The 2020 Short-Story Reading Challenge

Chris P said:

Thanks for suggesting the compilation, Lakey! Certainly worth the investment and I enjoyed the discussion with the group.

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Glad you liked it! I’m going to dip into it next—as soon as I finish another eyeball book—so with luck there will be a bit more discussion soon.

In the meantime, I finished the last of the stories reprinted in Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. (An absolutely excellent craft text, by the way, if you like that sort of thing; the rich selection of short stories in it is just the icing on the cake!)

66. “Victory Lap,” George Saunders, 2013
As I read the first section of this story, I was thinking “I can’t follow this at all. Too experimental and disjoint for me. I have no idea what’s going on.” It seems with every Saunders story I read I start with this feeling, and then settle into the rhythm or whatever it is he’s doing and wind up thoroughly engaged. I really didn’t think that would happen this time—but it did. In the chapter of Writing Fiction that covers POV, this story has three of them, that of a young teen girl, of the boy who lives across the way, and of a man who tries to abduct the girl. Each is rather stream-of-consciousness (interesting because I happen to be rereading Mrs Dalloway at the moment). The girl’s is the most opaque to me, which is why I found the first segment of the story so difficult to follow. But the boy’s, and the abductor’s, are masterful—illuminating so well the warped perspective (and psychological damage) of each, from inside minds that don’t recognize themselves as damaged. I really admire that, when a tight perspective makes things plain to the reader that aren’t understood by the character in whose perspective they are shown. So, despite a rocky start, a terrific story.

67. “No One’s a Mystery,” Elizabeth Tallent, 1986
An interesting choice for a chapter on POV, because this brief story is nearly all dialogue. There are some in-POV sensual details in the beginning but no interiority at all. It is a conversation between a young woman (the first-person narrator, minimally) and the older, married man she is having an affair with. He has given her a diary for her birthday, and by way of speculating about what she will write in it, they are imagining their future together (or not). Hers is a romantic vision; his, a much more realistic perspective on what happens when an eighteen-year-old dates a guy who is not right for her. “ ‘I like yours,’ he said, ‘but I believe mine.’ ” It’s a good story, but too short. I don’t often feel satisfied when I read stories of this length—they end just as I am getting oriented.

68. “Reply All,” Robin Hemley, 2007
Absolutely HILARIOUS epistolary story. Totally ridiculous and great fun. It’s so delicious that I wanted to include a link for all of you to experience it, and while I didn’t turn up a readable copy of it online (though there may be one) I did find a YouTube clip of the author reading the story. Enjoy!

68/100 read, 26/50 from the last five years

ChrisP, I have really enjoyed your survey and analyses of Wendell Berry, a writer I knew nothing about before you starting reading him here. Thank you!

More of the Nafissa Thompson-Spires collection:

69. “Belles Lettres,” Nafissa Thomspson-Spires, in Heads of the Colored People, 2018
It is evidently my day for snarky epistolary stories. This one is a correspondence between two educated Black women, the mothers of the only two Black children in an otherwise white school. One of the girls is rather a bully, the other her victim and, ultimately, nemesis. The letters start out superficially polite but with less friendly implications; they grow increasingly overt as the gloves come off and the two women go after each other. Subtext in the letters relates to the two women’s different relationship with their Blackness; there are class implications here as well, as the bully’s mother accuses the other of being “ghetto” while the victim’s mother’s reply is, more or less, damn right there’s a little ghetto in me, and I don’t start fights I don’t intend to finish. Her transformation at the end is rather abrupt, and I’m not completely sure I understand where it came from, but perhaps it is a concession to the power of the white principal to upend her daughter’s education if she does not capitulate.

70. “The Body’s Defenses Against Itself,” Nafissa Thomspson-Spires, in Heads of the Colored People, 2018
The victim, Fatima, is grown, reminiscing about her childhood and her battles with the girl who bullied her. This is a rather melancholy story about the way women are made to go to war with their bodies; Fatima suffers (like so many women) from disordered eating and undiagnosed endometriosis. There is a bit of healing in the story arc; the frame of the story is a yoga class in which Fatima feels herself silently competing with a woman in the class who reminds her of her childhood nemesis; toward the end, Fatima is injured, and the woman turns out to be a nurse, and is kind to her; one has the sense that in realizing that her competition with the woman was unwarranted and silly, she has maybe begun to forgive and find some sympathy for her nemesis as well.

70/100 read, 28/50 from the last five years

And still more Nafissa Thompson-Spires -- I have been tearing through:

71. “Fatima, the Biloquist: A Transformation Story,” Nafissa Thomspson-Spires, in Heads of the Colored People, 2018
Another story about Fatima's youth; this one explicitly examines the dual space that a middle-class Black girl must navigate, being too Black to fit in with her white schoolmates (in a familiar though no less cringey for being familiar, her white boyfriend tells her, "you're not, like, Black Black, though") and not Black enough to fit in with her Black neighborhood friends. Fatima sets out to create a Black identity for herself in this story, with mixed success. (In an interesting irony, the friend who is her guide into Blackness is albino!) I had to look up the word "biloquist," which means "a person who speaks in two voices." This is subtly different from being bilingual, and is a super interesting way to characterize the code-switching that Black people must do to move through the white world. Its root-association with "ventriloquist" carries a connotation of falseness, the projection of one or the other of the biloquist's voices on an artifice, an act. The great ambiguity for Fatima is that it is not clear to her which of these voices, if either, is her authentic or natural voice.

72. “The Subject of Consumption,” Nafissa Thomspson-Spires, in Heads of the Colored People, 2018
A fairly satirical story about a mixed-race couple -- Black man, white woman -- where the man is controlled entirely by the woman's obsessive need for rebellion, individuality, and attention. She drags him along from fad to fad; her current obsessions are fruititarianism and "detachment parenting." She is extremely eager to impress a reality-show producer who has come to film the family for a show pilot; the husband flees for the day and engages in ever-escalating acts of rebellion against her. There is a sense of him awakening or emerging from a cocoon as he becomes bolder and bolder in his defiance of her, before finally taking it to her directly. The dominant theme of this story is its critique of attention-seeking (white) privileged people, though there are quite a few other themes woven throughout.

73. “Suicide, Watch,” Nafissa Thomspson-Spires, in Heads of the Colored People, 2018
Another satirical story about an attention-seeking narcissist angling to boost her social media popularity.

74. “Whisper to a Scream,” Nafissa Thomspson-Spires, in Heads of the Colored People, 2018
Another social-media story, this time about a teen girl who records ASMR videos while struggling with her own identity and her mother's overbearing way of minimizing her. Although it doesn't really have a tragic ending, there is a broadly tragic feel to the story, like something terrible is going to happen soon after the story ends.

75. “Not Today, Marjorie,” Nafissa Thomspson-Spires, in Heads of the Colored People, 2018
This story made me think of some stories I read and commented on earlier in the year, with distasteful protagonists whose attempts at self-justifying were transparent to the reader. I'm very interested in this kind of unreliable narrator. This one is about an officious woman with an anger-management problem. It's heartbreaking, really, because you can feel her loneliness and her fear of loneliness; her sense that she needs to improve herself or she will lose the few friends she still has. But you also feel her fighting against that sense, not wanting to take responsibility, wanting to find a way to fix it (such as, through Jesus) that's easier than really confronting her own destructive behaviors. It's a really nicely set up internal conflict. And it's framed in an interesting way, craft-wise -- the present action of the story is just Marjorie waiting in line at the DMV, an experience that most of us can relate to as maddening. Everything else is in the story and backstory spins out in Marjorie's wandering thoughts and growing frustration.

Phew! Three more stories in this collection, I think.

75/100 read, 33/50 from the last five years.

I finished the Nafissa Thompson-Spires book.

76. “This Todd,” Nafissa Thomspson-Spires, in Heads of the Colored People, 2018
Another semi-satirical story, this time with an unreliable narrator who is an absolutely terrible person. She recounts relationships with three disabled men, and it’s clear that she fetishizes them and treats them in really gross, inappropriate ways. One of the many ways in which she dehumanizes them is that she refers to them all as “Todd” even though only one of them is actually named Todd (hence the title). In the next story, you find out (incidentally) that she has stalked one of them to the point that he’s brought legal action against her.

77. “A Conversation About Bread,” Nafissa Thomspson-Spires, in Heads of the Colored People, 2018
This, of all the stories in the book, is the one I connected to the least, or the one that did the least for me. It’s essentially a conversation between two anthropology graduate students about how to talk about Black experiences without fetishizing, tokenizing, or stereotyping. It’s a little too on-the-nose and didactic; too much lecturing and not enough story.

78. “Wash Clean the Bones,” Nafissa Thomspson-Spires, in Heads of the Colored People, 2018
Oh, such a desperately sad story. The protagonist is a woman at war with her own body, and that war parallels the violence that surrounds her—she has lost her brother to police violence, and she is a nurse in a hospital where she frequently encounters the aftermath of violence against and by Black men. She has nightmares, or perhaps waking nightmares (she refers to them as “terrors”) that bring these two wars together, in which she is visited by her brother and other boys whose trauma she has witnessed at the hospital, and they perform surgeries on her. She has a little baby, too, and perhaps some postpartum depression.

78/100 read, 36/50 from the last five years.

ETA: This is effing insane. I can’t get the post to include both paragraphs, even though when I edit the post, they are both there. I’m going to try splitting it into two posts and seeing whether that works. I’ve already been fighting with this far longer than my feeble thoughts about these stories are worth!

These two sci-fi shorts that mrsmig mentioned looked like quick fun, so I read them too.

79. "[URL="https://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/future-societies/matthew-f-amati/planet-earth-just-blew-and-theres-nothing-i-can-do”]Planet Earth Just Blew And There's Nothing I Can Do[/URL]," Matthew F. Amati, in Daily Science Fiction, 2020
I agree with mrsmig that this one is a bit of a blunt cudgel. It’s cute, though, and while the voice is over-the-top, it’s executed with a steady hand and is amusing. My problem with the twist is that I immediately went to “how did the rest of the world pull this off?” and just felt it was impossible. (Also, what about the staff on the rich people’s ship, who must have been legion? Who decided which of the servant class would have to make that sacrifice?) So, while it’s a cute idea, it doesn’t hold up to thirty seconds of thought.

ETA: ... and here’s the second half of my post.

80. "Literary Cocktails," Preston Grassman, in Daily Science Fiction, 2020
Another cute idea, but this story felt unfinished to me, both editorially and conceptually. Editorially, there are mechanical errors (like “... but curiosity and defiance was something the state had never been able to take away.”) that just erode my trust in the author’s care. That matters because it makes me more likely to read the conceptual vagueness in the story as details the author couldn’t be bothered to sharpen, rather than something intentionally ambiguous or something I just don’t fully understand. I’m probably reading the story too critically; it’s probably not how Daily Science Fiction is intended to be read. But in the end, I don’t really understand what the narrator has experienced in the Scrublands, or what the real consequence of taking this drink is going to be. So it’s a cute idea—and nothing else. A cute idea without an actual story to explore it. The upshot, I think, is confirmation that flash fiction, and especially SF flash fiction, isn’t really for me.

80/100 read, 38/50 from the last five years.

mrsmig said:

Lakey, I agree with you that "Literary Cocktails" feels a bit undercooked, conceptually.

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Oh! You stated that so much more succinctly and evocatively than my rambling paragraph. Yes, ^^ this.

Folks, I'm really excited about this one: Today's Kindle daily deals email tells me that Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and Other Stories is on sale (in the US, at least) for $2.99. I absolutely adore this collection--it's a touchstone for me, a fine example of clear, deceptively straightforward writing that nevertheless creates intense moods and oodles of subtext.

If you're only familiar with the title story, well, that one is always worth reading again anyway (as I did earlier this year, mentioned upthread). But the rest of the collection is also superb, and covers a lot of ground. There is the kind of moody, creeping horror that Jackson is famous for, but there are also stories that look at the stifling confusion of being a young woman in the post-war era (the book is a rich source and inspiration for my stories set in this time period); stories that look at race relations; there is even some humor.

My favorites include "The Daemon Lover" (I think we might have talked about this story in this thread last year?), "Afternoon in Linen" (A recent New Yorker fiction podcast features Kristen Roupenian talking about this one, and it's definitely worth a listen), and "The Tooth" (this story is like a personal gift to me from Ms Jackson; it contains so many minute details organic to the time and people I write stories about). "My Life With R.H. Macy" is a hilarious account of a soulless job in a department store. There's another comical story, too, whose name is not coming to me even as I look at the table of contents, which has some resonance for us as writers; it's about a literary agent who runs a sort of scam operation where she suckers hopeful authors into editorial services.

Anyway I can't stress enough that if you aren't familiar with these stories (even if you are), do jump on this offer -- it's the best three bucks you'll spend today, for sure.

Back with yet another interesting short-story related deal: Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, on Kindle for $0.99.

I read this collection a couple of years ago. It contains stories, journal excerpts, and (if I recall correctly) an excerpt from an unfinished novel. What is most fascinating about it, if you're into writing short stories, is what it shows about Plath's process. In the journal excerpts, she sets exercises for herself to capture the quirkiness of her neighbors in the English countryside, deliberately to improve her skills at characterization. These become even more interesting as they are set beside some of the short stories that came out of the observations. The book is arranged (by Ted Hughes) roughly in reverse chronological order, meaning that as you approach the end, you encounter short stories from the early 50s that are recapitulated a decade later The Bell Jar.

Really, what I love best about this book is not just the content, but what it shows of how hard Plath worked at writing, how consciously she set herself to thinking about it and improving at it. It's inspiring to me.

It also contains one of my all-time favorite short stories, "The Fifty-Ninth Bear," which I now really badly want to read again, and I might have to collect my copy of this book the next time I visit the house where it's currently stashed, so I can do so and talk about it here!

I started the Story Prize anthology that was one of the kindle deals I mentioned earlier this year — I know both ChrisP and mrsmig read it too and commented on these stories upthread.


81. "The Book of Miracles,” Edwidge Danticat, 2004
I rather agree with Chris’s assessment that the story doesn’t quite come together, though I think all its disparate elements are beautifully rendered and the moment of connection between the daughter and the mother at the end is rather sweet, and rather unexpected given the general level of anxiety and discomfort in the story. The POV character shifts through a lot of anxieties through the story, about her own memories associated with death, about her husband’s past as a brutal prison guard in Haiti, about her lack of connection with her daughter, about whether her religion can really offer any meaning or comfort. It’s curious to me that neither the daughter or the husband are named. The husband’s name has reasons to be obscure—it’s presumably not the same name he used in Haiti—but Anne must call him something, think of him by some name. The elision of the daughter’s name carries meaning too, I think, as though the only identity she has in Anne’s eyes is that of being Anne’s daughter, and so if they can’t connect on that axis, they can’t connect at all.

81/100 read, 38/50 from the last five years.

Two more stories from the Story Prize anthology — I think I liked both of these better than either ChrisP or mrsmig did.

82. "The Postman’s Cottage,” Patrick O’Keeffe, 2005
I loved this story; I love the rather “once upon a time” narrative voice that made it hard to guess when the story was set (from the 60s through the 80s, I eventually decided); I love the character voices; I love that it’s about a middle-aged woman, the compromises she has had to make and the truths that she has or has not allowed herself to admit throughout her life; and I loved the combination of factors that force her to face those truths—the physical and emotional distancing of her grown son, her sudden intense connection to a young man who reminds her both of her son and of her past, and the prospect of a new marriage and a new chapter in life waiting for her at the end of a journey (I even love that it takes place on a train). I noticed that ChrisP’s description of this story focuses entirely on its prologue, the relatively short opening section that describes the disappearance of a young man. For me, the story was much more about Kate and the subtle way in which the existence (and disappearance) of Eoin reverberates throughout her life.

83. "My Podiatrist Tells Me a Story About a Boy and a Dog,” Mary Gordon, 2006
I rather enjoyed this story. The book’s little intro to it is a quotation from Mary Gordon about how writing short stories gives you license to play with voice in a way you cannot do when you are committed to a novel-length work. (I myself have written here on AW a theory that short stories allow you more intensity in both form and voice because you do not have to sustain it for longer than a few thousand words; a conceit that might become tedious at novel length can be exciting in a short story.) I read this story as all about that kind of narrative play. There are two distinct voices, that of the narrator and of the podiatrist. Each is strong and entertaining (for instance the narrator in a wee burst of jealousy remarks that the podiatrist doesn’t share his interesting stories with his other patients, which seems unlikely, while the podiatrist’s story about the dog is almost certainly apocryphal for all its detail). And it’s a very short little story, a ten-minute or twelve-minute read, so it works as a little flavor-burst of narrative fun that, as Chris notes, probably does have some symbolic content as well (though none jumps obviously at me).

83/100 read, 38/50 from the last five years.