Who's Reading What
We asked our "Salon" writers to tell us what they think is the one indispensable short story, story collection, or anthology.
(Some of them begged for just a little more latitude, and like the Penguin, we relented.)
Here's what those intrepid enough to answer had to say.
-Grace Johnstone
Compiled and edited by Grace Johnstone and Catherine Muss
CYNTHIA FLOOD, "Miss Pringle's Hour" (CNQ)
My favourite still is An Introduction to Fiction, 5th ed., ed. X. J. Kennedy, Harper Collins 1991. Once a year or so I take it down to savour and to remember some of the best college students I was ever privileged to teach. Our classes centred on stories such as T. Coraghessan Boyle's "Greasy [and horrifying] Lake," Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever," Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" (this was before RC completed the wash-spin-fame-scorn cycle of literary reputation), Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge," and the amazing William Carlos Williams' "The Use of Force"—that two-page scorcher! The book also includes comments by some stellar practitioners, variously uplifting (Henry James) and crabby (O'Connor) and mystical (Charlotte Bronte), on writing fiction. Plus, should you ever need to write a good essay for a lit class, there are excellent instructions on how to do so.
Thanks for asking!
PATRICIA YOUNG, "Dumb Fish" (TNQ)
I don't know about a particular book being indispensable (so much of what I read becomes indispensable once I've read it) but I can give you my present bedside reading—Going to the Zoo by Laura Lush and The Age of Miracles by Ellen Gilchrist. Not a dull moment in either of these books! In today's Guardian, Tobias Wolff talks about the short story as an invitation to aspire to perfection. Stories by both these writers, Lara Lush and Ellen Gilchrist, come pretty close to perfect in their balance of seriousness and play.
MARK ANTHONY JARMAN, "Cowboys Inc." (CNQ)
I don't have one indispensable book, I like lots of story collections, but I rode a Greyhound from Philly to Seattle once, 3 days on the bus, and John Cheever's Collected Stories, a paperback missing the cover, kept me sane. A good influence; I like his voice in my ear.
PATRICIA ROBERTSON, "Agnes & Fox" (CNQ)
Am I allowed two?
My most battered copy is the 20-year-old The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories, ed. by Daniel Halpern. I love it because it's international, and while the U.S. (it's an American anthology) is perhaps a touch over-represented, the collection also ranges from Morocco to Spain to India to Japan to Czechoslovakia to Israel to South Africa. It needs updating: Asia is underrepresented, and the Canadian entries are Atwood (natch), Gallant, and Rooke—though, surprisingly, not Munro. But here's where I first encountered Julio Cortazar's wonderfully surreal and disturbing story "Bestiary" (it drives my reality-oriented Canadian students nuts) and Jean Stafford's equally wonderful "Children Are Bored on Sundays," which violates the "rules" by taking place entirely as a flashback.
As for my second choice, that would have to be Mavis Gallant's Selected Stories, a more recent publication (it came out in 1996), for its subtlety, psychological acuity, fiercely unblinking gaze, and command of craft. I had to ration this collection like candy when I got it. Her stories do not follow the traditional story arc and yet I find them mesmerising. In my personal pantheon, St. Mavis occupies the pinnacle of achievement in the English short story.
JOHN METCALF, "Ceazer Salad" (TNQ)
"The one indispensable story collection"? Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time (1925). Especially the paragraphs between the individual stories. Oh, Papa!
REBECCA ROSENBLUM, "Linh Lai," "Zoom," "The House on Elsbeth" (TNQ)
Good question, but I can't really answer it—I read too many astounding story collections! The last two that spun my head around were Carol Shields's Various Miracles and Mark Jarman's Dancing Nightly at the Tavern. Both do incredible things with form and structure, and yet remain absolutely faithful to human emotion and experience. And of course they are vastly different from each other; it was somewhat dizzying to read them back-to-back.
Then again, maybe the story collection that made the strongest impression on me was one that was (more or less) non-experimental in form, but absolutely flawless on the emotional experience axis, John Updike's Too Far to Go. I first read it as a teenager, and I've never really stopped thinking about those characters, the Maples. That's probably a strong sign of...something.
MIKE BARNES, "Cogawee" (TNQ)
Love many of the usual suspects that others will name, but somebody pops into my head that I don't hear so much about these days: Isaac Bashevis Singer. His Collected Stories, returned to again and again, have given me not only deep pleasure but also a kind of comfort so eerily reliable it could be called Singer-esque. Ah, the afghan of traditional realism, I can hear someone saying, but that's wrong. Few writers can match Singer's subversively inventive ways of slipping the weird into the daily, and vice versa.
SHARON ENGLISH, "The Road to Delphi" (TNQ)
There are stories I re-read again and again. "The Lady with the Little Dog" by Chekov. "Return" by Adam Thorpe. Stories by Mark Jarman, Douglas Glover, and Mavis Gallant—oh "Potter," oh "Bonaventure," and "The Ice Wagon Coming Down the Street." I have a fairly long list. "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" by Will Self and "Psychopolis" by Ian McEwan. I could go on and on because I read almost nothing but stories for eight years. I have skipped countries here. Lists are mutable, mood-dependent things.
DIANE SCHOEMPERLEN, "Forms of Devotion" (CNQ)
Can I have two???
In June 1979 I bought the hardcover of Susan Sontag's story collection, I, etcetera. I bought it at either The Banff Book and Art Den or possibly at Pages on Kensington in Calgary. The price is still on it...$11.75. At the time, this was a big investment for me. I owned only a handful of hardcover books then. I've now owned this book for almost thirty years, and I have reread it every year since then. Some people are aghast at making marks in their books but I am not...this one is happily disfigured by red and blue underlining and much bright yellow highlighting, some stars and exclamation marks in the margins. As brilliant as Sontag's essays and novels are, this short story collection is my favourite of all her work. I have yet to meet anyone else who has ever read it!
Three favourite quotes from this book, all of them from the story "Debriefing":
"I exhort, I interfere. I'm impatient. For God's sake, it isn't that hard to live. One of the pieces of advice I give is: Don't suffer future pain."
"Sometimes it helps to change your feelings altogether, like getting your blood pumped out and replaced. To become another person. But without magic. There's no moral equivalent to the operation that makes transsexuals happy."
"All around us, as far as I can see, people are striving to be ordinary. This takes a great deal of effort. Ordinariness, generally considered to be safer, has gotten much rarer than it used to be."
2. Another writer better known for other forms is Peter Carey. His Collected Stories was published in 1995, the Vintage Canada Edition in 1999. Many of these 27 stories are works of sheer short-story genius. And yet again, few people that I know have ever read it, even those who are long-time Carey fans!
CLARK BLAISE, "Meditations on Starch" (CNQ)
There are must-read collections for each decade of my life (and probably every writer's) which began with Joyce and Hemingway, then Malamud and Cheever and Barthelme, and now Gallant and Munro.
CAROLINE ADDERSON, "Influence" (TNQ)
I've just been reading, in proofs, Rebecca Rosenblum's wonderful Once. Her stories are little miracles that deserve a preferred spot right next to Annabel Lyon's Oxygen. I'd also throw in anything by Mavis Gallant. Then there's Munro's Runaway. I teach a class twice a year where we dissect all the stories in the collection. Each time I find something new. The annotation in my teaching copy runneth over the margins.
HEATHER BIRRELL, "Impossible to Die in Your Dreams" (TNQ)
Not a fair question—next you'll be asking me to choose my favourite parent/child/pet/student and proclaim it publicly—but I'll give it a shot. I have a signed copy of Grace Paley's Collected Stories that I treasure. The range of stories in the book is incredible—she does long, short, absurd, realist, magical—and they're all in her inimitable, straight-up style. I can always find something in that book to spur me on, whether it's a surprising, insightful turn of phrase or an odd, lopsided structure that really shouldn't work but somehow does. The stories are steeped in the uncertainty and sorrow of the everyday, but their seriousness is leavened by the sly, kind humour that lurks in Paley's authorial voice.
She signed the book after a reading she did at the Harbourfront Festival of Authors in 1999, and I remember feeling completely delighted hearing her read from one of my favourite stories, "The Story Hearer." I'm pretty sure I mouthed along and swayed in my seat a little as if at a stadium rock concert. Afterwards, when I approached her to sign my copy, she was very gruff, verging on grouchy, which kind of made me love her more. I was very sad when she died last year, but felt comforted knowing I had a chance to hear her voice in person, and can always dip into her collection for solace and inspiration.
AMY KING, "Rebecca Rosenblum: The Truth Is No Excuse," "Like Germaine: The Complex Characters of Sharon English"
Without a doubt, my favourite short story collection is The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. The collection shows Nabokov's development as a writer and demonstrates the incredible range of his writing. From his early Russian folk tales through his period in Germany and France to his later novels in English, Nabokov's prose is always dazzling; it is elusive (in the best way), funny, heartbreaking, and just plain gorgeous.
I remember an incident that occurred the first time I read the collection. I was in Grade 11 Biology class, reading the story "The Thunderstorm" under my desk. When I came to the end I couldn't stop crying. I had to go the bathroom to avoid feeling like a complete fool. The end of the story is not particularly tragic; it is simple and poignant, and I just felt it so overwhelmingly.
I definitely appreciate writing that appeals to my intellect, but unless it also appeals to me viscerally, I cannot truly love it. Nabokov's writing succeeds tremendously at doing both.
ELISABETH HARVOR, "Freakish Vine That I Am" (TNQ)
One rainy afternoon in Ottawa in the 1980s, I opened Bernard Malamud's Rembrandt's Hat, then read three of its stories in quick succession: the title story, an intense vignette about an emotional conflict between a sculptor and an art historian; "Notes From A Lady At A Dinner Party," a weirdly evocative story about a flirtation carried on via a furtive exchange of notes at-where else?—a dinner party; and then "In Retirement," a story whose title made me decide it would be the least exciting of the three.
I was reading it while sitting in a safari chair on an African sort of afternoon, the rain ticking onto the broad green leaves beyond the opened patio doors to my balcony, and when I look back on that decade now, the words African and safari make me remember all those great Norman Rush stories set in Botswana in the eighties ("Instruments of Seduction," "Official Americans," and "Alone in Africa"), stunning stories that owe a lot to "La Vie Boheme," a brilliant early South African story by Nadine Gordimer collected in The Soft Voice of The Serpent, while Gordimer's first name makes me think of a Canadian Nadine—Nadine McInnis—and her incendiary title story in Quicksilver, but we were only to choose one story, weren't we?
And so to go back to "In Retirement" again: everything kept changing as I kept reading, so much so that this story of humiliation and desire set in New York City in the 1960s has stayed with me ever since that long afternoon. Dr. Morris, its central character, is a Manhattan physician who has unwisely taken early retirement and consequently spends his days and evenings going to museums and the theatre, but otherwise suffers from a moderate depression that he tries to ward off by living an orderly life of careful routine.
"One morning after his rectangular long walk in the rain..." begins the story's third paragraph with a serene clarity that I've admired from the first moment of reading it, and so it follows that it would have to be on this particular morning that the doctor stoops to pick up a letter that's been dropped on the rubber mat under the row of mailboxes in the lobby. His guess is that it belongs to the young woman he saw hurrying down the steps of his building as he was on his way back from his morning walk—as she passed by him on another occasion he got "a breath of her bold perfume"—and instead of handing the letter to the elevator man to return to her, he takes it up to his apartment and reads it, which is when the action of this quietly electrifying story really begins. And how does it end? I won't tell, I'll only reveal that it has eleven endings—each ending a bit more revelatory than the last—and these endings, like waves, wash backwards over everything the reader has learned about hope and mistakes of the heart on the way to the story's last end.
ANNABEL LYON, "On Reading Elisabeth Harvor" (TNQ)
Joy Williams, Escapes.
KIM JERNIGAN, "Keath Fraser: His Master's Voice" (TNQ)
As Sharon English says above, "Lists are mutable, mood-dependent things." But given my current mood (and age), I'd have to say Tillie Olsen's "Tell Me a Riddle," a story that has never-failed to bring me to tears.
Apparently, I'm not alone in this—Constance and Leon Rooke, in their anthology The Writer's Path, tell us Alice Munro, "[w]hen asked to name her favorite stories, those that she would include in an ideal anthology," called it "the one indispensable story." They add that critical opinion more generally holds it "the most sensitive & artistically rendered of American short stories. ‘People read it for the twentieth time and they weep.'"
Or maybe TNQers are just criers (see Amy King above).
What makes "Tell Me a Riddle" so deeply moving? It's a story about end things, but so are many others. It's neither tragic (the woman whose approach to death it recounts has lived a long and, in many ways, fulfilled life) nor sentimental (her marriage has devolved into an on-going war of words and silences). But somehow this one life becomes a prism for all the tragedies of the twentieth century, both large (the Russian pogroms, the Nazi death camps, the American bombing of Hiroshima) and small (those lives lived in loneliness and quiet desperation). Olsen manages this large compass by somehow rendering on the page the texture of consciousness, of a mind at work on the stuff of memory, moving from past to present, from the real to the remembered, from desire to disappointment. It's a mind that's moving deep into itself, possessed of conscience as well as a conciousness. And it nudges the reader, imperceptibly, from judgment to compassion. "Tell Me a Riddle" is a demonstration of letting go and holding fast, of conflict and conciliation. But it's also uncompromising—death is an ending, not a beginning; joy will be sparse, cruelty recurring. You mourn in the end for her characters but also for yourself, for all of human kind.
One of my students has put this better than I. When asked for the answer to the riddle that is the story, for the story's governing truth, he wrote, "Life is a hardship, and ultimately nothing we do matters. But because of that, everything we do is important."
GRACE JOHNSTONE, "Swimming Into the Forest: The Up-close World of Patricia Young"
Because I was the one who posed this question to our writers and because I got to read the very entertaining reponses as they came in (particularly Elisabeth's, who's story's story evolved into a little tale just for me [i like to think]), choosing my own selection for this list was particularly difficult. I had not read nearly enough! I had to run out right away and read everyone else's stories first, before the list went up! But despite my anxieties, I was nevertheless compelled to choose a story that retains for me within its words the time and place of its first reading.
So I think my selection will have to be Joyce's Dubliners. A bit obvious, perhaps, but I read "The Dead" during my second winter in Montreal so how could I forget it? It was at McGill in a class I hated but I remember being so enthralled by the last line of the last paragraph (I had just learned what "alliteration" was) that after class I ran over to The Word bookstore on Milton street and bought a paperback copy for $3.75. It was the dead of winter and I was taking the bus home and I remember waiting at the bus stop for the # 24 and being so anxious to read those words again that I bravely pulled off my mitts to turn the pages and read over and over "his soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe...". I read it all the way home standing up on the bus.
TERRY GRIGGS, "The Discovery of Honey" (CNQ)
