15. “Thirty Seconds from Now” by John Chu

I loved this story. John Chu’s “Thirty Seconds from Now” is wonderful in it’s ability to mirror the sense of destiny that comes with falling in love, especially young love. The main character, Scott, is a juggler and a college junior. He has a magical ability to sensually preview the future, well, kind of.  He is attuned to the myriad possible forms the future may take, and he can explore these possible futures with all of his senses. He’s kind of like a synesthetic daydreamer, haunted by the phantoms of what may be. And his future is love, and his future is heartbreak.

Because of Scott’s unique ability to sense the feelings of a future self, to embody the present and project that same body into the futurally orientated search for sensual experiences, Chu can rely on an inventive structure for this love story. He mixes past, present, and future tenses, overwhelming the reader in the same way that infatuation, that the early stages of love, can wreak havoc on one’s sense of linear time. We stay in the moment before Scott meets Tony, but we also wander with him through the intense build up and the break down of their love.

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You can read this story in The Boston Review.

Image source.

14. “Knock, Knock” by Michelle Berry

Michelle Berry’s “Knock, Knock” isn’t about anything. Well, okay, so it’s about being a mom, it’s about working from home, it’s about danger coming to the door, about presumption and disorder and even a little bit about dogs and teddy bears. Or at least, all these things are in the story, which I guess doesn’t mean that these are things the story is about.

The narrator is a busy woman, who makes specialty bears and frequently trips over her dog, and the dog doesn’t even eat crumbs off the floor, so the woman still has to do things like vacuum. There’s a weird turn when a small bald man knocks on the door, and then says ‘Knock knock,” out loud on the stoop, because he uses onomatopoeia to punctuate his strangeness.

He gives her a pamphlet, and she’s trying to get rid of him, and when she sees whatever it is that he’s placed in her hand, that’s the exact point you get that there’s a lot in this story, even if it’s not about the things that happen in it.

Berry’s style seems dead realist right up until this little dip into the dark, into something vauge and sinister and a little bit surreal. It’s a great effect, but she nearly ruins it by trying to explain it away with the last paragraph. If you can help yourself, read only to the last sentence of the penultimate paragraph and you’ll walk away just a little off kilter. Disturbed, but in a good way, by a story that roughs up the edges of the world, just a little, just enough.

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You can read this story here,  in The New Quarterly.

Image taken from a post about dogs and couches in the Albany Times Union, um,  dog blog.

13. “Citizen Conn” by Michael Chabon

“Citizen Conn” is about partnerships. The narrator is partnered doubly, to her academic husband David and to God through her work as a rabbi, and it becomes her project to heal the partnership of two old men, Artie Conn and Morty Feather: two comics legends whose early collaborative work grew into something hugely popular and became the foundation of a whole publishing company. There was money involved, and Artie signed away some of those rights for a large lump sum, but the betrayal runs deeper.

The rabbi is employed by a sort of hospice, and I kind of love her. She’s sure of her work, her abilities to give comfort and spiritual solace to the dying, and she is certainly up for the continual trials of revelation that dealing with people in pain entail. But she also recognizes her limitations, and she waivers between the feeling of being called to her vocation and her own human weaknesses, when communication breaks down, or when she feels burdened by her feelings or sadness or irritation.

It’s no secret that Chabon is a master of long sentences, that he can pack a whole universe into a few linked clauses. But they move quickly and they never lose you in their vastness. Because this story is told from the rabbi’s perspective, it is also littered with comments on the one of the central questions of the faith, being of course ‘what is it to be a Jew?’ Rabbi observes: “Aged Jews tend to shrug with practiced eloquence, expressing subtle fluctuations in the nature of their doubt.” Doubt and miscommunication and faithfulness are at the centre of the larger Venn diagram of the partnerships explored in “Citizen Conn”, with having both love and the knowledge that you are loving always an unknowable thing, because that’s part of what it means to be with other people,  or even with God.

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I read this story in this week’s issue of The New Yorker.

12. “A Tarantella” by Zoë Ferraris

Sometimes I feel like I read fiction in lieu of traveling. I’d rather be a story tourist, I think, getting into heads and language, picking apart sentences, than a real tourist, walking around a strange place to see how it feels to be somewhere else. Plus, it’s nice to be at home. I bring this up because travel, or, more precisely, the culturally loaded notion of tourism, is integral to  Zoë Ferraris’s bracing story, “A Tarantella.”

Opening with a collection of gruff and grunted descriptions of the main character, Massimo, you immediately get a sense that Ferraris is interested in messing you up a little with this one. Massimo is a legitimately tough guy; he’s a recovered heroin addict, an ex-con, and a scarred up survivor. His mother once stabbed him repeatedly in the chest. In the story, he cooks the same slop of penne and meatballs day after day for the guests at his brother’s hostel, where Massimo also scrubs toilets and makes sexually aggressive advances on some of the female travelers staying in the hostel.

In the end, “A Tarantella” is a kind of broken love story, about music and pain and the tricky correlation between destructive and erotic impulses. Massimo woos a young woman staying at the hostel, Ingrid, and though she seldom speaks she listens and he empties himself out to her, telling her every shit thing that’s happened to him, every shit thing he’s ever done, and of course he doesn’t do this often, not with these tourist women, and so it’s a big deal and he ends up making himself crazy about her, about Ingrid. And she gets a little crazy too, but not too crazy. She’s kind of better at love than he is, which is understandable given the story of his life, which is to say, I guess, given this story, “A Tarantella.”

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Joyland published this story, so you should go and read it over there.

Photo from  www.simplygoodeating.com

11. “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” by Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz’s “How to Date” is written in the second person, but like most successful second person stories, that tricky little ‘you’ is anything but general. You, in this case, are a young man living in America. You’re from the Dominican Republic. Some of your family still lives there, and you take  the photographs of shirtless young cousins leading goats around off of the walls of the crummy apartment you live in when you’re expecting to host a girl. You are also totally girl crazy, or maybe just crazy in general, because you’re a teenager. Because of who you are and where you live you’re a little fucked up by racism, by poverty, and by the way that desire is so often tied to big things outside of what it is you want. Mostly, you just want to bang, but even that’s imbricated within a larger social structure.

I like Diaz, and he’s so good with this story. The details feel so right, hiding the government supplied foodstuffs so your date wont know the extent of your poverty, the awkwardness of making conversation, experimenting with boundaries and social roles… they just feel right. But the story is painful, too, because it’s not just about being girl crazy, it’s about negotiating the complexities of race, and about the hierarchy of racialized desires, about stereotypes and sounding ‘smooth’ when the person you want to snuggle up to is categorically collapsing you. But now I’ve made it sound heavy, and parts of “How to Date” are, but it’s also fun and sweet! In that respect, it’s a lot like adolescence itself.

10. “The Landing” by Lydia Davis

I didn’t know I was afraid of flying until I took my first flight when I was 18. It was from Calgary to Toronto, from high school to university, from everything I had known into a strange galaxy made of new stars. And I was shaking and pale and sweaty and one of the flight attendants had to rub my arms and back to keep me from completely losing my shit. I cried in absolute terror for two of those four hours over Canada.

Now I can manage a plane ride without a full on panic attack, thanks to a little help from Ativan and some strictly managed pre-flight rituals.  But reading Lydia Davis’s new story, “The Landing” still filled me with a familiar terror.

I generally don’t spoil endings here, so I’ll try to think through this without giving the last minute reward away, but the story is about how we tell ourselves stories in order to neutralize trauma. The narrator details a rough patch of flight, thinks through what may be last thoughts, tries to get right with the world before possibly being thrust out of it. The narrator looks to the steward, to in flight companions, others as they silently face down an immediate future that might include death. The plane has something wrong with it, and so it has to land at a dangerous clip, and there are risks, and the captain makes an announcement, and the narrator tries to plan out the last thing they want in mind, a possible last minute of mindfulness. I felt anxious and nauseous, and really wish I hadn’t read this right before what became a failed attempt to fall peacefully asleep.

Davis is so good here, her words so loaded and measured, her sentences mostly short but never stuttering, some longs one there to string you along. The calm rhythm of her prose is just right, like when you start to hyperventilate and force yourself to slow your thoughts down, or when you look back in wonder at something that excited or upset you. The feeling is that the narrator is making the event a little less shockingly exterior, making sense of what almost happened by telling you that it did and it didn’t. You can actually watch experience turning into narrative, into memory.

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Photo by William Eggleston, and is the one I would’ve chosen even if the folks at Telegraph hadn’t, which by the way, is where you can read this story.

9. “Lust” by Susan Minot

Susan Minot’s “Lust” is about sex.  It’s made up of short paragraphs that get just a little longer, describing the intimacies  with various very young men one very young woman experiences at boarding school. And the way she comes to feel about giving herself over, “surrendering” to sex and the men she’s having it with.

In part because of the shortness of the paragraphs, and that there are a lot of different men in this story, individuated from each other  only through single actions, features, little collapsible moments, “Lust” feels very fragmentary. And also very personal. Minot’s prose is deadly in it’s clarity, there’s no poetry here to distance you from her subject. In fact, she brings you as close as possible, executing a perfect and barely perceptible transition from the first to the second person somewhere in the middle of the story. It becomes all but impossible not to recognize your history in that of the unnamed narrator towards the end.

I think that this subtle switch in voice, this mingling of histories (yours and hers), is one of the main sources of the power this story had over me. It was impossible not to think backwards, about the sex I had as a teenager, about discovering this thing “that felt like a relief at first until it became like sinking into a muck.”

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This story was kindly sent to me by Nick Moran,  my co-captain over at millionsmillions.

8. “@M1racleM0m” by Jim Hanas

One of the things I like about twitter is that it feels just a little like eavesdropping. You can see people talking to each other, and while it’s true that some tweets are a little more banal than others, it’s still fun to piece together your impression of a person, or more rarely, corporate entity, through the short and sometimes jumbled tweets they release into the world. I’m obviously not alone in this fascination.

A couple months ago, Jim Hanas, in collaboration with @storyvilleapp published a multistranded short story, “@M1racleM0m”, on Twitter. The story is about a woman, a mother of genetically mutated fraternal twins, and her paronoia about her pot smoking neighbor. It’s a little weird, and it feels really voyeuristic to read @M1racleM0m‘s tweets interrupting the story that the neighbor is telling. I was lucky enough to read this story live, as it was being published, which was pretty exciting, this little fiction exploding in my tweet stream.

The story itself is compelling, more about the interaction between the characters than about an event or plot per se. It’s kind of about the medium, too, in a roundabout way, that we can broadcast our acts of micro surveillance and neighborly aggression. It’s also a welcome experiment with fictionalizing social media, those devices we use to tell our stories. I’m into it.

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Photo sourced from the story itself, which you can read here.

7. “Pet Milk” by Stuart Dybek

So this one’s a little different. I asked my friend Matt Pearce to chat about one of his favorite stories, Stuart Dybek’s “Pet Milk.”  Though he was in Toronto last week, Matt lives mostly in Missouri, and we generally talk to each other over Gchat. Our dialog about Dybek’s charming story went mostly as follows:

EMK: First of all, thank you for recommending “Pet Milk.” I’d never heard of Stuart Dybek before, and this was delightful.

MP: Do you want to talk about why we’re doing this on Gchat first? So, Emily, why are we doing this on Gchat?

EMK: 1: We’re presently in different cities. 2: It’s easier than transcribing a face to face conversation. 3: It’s our primary mode of communication with each other anyway.

One thing that’s kind of interesting, though, is that the characters in Pet Milk are so mired in a romantic past, that they couldn’t be like they are if they had Gchat.

MP: Yeah. That’s one of the reasons that I picked the story. It’s long been one of my very favorites, but there’s also something a little like a period piece about it. It’s set sometime in postwar Chicago, and the story is almost as much about the city as it is about the relationship between the narrator and the woman, Kate, that he loves at that time. Most of the story takes place in his reminiscence of a love he had when he was our age — that 23-to-26 period where things tend to be pretty unsettled.

EMK: I think that the characters are fascinated with a sense of history, too. We like the story because it’s from a period outside of our own, but they’re equally obsessed with some imagined history. The narrator makes constant reference to ‘the old country’ and they play at glamor by dining in an ‘old world’ restaurant, knowing full well that they are heading towards separate but exciting futures.

MP: There’s such a sense of history to it — either in physical objects, like his grandmother’s staticky radio, or in the city itself, which was then a mutating mishmash of working-class Polish, Irish and Mexican neighborhoods. Everything comes from somewhere and leaves a physical stamp on the city. Which says something about how the relationship he describes with Kate — it’s not something that happened over Gchat.

EMK: Perhaps because there’s a feeling that the narrator is re-telling this story, and definitely with the ending scene, there’s such a sense of moving both forward and backward, of hope intermingling with nostalgia. But I think people in our age still have that, it’s just expressed differently. When we talk on the internet, we can still talk about place, we can still obsess over the mixed bag that is the expanding cultural archive.

MP: But this is different! Everything about this story is so sensual.

EMK: That’s true. I was really struck by the way that Dybek’s language is practically a caress.The waiter deboning the trout… The pet milk blooming in a cup of coffee in the first scene.

MP: I think he’s describing a memory of love in this story. But it’s not a memory about narrative, right? We don’t get the big back-story about how they met, or what they’ve done together. Instead it’s this semifrozen moment in time that’s inescapably… physical. You see it when she blushes, you feel it when he touches her knee. He’s not telling the story as much as he’s giving us an emotional snapshot, which is why I think Chicago springs out of the backdrop so much.

EMK: Absolutely. But even in the memory there are the constant projections to a time without her. The sense of the impermanence is part of the pleasure. He says “It was the first time I’d ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with.” So even as it’s wrapped up in memory, it revolves around the sweetness of that first time, the sense of longing and knowing that something is ever out of reach. Like the past itself.

MP: So, here’s where I out myself as a huge Dybek fan. I like his style a lot, which is perfectly matched to his nostalgic mode. It’s very lyrical and incantatory, with commas floating all over the place so he can crowbar in another physical detail. And then there’s that ending…You just can’t hold on to anything.

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If you subscribe to The New Yorker you can read Stuart Dybek’s “Pet Milk” here.

6. “A Real Doll” by A.M. Holmes

AM Homes’s  “A Real Doll”  is powerful, playful, and a little dark. This might be the story I’ve re-read the most in my life, because it’s the best piece of writing I’ve ever read on burgeoning adolescent sexuality, the dangerously rigid confines of commercially defined gender binaryism, the exciting wilderness of negotiation during those first few tentative steps toward sexual relationships, and the way that the mediated cliches of love and attraction make it difficult to feel the things you want to feel.

The story unfolds in the voice of an unnamed young man, who falls into something that seems to approximate love with his younger sister’s barbie doll. Homes’s prose is engaging and funny, and the story of this  boy-on-Barbie fling is totally captivating for it’s sheer fuckedupitude. But it’s tricky, because it’s not actually shocking, that a person would confuse plastic for the pleasure of the flesh.  Sex is one of the only arenas of adult life that allows for real play, for trying on stories and identities and tying your imagination to your body. Because Homes’s narrator is right on the cusp of adulthood the posturing he does is a little more anxiously free, outside of the implied boundaries of the adult world between the bedroom  and everywhere else. His footing is made even more unsure by the socially constructed world of desire, of men and women and boys and girls, and of course that his feelings are wrapped up in a literalness of the phrase ‘object of his desire.’

“A Real Doll” is so full of detail and expertly used syntactical contradiction that I feel a bit guilty for talking about the themes of this one instead of just gushing over the humour and dark warmth of Homes’s craft in this story. It’s a blessing and a curse that this story is so good because I just want to keep reading it over and over.

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You can read “A Real Doll” in the Barcelona Review here.

Photograph borrowed from the Flickr account of Keven Fredirko.