A Personal Anthology, by Vincent Scarpa
As others have written in their introductions to this project, before I could begin selecting the stories I chose below, I had to exhaust myself of numerous inquiries about how one should go about doing something like this — specifically, should I worry about those writers and stories I’m invariably leaving out? No such list is complete, it should go without saying, and if you asked this of me a year ago or a year from now there would likely be a different set of stories than those given below. That said, these stories are — today, at this moment in time, at this moment in my life — twelve of my favorites. I have taught most if not all of them at some point in my life, and I return to each of them regularly. (One mark of great short story, I think, is how often you can return to it and still encounter it, somehow, anew.) I hope some of these stories will be unknown to you, and that you will seek them out. You have my promise that they reward your reading.
‘Health’ by Joy Williams (First published in Short Stories by Women, Graywolf, 1986, and collected in Escapes, Vintage, 1990 and The Visiting Privilege: New and Selected Stories, Knopf, 2015)
It would be inconceivable to me to begin any selection of my favorite stories without including ‘Health’, which is my favorite short story by my favorite practitioner of the form — my favorite writer, period — Joy Williams. I first read this story when I was eighteen, after picking up a collection put out by Graywolf in the mid-80s called Short Stories by Women. I remember that I bought it for a few bucks in the basement of the Harvard Book Store. That anthology introduced me to writers like Elizabeth Tallent and Ann Beattie — more on both of them in a moment — but it was Joy’s story, ‘Health’, that most thrilled me. It’s a fairly simple story in which a young girl, Pammy, goes to a spa to get a tan. Something serious and sundering may or may not happen while she’s in the tanning booth. (The ambiguity of the encounter — real? imagined? somehow both? — is one of the most haunting elements of the story’s construction.) She exits the tanning spa a different person; the surface area of her innocence has shrunk, irremediably, irredeemably. This story contains an entire world in it, and it’s only about eight pages. It also has the best cough in all of literature.
‘Ice’ by Elizabeth Tallent (First published in The New Yorker, September 1980, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Tallent’s first collection, In Constant Flight, Knopf, 1983)
I’m excited by the opportunity to highlight some possibly lesser-known stories in this project, and I’d bet that Elizabeth Tallent’s ‘Ice’ is one that many do not yet know. One can feel saddened by this — one can worry about what gets lost when books go out of print, always one can worry about that — while also reveling in the opportunity to be the one to introduce this story into the life of another. This story was Tallent’s first to be published — in The New Yorker, of all places — and it opens her debut collection, In Constant Flight. The story is about a professional ice skater who’s viciously lonely and full of inchoate longings that come to define and circumscribe her. Its final scene — involving the skater dancing on the ice with a man in a bear costume — is pitch perfect, a marvelous marriage of the absurd, the comic, the cosmic, the surreal, the devastating.
‘The Burning House’ by Ann Beattie (First published in The New Yorker, and subsequently in Beattie’s collection The Burning House, Random House, 1982)
Speaking of endings, it’s hard to top the ending of this Ann Beattie story. I was assigned this story in an undergraduate literature course by Shannon Derby, and it has remained with me in all of the years that have passed since then, which are a great many years. This is Beattie at her absolute finest. A story overrun with people who are both desperate to be known and horrified by that very same prospect. The characters engage in masking — both figurative and literal — throughout the course of a boozy, smoky evening, and the story ends with the narrator, Amy, in bed with her husband. It’s from this bed that the narrator’s husband delivers a speech that ends the story, and, effectively, his marriage. Beattie leaves us there in that unforgiving wreckage. It’s a speech that Beattie, in an interview with The Paris Review, says readers approach her about more than anything else in her work. The temptation is to reproduce the speech here, but I will refrain from doing so, in the hopes that you’ll seek out the story for yourself.
‘At the End of My Life’ by Beth Nugent (First published in City of Boys, Knopf, 1992)
Beth Nugent is one of the greatest writers you’ve probably never heard about before this. And it’s easy to understand why: her singular collection of stories, City of Boys, has long been out of print. It was the writer Mary Miller — a short story savant in her own right — who turned me on to Nugent’s collection. I can’t remember now which was the story Mary liked best, but for me, although I love each of the stories in that collection — which is rare, in my experience; there are usually at least one or two skips — it’s ‘At the End of My Life’ that I return to the most often. It’s a story I’ve taught every time I’ve ever taught fiction. I just never tire of it, and none of its magic nor its tragedy ever seem to be drained from it by my constant revisitations. The story anatomizes a significantly fraught relationship between Lizzie, the narrator, and her younger, developmentally challenged brother, Glennie. Lizzie longs to escape her familial predicament, but is waylaid by her love and sense of duty toward Glennie. I find that I’m most drawn to stories where some version of this dynamic is at play; stories that take up questions of obligation, of debt, of what we owe ourselves and one another. Impossible questions, naturally, and this story doesn’t provide anything like an answer. Instead, Nugent leaves us to wonder and wander inside of the place Lizzie is asking these questions from, and she does it in an idiosyncratic, singular style.
‘Dance in America,’ Lorrie Moore (First published in The New Yorker, Jun 1993, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Birds of America, Knopf/Faber, 1998, and The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore, Knopf/Faber 2010)
I found it especially challenging to choose a favorite Lorrie Moore story to include on this list, though I knew she’d be on it from the get-go. There are so many wonderful options: ‘You’re Ugly, Too’ or ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’ or ‘Thank You for Having Me’ could’ve all easily taken this spot. But, for me, ‘Dance in America’ is Lorrie’s finest story. It’s one that makes me a little teary even to think about, if I’m being honest. The narrator is a disenchanted dancer visiting a college friend, his wife, and their young son, Eugene, who has cystic fibrosis. Without giving too much away, I will say that there’s a moment in which the narrator makes a promise to Eugene that she later, inadvertently, breaks, and her realization of this is one of the most gutting moments in all of Moore’s work. This story, it should also be said, is counterbalanced by Moore’s signature wit, containing one of the most hysterical anecdotes in all of fiction: a story about raccoons catching fire in the chimney.
‘Tumble Home’ by Amy Hempel (First published in Hempel’s collection Tumble Home, Scribner, 1998, and collected in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, Scribner, 2006)
Choosing a favorite Hempel story was also challenging for me; there are just so, so many options. In the end, I went with ‘Tumble Home,’ which may or may not be a novella. Its inclusion in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel certainly would allow us then to call it a story, regardless. ‘Tumble Home’ takes the form of a letter written from a psychiatric rehabilitation center; a letter to a man, a painter the writer briefly met before her breakdown. The letter is an attempt to express the inexpressible, the pursuit of which, we are given to believe, may have been what caused said breakdown in the first place. The structural bones of this story are fairly simple — it doesn’t get much more straightforward than an address — but Hempel chisels from marble, and what we get is an exquisite portrait of a woman who, like the narrator in Beattie’s ‘The Burning House’ is desperate to be understood by the object of her affection.
‘Antarctica’ by Laura van den Berg (First published in Glimmer Train, widely available in van den Berg’s collection The Isle of Youth, FSG Originals, 2013)
In a very real sense, Laura van den Berg was my introduction to the short story. It was her story ‘Where We Must Be,’ collected in Best American Nonrequired Reading, that first got my attention, and she has had it ever since. ‘Antarctica’ is, I think, her most accomplished story, and was included in Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery Stories in 2014. Few writers can accomplish what van den Berg does in this story, which is to render whole and legible a terribly unfinished, incomplete soul. She does this in the person of Lee, our narrator, who ventures to the titular frozen continent after her brother is killed in a freak accident at a research outpost. The story is populated by characters facing circumstances they never intended to incur, and those are my favorite kind of characters to watch move through the screens of language and narrative.
‘Testimony,’ Jessica Treadway (First published in Glimmer Train, widely available in Treadway’s collection Please Come Back to Me, The University of Georgia Press, 2010)
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!
‘Days,’ Deborah Eisenberg (First published in Eisenberg’s collection Transactions in a Foreign Currency,Knopf, 1986, and collected in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, Picador, 2008)
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.”
‘Reverón’s Dolls,’ Sara Majka (First published in Jerry, and collected in Majka’s collection Cities I’ve Never Lived In, A Public Space Book/Graywolf Press, 2016)
“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.
‘Natural Light’ by Kathleen Alcott (First published in Zoetrope 22.1, soon will be more widely available in Alcott’s debut collection of stories Emergency, W. W. Norton, 2023)
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.
‘Fifty-Seven,’ Rachel Kushner (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)
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!)
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Vincent Scarpa is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers whose work has appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, StoryQuarterly, Indiana Review and other journals. He lives in New Jersey.
* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 2,500 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. His story 'A Prolonged Kiss' was shortlisted for the 2021 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. He is Programme Director of the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.
* 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!
* We will end the Spring-Summer run of A Personal Anthology with a collaborative summer-themed edition on Friday 30th June. This is open to all – contributors, subscribers and readers - to suggest their favourite holiday- or summer-themed short stories. So get thinking, and please get in touch if you’d like to contribute!