‘Testimony’ by Jessica Treadway

Many of my favorite stories are concerned with questions of memory and forgetting, how we are calibrated by both forces, in turns. That’s certainly the dynamic at work in Jessica Treadway’s excellent ‘Testimony,’ a story about which I am reticent to say too much out of fear of spoiling it. There are goats in this story, wonderful goats. Also: some pretty serious lying. Read it for yourself to find out more, and then we can talk about it once you’ve finished. It contains one of the most haunting endings I know of, and I know of a good number of them. And a killer last line, too!

First published in Glimmer Train, widely available in Treadway’s collection Please Come Back to Me, The University of Georgia Press, 2010

‘Days,’ Deborah Eisenberg

According to an interview she gave with The Paris Review, this is Deborah Eisenberg’s first short story. This is maddening, incomprehensible. How is it that she arrived at this voice, which feels so accomplished, so idiosyncratic, so deft? She has obviously gone on to write a great number of short stories — her Collected Stories is a veritable doorstopper — and there are so many I love, but it’s ‘Days’ to which I most regularly return. The plot is about as straightforward as it gets: A woman who has given up smoking takes up running at the local Y. Surely this can’t be enough to generate nearly forty pages, you’d think, and you’d be wrong. There are so many lines I want to quote — including a hilarious misunderstanding in which the narrator mistakes Adidas for an airline — but I think maybe I’ll just share the opening two sentences here and encourage you to seek out the rest:

“I had never known what I was like until I stopped smoking, by which time there was hell to pay for it. When the haze cleared over the charred landscape, the person I had always assumed to be behind the smoke was revealed to be a tinny weights-and-balances apparatus, rapidly disassembling on contact with oxygen.”

First published in Eisenberg’s collection Transactions in a Foreign Currency,Knopf, 1986, and collected in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, Picador, 2008

‘Reverón’s Dolls’ by Sara Majka

“Maybe ten or eleven years ago, when I was in the middle of a divorce from a man I still loved, I took the train into the city.”

So begins the first story of Sara Majka’s Cities I’ve Never Lived In, a story titled ‘Reverón’s Dolls.’ I love that first line for reasons I’m not quite articulate enough to capture in words — something about the chilly sense of narrative distance, something about how time is demarcated and gauzy for the narrator. These elements persist in the stories that follow, which are — most of them, anyway — linked. This story in particular follows our narrator — who, she admits, “wasn’t well in the way that [she] would be several years later” — and her recollecting an exhibit of the Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón she once went to see. Cities is Majka’s only book as of now, though she has published a number of terrific stories since the collection came out. Majka is a capital-M Master, and I return to these stories again and again, in awe of their wisdom, their beauty, their exquisite despair.

First published in Jerry, and collected in Majka’s collection Cities I’ve Never Lived In, A Public Space Book/Graywolf Press, 2016

‘Natural Light’ by Kathleen Alcott

This is another story where, when I go to talk about it, it feels most appropriate to just reproduce for you its opening line: “I won’t tell you what my mother was doing in the photograph — or rather, what was being done to her — just that when I saw it for the first time, in the museum crowded with tourists, she’d been dead five years.” I mean, if that doesn’t engage your interest, if that doesn’t engineer serious narrative momentum for you, I don’t know what will. To say too much would be to risk spoiling a story that you can only read for the first time once, so I will only say that Kathleen Alcott’s is one of my favorite voices to read on the page and this story is all the evidence I need to present my case that she is among the strongest sentence-level writers in her generation. I first read this story in Zoetrope, and predicted — correctly, if I can toot my own horn for a second — that it would be included in Best American Short Stories in 2019. It’s simply unforgettable.

First published in Zoetrope 22.1, soon will be more widely available in Alcott’s debut collection of stories Emergency, W. W. Norton, 2023

‘Fifty-Seven,’ Rachel Kushner

The thing about Rachel Kushner is that she understands — with an intelligence that verges on sadistic — the knotty, contradictory dimensions of the self, and nowhere as cannily as in this story, ‘Fifty-Seven,’ which originally appeared in The New Yorker. Its interests as a story — namely, the effects of incarceration on one’s personhood — in the hands of a lesser writer would result in something tawdry and tasteless, patronizing, even. In Kushner’s hands, however, what we are presented instead is a tale both searing and stirring that manages to materialize her protagonist’s singularity against the backdrop of a system which seeks to annihilate it. (Bonus: Listening to Kushner read this story for The New Yorker‘s podcast is a serious lesson in how to read your own work!)

First published in The New Yorker, November 2015, and available to subscribers to read here; not currently collected in a volume of Kushner’s work

Introduction

The short story I think of most often was about a woman whose house was damp whilst she was getting a divorce. It was written in sentence-long paragraphs and I have a vague memory of rotting floorboards with spaces between them. I have a feeling that the divorcing woman went mad for a bit – but it was a domesticated sort of madness, which prevented her from being able to pay her bills but did not prevent people from leaving her alone to look after herself. Despite being tragic in a quiet and strangled sort of way, I think it was quite funny, although I don’t remember any jokes. Things like seasons and vermin and offspring toppled out of existence between the damp and perfect paragraphs that were also sentences.

I’m about 75% sure this story exists. I came across it on the wilds of the internet via a link from I don’t know where, during a time when I was looking for I don’t know what. Probably it sat for a while on my browser in the mysterious coded potential of a small tab getting smaller, squeezed tight by informational clutter administrative and otherwise, before a routine electronic cataclysm caused my system to crash and I lost it along with some other things I had forgotten I didn’t want to forget. The divorcing woman disappeared and mostly what I remember about her are the gaps between her sentences.

Blanchot says that tone in literature is “not the writer’s voice, but the intimacy of the silence he imposes upon the word.” Sometimes I think he means something like – a writer’s voice consists in the vibrations that hang in the air after the story has finished, innocent as church bells on Monday morning. Other times I wonder if it’s the exact opposite – that when you write a story you freeze the thing you’re writing about, like a doctor freezes off a wart, and the intimate silence is the wartless unhealed wound left by words transfigured into chilly unreal.

Either way, it captures what I’m always looking for when reading; the sense of things falling away. At heart I’m something of a secular mystic, and what I like best is when a story leads me right into the middle of an Indiana Jones-style jungle bridge, but whilst it tempts me across to the other side it brings me to a plank that can’t hold the weight of the story’s specificity, so that the wood crumbles away, presenting me to the ravine. As I tumble I remember I never wanted to get to the other side to begin with, and when I started to read, this was what I hoped for: a few moments alone with the blank dark damp.

The short story is a perfect medium for this kind of plunge. With the proximity of both beginning and ending haunting every sentence, it barely exists, a vivid island of words surrounded by their opposites. My favourite stories feel as though they’re always in conversation with their own disintegration. Wanting to exist, but also acutely aware that in so many different ways they can’t, and don’t. I think about my divorcing madwoman and her gappy floorboards. The fact that her disappearance has not disappeared. That she exists as a hole in my head. She’s silent, and her story is riddled with silences, but they’re her silences, specific but inarticulate utterances of the funny aching hollow at the heart of things. 

All of the twelve stories I’ve chosen left me with that sense of the apophatic. Each feels as though they have left enough space for me to fall through the cracks. The stories suggested themselves to me in thematic clumps, and I arranged them carefully, according to a design that I can’t quite articulate. The jungle bridge leads from ‘The Blank Page’ to ‘The Instant of my Death’. In between, I hope, are some pleasurable tumbles. 

P.S. If anyone does know the story of my damp divorcee – please tell me! If there’s one thing compiling this list has shown me is that the silences of remembered things are usually made more potent by encountering them again.

‘The Blank Page’ by Karen Blixen, under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen

“Hear then: Where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a small snotty lass understands it or not.”

Instead of writing an introduction, I should really have just presented this story. In gorgeous, circuitous detail, it teaches us (the quiet readers of a story narrated aloud by a woman who cannot read) how to produce the most perfect kind of silence. It portrays creativity is inherently female – not, I don’t think, because it’s talking specifically about female creativity, but because it wants to use the particular muffled and obscure experience of being a woman at that time (or any time?) as a metaphor for the awful liberation offered by the symbol created by a work of art. That final image! I find it genuinely revelatory.

Published in Last Tales, Random House, 1957

‘The Figure in the Carpet’ by Henry James

“‘I see–it’s some idea ABOUT life, some sort of philosophy. Unless it be,’ I added with the eagerness of a thought perhaps still happier, ‘some kind of game you’re up to with your style, something you’re after in the language. Perhaps it’s a preference for the letter P!’ I ventured profanely to break out. ‘Papa, potatoes, prunes–that sort of thing?’ He was suitably indulgent: he only said I hadn’t got the right letter.”

‘The Figure in the Carpet’ forces you to accept ambiguity, waking up your thoughts and giving them insomnia. This was one of the stories I couldn’t have omitted without ingratitude – I read it early and it’s become part of the furniture of my brain. It’s about a young critic who dedicates his life to learning the hidden meaning of an author’s work. Like Paul Auster’s City of Glass or any number of Borges’ stories, it captures something ineffable in concrete, only to sink it just out of view so that we really feel its absence.

I am often very sure that I know things – about myself, other people, the meaning of books and films and tv shows – right up until the moment that I try to articulate them to myself or others. Then I have that moment of terrifying undoing when I realise that nothing exists outside the how of my saying it, and if I don’t have that how, the knowledge recedes, and I’m left with nothing but a feeling of personal insufficiency. I think that’s what’s compelling about ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, more than it being a theorisation of ‘criticism’ or ‘authorship’ or whatever – it’s a story about the frustration of feeling like you ought to be able to know.

First published in Cosmopolis, 1896. Collected in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 1986; also available as a Little Black Classic, Penguin, 2015. Read online at Project Gutenberg here

‘Fragment of a Diary’ by Amparo Davila, trans. Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson

“I’ve always liked stairways, with their people who go dragging their breath up them and fall dully down them in a shapeless mass. Maybe that’s why I chose the stairs to suffer on.”

A man sits on the steps and practices suffering. He exercises his pains – moving from the 4th degree to the 9th of suffering, gaining mastery over remorse and jealousy. It’s a perfect portrayal of the paradox of the martyr – and of the artist. The hubris of trying to be in control of pain, thinking that if you just dwell on it enough, it won’t overwhelm you in the end. As long as you’re in love with suffering, you can never really suffer. Of course, ultimately, it’s love that gives the lie to this – because the most unbearable pain of all is the one that’s poisoned by the hope that things might stop hurting quite so much.

English translation published in The Houseguest and Other Stories, New Directions, 2018

‘On the Day of the Crucifixion’ by Leonid Andreyev, trans. Herman Bernstein

“On that terrible day, when the universal injustice was committed and Jesus Christ was crucified in Golgotha among robbers—on that day, from early morning, Ben-Tovit, a tradesman of Jerusalem, suffered from an unendurable toothache.”

This story begins my little trio of god texts. As I say in the introduction, I myself am not religious, but religious stories were some of the first texts I saw being talked about with reverence. Stories that were held up as something important, rather than your ‘Biff and Chips’ or Charlotte’s Webs, which were, as far as I could tell as a child at least, for play, or simply ‘educational’. Yes, I was indeed a fairly serious sort of child.

My grandpa on my mum’s side was a Church of England vicar, whilst my dad is a very atheistic Jew who tried sporadically to keep up the tradition of Shabbat and Passover. All this culminated in a personal sense that when people talked about god, it was a symbol for something foreign, distant, and outside the everyday.

The excerpted sentence above pretty much summarises the plot of this story. In the shadow of infinite suffering, Ben-Tovit has a tooth ache. The description of a man not noticing the immensity of something right beside him is as discomfiting as it is amusing. You get a prickling feeling that the sublime could pass you by and you wouldn’t even know it, because you’d been too busy explaining the details of your own personal gripes to notice that the irredeemable world was in the process of being redeemed.

English translation published in The Crushed Flower and Other Stories, 1916. Read online here

‘The Martyrdom of St. Edmund, King of East Anglia, 870,’ by Abbo of Fleury, trans. Kenneth Cutler

This kept popping into my mind when I was putting together my anthology, and in the end I just gave in to whatever it was my subconscious was trying to tell me.

It’s a hagiography of a King who’s martyred by invading Vikings for refusing to give up Christianity. It’s not a short story but I think it feels like one to read it today. What’s stuck with me is the way that it depicts (or rather, doesn’t depict) pain. The weirdness of it! The odd, affectless way that physical agony is described! There’s a line about him being pricked all over with spears ‘like a hedgehog’ that I think about weirdly often – it’s so impassive, disconnected – like his body is nothing but surface.

I read this at university and I remember not really knowing what to do with it academically. Now I’ve forgotten everything I learnt about hagiography and Abbo of Fleury, but the feeling of reading the text hasn’t budged – its bright, solid images, its refusal to go inside of things.

Perhaps this is what I like about reading it: that it reminds me of the uncanny fact of other lives and other times. Often stories give us the illusion of true empathy – of feeling with. But reading this, with all its meanings distant and its contexts inaccessible, I become aware of how many things have been, are, and will forever be alien to me.

Collected in Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer, Oxford University Press, 1882. Read online here

‘God’s Love’ by Sheila Heti

“Jenna, you better start loving God now, cause the years are passing, and when I screw you, I can see there are little hairs in your ass that weren’t there before, so I’m just telling you that you better find him soon.”

At her best, Heti is simultaneously deft playful and slight, and profound tragic and weighty. Sometimes her stories get a bit cute for me, but this one hits the note perfectly. Consisting of a man exhorting his girlfriend to stop sending emails to other men and to start loving God instead, it’s both funny and humiliatingly human. Is it cynical? Certainly it’s cruel, in the way only impeccably observed truthfulness can be. The speaker is so misguided that he’s almost endearing. At the centre of it there’s an interminable anxiety, and a stupid, stubborn, ridiculous refusal to believe that nothing’s ever going to calm it. And what is the speaker supposed to do with that? Heti doesn’t presume to know – only, not this.

Published in Mal Journal, 2019. Read online here

‘Good Old Neon’ by David Foster Wallace

“My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.”

I know at least one person whose life was saved by this story. I’m not exaggerating. My own experience – who knows? The effect it had on me was so intense, it’s certainly not far off. Reading it at 19, trying to work out why I couldn’t find a way of being alive that felt natural, or make connections that felt effortless, or have an emotion that felt pure – it put those experiences I saw as insoluble personal failings into the context of being a human subject and having to deal in the insufficiency of concrete things. I re-read it every couple of years, so I can confirm – it’s not just a late-adolescence thing. The stubborn sense of knotty anguish that forms at the beginning gives way to a struggling acceptance of the indignity of it all, and it’s so tender, so kind, so tremulously sublime, that every time I read it again, I feel it opening up inside my lungs. “So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.”

First published in Harper’s Magazine, January 1998, and collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown, 1999, and The David Foster Wallace Reader, Little, Brown, 2014

‘Artur and Isabella’ by Daša Drndić, trans. S.D. Curtis

“He watches grey-haired ladies weeing in their nappies and smiling. They smile tiny smiles and they smile broad smiles. When they give off big smiles, old ladies quiver. Old ladies in aspic. In buses they piss and smile to themselves.”

This is not a what I would call a fun story to read. It’s unflinching about the physical ignominy of aging. Lots of shit. Piss. Shrunken genitals. Atrophied genitals. Under surveillance by a police state, Artur and Isabella perform sex acts on each other and obsess about hats and garden gnomes and chocolate balls – bits of stuffthat they invest with meaning whilst their bodies degrade.

I’m really selling it, I know.

There’s something quite Beckettian about the grimness of this story – the highest praise I can give. It’s an exploration of the humiliation of embodiment, about whether souls exist without the inevitability of excrement. The end is weird and esoteric and offers no closure – just a different type of unease. I think it’s fantastic. But I suggest that you don’t read it over lunch.

English translation published in Doppelgänger, Istros Books (UK), 2018 and New Directions (US), 2019. Read online here