10 Outstanding Short Stories to Read

in 2018
Posted by Longreads

Author Han Kang (Roberto Ricciuti / Contributor / Ge y Images)

For years, the #longreads hashtag on Twi er has been filled with great story
recommendations from people around the world. Pravesh Bhardwaj is a
longtime contributor — throughout the year he posts his favorite short stories,
and then in January we’re lucky enough to get a list of his favorites to enjoy in
the year ahead.

***

For many years now I’ve been posting short stories on Twi er. It’s a
nightly thing: Before si ing down to write (I work on spec
screenplays), I look around for a story, read it, then share it. I end up
reading almost every day, irrespective of whether I am able to write
something or not. (This year I am working on a screenplay that’s a
noirish police procedural in the Hindi language set in satellite city
Noida, near New Delhi, the capital of India.)

Starting with Yiyun Li’s “On the Street Where You Live” from The New
Yorker, to P. D. James’s “The Murder of Santa Claus” from Lithub, I read
305 stories in 2017. Here are ten that I enjoyed the most, in random
order:

‘Dimension’ (Alice Munro, The New Yorker, 2006)

Alice Munro is one of my favourites, and I loved this one about a
grieving woman who goes to an institution to meet her husband.

Doree had to take three buses—one to Kincardine, where she

waited for one to London, where she waited again, for the city bus
out to the facility. She started the trip on a Sunday at nine in the
morning. Because of the waiting times between buses, it took her
until about two in the afternoon to travel the hundred-odd miles.
All that si ing, either on buses or in the depots, was not a thing
she should have minded. Her daily work was not of the si ing-
down kind.

She was a chambermaid at the Comfort Inn. She scrubbed

bathrooms and stripped and made beds and vacuumed rugs and
wiped mirrors. She liked the work—it occupied her thoughts to a
certain extent and tired her out so that she could sleep at night.
She was seldom faced with a really bad mess, though some of the
women she worked with could tell stories to make your hair curl.
These women were older than her, and they all thought that she
should try to work her way up. They told her that she should get
trained for a job behind the desk, while she was still young and
decent-looking. But she was content to do what she did. She didn’t
want to have to talk to people.

‘The Fruit of My Woman’ (Han Kang, Granta, 1997)

Han Kang wrote this story way back in 1997 and this story evolved
into her novel The Vegetarian, Kang’s sensational introduction to the
English-speaking world. (Translated from Korean by Deborah Smith.)
 I struggled to recall the last occasion that I’d seen my wife naked,
and it had been bright enough to see her properly. Not that year,
for sure; I wasn’t even certain that it had happened the year
before.

How could I have failed to notice such deep bruises on the body of
the only person I lived with? I tried to count the fine wrinkles
radiating out from the corners of my wife’s eyes. Then I told her to
take off all her clothes. A red flush appeared along the line of her
cheekbones, which her weight loss had left indecently sharp. She
tried to remonstrate with me.

‘What if someone sees?’

‘Crooner’ (Kazuo Ishiguro)

I was over the moon when Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for
literature in 2017. I love his books, especially The Remains of the Day and
The Unconsoled, and this short story appeared in his short-story
collection Nocturnes.
 Tony Gardner had been my mother’s favourite. Back home, back
in the communist days, it had been really hard to get records like
that, but my mother had pre y much his whole collection. Once
when I was a boy, I scratched one of those precious records. The
apartment was so cramped, and a boy my age, you just had to
move around sometimes, especially during those cold months
when you couldn’t go outside. So I was playing this game
jumping from our li le sofa to the armchair, and one time I
misjudged it and hit the record player. The needle went across the
record with a zip—this was long before CDs—and my mother
came in from the kitchen and began shouting at me. I felt so bad,
not just because she was shouting at me, but because I knew it was
one of Tony Gardner’s records, and I knew how much it meant to
her. And I knew that this one too would now have those popping
noises going through it while he crooned those American songs.
Years later, when I was working in Warsaw and I got to know
about black-market records, I gave my mother replacements of all
her worn-out Tony Gardner albums, including that one I
scratched. It took me over three years, but I kept ge ing them, one
by one, and each time I went back to see her I’d bring her another.

‘The Proxy Marriage’ (Maile Meloy, The New

Yorker, 2012)
A story about a young man and a young woman who take part in
proxy marriages for soldiers posted abroad. I wonder why it has not
been filmed.

William had no girlfriends in high school, and his mother once sat
him down at the table in her spotless kitchen and asked if he was
gay. She said it would be fine with her. She loved him
unconditionally, and they would figure out a way to tell his father.
But William wasn’t gay. He was just absurdly, painfully in love
with Bridey Taylor, who leaned on the piano and sang while he
played, and he had no way of telling her. He was too shy to
pursue other girls, even when the payoff seemed either likely or
worth the agony. But he didn’t tell his mother that. It was too
humiliating. He just stammered an unconvincing denial.
‘Axis of Happiness’ (Min Jin Lee, Narrative
Magazine, 2003)
Pachinko is one the best-received books of 2017 and I need to buy it as
soon as possible.

The morning Henry Evans stopped by my office to tell me to go to

Chicago, I was in the middle of my chapter-a-day habit: still in the
Book of Hosea, much to my dismay, still in the Old Testament
after years of dogged reading. This habit required skimming the
day’s chapter of the Bible (usually the length of one onion-skin
page), then reading the extensive commentaries in the footnotes,
then finally reading the chapter again—all of this took on average
forty-five minutes. I did this at work because it was where I lived
—fourteen hours a day, often six days a week. I couldn’t help
knowing some of the Bible because I was a P.K. (preacher’s kid),
but I’d started reading this fat copy of the NIV Study Bible with its
elephant-gray leather cover because my mother left it for me along
with her modest wedding jewelry when she died three years ago.

‘The Deer-Vehicle Collision Survivors Support

Group’ (Porochista Khakpour, Guernica, 2010)
Lovely title and a lovely short story. It just worked its way up and
overwhelmed me. If you intend to read just one story from this list,
then I suggest please make it this one.
 We have nothing. Out here, we have only ourselves.

This is all new to us. Once upon a time, we were in the big city,
and the population of our neighborhood—a small district in a
large borough in one of the nation’s largest cities—the population
of just our neighborhood was ten times bigger than the population
of our entire city today. If you can call it a city. Everything here is
called Village Something: the Village Laundromat, the Village
Stationery, the Village Tavern, the Village Pizza, the Village Freez
(an ice cream stand), the Village Idiot (a bar). It doesn’t pretend to
be what it’s not.

It is not a lot. We left everything behind. I had nothing to do with

it. I had nothing. It was Azita; Azita had it all.

‘In Country’ (Rabih Alameddine, Zoetrope)

Do you follow Rabih Alameddine on Twi er? You must… everybody
must.

I descended the stairs to the living room and master bedroom. I

had a strong urge to touch everything, my hands sweeping over
marble, mahogany, satin, and velvet. In the bedroom, I rubbed the
wallpaper, my hand grazing the soft fabric in wide sweeps. I sat
on the bed, caressed the pillow, lay my head down. I usually loved
smelling the scents of my parents on their bed, but something here
was peculiar. I smelled foreign cologne. I stood back up, looked
around, and saw one of my father’s watches. It was his room all
right.

I ran up the winding stairs, grabbed a washcloth from the

bathroom, dropped my jeans, jumped onto my bed, and humped
the soft fabric of the bedcover. Soft, rich, lush, it did not take long.
I barely managed to cover my penis with the washcloth.

‘Fair Warning’ (Robin Olen Butler, Zoetrope)

Francis Ford Coppola recommended this story in the By the Book
Column of The New York Times as one of his favourite short stories from
Zoetrope site.

Perhaps my fate was sealed when I sold my three-year-old sister.

My father had taken me to a couple of ca le auctions, not minding
that I was a girl–this was before Missy was born, of course–and I’d
loved the fast talk and the intensity of the whole thing. So the day
after my seventh birthday party, where Missy did a song for
everyone while I sat alone, my chin on my hand, and meditated
behind my still uncut birthday cake, it seemed to me that here was
a charming and beautiful li le asset that I had no further use for
and could be liquidated to good effect. So I gathered a passel of
children from our gated community in Houston, kids with serious
money, and I had Missy do a bit of her song once more, and I said,
“Ladies and gentlemen, no greater or more complete perfection of
animal beauty ever stood on two legs than the li le girl who
stands before you. She has prizewinning breeding and good teeth.
She will neither hook, kick, strike, nor bite you. She is the pride
and joy and greatest treasure of the Dickerson family and she is
now available to you. Who will start the bidding for this future
blue-ribbon winner? Who’ll offer fifty cents? Fifty cents. Who’ll
give me fifty?” I saw nothing but blank stares before me. I’d go en
all these kids together but I still hadn’t quite go en them into the
spirit of the thing. So I looked one of these kids in the eye and I
said, “You, Tony Speck. Aren’t your parents rich enough to give
you an allowance of fifty cents?” He made a hard, scrunched-up
face and he said, “A dollar.” And I was off. I finally sold her for six
dollars and twenty-five cents to a quiet girl up the street whose
daddy was in oil. She was an only child, a thing I made her feel
sorry about when the bidding slowed down at five bucks.

‘The Sex Lives of African Girls’ (Taiye Selasi,

Granta, 2011)
A searing story dealing with abuse, about a young girl who lives with
her uncle’s family – her mother’s brother in Accra, Ghana, after her
mother abandoned her.
 You can barely manage movement in the big one-piece buba you
borrowed from Comfort, your cousin, under duress. The off-the-
shoulder neckline keeps slipping to your elbow, exposing your
(troublingly) flat chest. Absent breasts, the hem drags and gets
caught underfoot, a malfunction exacerbated by your footwear,
also Comfort’s: gold leather stile os two sizes too small with a
thick crust of sequins and straps of no use. You’ve been tripping
and falling around the garden all evening, with night-damp earth
sucking at the heels of the shoes, the excess folds of the buba sort of
draped around your body, making you look like a black Statue of
Liberty.

‘Smokers’ (Tobias Wolff, The Atlantic, 1976)

This entertaining short story is the first published story by Wolff, about
the friendship of three young men from different classes in first year
college.

Eugene was a scholarship boy. One of his teachers had told him
that he was too smart to be going to a regular high school and
gave him a list of prep schools. Eugene applied to all of them
—”just for the hell of it”—and all of them accepted him. He finally
decided on Choate because only Choate had offered him a travel
allowance. His father was dead and his mother, a nurse, had three
other kids to support, so Eugene didn’t think it would be fair to
ask her for anything. As the train came into Wallingford he asked
me if I would be his roommate.

p.s. I must add that I also liked Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” and I’m
absolutely fascinated by the fact that it went viral on the internet. It was
surprising to see a short story all over the place.

***

Read Pravesh’s story picks from 2017, 2016, and 2015.

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  January 9, 2018