A Personal Anthology, by Bojan Louis
Some of these stories inspired and guided the style of my debut collection of short stories, Sinking Bell, and others have shown me the future of what is possible with the next sequence of stories that I’ll write. I grew up reading horror and hearing stories of the supernatural from my parents, grandmother, and extended family. As a personal practice, I resist seeing the elements of genre, though as a professor I often have to examine the criteria of genre with my students so that they know what “rules” to bend, reshape, or ignore all together. Ghosts, monsters, the inexplicable and unknown are all real to me and I approach them with a realist’s eye and practice. For what is more evil, disgusting, and detestable than the horrors of man.
‘Collections’ by Amber Wardzala-Blaeser (Collected in Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Anthology of Dark Fiction, Vintage, 2023)
Wardzala-Blaeser is a writer to watch. This story, which was included in Never Whistle At Night: A Indigenous Anthology of Dark Fiction, is enthralling and fantastic. It hits my creative center while also reminding me of the tokenization that occurs in academic institutions, which have become hellholes for shortsighted bootlickers and incompetent cronies. An English major, who is Anishinaabe, attends a gathering at an “esteemed” professor’s house (because all these fools want to be esteemed) to ask if the professor will write a letter of recommendation. The professor’s walls are decorated with the heads of BIPOC students who she has helped, claiming these student’s successes as her own, as white supremacy does in institutions because these institutions were created out of white supremacy. Despite the horror of the walls of heads the character comes to a crossroads: run, and perhaps keep her life and integrity, or succumb to the professor’s blood and accolade lust and request the letter of recommendation for assured fame. This prompts me to reflect: does writer give readers what they want and desire, the trauma porn of struggle, or say, fuck the reader. Either way, there’s something to be lost?
‘The Missing Morningstar’ by Stacie Denet-Tsosie (Collected in The Missing Morningstar: And Other Stories, Torrey House Press 2023)
Denet-Tsosie, a Diné writer, is another writer to watch and read. The first paragraph is exquisite, as is the rest of the writing in this story and throughout the collection by the same title. I love short stories that feel expansive and operate with depth. There are stories within stories within stories, each sentence a gift of sensory detail and description. The narration here is close, personable, like I’m sitting next to the narrator on the tailgate of a pick, and we’re maybe telling sheep stories, or “this one time” stories, and this tale of a missing girl unfolds, but the story isn’t simply about the missing girl, but everything leading up to that event and everyone, every being around that event. Everything has a presence in this story and agency. The story reciprocates, the ending a relief, a signal of hope and survival. A wonderful way to end a fantastic collection.
‘Cannibal’ by Natanya Ann Pulley (First published in Split Lip, and available to read online here. Collected in With Teeth, New Rivers Press 2019)
This story by Diné writer Natanya Ann Pulley is dark, ethereal, and violent. Three things I enjoy in literature, though this story, or the whole collection, doesn’t seek to capitalize or glorify those aspects. The narrator here has been consumed by a cannibal and plays observer to the emotional turmoil that her consumer goes through. I’m in it all the way, perhaps like the narrator. The setting is tone and mood driven, nothing stable or concrete. The uncertainty of all this makes the story feel mythic and revelatory.
‘Brother’ by Chelsea T. Hicks (Collected in A Calm and Normal Heart: Stories, The Unnamed Press 2022)
Hicks, a citizen of the Osage Nation, has written a kick-ass collection of fiction. The story details a night of dances and the sudden violence that occurs outside a three-star Ponca casino. This story expands and contracts, its use of time finely consolidated. I love how Hicks’s work interweaves the myriad aspects of Native life, specifically the Osage, but I can relate to the differing characters and cultural makeup of a community. The cousins/siblings who live off the reservation, the ones who stayed and try to ignore the people from high school, the troublemakers, gangsters, and drug dealers. Everyone enacting their mode of survival and existence. Violence is a part of life for a lot of Native people, for a lot of non-Native people, for people everywhere and it’s refreshing to see how it is survived in this wonderful story.
‘The Furies From Borås’ by Anders Fager, translated by Ian Lemke and Henning Koch (Collected in Swedish Cults, Valancourt Books 2022)
This story perplexed me at first for its entangled cast of characters and how they are placed and move about on the page. Entanglement is also enacted by way of the three intersecting towns of Vårnamo, Borås, and Jönköping; the lives of girls who frequent the Underryd Dance Hall and the Meat (boys) who are lured for sacrifice to the Black Goat; the tentacles and multiple eyes of the Black Goat monster and the entanglement of time because of the centuries that some of the girls of Borås have lived. There is almost no central character in this story because the characters exist as a community on the fringes of reality and as a ritual/sacrificial collective. The place and its history, its hunger, exist to feed the beast(s). Cosmic and earthly entanglements, and collision make this story wonderfully compelling.
‘The Return’ by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews (Collected in The Return, New Directions, 2010)
Connection, connections, are at the core of this story. “Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac.” An eccentric, an artist, an outsider, a being seemingly ashamed of his body or his entire existence. We meet our narrator at the moment of his death in a Paris nightclub while he pursues the woman of his dreams. Hard drugs and a heart attack snatch him from the world of the living and we get to observe and listen to what sort of afterlife is in store for him. The narrator witnesses the transportation of his corpse from the morgue to Villeneuve’s remote house where it, his body, is used for Villeneuve’s sexual desire, even if tender. And here the story turns or progresses and the narrator becomes the ear for all of Villeneuve’s troubles, memories, and secrets. If allowed a voice from the afterlife might one’s existential loneliness become more bearable or all the more alienating, pulling one deeper into the void.
‘Decent People’ by Garth Greenwell (First published in The Sewanee Review, Fall 2019, and available to read here. Collected in Cleanness, FSG 2020)
This story is populated; the blurred street lights and indiscernible store fronts viewed from a taxi with a talkative and somewhat mysterious driver. Greenwell’s sentences bustle along with the atmosphere of a street protest and flashbacks of a first encounter with a former student, who the narrator finds an unlikely kinship with. I love Greenwell’s structure and style, the seamless and lyrical syntax set within lushish paragraphs. I don’t recall how I arrived at Greenwell's work, but I do remember seeing a piece in One Story many years ago, ‘The Frog King,’ the title piquing my interest. Perhaps that is what stayed with me, the title and mystery of its contents. As I was completing edits for my debut story collection and frantically writing a new story to round out the collection at the suggestion of my editor this story, or chapter, entered my life. I had been searching for a form to harness the new voice that I was investigating, a voice and form that would propel me beyond the collection I was finishing, and which showed me the futurity of my work and practice.
‘This Is Paradise’ by Kristiana Kahakauwila (Collected in This Is Paradise: Stories, Hogarth, 2013)
This story begins one of my all time favorite story collections by the same title. Dark, precise, and exhilarating. I’m fortunate and honored to count Kahakauwila as family, a friend, and source of inspiration. This collection was grossly overlooked, perhaps because it is hard, honest, and resists the white colonial gaze and violence perpetrated by American and European ideals of paradise and entitlement to an already inhabited vision of paradise. The narrator is that of a collective, a community of housekeepers for one of the many resorts along the beach in Waikiki who befriend a tourist. We get a glimpse into the private and collective lives until Susan vanishes with a man and meets her end; her death nothing more than a passing warning as more and more tourists flock to claim their little version of what they think is paradise.
‘This Is Not Miami’ by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes (First published in Spanish in Aquí no es Miami, Almadía, 2013, and in English in This Is Not Miami, New Directions/Fitzcarraldo 2023)
Melchor knows brutality and how human fear can amplify those brutalities. Not a fictitious story but the testimony of a fellow human’s fearful experience with brutality. There is little introspection in this relato, this testament of experience. I’m a big fan of Melchor’s two novels, Hurricane Season and Paradise, for their depth and acute detail of human hatred, anger, and pain. Her style is wonderfully dense, lyrical, and unrelenting.
‘Florida Lives’ by Dionne Irving (First published in The Missouri Review, September 2010. Collected in The Islands: Stories, Catapult 2022)
Sometimes it can be difficult to determine when a story, or an occurrence, becomes fiction, and perhaps when it is considered nonfiction, or memoir. A straightforward way of thinking about this might be that nonfiction seeks to maintain truth, accuracy, and facts while fiction bends the rules; the borders of trust, truth, and self awareness blurred and distorted like the crumbling relationship of the characters in ‘Florida Lives’ and the encroaching and “tacky” neighbors. Though in both fiction and nonfiction, we, or our characters, can become the thing we have come to judge or detest. A former mentor and professor of mine, Simon J. Ortiz, had the saying: “If it’s fiction, it better be true.” Which I’ve taken to mean that the emotional resonance of any piece of writing should ring true with regard to human emotion and experience. Often, when we write, we write from our own experiences and can use the form of fiction to examine what could have been or what went wrong or what went right, blurring the lines between reality and imagination. Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño, has said: “In fiction, anything is possible.”
‘Susto’ by Manuel Muñoz (First published in Freeman’s, California, 2019. Collected in The Consequences, Graywolf Press 2022)
Atmosphere. Or, a story’s ability to create a certain mood, maintain tension, and create an emotional setting. Manuel Muñoz’s story “Susto” can be translated as “fright” in English, but in a Mexican context it can imply a deeper, stronger trauma. The story centers around a working class community and a foreman who lives in the town who comes across the body of a dead man who has materialized. A fairly straightforward plot line or narrative, but what draws the reader in and creates the atmosphere or mood of the story is Muñoz’s style: elegant and lucid, existing in a liminal space between hyperreality and gothic superstitions. This is a story crafted with patience and attention to detail, not a single word is wasted or extraneous. Atmosphere can be closely related and effect genre, but when considered and crafted with attention to style the story can transcend genre and become something more unique and, in the case of ‘Susto,’ more haunting.
‘The Head’ by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur (First published in Samovar, September 2019, and available to read online here; collected in Cursed Bunny, Honford Star, 2021)
Chung’s work is new to me. A talking head made of clay, hair, fecal matter, and any other bodily waste put into the toilet by the main character. This creation calling out, “Mother!” It took me a few false starts to read through the story because each time I started I kept saying, “What?” And being both baffled and excited by the unknown, the story gave me pause. I admire how Chung handles the passing of time in the story, how it flies by for the character because of her choices and circumstances, and how the head at the end of story becomes the main character with a new future.
Bojan Louis is Diné of the Naakai dine’é, born for the Áshííhí. He is the author of the short-story collection, Sinking Bell: Stories (Graywolf Press 2022 and Dead Ink Books 2023), the poetry collection Currents (BkMk Press 2017), and the nonfiction chapbook Troubleshooting Silence in Arizona (The Guillotine Series 2012). His honors include a MacDowell Fellowship, a 2018 American Book Award, a 2023 National Endowments for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a 2023 Southwest Book Award, and a 2023 American Book Award. Louis is an associate professor at the University of Arizona.
* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 3,000 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com.
* A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs, author of two novels, Randall, and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He is Programme Director of the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.
* And if you are interested in contributing your own Personal Anthology to the project, then please let me know by replying to this email. I’m always on the lookout for guest editors!
* Finally, if you enjoy this Substack you might enjoy Creative Digest, a collaborative Substack produced by the Creative Writing team at City, and to which I contribute. Read and subscribe here.