A Personal Anthology, by Trahearne Falvey
I started reading short fiction properly when I entered the world of full-time work. A novel is for stretching out an afternoon in a bed or a bath, whereas a story is for the morning train, the lunch break, the last exhausted minutes before sleep sets in. George Saunders, the contemporary story writer who understands this the most, once published a piece on a Chipotle burrito wrapper. The greatest short fiction not only fits into the gaps in work-time, clock-time – all the alarms and schedules and deadlines that make up our days – it explodes them, making them somehow bigger, slower, stranger.Here are twelve stories that do just that.
‘Lifelong Learning’ by Ben Pester (First published in Am I in the Right Place?, Boiler House Press 2020)
“‘There’s a hole in your ear!’ Carl once said. You were in his spare room, during a phase in which you weren’t going out because Carl wanted things to be home-based.”
A couple of years ago I decided it was time to stop being sad. I found a therapist who was not too far away and whose hourly rate I could just about afford. I told him that I hadn’t been able to write in such a long time – I was barely reading, barely thinking – and he suggested that I write about the sadness. I left pissed off and didn’t return; I’d never heard something so stupid. I felt nothing, and this nothing had no shape, no substance: what was there to write about? Ben Pester’s collection Am I in the Right Place? is one of the books that brought me back to literature, mostly because it is hilarious and weird and surprising, but also because it is about the nothing I had been experiencing. In ‘Lifelong Learning’, the protagonist has a hole in his ear into which half a can of Grolsch lager disappears. He escapes an awful WKD-and-Call-of-Duty party through a hole in the back of a cupboard which leads to the Village. There, he struggles to articulate the shapeless nothing of his life and hopes ‘to find someone’. ‘Because I have been alone on the limits for so long,’ Pester writes, ‘I have been in need of my friends for so long.’
‘The Debutante’ by Leonora Carrington (First published in Anthology of Black Humor, ed. André Breton, Editions du Sagittaire 1940, collected in The Debutante and Other Stories, Silver Press 2017 and The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, Dorothy, 2017)
“In front of the mirror, the hyena was admiring herself in Mary’s face. She had nibbled very neatly all around the face so that what was left was exactly what was needed.‘You’ve certainly done that very well,’ I said.”
Decades before any of us had seen a Yorgos Lanthimos film, Leonora Carrington used surreal horror to play social etiquette for deadpan laughs in ‘The Debutante’, a story in which the threat of boredom leads a young girl to enlist the services of a hyena. I can imagine that, today, an editor or workshopper might draw a red line through one or both instances of ‘very’ in the passage quoted above. They are important. Carrington’s debutante avoids the ridiculousness of polite society only by re-enacting it with a hyena. It is crucial, too, that the animal is a hyena – no other beast is so abject, so liminal. Sometimes, I dream of a hyena wearing the flattened, eyeless face-flesh of a maid, nibbled off very neatly.
‘Letter to a Young Lady in Paris’ by Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn (First published in English in Blow-Up and Other Stories, Pantheon 1967; also in Bestiary, Vintage Classics, 2020. For another translation online, see here)
“Andrea, I didn’t want to come live in your apartment on Suipacha. Not so much because of the bunnies, but rather that it offends me to intrude on a compact order, built even to the finest nets of air, networks that in your environment conserve the music in the lavender, the heavy fluff of the powder puff in the talcum, the play between the violin and the viola in Ravel’s quartet.”
I can’t tell you what this story is really about – beauty, anxiety, overwhelm perhaps – but I can tell you that, literally, it is about a translator who moves into an apartment and begins vomiting more rabbits than he usually does. It is incredible.
‘Poison Plants’ by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder (Collected in Revenge, Vintage, 2013)
“Then I found myself at the edge of an open field that sloped gently above me – a field covered with boxlike objects. I reached out to touch the nearest one: a refrigerator.”
Some of my favourite novels (Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives; Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child) and some of my favourite story collections (Bennett’s Pond; Corin’s One Hundred Apocalypses) are not really novels or story collections at all, but a secret third thing – a shattered mosaic. When it exists within a constellation like this, a single short story accumulates a depth of meaning that defies the form’s slightness. Ogawa’s Revenge works in this way: an image – a carrot, say – gathers an uncanny power over the course of the book, such that by the time it appears in the final story, ‘Poison Plants’, just the mention of the vegetable is chilling. Another analogy for Revenge might be San Jose’s Winchester Mystery House: a testament to death and madness where architecture defies logic and a trap door is never far away.
‘Me, Rory and Aurora’ by Jonas Eika, translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg (Published in After the Sun, Lolli Editions 2021, and available to read online at Granta, here)
“I was sucking on her nipples and could have sworn some milk came out, just a few drops. Just a second of that body-warm, sugary, a little oniony, a-little-too-soon liquid in my mouth”
I bought Jonas Eika’s After the Sun because of the title and the cover and because Lolli Editions had published The Employees by Olga Ravn. When I began reading, I didn’t understand it – I still don’t – but I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. ‘Me, Rory and Aurora’, a story about a fucked-up throuple-cum-Oedipal triangle existing at the margins, is sad and strange and sexy. The final sequence, in which the narrator enters a complex housing the “Newly Dead: warm, breathing, urinating”, is astonishing.
‘Barbarians’ by Lucy Corin (First published online at McSweeney’s, 2013, and available to read here, andcollected in One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, McSweeney’s, 2016)
During the first lockdown, I carried Lucy Corin’s book One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses around with me like some kind of survival manual. I read it front to back and back to front. I read individual stories over and over and over again or I opened the book at random and stared at a page. Corin transforms our shattered experiences of living in the end times into comedy and tragedy and poetry. Her language is so weird, so jagged, so precise. I could choose almost any of the one-hundred-and-three apocalypse stories that make up the book but I will choose this one, because it begins with this sentence: “It was exciting about the economy because the economy deserved it”.
‘A Love Story’ by Cathy Sweeney (Collected in Modern Times, Stinging Fly Press, 2020)
“There once was a woman who loved her husband’s cock so much she began taking it to work in her lunchbox.”
All of Sweeney’s trademarks are on show in this one-page story: the almost flippant treatment of time, the arch comedy, concern with the mystery and disappointment of marriage. I could read it every day and still laugh at “the French dish called chicken-in-wine.” Proof that among the many things a short story can be, a dick joke is one of them.
‘Rhinoceros’ by Camilla Grudova (Collected in The Doll’s Alphabet, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017)
“It was inside the couch that I found the beef can, after removing the cushions and cleaning underneath because the couch sometimes gave off an odd smell. The can had a white animal on it, called a beef. Nicholas became terribly excited.”
The obvious stand-out in Camilla Grudova’s first collection is ‘Waxy’, but it is ‘Rhinoceros’ I think about the most, maybe because I read it around the same time as John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? A tin of meat. An empty zoo. A “pink lump” without mouth or eyes or hands but “alive”, emerging out of the protagonist as she lies in a bathtub. Something unnameable happens when Grudova places these images together. Her world is so peculiar yet familiar (to my mind, very English – strange, considering she is a Canadian living in Scotland), and I love being inside it even as it makes me feel a bit sick.
‘Derland’ by Kathryn Scanlan (Collected in The Dominant Animal, Daunt Books 2020)
“Uncle Dick – he was always unbuckling. He unbuckled all across this great land of ours. Eventually he headed south of the border to continue his life’s work, and was never heard from again.”
I love a short story collection you can treat like an album of pop songs: play it again and again, allow it to become part of the texture of your daily life, find your own personal bangers. Kathryn Scanlan’s The Dominant Album is one of those. Sharp, sharp sentences, stories that turn on a dime, and such artful use of the em dash.
‘Voyage in the Dark’ by Claire-Louise Bennett (Published in Pond, Stinging Fly Press, 2015)
“Oh, but we were only little girls, little girls, there on the cusp of individuation, not little girls for long.”
The short story as prose poem, piece of music, perfect object. There are few writers living today that burrow underneath memory and consciousness and language like Claire-Louise Bennett.
‘My Life is a Joke’ by Sheila Heti (First published in The New Yorker, 2015 and available to read here)
“Could I have a glass of water, please? Where is my water? I am parched and I am dead.”
The short story as stand-up routine, as ‘Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?’ joke. A lecture delivered from beyond the grave. I must confess to mixed feelings about Heti’s recent work – Pure Colour was too sweet for me – but the early hits speak for themselves. Here, Heti’s philosophical comedy is literally grounded: the “salt and soil and sweat and worms and seedlings” and “those little Styrofoam balls”. When I think of this story I think of those little Styrofoam balls.
‘Carlos Ramirez Hoffman’ by Roberto Bolano translated by Chris Andrews (from Nazi Literatures in the Americas, Picador, 2010)
“Look after yourself, Bolaño, he said, and off he went.”
Short story as encyclopaedia entry and nightmare of fascism. Bolaño spends most of Nazi Literatures in the Americas in an objective third person as he documents the lives and works of various fictional fascist writers – football hooligan poet brothers, a novelist who spells out LONG LIVE HITLER using the first letters of each chapter, a Texan who edits the Aryan Brotherhood’s literary journal from within prison – but the final section moves into first person. After the intoxication of the previous pages, things sober up. The jokes stop. Bolaño himself is enlisted in a quest to find a murderous, sky-writing Nazi pilot poet (who will reappear in the novel Distant Star), against the backdrop of Pinochet’s brutal coup. The final line, when Bolaño is told to look after himself, calmly underlines the terror in the world that Bolaño has witnessed. With the obsession of someone not really being listened to, Bolaño told us again and again of the inextricability of literature and evil. I mean it, he tells us here, I’m not just making it up.
Trahearne Falvey’s writing has appeared in Lunate, Necessary Fiction, 3AM Magazine and other places, and his stories have won the Writing East Midlands’ Aurora Prize and the Short Fiction/University of Essex International Short Story Prize. He is currently an Associate Editor at Short Fiction and intermittently working on a debut collection when not teaching teenagers or exhausted from teaching teenagers.
* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 2,700 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!
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