. In only 1100 lines (it can be read in under an hour), Statius fills in the gaps of the Achilles story that makes the hero of those other epics seem more human, and more tragic.

Originally written in Latin, and most recently translated by Peter Heslin, Hackett, 2015

‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ from The Georgics Book 4, by Vergil

One of my favorite short narratives in all of Latin Literature is the Orpheus and Eurydice story in Vergil’s fourth Georgic. In my very early days as an undergraduate, when taking a Vergil course, I was given these lines from the Georgics and asked to produce a polished translation and commentary; I carefully and lovingly labored over this Latin text for weeks. A farmer named Aristaeus chases Eurydice through a field where she is bitten and killed by a serpent. Orpheus, in his intense grief, asks the ruler of the Underworld to allow him to bring his wife back to the living. However, by not following the only rule—not to look back at his wife on the journey up from Hades—he is unsuccessful.

Vergil also uses this as an etiological myth to explain the presence of bees. As a punishment for his indiscretion Aristaeus’s bee colony is destroyed and he is allowed to visit his mother and the other nymphs in their underwater lair to get advice on how to resurrect his hives. I vividly remember translating the part in which Aristaeus enters this watery, maternal realm—there were certain Latin words I keep thinking about and adjusting in my translation. My mother would call me every week and ask, “How are the bees coming along?” Although I had studied Latin in high school, I viewed translation as just another acquired skill, but it was due to this Vergil class and this short narrative I translated that made me decide to be a classicist.

Originally written in Latin and published in 29 B.C. Widely translated into English since the 17th Century, it can be read online here

‘Pygmalion’ from The Metamorphoses, by Ovid

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a narrative poem written in 8 A.D. and covers over 250 myths in 15 books. Each story, however, can be read individually as a stand-alone piece. My favorite short narrative is that of Pygmalion, an artist who cannot find a wife that matches his ideal of what a perfect woman should be. So as an artist and sculptor he decides to make his own ‘woman.’ Ovid says that the figure of a woman he sculpts is so flawless that one would think she is alive: ars adeo latet arte sua. (The art is especially hidden by its own skill.) In other words, the brilliance of Pygmalion’s art hides the fact that his sculpture is indeed art and not a real woman. Isn’t this the kind of seamless perfection towards which all artists or creators strive?

Although it is oftentimes viewed as a commentary about unattainable standards of beauty, I’ve always seen more in the Latin than this message. Pygmalion, in his daily solitude, uses the utmost care and love to gently coax a form out of the white block of marble that will become his beloved: “Pygmalion is amazed at his creation and drinks up with his heart the passionate fires of her simulated body.” Ovid demonstrates through Pygmalion’s sculpture the power that love, kindness, and, most importantly, patience can have on our relationships.

Originally written in Latin and published in 8 A.D. Widely translated into English since the 17th Century, it can be read online here

‘The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis’ Carmen 64, by Catullus

Catullus actually gives us two short stories in this 400-line poem. It begins with the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of Achilles, who meet while he is sailing on the Argo. After their wedding the royal marriage bed is adorned with a dazzling tapestry that depicts the story of Theseus and Ariadne. In Catullus’ epyllion, Ariadne is given her own voice and tells her own side of the Minotaur story. After she falls in love with Theseus and helps him escape the labyrinth and the Minotaur, she sails away with him but is quickly abandoned by him on the island of Naxos. She immediately realizes her mistake in trusting this man who was supposed to be a hero; Ariadne speaks to a now absent Theseus and gives full vent to her anger, her heartache and her grief:

“From now on may no woman ever put her trust in any man who makes promises; from now on may no women believe that the words of any man can be trusted. While a man’s mind is set on getting something and his mind eagerly longs to gain that thing, then he will swear to anything, he will promise anything. But as soon as the desire of his greedy mind is sated, he remembers none of his previous words, he cares nothing about his false promises.”

Originally published in the middle of the first century B.C.E. Catullus has been widely translated into English and it can be read online here

Introduction

I wasn’t a committed short fiction reader until university. I read long, wrote long and ignored the benefits of brevity in prose until I was given a Hilary Mantel collection in my second year. It was the best introduction to the form I could have had.

I mulled a lot over the selections I should pick. In the end, I’ve tried to stay true to the title of this series. The below selections are stories that in various ways mark out my adult life. They are also the ones where specific lines have lingered with me, from first reading until now.

‘Sorry to Disturb’ by Hilary Mantel

I was reading Wolf Hall when a friend gifted me this collection. This story is the opener and is set in Jeddah in 1983, based closely on Mantel’s own four years in Saudi Arabia. What Mantel manages here is to communicate the claustrophobic life of the white expat in the region. The narrator carries her own biases and is nearly out of her mind with anxiety, the thrum of which runs under this uncomfortable account of an odd friendship between the English narrator and a Pakistani man she reluctantly allows into her home.

“Sometimes in those days when I closed my eyes I felt that I was looking back into my own skull. I could see the hemispheres of my brain. They were convoluted and the colour of putty.”

First published in memoir form – as ‘Someone to Disturb’ in The London Review of Books, 2009, and available to read here. Published as a short story in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘The Mud Below’ by Annie Proulx

If I could recommend every story in Close Range, a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, I would. Proulx is a writer who belongs to the Wyoming prairies and this story of Diamond Felts, a rodeo rider with a desolate past and a proclivity for violent sexual assault, is a bleak, honest look at life on the edges of rural America.

“The shock of the violent motion, the lightning shifts of balance, the feeling of power as though he were the bull and not the rider, even the fright, fulfilled some greedy physical hunger in him he hadn’t known was there.”

First published in The New Yorker, 1998, available here. Collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Scribner, 1999

‘Sucking Stones’ by Hanif Kureishi

This story is an uncomfortable read for aspiring writers. An established author befriends Marcia, a woman desperate to be published. Marcia feels her own life is small and her terrible hope that the friendship will turn to literary success is palpable in the text.

“She didn’t see how to go on. She did sometimes feel like this, although it was more ominous now. She had been writing for ten years and had never given up hope.”

Published in Midnight All Day, Faber & Faber,1999, and then in Collected Stories, Faber, 2011

‘The Dragon Danced at Midnight’ by Ray Bradbury

This is an absurd tale of Willis Hornbeck Jr, the operator of a film projector who, when drunk, mixes reels up to accidentally create acclaimed avant-garde cinema. The prose is also deeply funny and captures some truths about art, creativity and the inexplicable sources of genius.

“And there in the projection-room window above, a shadow loomed with wide-sprung eyes. The projectionist, bottle in numbed hand, gasped down upon our revelry”

First published with the title ‘The Year the Glop Monster Won the Golden Lion at Cannes’ in Cavalier, 1966. Collected in One More for the Road, William Morrow, 2002

‘In the Air’ by A. S. Byatt

Mrs Sugden, a retired teacher, lives on her own with her dog. She is lonely, addicted to television and constantly terrified of being attacked and raped by a stranger. Her fear of men governs her days and in particular a queasy exchange with a young, sarcastic man she meets when walking her dog. Her instincts tell her he is no good, yet she is forced to interact with him to help a fellow pensioner.

“She knew it was irrational, though there was logic in it, to feel better indoors. There were women who had found men waiting for them in the dark when they came home, women who had been followed and then pushed in quickly from behind, women whose windows or barred doors had been contemptuously shattered.”

Published in Sugar and Other Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1987

‘Munro Country’ by Cheryl Strayed

This is the only nonfiction piece on my list, an essay more than a short story. I’m bending the rules because much of it is about a short story, ‘The House with the Horse and the Blue Canoe’, which Strayed wrote when she was 24. She won a prize with it and sent it off to Alice Munro, the great writer, who she’d admired for years. The essay is about what happens next and about how art inspires longing.

“Her mother had died young too, and she haunts the pages of Munro’s stories the way my own mother began to haunt mine. I read Munro through my sorrow, rereading certain stories and scenes over and over again, memorizing particular sentences.”

Published in The Missouri Review, June 2009, available here

‘Family Furnishings’ by Alice Munro

Strayed led me to Munro, whose portrayals of dreamy and isolated, somewhat cold and ambitious women were ideal for my undergraduate years.

This particular story is about a girl coming of age in rural Ontario, dissatisfied with her provincial roots and fascinated by a cousin of her father’s, Alfrida. Alfrida has left for the big city, though that departure has come with the disillusionment that many of Munro’s women suffer. There is a momentum to this story, a sense that there is something to be worked out, that keeps the reader going until the end, where the concluding shock is delivered with grace. But it’s also about the ruthlessness it takes to write about your family.

“If you have something to tell that will stagger someone, and you’ve told it, and it has done so, there has to be a balmy moment of power.”

Published in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, McClelland & Stewart, 2001, and collected in New Selected Stories, 2011, and Family Furnishings, Knopf, 2014

‘Mrs Sen’s’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

How can I compose a list of short stories and not have Lahiri on it? If you exist in a particular ethnic and class niche – that is to say someone raised in the West, of bookish bent, whose family left India long ago – reading Lahiri is inevitable. And this story is something of a classic, from her debut prizewinning collection. Lahiri shows us Mrs Sen, an academic’s wife who babysits a young American boy, Eliot. Mrs Sen is seen through Eliot’s eyes when he goes to her house after school. The child is the only witness to Mrs Sen’s repressed desperation, her homesickness and her frustration with the lack of Indian home comforts in her new life.

“‘They think I live the life of a queen, Eliot.’ She looked around the blank walls of the room. ‘They think I press buttons and the house is clean. They think I live in a palace.’”

Published in Interpreter of Maladies, Flamingo, 2000