Akpan, MacLeod, Muñoz, Savaş, Talty and Tamayose

Short Stories in April, May and June 2023

Whether in a dedicated collection or a magazine, these stories capture a variety of reading moods.

This quarter, I returned to two favourite writers and also explored four new-to-me story writers.

Ayşegül Savaş’s story in The New Yorker, “Notions of the Sacred”, took me to the Turkish writer’s backlist, particularly Walking on the Ceiling. Both works remind me of Duras: sharp clarity with highly emotive themes. The story is about motherhood and fertility, and it’s unsettling; it reminds me of how I felt when, years ago, a friend recommended Ferrante’s novels to me because of the focus on female friendships, and how surprised I was by the nature of that friendship, far more complex (and occasionally brutal) than I’d anticipated. There’s something of Rachel Cusk, too, with the element of distance and persistent psychological burrowing (but concise, not sprawling). In another mood, I might have recoiled, but within a week I was reading her novel.

There’s an emphasis on inward ruminations and realisations in Alexander MacLeod’s short fiction too. Years ago, I borrowed Light Lifting and was disappointed to find that I’d already read some of the stories, and it was one of the library books that was returned while others claimed attention instead; this is how quickly expectations can become obstacles. This time I borrowed the book in the mood to reread)—and, in fact, the first story in his newer collection I had also read previously, in an issue of Granta—so the familiarity didn’t interfere one bit.

Light Lifting (2010) is MacLeod’s debut but I took almost as many notes as I did from the newer collection. The title story illuminates his capacity to take relatable experiences and pull readers beyond mere recognition. Here a young construction worker, adjusting to summer work, discovers an unanticipated layer of vulnerability: “Everything seems fine when you’re out there in the daytime, but at night—when a bad burn starts to come out—that’s a totally different thing. That’s a special kind of trouble. I’ve been there. Probably everyone’s been there.” MacLeod is preoccupied by the fictional relationships at the core of his stories, but also with his relationship with readers; he’s attuned to every element of delivery and presentation to finesse a connection, in the simplest terms.

Contents: Miracle Mile, Wonder about Parents, Light Lifting, Adult Beginner I, The Loop, Good Kids, The Number Three.

MacLeod’s psychological acuity and attention-to detail reinforce the solid foundations of characterization and story in Animal Person (2022) too. There’s an unexpected zing of tension; even when scenes appear banal, the white space around the prose seems claustrophobic, as though you’re overlooking something essential and…horrible? “Earlier this summer, we had some drama with a trampoline and we are not over it yet.” How horrible can that be. “Sometimes, in the middle of a day, you find yourself doing things you never imagined in the morning.” Mostly it’s the discomfort between those mornings and middays that rankles readers in these stories. And the sense of relentless escalation as time passes: some things go undone and unsaid, while other things are said and done and over. Halfway through this collection, I was annoyed by how many flags I’d added to this slim volume, and simultaneously grateful. “We do not know if the decisive moment has arrived or if it is yet to come. Led only by what we desire, we go out into the world, and we make our way. And then we sleep, each of us in temporary bedrooms that will one day be occupied by other people.”

Contents: Lagomorph; The Dead Want; What Exactly Do You think You’re Looking At?; Everything Underneath; The Entertainer; The Ninth Concession; Once Removed; The Closing Date.

Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them (2008) landed on my stack after I read my first story in The Granta Book of the African Short Story. These five stories are set in Kenya, Nigeria, Benin, Ethiopia, and Rwanda. They are long and sorrow-soaked, and each revolves around a particular kind of betrayal or tragedy. Together they have the sense of having been collected from travellers; there is enough sensory detail and dialogue to feel as though it all has happened just as Akpan says. But they also feel as though they are stories written for a western audience, with an element of display or formality that keeps me at a distance. I wondered if this is because Akpan’s Christian faith has so deeply imbued his stories that the stories feel more like scripture than revelation, the children like symbols than individuals, but then I thought about how intimate Edward P. Jones’s stories feel despite his characters’ Christian faith and religious devotion. Each of Akpan’s stories is told from the perspective of a child, which increases readers’ outrage at the injustices they face; it also allows for readers to intuit what’s only half-understood by the young narrators so that certain horrors remain unexpressed. Perhaps the distance I perceived is merely the distance between childhood and adulthood; or, I may have rushed them, reading one each day over the course of a week. They are powerful and worthwhile stories and, for those who have not read many African writers, they could serve as invitations to further explore the literatures of these five countries.

Contents: An Ex-Mas Feast, Fattening for Gabon, What Language Is That? Luxurious Hearses, My Parents’ Bedroom

I definitely read Manuel Muñoz’s The Consequences (2022) too quickly, and not by design and not just one each day. I gulped them, feeling more immersed with each story finished, with each character encountered in this community of agricultural workers. Not all the characters are acquainted and, so, readers gradually understand a little more about the community’s complexity, how a man who works in the fields might not know anything about a man who works with the cattle. What’s irrevocably clear is that everyone has a story: “I get a seat alone and the bus moves on to Goshen, then Lulare and Delano, each woman who boards most weary than the last. They’re all like me. Or at least, they look like me. I don’t know their histories.” Some stories are preoccupied with what’s told and understood: “This was in a little town called Mathis, Texas, and I was twelve when I first started to realize that I lived in a place that wasn’t ever going to change much.” Others with what’s not: “Even with everyone quiet, they couldn’t quite hear what she said to him. They couldn’t even tell if he nodded at her, only that she took the children back into the house.” Like Kirsten Valdez Quade’s Night at the Fiestas and Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Water Museum, Muñoz leaves you feeling like he could write stories in this collection forever.

Contents: Anyone Can Do It, The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA, Presumido, Susto, The Reason Is Because, The Consequences, Compromises, Fieldwork, That Pink House at the End of the Street on the Other Side of Town, What Kind of Fool Am I?

I read Penobscot writer Morgan Talty’s debut collection The Night of the Living Rez (2022) quickly too, so it was easy to assemble the timeline in the linked stories, to navigate past and present and track the characters across time. It’s not so much a matter of tension that kept me reading (as was the case, say, with Tommy Orange’s Never Never, a book to which Talty’s has frequently been compared). Often, there’s not much happening. “Mom slammed plates and cups and silverware while she did the dishes. Half the time that was how she washed dishes. Every so often Paige’s laughter hit my ears and I knew it made Mom angrier and angrier. After about an hour, the house was quiet. But that they weren’t talking didn’t mean the argument was over.” It was a matter of engagement; I cared about the characters and wanted to understand what motivated people’s decisions, wanted to build the tissue between the seemingly disconnected events (the final stories secure the rest). “Where I had been. I left a lot of things behind. Or maybe that’s not it—maybe it’s that a lot of things had left me behind. Friends. Family. Relationships. The future.”

Contents: Burn, In a Jar, Get Me Some Medicine, Food for the Common Cold, In a Field of Stray Caterpillars, The Blessing Tobacco, Safe Harbor, Smokes Last, Half-Life, Earth Speak, Night of the Living Rez, The Name Means Thunder

Darcy Tamayose’s Ezra’s Ghosts (2022) landed on my stack because of its Giller-Prize longlisting. It’s divided into four parts (left unnamed to avoid even a hint of spoilers) and four voices. Some parts feel almost academic and disorienting, like a dissertation. “He was certain that somewhere between the books, between the pages, within the sentences—somewhere in his library a formula existed that would deliver a successful love match for his daughter. But he didn’t know that true love is neither quantifiable nor quantitative, but rather karmically measured—generally, it’s one per family.” Others feel more like poetry than prose, like someone’s diary you’ve not got permission to read. “Arteries led out to the endless spill of fields—wheat, canola, potatoes, mustard, barley. Where urban ended and rural began in Ezra was a mystery.” In this spill of story, readers struggle to identify the boundaries…but only until they realise there’s another mystery left unsolved that changes the geography entirely.