‘Saga’s Children’ by E.J. Swift

Swift is an absolute virtuoso of the science fictional short story, and ‘Saga’s Children’ is an example of her ability to craft hushed speculative realism. The story focuses on the – entirely ordinary – offspring of the Solar System’s most daring explorer, the titular Saga. It is a story about adjacency: what it means to be the child of celebrity; the unwilling participant in someone else’s narrative.

Although naturally in conversation with more classic science fictional narratives, it has immense contemporary relevance. What is it like to be ordinary in a world that only celebrates the extraordinary; human in the shadow of the superhuman? It sounds trite, but short stories excel at providing new perspectives on assumed narratives. Without knowing Saga, we know Saga. She is an archetype, and her adventures and heroics can be easily inferred. What we don’t know is the human cost of her passage, the emotional toll of growing up in her wake. Swift brings humanity a myth, and gives voice to the humans around the myth as well.

First published in The Lowest Heaven, Jurassic London, 2013. Collected in The Best British Fantasy, Salt Publishing, 2014. Find it online here

‘Ghosts’ by Vauhini Vara

‘Ghosts’ is the result of Vara using an early version of ChatGPT to discuss – and process – the loss of her sister. It is, again, something that could only work in the short form.

The story itself is a type of memoir, with Vara giving the AI increasingly detailed prompts and letting it ‘finish’ her sister’s story. But it is more about the process than the prose. There’s no attempt to pass the machine’s outputs off as real, human effort, nor is the AI’s work ‘good’ in any conventional sense. The real story here is what’s happening off the page, as we witness the author walk, one small, AI-aided step at a time, towards a form of healing.

As I write this, the use of AI in the arts – in all aspects of our lives – is terrifying. It is cold, and cruel and dehumanizing. Vara’s story is not ‘by’ AI or even ‘about’ it. It is entirely about herself and her own, very human, feelings. The tool is rightfully secondary to the human behind it. It is an exquisite work, and, again, something that is far more than the sum of its parts.

First published in Believer Magazine, 2021. Collected in Best American Essays, Mariner, 2022, The Big Book of Cyberpunk, Vintage, 2023 and the upcoming Searches, Pantheon, 2025. Read it online here

Introduction

Several times, making this list, I was tempted to pick different stories, to make me seem smarter or cooler or whatever. Where’s the Cheever? Nabokov? Welty? Joyce? I won’t say what I would’ve replaced to make me appear that way but each of these stories below I did pick have affected me in some way as a writer or, dare I say it, as a person. This list was hard to curate when, at first I was tempted to appear some way, and much easier when I just thought of stories I loved. Then I overshot a dozen so there were a few I had to leave out. I love these stories. I could read them, or experience them—since a couple are songs—forever. A short story, as gleaned from this list, to me, might just be a kind of consciously, or unconsciously, curated, or semi-curated, assemblage of beautiful images via language that culminate in something like a kind of tension or attention to the language itself. Or a short story might be something more traditional. Each of these stories have something I want in my writing. These stories are a little sad, beautiful, both, told in a kind of language, a kind of voice, that moved me and stuck with me over the last 10 years of writing, of trying to write. When I finish reading one of these, I think, I wish I did that.

‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ by Mark Richard

What a story. What a writer. Where’d he go? Richard had another story I wanted to put on this list. But I only allowed one. It went head-to-head with this one. I’ll cheat and mention the other. ‘Her Favorite Story’ is that other one. I guess it depends on my mood. Right now I’ve been thinking about ‘Gentleman’s Agreement.’ One day a little boy is throwing rocks and he breaks a windshield. The father, a forest firefighter, gets mad. All his hard dangerous work and he’s not making a ton of money. The most of his recent check will have to go to fixing this windshield. He tells his boy that if he, the boy, throws another rock he, the father, will nail the boy’s hand to the toolshed. Well, the boy can’t help himself. Another accident happens and this time the boy gets injured. The boy has to get stitched up. It’ll cost more money. The boy, at the end of the story, is taken out to the toolshed. I’ll leave it at that. Richard’s voice, language, style are always on another level. He said somewhere, for this story, he took influence from the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac—a strategy he’s done elsewhere. (‘Happiness of the Garden Variety’ is another one.) I love what this story does with the idea of contract/contractual obligations with the reader and the characters in the story, with a child’s innocence and expectations of consequences. The sentence boil, the pressure builds up—akin to the pressure the boy feels from his firefighter father. It’s uncomplicated, beautiful, and to me, a lesson in storytelling.

First published in Esquire in 1994. Collected in Charity, Anchor Books, 1998)

‘A Man in Louisiana’ by Thomas McGuane

I love stories about dogs. I love McGuane’s dogs. Like in his novel Panama, the one he can’t name until he does name her. We get a few men in this story. A businessman who sends another man, his assistant, to an old man a good drive away to buy the old man’s pointer. There’s something mystical about the dog and the old man. It’s like the old man and the dog are con-men. Maybe. There’s a question of a scheme—the old man and the dog knowing the kind of person who wants to buy the dog and the kind of person who gets sent to buy the dog. A couple easy marks. Or maybe, more than anything, it’s just about the love between the old man and the dog. I just love to see a dog run.

First published in Shenandoah in 1986. Collected in To Skin a Cat, Vintage, 1986; also in Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories, Knopf, 2018

‘Cake’ by Rudy Wilson

Short simple sentences. One we were/I saw/she watched short(ish) sentence after another. The syntax of matter-of-fact. But it seems hard for the narrator to get it. A world populated by things and colors. Lots of colors. Lots of yellow—butter and paint. Green grass. Blue sky. Black birds. A red truck. This story actually fooled me into thinking it was an excerpt from his novel The Red Truck. The narrator spends a lot of time with his across-the-street-neighbor Katie and her four-year-old daughter Angel. Angel would sing and dance and ride a wooden horse. The narrator loves Katie. But it’s not straightforwardly mutual. “‘How can you know me,’ [Katie] asked, ‘when you don’t even know about simple things? Even a color, a simple color like a yellow color.’” He leaves Katie letters in her truck, she tells him to stop. Seems like she thinks he’s getting too close to her and Angel. He’s inchoate and dealing with love. Hardly able to. He pushes it a little too much. Rudy Wilson, I say this endearingly, is a B-side Lish writer. My favorite kind. (I’m bored of the Carver debate.) So the story goes on to swerve a few times, with so much feeling. So much crammed into simple sentences over 13 or 14 pages.

First published in The Quarterly in 1987. Collected in Sonja’s Blue, Ravenna Press, 2010 as ‘Horsie-Child, of Mine’

‘The Apprentice’ by Larry Brown

Larry Brown writing about writing. But here, the narrator isn’t the writer in this story, it’s his wife. It cracks me up. The narrator says things about his wife’s writing that I bet Brown heard when he got the bug. It’s, for lack of a better word, a nice look at things from the other side. The narrator says, “She was always writing, and always wanting me to read it.” It’s a funny and sweet story. The wife’s love of writing can affect their sex life. The narrator tries to be honest. Good in theory and practice. He allows himself his own little jokes, but he takes his wife’s obsession with writing and trying to publish seriously. He says when he told her didn’t like a piece of her writing she got pissed. When he said something was good she’d get him to point out everything he liked and if he didn’t she got bummed out. I do this type of thing to my wife but I’m the wife in the story and she’s the narrator. I love Brown’s narrator. I think Brown is asking for grace through him. The narrator took a higher paying job working inside a nuclear reactor so his wife could write full time, roll with the momentum she’s got. He has to eat his TV dinners by himself sometimes. They didn’t hang out with friends as much as they used to. The narrator says it’s a little goofy to say you can’t hang out because your wife is writing. You get where this is going, the parallels.

First published in Big Bad Love, an Algonquin Books Hardcover in 1990; also in the paperback edition, Vintage, 1991

‘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