The Fine Fifteen: Short Fiction

[CC image by David Sherrett] 

I’m enjoying participating in the “15 books” meme– the selection I end up with consistently surprises me. The “rules” result in something very different from a “Best X” list:

…take 15 minutes (no more!) to list, in no particular order, 15 books [in this case short fiction] that have most intensely “stuck with you.” No Googling, etc.

Coming up with the short fiction selection was harder than figuring out the Fine Fifteen Novels. I prefer short fiction to novels… in five minutes I had 30+ titles off the top of my head. Then came 10 minutes of painful winnowing:

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Raymond Carver)
Strange how a book of spare, “minimalist” fiction had such an enormous effect on me. No one wrote in this particular mode better than Carver. Despite the negativity that has surrounded some of the revelations regarding Gordon Lish’s editing of Carver’s work (see here and here for some of that story), I’m gratified to see that the deeper humanity I always sensed (even in the early stories) lurking wasn’t just a figment of my imagination.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Sherman Alexie)
I’ve always preferred Alexie’s short stories to his novels, and this is by far his best collection (Smoke Signals—the movie based on this collection—is also a favorite; that doesn’t happen very often).

Brief Interview with Hideous Men (David Foster Wallace)
A tour de force in both popular senses of the term—an exceptional achievement and a particularly adroit maneuver. The exceptional achievement is how Wallace managed to weave together so many stylistic and formal innovations without becoming the kind of book fairly referred to as “experimental fiction.” The adroit maneuvering is in exposing deep veins of pain and the inconsolable aspect of dasein while slyly—or inevitably? Uncontrollably?—exposing an inexplicable hope. Betraying this hope and intrinsic belief in humanity may be the single aspect of Wallace’s suicide that most haunts and disturbs me.

Ficciones (Jorge Luis Borges)
Read the Introduction. Read my reading log notes. Read the freakin’ book already. There’s nothing else like it.

Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
So. Many. Great. Stories. “The Killers” – “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” – “Hills Like White Elephants” – “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” – “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” But the one that haunts me? “Now I Lay Me” with those chewing silkworms…

Forty Stories (Donald Barthelme)
Many of Barthelme’s stories could be considered flash fiction, or even prose poetry. All I know is he’s one of the very few “experimental” fictioneers that I not only admire technically, but actually enjoy.

A Model World and Other Stories (Michael Chabon)
Chabon writes wonderful sentences. So wonderful that sometimes they keep the reader from getting below the surface of the stories. The second half of A Model World (a group of stories grouped together under the title “Lost World”) will powerfully dispel the notion that Chabon’s writing is all surface and shallows.

No One Belongs Here More Than You (Miranda July)
I can’t make the case that this collection—or A Model World—is a canonical piece of literature for the ages, but July is one of the most entertaining and interesting new voices I’ve come across. I discovered July in a roundabout way: checking the credits of the fantastic film Me and You and Everyone We Know, which, as it turns out, July wrote and directed…

Dubliners (James Joyce)
Does Joyce’s collection fit into the rules given that the best piece in the book (“The Dead”) is arguably a novella? No matter.

The Stories of Paul Bowles
“A Distant Episode” isn’t just one of the single best stories in the English language… it’s also one of the most unsettling, terrifying and ultimately haunting. “The Delicate Prey” is not far behind. I’m not blowing smoke into any of your orifices here—Bowles was one of the very rare, very real deals.

Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
Anyone who professes to like to read or write fiction better have read O’Connor’s stories. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is another top 10 short stories in the language. Maybe top 5. The final lines reside complete in my memory:

"She’d a been a good woman," the Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

"Some fun!" Bobby Lee said.

"Shut up, Bobby Lee," the Misfit said. "It’s no real pleasure in life."

Stories of Anton Chekhov
Chekhov would have made the list no matter what, but I’ve been rediscovering his stories in the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation and connecting with them in a new and exhilarating way (as I did with the P&V translation of Crime and Punishment).

The View from the Seventh Layer (Kevin Brockmeier)
I raved about The View from the Seventh Layer to a mailing list of writers and editors and received nothing but the email equivalent of bemused, puzzled stares. I raved about it here to apparently completely silent assent.

Collected Stories (Isaac Babel)
The collected has given me a different view of Babel. His writing changed and evolved quickly, from his early pastoral stories, burlap over blade, to the almost genre-fiction of the Odessa stories featuring Benya the Jewish gangster, to the lean, powerful Red Calvary stories that attracted me to Babel in the first place. What’s consistent about Babel from the very beginning is that he is “a writer’s writer”—instinctively seeking, and finding, the perfect words for each expertly crafted sentence of each story, simply going where the words take him.

The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien)
There was a time when I devoured an excessive number of books about the Vietnam War. Only three really stood out: Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Caputo’s A Rumor of War and The Things They Carried…the only fiction in the bunch, but at least as true as the others in all the ways that matter.`