‘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

‘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)