The best Short stories are YOUR letters from hospital !!!! They are current, very meaningful, to me as a fellow sufferer Wish that was still going on but I understand if you and family pulled in many other directions for your needs. Much love
Short stories? If I had to pick one, it might be Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find." I especially like the Misfit's remarks at the end of the story: "She would of been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." I can't remember how long ago I read her stories, probably in college.
I suppose as a child it was The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde which has that song like refrain in it, “Swallow, swallow little swallow”. I loved it so much because it didn’t succumb to the simple happy ending and the sorrow was true, authentic and made me feel something outside of myself. So perfectly written. It’s extraordinary that a book written for children can present grief so honestly and not shy away from it. The sadness was just as important as the joy.
I met you through "My Son the Fanatic," which still haunts me: the sad cabby, the prostitute, the serious son. The short story which changed my life: Doris Lessing's "A Love Child." The last scene, where the older man weeps on a bench in South Africa, realizing he has lived the wrong life, so profoundly shook me that I changed my own and went to work in Afghanistan (before the recent fall BACK to the Taliban). Now, older, I know I have lived my purpose though I remain vigilant for signs in case there is a chapter I haven't yet lived. Your posts, Hanif Kureishi, have made me even more vigilant. I am broken-hearted for you and so grateful for every word you are willing to share. We learn and learn and learn. Together.
Katherine Mansfield.I read her stories as a teenager. I knew I liked them but didn't know why.i read them again twice more.Recently again as featured on BBC radio.They are rich and harsh and real.
The latter blew my mind as the unseen paper in A or S level or something, can’t remember it was so long ago. It made me burst into tears though because I’d never read anything like it and when the teacher invigilating came to check on me at the end of the exam thinking I’d screwed up the exam all I could say was ‘I didn’t know you could do that with words’.
Then a few years later I read The Buddha of Suburbia and said that again: I didn’t know some bloke from Bromley would do something with words that would finally describe what it was like for me growing up Anglo Indian in the 80s. I can never thank you enough for that book, and all your other ones.
I’m so sorry you’ve had something so shit happen to you but so grateful that you are here, and writing as beautifully as ever, even though it must be doing your head in having to do it the way you’re doing it. Thank you though. So many of us here are rooting for you to make a recovery. X
Chekhov's the Lady and the Dog. The simple arbitrariness of that affair. How they convince themselves in an odd and passive way to fall in love. How they then suffer it. How they suffer their lives.
I love "the Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka. Also "In the Penal Colony," almost any short story by Kafka. "The Shawl" by Cynthia Ozick, amazing. "The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. Now, for contemporary stories, let me think on that.... :)
"Araby" by James Joyce. I read it in college and that moment near the end when the boy is filled with an all consuming shame when faced with the realization (or epiphany, if you will) at his place in the world. I find it just heartbreaking, and it's never left me.
I've just read Tolstoy's 'The death of Ivan Ilyich' after seeing film Living- the short story is apparently an original inspiration for this film. The book is a much more visceral experience if a man approaching death than the film! Sorry to be morbid!
I have several as it is one of my favourite genres but I choose three: The lottery by Shirley Jackson, A Perfect Day for Bananafish by Salinger and Mi Vida con la Ola (My life with the wave) by Octavio Paz. All three outstanding.
"Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor. Loved it. I read it first when I was maybe 16--during silent reading and meditation at St. Mary's Academy--and it was the beginning of the absolute joy in the irreverent.
Boule de Suif by Maupassant. Read in summer of 1989, interrailing after A levels, somewhere in Yugoslavia. It's beautiful, moving, moral and introduced me to 19th c French history and literature. The fat tear rolling down her cheek after the final humiliation...
Oh! and Somerset Maugham - hoovered them up in my mid teens - my favourite light one has to be 'The Luncheon' for his rising anxiety about the bill, and the desciption of the food.
Hi, I'm Charlotte before telling you about my encounter with books, I want to send you all the good vibes, hoping that your health improves soon, I'm from Nicaragua, I was born in the middle of an effervescent revolution in the eighties. My contact with books was through public libraries, the first book I remember was an illustrated Quixote for children, the first short story I enjoyed and loved was Rip van Winkle, I found a selection of stories in my cousin's old bookcase, I was eight years old, it was a fascinating story.
Jan 25, 2023·edited Jan 25, 2023Liked by Hanif Kureishi
The story "A Summer Job" in Colm Tóibín's Mothers and Sons moved me as no other has. In it, a teenage Irish lad reluctantly assumes companionship of his aged and rapidly declining grandmother over one summer. Just before the end of the story the boy utters five words to his mother that literally (in the literal sense) made me gasp, and brought tears to my eyes. Then a couple of paragraphs later he repeats them.
I could not think of this story today without tearing up. I've never been so moved by a simple English sentence. Or by a work of fiction. It is like a powerful musical composition and manages to go beyond words into a nameless territory, telling a human story that turns out to embrace all of humanity in a painful and provocative way.
The story 'The Necklace ' by Guy de Maupassant - especially its twist ending- loved it as an author myself - in learning about writing stories - but also used it in classes, read it aloud and loved watching the expression on the students faces when they found out what had happened at the end. One of those unforgettable stories.
Also the Tell Tale Heart - by Edgar Allan Poe - for the same reasons. Simply captivating!
I really enjoy stories by O’ Henry and Rabindranath Tagore. One of my favourites Henry is the ‘Gift of the Magi’ and of Tagore ‘Ichcha puran’ where father and son reverse identities for a day.
Since you began writing after your accident in Rome, I’ve read all your dispatches. Your posts are so charming, dazzling, so joyous, so very life affirming. They feel like a beam of sunlight lighting up a gloomy day. I wait for them. I’m really saddened to see your experience with writing the My Beautiful Laundrette disappear being a paid wall.
Every few years, I read the collected fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. He is, or rather was, an Argentinian writer, who is associated with the genre of Magic Realism, though he also wrote floridly about an assortment of historical bandits, pirates and desperadoes.
One of his most well-known stories 'The Library of Babel' describes an infinite library, composed of hexagonal galleries that contain every book that ever has, or ever will, exist. This selection extends presumably to 'The Winds of Winter', which George R R Martin still occasionally threatens to finish, usually just before he throws his weight behind some other unrelated project.
Naturally, most of the volumes in the Library are filled with complete gibberish. The narrator recalls a book discovered by his father that repeated the letters MCV from the first line to the last. Another, that includes the line 'O Time thy pyramids', in amongst the babble, is considered by the inhabitants of the Library to be of great, yet to be understood, significance.
The story and its concept of the Total Library seems prescient of the Internet. I wonder what Borges would have made of the online world and its encroachment on our lives.
Another, very prescient, Borges story, that labours under the opaque title 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', describes an attempt to overwrite the world with a new reality. Initially this is done by means of a fraudulent reprint of the 1902 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. By the conclusion of the story the world has all but been replaced by the once-fictional reality of Tlön. Again, one's thoughts drift to the Internet and the battles between the different, agenda-driven permutations of reality that play out with increasing subtlety.
Over the years, Borges' stories have become a reflection of where I am in life.
The first time I ever read his work was after I selected a paperback at random from the shelves of Waterstones, to read while I was at the dentists. Having never even heard of Borges, I was astonished by these stories that felt like they had been written for me. I devoured everything that I could lay my hands on, and took all of it extremely seriously.
The next time I revisited Borges, I began to take note of a very dry sense of humour that I had not noticed before. The eponymous macguffin in 'The Aleph' is a point in time and space from which all other points in time and space can be perceived. In the story, Borges is using it to catch glimpses of an unrequited love who has passed on from the world. The owner of the house where the Aleph is located is using it as the inspiration for an interminable poem, to which Borges becomes an unwitting audience.
The third time I returned to Borges, my appreciation of his work was supplemented by a reading of Edwin Williamson's biography. The book has come in for some criticism. However, it did help me to understand that what I had regarded as dry intellectual exercises were both inspired and informed by events in Borges' life, some traumatic in nature. As a result of this, I perceived a more human side to his writing.
I feel that I have a very incomplete understanding of Borges that nonetheless continues to come more into focus with each re-visitation of his work. I tried (unsuccessfully, if the reception is anything to go by) to embody, in a piece of short fiction, the linear labyrinth that is described by the criminal mastermind Red Scharlach at the conclusion of his story 'Death and the Compass'.
I am at a stage with his writing that one reaches with certain bands, where you latch onto some hitherto overlooked minor work and obsess over it.
Currently this would be 'A Theologian in Death' which gives me the same gnawing, indefinable feeling that I got the first time that I laid eyes upon a William Blake watercolour titled (not by its creator, apparently) 'An Allegory of the Bible'. There is no tangible reason for making this connection, but it exists in my mind regardless.
In the story, the protestant theologian, Philip Melancthon, dies and is transported to a room identical the one in which he once lived, where he continues to work on his religious meditations. His omission of any reference to charity in his writings prompts a visitation from concerned angels and a gradual deterioration in his living conditions and personal appearance, until he is covered in hair, and has enlisted the services of a magician to trick visitors into thinking that they calling on him in Heaven. At the conclusion of the story, he has been taken from his dwelling by one of these magicians and is living in the encroaching desert where he has become a servant of demons.
I find the depiction of Heaven in the story, as a state of existence that must be continually earned by an adherence to the party-line, even when such adherence conflicts with one's own natural instincts, to be very unsettling.
CAN ANYBODY WRITE A LIST out of these delightful posts? I shall add my very first short story in primary school, Ciaula scopre la luna by Pirandello. A child-slave’ s wonder.
"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant still gives me the shivers. Love Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle"- the horror and humor of that wasted life! Also, that story also makes me think of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," which gave us the line "I prefer not to ...." That has certainly come in handy from time to time!
Then we get into more contemporary stuff. I really love Andrea Barrett's collection Ship Fever. The first time I read stories like "The Littoral Zone," "The Marburg Sisters," and "The Behavior of the Hawkweeds," I knew they would be with me for life. It's not so much the images, as the wonderful language and richly drawn characters (and something about the economy of lines like, "But all they have lost in order to be together would seem bearable had they continued to feel the way they felt on. the island.")
I had the same reaction to the collection of Raymond Carver's short stories from Where I'm Calling From. Oh, so many lines and stories I love: "Cathedral." "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," "Fat," that follow me. Impossible to choose a favorite, but perhaps I can make a case for "A Small Good Thing," which is about a baker who harasses a family by phone for failing to pick up the birthday cake they ordered for their son. They show up at his bakery to confront him, and they tell him their son was killed in an accident earlier that day. The ending is a miracle of humanity, compassion, and forgiveness: "'Smell this,' the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. "It's a heavy bread, but rich." ... It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the flourescent trays of light. They talked into the early morning, the high pale cast of light in the windows,and they did not think of leaving."
Can't remember when I first read it, around 2015, never read any MR James before, blew me away. It was in a penguin paperback of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, from 1930s. A Second hand shop buy. It was around the time I met my wife. A year after first reading it we were on holiday in South West France staying in a friends house (not as fancy or as middle class as it sounds), a place called Beaumont-de-Lamange (the Cramlington of South West France)
We had a car and took a trip out. I suggested that we go to the town where the story was set. Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges. 2hr journey away. We booked a hotel in the town right opposite the cathedral in the story. I remember being so excited. It was out of season. A pair of old English women sat outside a bar in front of the church. Like a loon I asked them if they were here because of MR James.
The hotel we stayed at was horrific with the maddest decor and paintings on the wall, an interior designer on LSD.
Remember having a terrible unsettled sleep dreaming about vampires. Before bed we walked around the desolate town which was a labyrinth, we only bumped into English people, not more than half a dozen, all looking as lost. All you could hear was this beeping sound in the air, which we later found out was the sound of Midwife Toads. We ate in a restaurant along with lost English tourists. A man with his belly hanging out was waiting tables and also maybe preparing the awful food, a horror story in itself.
“The Spider’s Thread” by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. The image of one’s fate literally hanging by a thread connecting heaven and hell is hard to shake. I read it in college and went on to study Japanese literature.
I was talking to a friend who is in a hospital and I told him that Hanif Kurieshi is also in the hospital, and he said Hanif, the one who wrote that short story about the big turd? The Tale of the Turd
The "Bad Behavior" collection from Mary Gaitskill (1988). I read those stories over and over again as I was trying not to lose my mind in my very dramatic and very passionate 20's. “My ambition was to live like music.” Oh, what a time that was. Everything was so filled with color and sound and texture. And joy at the promise of such exciting times ahead. When I met Ms. Gaitskill finally in 2009, I just cried and told her thank you a million times. Hopefully she knew that her stories meant so much in propelling a broken girl forward.
Two Bottles of Relish by Lord Dunsany. I read it in high school, and the last image of the trees, when everything makes sense, persists.
Smoking, Inc. by Stephen King. I read it about 15 years ago. It is one of the truest depictions of addiction I have ever read. I remember the view of the woman's hand, with all it means,
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi by Kipling. I read this in high school, too. The mongoose is so noble. He didn't do what he did for gain, but the image of his living in luxury is a wonderful reward to savor.
This wasn’t exactly my favorite short story, but it is one that horrified me as a child of 9 or 10 and the feelings of the story are forever seared in my memory. It is titled « All Summer in a Day » and was written by Ray Bradbury in 1954. It took me 45 years to locate and reread the story. It is about a young girl, Margot who moves to Venus (from Earth) where it rains every day except for one hour every seven years when the sun comes out. The girl has fond memories and misses the sunlight she felt on Earth, but the other children in school with her were too young to have experienced sunlight on Venus. One day a bully locks her in the school classroom and that is the very day there is one hour of sunlight on Venus. The children forget she is locked in the closet and run out to play and dance in the sun. Everyone leaves Margot in the closet and she loses her chance to see precious sunlight for another seven years. The HORROR of it.
Okay so the story no longer affects me like it did the nine year old Texas self that spent every free moment outdoors under clear skies and white hot sunlight. I lived being outside, barefoot and hanging upside down from the trees, rolling in the grass or creating chalk masterpieces on the sidewalk. I couldn’t fathom living and playing under dark gloomy rainy skies. It was shocking and sad, a violent crime had been committed, worse than murder.
Who knew that one day many many years later I would learn to live in a very cloudy and rainy environment just like Ray Bradbury’s Venus.
Dear Life by Alice Munro. The penultimate paragraph is a killer:
I did not go home for my mother’s last illness or for her funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with. We could haveaa barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had a contempt for formal behavior, but why blame it on him? I felt the same. We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.
When my mother was dying, she got out of the hospital somehow, at night, and wandered around town until someone who didn’t know her at all spotted her and took her in. If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true.
I agree your short stories are brilliant. I know you are in some difficulty at the moment but your posts still shine with humour and optimism. I read last year The Stories of John Cheever - some are dated and particular to a bygone era and many very class ridden. But I enjoyed The Swimmer very much. It is what is inferred or suggested by the text that draws you in. It takes a special skill to say so much in so few words. The film from 1968 is very true to the story - like a ready made screenplay.
I prefer novels to short stories because i never want to plot to end and want the characters to stay alive.
However, Stefan Zweig's Fantastic Night and all his other stories are superb. And all of Guy De Maupassant ( particularly The Necklace) and all of Colette also.
Jean Rhys ‘Mixing Cocktails’ and ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’- huge influence early on. A wonderful writer whose ellipsis and absences say it all. I hope things slowly
Improve. I’m so moved by your blogs and letters; their resilience and humour despite the ghastliness.
"Family ties" by Clarice Lispector. "El Aleph" by Jorge Luis Borges. "Bestiario" by Julio Cortazar. Impeccable, precise, pristine writing and inventive.
I was 18 when I first discovered Andrea Lee’s short stories in the New Yorker. I had read stories with black protagonists up to that point (thanks almost entirely to my parents; the only ones I encountered in school were Bigger Thomas and Huck Finn’s Jim) but that was the first time I’d come across a character that resembled me: a black girl from a comfortable middle-class home growing up around white people to whom she was both visible and invisible. The first time I heard the word “postracial” was in reference to her work.
I don’t think about short stories as much as I think of short story writers—Alice Munro, William Trevor, Raymond Carver, George Saunders, and others—or collections—The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, Will You Please Be Quiet Please, etc. I’m particularly fond of Italo Calvino’s Difficult Loves, and, if pressed, would single out “Adam, One Afternoon,” “The House of the Beehives,” and particularly, “Theft in a Pastry Shop.” For the most part, I don’t look to short stories for solace or comfort, but the opposite, a sense of disquiet, emotional or intellectual. Maybe I think of novels as a warm bath and short stories as a cold shower, a convenient metaphor if not universally true.
I used to teach creative writing and there were a few stories that really stuck with me over the years. "White Angel" by Michael Cunningham was one. It's a beautiful story about two brothers and grief, love, mentorship, and more. Beautiful writing. Another I loved was "How Far She Went" by Mary Hood. It's a scary, dramatic story, with such beautiful writing, especially the end. Another is "Love is Not a Pie" by Amy Bloom. The title drew me to this one and the story had some shock effect on my young students. Really, it's not so shocking, just some mature content for adults. Beautiful on the expression of love and the complications of love & marriage. Of course, James Joyce, too, and Chekhov and Flannery O'Connor. Must go! I see a spider crawling on the wall here. Sending you best healing wishes.
"The Swimmer" by John Cheever. John Cheever lived in my hometown, Ossining, NY, and the spirit of suburbia is so strong in that story, it takes my breath away.
As a young woman, I read these three different stories but three great teachers: A very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was an enchanting story written in a direct simple language but filled with extraordinary events that could not be interpreted correctly, I laughed when I read it. And in retrospect, sadly, I tortured my very pious older sisters, reading the story out loud, but telling them they reminded me of the local priest in the story that cannot recognize the decrepit old man as an angel because he spoke in an unrecognizable language, not in Latin. I hope my old sisters have forgiven my arrogance. Then I read Julio Cortázar, La Noche Boca Arriba. What a story. I was thrilled in how Cortázar managed the shift and control,of time and space, the protagonist, a nameless man finds himself inn20th century Mexico City, but after an accident discovers he is a Moteca Indian running in the 15th century Aztecs Empire, running hard Not to be captured for the Aztecs to sacrifice him to their God, the Sun. They believed without the heart of the human sacrifice the sun would not rise. Again, the dominance and bizarre understandings of religious beliefs. This is a brilliant short story. And then, Jorge Luis Borges, El Sur. It is advantageous to have visited the sites in Buenos Aires found in this short story, but then head south to that inevitable encounter with self.
I am glad that Ii read these stories in Spanish, I wonder if in English they still have that power that enthralled me. Thanks
James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" reveals itself anew with each reading. I first read it when I was teaching high school English and needed to add some diversity to the white male canon contained within the old textbooks. The scene where the narrator finally watches, with an open heart, his brother Sonny play piano at the jazz club is seared into my brain as the image of being willing to allow ourselves to see our relatives with grace and humility.
As a young avid reader, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, I recognize the ironic bite of this story, and, in retrospect, and sadly, I tortured my pious older sisters by reading it out loud to them. In my view, my sisters were like the priest who refused to recognize this decrepit old man with enormous wings as an angel because he spoke an incomprehensible ancient language not Latin. The story also made me laugh. Another short story from Julio Cortázar La Noche Boca Arriba delighted me and had me in aw of the skills of Julio Cortázar. His gift of moving the protagonist from 20th century nameless man to the 15th century reignn of the Aztecs who believed in human sacrifice to bring out the sun every morning. Again how frightening it was for me to read this incredible tale of being trapped by some bizarre religious belief that one could not escape. It is a story that held me in suspense. I dont think I slept at all the night when I read it.
Of course, Jorge Luis Borges, El Sur. Those of you who have travelled to Buenos Aires will recognize places mentioned in this short story, but is moving south which leads the protagonist to become real but then chooses his death. Three stories that fascinated me, and have kept me thinking about them often.
Hanif, I hope you had a good day and a good night. I look forward to your chronicles with excitement and interests.
Last year I was walking on one of the local beaches where I live in Càdiz (Andalucia) and a dog emerged from the east end of the shore with a small shoe in its mouth. Thinking it belonged to a child, because I fear the worse for those crossing seas for a different life, I am bound to say "baby shoes for sale, never worn" by Ernest Hemingway. I read this story the day before I introduced it to a class of 11 yr kids in an inner city school before I got out of the UK in 2019. None of the hard ones said a word. Like me, the night before, they looked at something they could not describe even though it was a chair, a window or wall. They seemed to have lost all movement and the immediate stasis said literature is news and more.
Right off the top of my head: "White Angel" by Michael Cunningham. The image of the boy crashing through a glass door, his little brother witnessing. So much incredible visual and emotional detail here. "The Bear Went Over the Mountain" by Alice Munro. The woman who doesn't recognize her husband and falls in love with another man at her assisted living place. "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx. I know that people are focused on the movie (which I thought was excellent) but the short story made me cry years earlier. The intertwined shirts in the closet.
"The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" by Marquez. 11th grade English. Images: The children decorating the body, burying and unburying it by the shore. The wives with their increasingly fantastical hopes of who this man had been. Giving him a name: Esteban. I remember thinking, both, wow this is what it is to write! To spin magic out of words. And also, how powerful to give someone a name--how quickly then can myth and identity flow from this simple constellation of letters.
Wishing you strength and courage, Hanif. Thank you for sharing your journey.
Jan 25, 2023·edited Jan 25, 2023Liked by Hanif Kureishi
My first favourite short stories were the adventures stories by Mark Twain and Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino. Marcovaldo was an absolute hero for me (and probably still is). The image of the moon from one of those stories is always there with me.
The best Short stories are YOUR letters from hospital !!!! They are current, very meaningful, to me as a fellow sufferer Wish that was still going on but I understand if you and family pulled in many other directions for your needs. Much love
Short stories? If I had to pick one, it might be Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find." I especially like the Misfit's remarks at the end of the story: "She would of been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." I can't remember how long ago I read her stories, probably in college.
I suppose as a child it was The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde which has that song like refrain in it, “Swallow, swallow little swallow”. I loved it so much because it didn’t succumb to the simple happy ending and the sorrow was true, authentic and made me feel something outside of myself. So perfectly written. It’s extraordinary that a book written for children can present grief so honestly and not shy away from it. The sadness was just as important as the joy.
I met you through "My Son the Fanatic," which still haunts me: the sad cabby, the prostitute, the serious son. The short story which changed my life: Doris Lessing's "A Love Child." The last scene, where the older man weeps on a bench in South Africa, realizing he has lived the wrong life, so profoundly shook me that I changed my own and went to work in Afghanistan (before the recent fall BACK to the Taliban). Now, older, I know I have lived my purpose though I remain vigilant for signs in case there is a chapter I haven't yet lived. Your posts, Hanif Kureishi, have made me even more vigilant. I am broken-hearted for you and so grateful for every word you are willing to share. We learn and learn and learn. Together.
Katherine Mansfield.I read her stories as a teenager. I knew I liked them but didn't know why.i read them again twice more.Recently again as featured on BBC radio.They are rich and harsh and real.
The Dead by James Joyce
Let Them Call It Jazz by Jean Rhys
and Popular Mechanics by Carver.
The latter blew my mind as the unseen paper in A or S level or something, can’t remember it was so long ago. It made me burst into tears though because I’d never read anything like it and when the teacher invigilating came to check on me at the end of the exam thinking I’d screwed up the exam all I could say was ‘I didn’t know you could do that with words’.
Then a few years later I read The Buddha of Suburbia and said that again: I didn’t know some bloke from Bromley would do something with words that would finally describe what it was like for me growing up Anglo Indian in the 80s. I can never thank you enough for that book, and all your other ones.
I’m so sorry you’ve had something so shit happen to you but so grateful that you are here, and writing as beautifully as ever, even though it must be doing your head in having to do it the way you’re doing it. Thank you though. So many of us here are rooting for you to make a recovery. X
Chekhov's the Lady and the Dog. The simple arbitrariness of that affair. How they convince themselves in an odd and passive way to fall in love. How they then suffer it. How they suffer their lives.
I love "the Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka. Also "In the Penal Colony," almost any short story by Kafka. "The Shawl" by Cynthia Ozick, amazing. "The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. Now, for contemporary stories, let me think on that.... :)
Chechov, all of his short stories.
"Araby" by James Joyce. I read it in college and that moment near the end when the boy is filled with an all consuming shame when faced with the realization (or epiphany, if you will) at his place in the world. I find it just heartbreaking, and it's never left me.
I've just read Tolstoy's 'The death of Ivan Ilyich' after seeing film Living- the short story is apparently an original inspiration for this film. The book is a much more visceral experience if a man approaching death than the film! Sorry to be morbid!
I have several as it is one of my favourite genres but I choose three: The lottery by Shirley Jackson, A Perfect Day for Bananafish by Salinger and Mi Vida con la Ola (My life with the wave) by Octavio Paz. All three outstanding.
"Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor. Loved it. I read it first when I was maybe 16--during silent reading and meditation at St. Mary's Academy--and it was the beginning of the absolute joy in the irreverent.
Boule de Suif by Maupassant. Read in summer of 1989, interrailing after A levels, somewhere in Yugoslavia. It's beautiful, moving, moral and introduced me to 19th c French history and literature. The fat tear rolling down her cheek after the final humiliation...
Oh! and Somerset Maugham - hoovered them up in my mid teens - my favourite light one has to be 'The Luncheon' for his rising anxiety about the bill, and the desciption of the food.
Hi, I'm Charlotte before telling you about my encounter with books, I want to send you all the good vibes, hoping that your health improves soon, I'm from Nicaragua, I was born in the middle of an effervescent revolution in the eighties. My contact with books was through public libraries, the first book I remember was an illustrated Quixote for children, the first short story I enjoyed and loved was Rip van Winkle, I found a selection of stories in my cousin's old bookcase, I was eight years old, it was a fascinating story.
The story "A Summer Job" in Colm Tóibín's Mothers and Sons moved me as no other has. In it, a teenage Irish lad reluctantly assumes companionship of his aged and rapidly declining grandmother over one summer. Just before the end of the story the boy utters five words to his mother that literally (in the literal sense) made me gasp, and brought tears to my eyes. Then a couple of paragraphs later he repeats them.
I could not think of this story today without tearing up. I've never been so moved by a simple English sentence. Or by a work of fiction. It is like a powerful musical composition and manages to go beyond words into a nameless territory, telling a human story that turns out to embrace all of humanity in a painful and provocative way.
The story 'The Necklace ' by Guy de Maupassant - especially its twist ending- loved it as an author myself - in learning about writing stories - but also used it in classes, read it aloud and loved watching the expression on the students faces when they found out what had happened at the end. One of those unforgettable stories.
Also the Tell Tale Heart - by Edgar Allan Poe - for the same reasons. Simply captivating!
Qaisra Shahraz
I really enjoy stories by O’ Henry and Rabindranath Tagore. One of my favourites Henry is the ‘Gift of the Magi’ and of Tagore ‘Ichcha puran’ where father and son reverse identities for a day.
Since you began writing after your accident in Rome, I’ve read all your dispatches. Your posts are so charming, dazzling, so joyous, so very life affirming. They feel like a beam of sunlight lighting up a gloomy day. I wait for them. I’m really saddened to see your experience with writing the My Beautiful Laundrette disappear being a paid wall.
I wish you well and hope you get better soon.
“Where are you Going, Where have you been?” -Joyce Carol Oates
“Hills like White Elephants “- Hemingway
“The Harvest”- Amy Hempel
“Continuity Of Parks”- Julio Cortazar
“On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning “- Haruki Murakami
All of these spoke to me , learning about modern Literature.
Every few years, I read the collected fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. He is, or rather was, an Argentinian writer, who is associated with the genre of Magic Realism, though he also wrote floridly about an assortment of historical bandits, pirates and desperadoes.
One of his most well-known stories 'The Library of Babel' describes an infinite library, composed of hexagonal galleries that contain every book that ever has, or ever will, exist. This selection extends presumably to 'The Winds of Winter', which George R R Martin still occasionally threatens to finish, usually just before he throws his weight behind some other unrelated project.
Naturally, most of the volumes in the Library are filled with complete gibberish. The narrator recalls a book discovered by his father that repeated the letters MCV from the first line to the last. Another, that includes the line 'O Time thy pyramids', in amongst the babble, is considered by the inhabitants of the Library to be of great, yet to be understood, significance.
The story and its concept of the Total Library seems prescient of the Internet. I wonder what Borges would have made of the online world and its encroachment on our lives.
Another, very prescient, Borges story, that labours under the opaque title 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', describes an attempt to overwrite the world with a new reality. Initially this is done by means of a fraudulent reprint of the 1902 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. By the conclusion of the story the world has all but been replaced by the once-fictional reality of Tlön. Again, one's thoughts drift to the Internet and the battles between the different, agenda-driven permutations of reality that play out with increasing subtlety.
Over the years, Borges' stories have become a reflection of where I am in life.
The first time I ever read his work was after I selected a paperback at random from the shelves of Waterstones, to read while I was at the dentists. Having never even heard of Borges, I was astonished by these stories that felt like they had been written for me. I devoured everything that I could lay my hands on, and took all of it extremely seriously.
The next time I revisited Borges, I began to take note of a very dry sense of humour that I had not noticed before. The eponymous macguffin in 'The Aleph' is a point in time and space from which all other points in time and space can be perceived. In the story, Borges is using it to catch glimpses of an unrequited love who has passed on from the world. The owner of the house where the Aleph is located is using it as the inspiration for an interminable poem, to which Borges becomes an unwitting audience.
The third time I returned to Borges, my appreciation of his work was supplemented by a reading of Edwin Williamson's biography. The book has come in for some criticism. However, it did help me to understand that what I had regarded as dry intellectual exercises were both inspired and informed by events in Borges' life, some traumatic in nature. As a result of this, I perceived a more human side to his writing.
I feel that I have a very incomplete understanding of Borges that nonetheless continues to come more into focus with each re-visitation of his work. I tried (unsuccessfully, if the reception is anything to go by) to embody, in a piece of short fiction, the linear labyrinth that is described by the criminal mastermind Red Scharlach at the conclusion of his story 'Death and the Compass'.
I am at a stage with his writing that one reaches with certain bands, where you latch onto some hitherto overlooked minor work and obsess over it.
Currently this would be 'A Theologian in Death' which gives me the same gnawing, indefinable feeling that I got the first time that I laid eyes upon a William Blake watercolour titled (not by its creator, apparently) 'An Allegory of the Bible'. There is no tangible reason for making this connection, but it exists in my mind regardless.
In the story, the protestant theologian, Philip Melancthon, dies and is transported to a room identical the one in which he once lived, where he continues to work on his religious meditations. His omission of any reference to charity in his writings prompts a visitation from concerned angels and a gradual deterioration in his living conditions and personal appearance, until he is covered in hair, and has enlisted the services of a magician to trick visitors into thinking that they calling on him in Heaven. At the conclusion of the story, he has been taken from his dwelling by one of these magicians and is living in the encroaching desert where he has become a servant of demons.
I find the depiction of Heaven in the story, as a state of existence that must be continually earned by an adherence to the party-line, even when such adherence conflicts with one's own natural instincts, to be very unsettling.
CAN ANYBODY WRITE A LIST out of these delightful posts? I shall add my very first short story in primary school, Ciaula scopre la luna by Pirandello. A child-slave’ s wonder.
"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant still gives me the shivers. Love Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle"- the horror and humor of that wasted life! Also, that story also makes me think of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," which gave us the line "I prefer not to ...." That has certainly come in handy from time to time!
Then we get into more contemporary stuff. I really love Andrea Barrett's collection Ship Fever. The first time I read stories like "The Littoral Zone," "The Marburg Sisters," and "The Behavior of the Hawkweeds," I knew they would be with me for life. It's not so much the images, as the wonderful language and richly drawn characters (and something about the economy of lines like, "But all they have lost in order to be together would seem bearable had they continued to feel the way they felt on. the island.")
I had the same reaction to the collection of Raymond Carver's short stories from Where I'm Calling From. Oh, so many lines and stories I love: "Cathedral." "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," "Fat," that follow me. Impossible to choose a favorite, but perhaps I can make a case for "A Small Good Thing," which is about a baker who harasses a family by phone for failing to pick up the birthday cake they ordered for their son. They show up at his bakery to confront him, and they tell him their son was killed in an accident earlier that day. The ending is a miracle of humanity, compassion, and forgiveness: "'Smell this,' the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. "It's a heavy bread, but rich." ... It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the flourescent trays of light. They talked into the early morning, the high pale cast of light in the windows,and they did not think of leaving."
'Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book' MR James.
Can't remember when I first read it, around 2015, never read any MR James before, blew me away. It was in a penguin paperback of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, from 1930s. A Second hand shop buy. It was around the time I met my wife. A year after first reading it we were on holiday in South West France staying in a friends house (not as fancy or as middle class as it sounds), a place called Beaumont-de-Lamange (the Cramlington of South West France)
We had a car and took a trip out. I suggested that we go to the town where the story was set. Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges. 2hr journey away. We booked a hotel in the town right opposite the cathedral in the story. I remember being so excited. It was out of season. A pair of old English women sat outside a bar in front of the church. Like a loon I asked them if they were here because of MR James.
The hotel we stayed at was horrific with the maddest decor and paintings on the wall, an interior designer on LSD.
Remember having a terrible unsettled sleep dreaming about vampires. Before bed we walked around the desolate town which was a labyrinth, we only bumped into English people, not more than half a dozen, all looking as lost. All you could hear was this beeping sound in the air, which we later found out was the sound of Midwife Toads. We ate in a restaurant along with lost English tourists. A man with his belly hanging out was waiting tables and also maybe preparing the awful food, a horror story in itself.
“The Spider’s Thread” by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. The image of one’s fate literally hanging by a thread connecting heaven and hell is hard to shake. I read it in college and went on to study Japanese literature.
I was talking to a friend who is in a hospital and I told him that Hanif Kurieshi is also in the hospital, and he said Hanif, the one who wrote that short story about the big turd? The Tale of the Turd
The "Bad Behavior" collection from Mary Gaitskill (1988). I read those stories over and over again as I was trying not to lose my mind in my very dramatic and very passionate 20's. “My ambition was to live like music.” Oh, what a time that was. Everything was so filled with color and sound and texture. And joy at the promise of such exciting times ahead. When I met Ms. Gaitskill finally in 2009, I just cried and told her thank you a million times. Hopefully she knew that her stories meant so much in propelling a broken girl forward.
Two Bottles of Relish by Lord Dunsany. I read it in high school, and the last image of the trees, when everything makes sense, persists.
Smoking, Inc. by Stephen King. I read it about 15 years ago. It is one of the truest depictions of addiction I have ever read. I remember the view of the woman's hand, with all it means,
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi by Kipling. I read this in high school, too. The mongoose is so noble. He didn't do what he did for gain, but the image of his living in luxury is a wonderful reward to savor.
Nine Stories - JD Salinger, recommended by a bookseller in Shakespeare and Co, Paris. They stay with me somehow
Collected Stories - Vladimir Nabokov, bought by a friend at Goldsmiths' for me as an aspiring novelist 🥴
Wishing you well, and hoping it was an optimistic day for you in the gym x
Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional'
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: Haruki Murakami
This is the best short story book I know
It’s one I turn to when I’m struggling and his determination always helps me -
It’s about breaking through mental barriers and running is his way to find that
This wasn’t exactly my favorite short story, but it is one that horrified me as a child of 9 or 10 and the feelings of the story are forever seared in my memory. It is titled « All Summer in a Day » and was written by Ray Bradbury in 1954. It took me 45 years to locate and reread the story. It is about a young girl, Margot who moves to Venus (from Earth) where it rains every day except for one hour every seven years when the sun comes out. The girl has fond memories and misses the sunlight she felt on Earth, but the other children in school with her were too young to have experienced sunlight on Venus. One day a bully locks her in the school classroom and that is the very day there is one hour of sunlight on Venus. The children forget she is locked in the closet and run out to play and dance in the sun. Everyone leaves Margot in the closet and she loses her chance to see precious sunlight for another seven years. The HORROR of it.
Okay so the story no longer affects me like it did the nine year old Texas self that spent every free moment outdoors under clear skies and white hot sunlight. I lived being outside, barefoot and hanging upside down from the trees, rolling in the grass or creating chalk masterpieces on the sidewalk. I couldn’t fathom living and playing under dark gloomy rainy skies. It was shocking and sad, a violent crime had been committed, worse than murder.
Who knew that one day many many years later I would learn to live in a very cloudy and rainy environment just like Ray Bradbury’s Venus.
Dear Life by Alice Munro. The penultimate paragraph is a killer:
I did not go home for my mother’s last illness or for her funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with. We could haveaa barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had a contempt for formal behavior, but why blame it on him? I felt the same. We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.
When my mother was dying, she got out of the hospital somehow, at night, and wandered around town until someone who didn’t know her at all spotted her and took her in. If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true.
I agree your short stories are brilliant. I know you are in some difficulty at the moment but your posts still shine with humour and optimism. I read last year The Stories of John Cheever - some are dated and particular to a bygone era and many very class ridden. But I enjoyed The Swimmer very much. It is what is inferred or suggested by the text that draws you in. It takes a special skill to say so much in so few words. The film from 1968 is very true to the story - like a ready made screenplay.
I prefer novels to short stories because i never want to plot to end and want the characters to stay alive.
However, Stefan Zweig's Fantastic Night and all his other stories are superb. And all of Guy De Maupassant ( particularly The Necklace) and all of Colette also.
Jean Rhys ‘Mixing Cocktails’ and ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’- huge influence early on. A wonderful writer whose ellipsis and absences say it all. I hope things slowly
Improve. I’m so moved by your blogs and letters; their resilience and humour despite the ghastliness.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Katherine Anne Porter about lying in a fever unable to respond.
"Family ties" by Clarice Lispector. "El Aleph" by Jorge Luis Borges. "Bestiario" by Julio Cortazar. Impeccable, precise, pristine writing and inventive.
I was 18 when I first discovered Andrea Lee’s short stories in the New Yorker. I had read stories with black protagonists up to that point (thanks almost entirely to my parents; the only ones I encountered in school were Bigger Thomas and Huck Finn’s Jim) but that was the first time I’d come across a character that resembled me: a black girl from a comfortable middle-class home growing up around white people to whom she was both visible and invisible. The first time I heard the word “postracial” was in reference to her work.
I don’t think about short stories as much as I think of short story writers—Alice Munro, William Trevor, Raymond Carver, George Saunders, and others—or collections—The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, Will You Please Be Quiet Please, etc. I’m particularly fond of Italo Calvino’s Difficult Loves, and, if pressed, would single out “Adam, One Afternoon,” “The House of the Beehives,” and particularly, “Theft in a Pastry Shop.” For the most part, I don’t look to short stories for solace or comfort, but the opposite, a sense of disquiet, emotional or intellectual. Maybe I think of novels as a warm bath and short stories as a cold shower, a convenient metaphor if not universally true.
I used to teach creative writing and there were a few stories that really stuck with me over the years. "White Angel" by Michael Cunningham was one. It's a beautiful story about two brothers and grief, love, mentorship, and more. Beautiful writing. Another I loved was "How Far She Went" by Mary Hood. It's a scary, dramatic story, with such beautiful writing, especially the end. Another is "Love is Not a Pie" by Amy Bloom. The title drew me to this one and the story had some shock effect on my young students. Really, it's not so shocking, just some mature content for adults. Beautiful on the expression of love and the complications of love & marriage. Of course, James Joyce, too, and Chekhov and Flannery O'Connor. Must go! I see a spider crawling on the wall here. Sending you best healing wishes.
"The Swimmer" by John Cheever. John Cheever lived in my hometown, Ossining, NY, and the spirit of suburbia is so strong in that story, it takes my breath away.
As a young woman, I read these three different stories but three great teachers: A very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was an enchanting story written in a direct simple language but filled with extraordinary events that could not be interpreted correctly, I laughed when I read it. And in retrospect, sadly, I tortured my very pious older sisters, reading the story out loud, but telling them they reminded me of the local priest in the story that cannot recognize the decrepit old man as an angel because he spoke in an unrecognizable language, not in Latin. I hope my old sisters have forgiven my arrogance. Then I read Julio Cortázar, La Noche Boca Arriba. What a story. I was thrilled in how Cortázar managed the shift and control,of time and space, the protagonist, a nameless man finds himself inn20th century Mexico City, but after an accident discovers he is a Moteca Indian running in the 15th century Aztecs Empire, running hard Not to be captured for the Aztecs to sacrifice him to their God, the Sun. They believed without the heart of the human sacrifice the sun would not rise. Again, the dominance and bizarre understandings of religious beliefs. This is a brilliant short story. And then, Jorge Luis Borges, El Sur. It is advantageous to have visited the sites in Buenos Aires found in this short story, but then head south to that inevitable encounter with self.
I am glad that Ii read these stories in Spanish, I wonder if in English they still have that power that enthralled me. Thanks
James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" reveals itself anew with each reading. I first read it when I was teaching high school English and needed to add some diversity to the white male canon contained within the old textbooks. The scene where the narrator finally watches, with an open heart, his brother Sonny play piano at the jazz club is seared into my brain as the image of being willing to allow ourselves to see our relatives with grace and humility.
As a young avid reader, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, I recognize the ironic bite of this story, and, in retrospect, and sadly, I tortured my pious older sisters by reading it out loud to them. In my view, my sisters were like the priest who refused to recognize this decrepit old man with enormous wings as an angel because he spoke an incomprehensible ancient language not Latin. The story also made me laugh. Another short story from Julio Cortázar La Noche Boca Arriba delighted me and had me in aw of the skills of Julio Cortázar. His gift of moving the protagonist from 20th century nameless man to the 15th century reignn of the Aztecs who believed in human sacrifice to bring out the sun every morning. Again how frightening it was for me to read this incredible tale of being trapped by some bizarre religious belief that one could not escape. It is a story that held me in suspense. I dont think I slept at all the night when I read it.
Of course, Jorge Luis Borges, El Sur. Those of you who have travelled to Buenos Aires will recognize places mentioned in this short story, but is moving south which leads the protagonist to become real but then chooses his death. Three stories that fascinated me, and have kept me thinking about them often.
Hanif, I hope you had a good day and a good night. I look forward to your chronicles with excitement and interests.
Last year I was walking on one of the local beaches where I live in Càdiz (Andalucia) and a dog emerged from the east end of the shore with a small shoe in its mouth. Thinking it belonged to a child, because I fear the worse for those crossing seas for a different life, I am bound to say "baby shoes for sale, never worn" by Ernest Hemingway. I read this story the day before I introduced it to a class of 11 yr kids in an inner city school before I got out of the UK in 2019. None of the hard ones said a word. Like me, the night before, they looked at something they could not describe even though it was a chair, a window or wall. They seemed to have lost all movement and the immediate stasis said literature is news and more.
Right off the top of my head: "White Angel" by Michael Cunningham. The image of the boy crashing through a glass door, his little brother witnessing. So much incredible visual and emotional detail here. "The Bear Went Over the Mountain" by Alice Munro. The woman who doesn't recognize her husband and falls in love with another man at her assisted living place. "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx. I know that people are focused on the movie (which I thought was excellent) but the short story made me cry years earlier. The intertwined shirts in the closet.
"The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" by Marquez. 11th grade English. Images: The children decorating the body, burying and unburying it by the shore. The wives with their increasingly fantastical hopes of who this man had been. Giving him a name: Esteban. I remember thinking, both, wow this is what it is to write! To spin magic out of words. And also, how powerful to give someone a name--how quickly then can myth and identity flow from this simple constellation of letters.
Wishing you strength and courage, Hanif. Thank you for sharing your journey.
My first favourite short stories were the adventures stories by Mark Twain and Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino. Marcovaldo was an absolute hero for me (and probably still is). The image of the moon from one of those stories is always there with me.
I was momentarily stunned by this question, as I have read so many short stories, but why did none come to mind, except "The Lottery"?
But I thought for a bit longer, and "A Rose for Emily" by Faulkner is a masterpiece that makes me shiver every now and then.
Kate Chopin has some notable short stories, but I'd have to hunt for the titles. What an interesting question.
Simply love : The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami - a book of short stories all mad and mystical that transports you :)