My favourite short story collections
Part 1 of 3 newsletters for the time poor/ short attn spanned. Also today: Beckham, lip bacon and naughty otters
No sooner had I written this than I subconsciously decided to read less. Granted, I enjoyed a long summer without childcare for my three young children, but I’ve always made time (or my insomnia has made time for me) to read. No matter how tired I am, no matter how late it is, a book has beckoned. But in the last few months, I’ve felt inclined to do other things, at night. I’ve been cooking most days and doing a lot of corrective exercise for my scoliosis and so by my own vague Law of Reading Averages (or David Sedaris’s burners of life) it figures that I’m not reading nearly as much.
I’m not particularly fussed, nor am I fighting it. Not to go all lean in here, but I feel more ‘present’ in my body than I have in a long, long time and I’m really enjoying making myself tasty meals. I’m sure it could flip back again - I am familiar enough with matrescence to know that you try on about five new personalities in the construction of a post-partum self and less-bookish self might be one of them - but I am wondering if I fundamentally misunderstood why I read.
I always thought I read to remain rooted. To lasso my jumpy brain. Now I wonder if I read to escape. Seen through that lense (as Philippa Perry said recently, “If you have one foot in the past and one foot in the future, you’re pissing on the present”) a few less books, for me, might be a good thing.
All this to say that a reader request for essays and short stories which cater to the time poor and/or those with a short attention spans, couldn’t have arrived at a better time. I’m going to answer with a three-parter: Part 1 is short story collections, Part 2 will be essay collections and Part 3 will be what I think of as ‘dippy books’, or what my mother calls ‘loo books’, often witty/whimsical books that you can pick up for 5-10 mins and read a few pages of, before forgetting about for a month/ decade. The less scatalogical term for these might be ‘bath books’.
8 Short Story Collections I love
Intimacies, by the Irish writer Lucy Caldwell, which I wrote about here. In these 11 stories about female identity and early motherhood, Caldwell takes these specific, transitory moments - the split-second fear when you think someone might steal your child - and elevates them into something elemental, often cast against the backdrop of historical fact. In Caldwell’s hands, the domestic is vast. There is a shouty quote from me on the book jacket which just reads “My FAVE” because, well, they are.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies are 9 stories by Deesha Philyaw about the inner lives and sexuality of Black women in the South, who often find themselves at odds with their conservative values and church. The sweetest and saddest story is that of Eula, who will only consummate her love for her best friend once a year, on new year’s eve - she spends the rest of her year in denial, waiting for a man to ‘save’ her. (For these women, only God and/ or a man can redeem them.) The collection is currently being adapted for TV by HBO Max and I cannot wait.
Send Nudes is an acclaimed book of short stories by the writer Saba Sams who was just 25 when it was published. The stories are about sex and loneliness and technology and to plagiarise myself, it’s “a roiling raw gut-punch of a debut collection.” Tinderloin is about a butcher’s daughter losing her virginity and is suitably sanguinary, but my favourite story is Bread, about a woman processing her abortion while learning to bake bread. Not, perhaps, stories for the faint-hearted - and all the better for it.
All That Man Is by David Szalay is considered a novel by many, but it’s a collection of short stories imho. (Listen to our Book Chat ep on that, here). These 9 stories span manhood (arguably a depressing, hubristic vision of it), beginning with a story about a 17-year-old and ending with one about his 73-year-old grandfather. From a Russian oligarch contemplating suicide, to a Danish editor outing a celebrity affair, these pan-European stories are unsparing, clever and frequently grotesque.
Single Carefree Mellow is a clutch of weird, beautiful and earnest stories by Katherine Heiny, who is probably best known for the novel Standard Deviation (and most recently Early Morning Riser) but this early collection is actually my favourite of her work. There’s one story about a man who calls his lover en route to marriage counselling with his wife; another about a history teacher who checks him and his teenage lover into a hotel under the pseudonym “Mr and Mrs Bilbao Baggins”. Like Miranda July, Heiny excels in excruciating cringe.
Bad Behaviour is an intimate, elegant and sometimes cruel collection (although I know there is debate about their cruelty) written in 1985 by Mary Gaitskill, about disenchanted New Yorkers desperate for connection. It’s about women and their fractured identities and it’s got one of my favourite passages in it, which inspired my own essay collection:
"[S]he had an exhausting flashback of her haggard self carrying large chunks of her life, compressed into brightly coloured packages that were marked, ‘Constance the writer’, ‘Constance the social being’, ‘Constance as part of a couple’ - all layering plain Constance alone in her apartment… She saw each marked package as a weight she carried back and forth, setting one down in a random spot so she could pick up another and stagger off in a new direction.”
Hot Little Hands is by the Australian writer Abigail Ulman and like many of my favourite collections, it concerns young women on the cusp of discovery - of being betrayed or betraying; their power and powerlessness. There is one story that I think of constantly, about a young Russian gymnast who thinks she is travelling to America to take part in a competition. The stories ascend with this youthful optimism, the sharp dialogue and the narration simple, building this house of cards which doesn’t so much collapse as suspend - leave you, to fill in the blanks. It’s unsettling but moreish.
Of Women and Salt by Gabriel García has one of my favourite titles of a book ever. Billed as a “novel in stories”, about 5 generations of Latina women, the stories jump from Cuba to Miami, from 1866 to 2014, from a cigar factory to rehab, building this rich tapestry of female survival; of motherhood and immigration and inherited trauma. It has these thrilling, fleeting moments of freedom which you can almost taste, as the reader. These dense, poetic 12 stories aren’t always easy to follow, but try and hold on, because it’s worth it.
I’ve run out of time (natch) but also worth checking out:
Close Range by Annie Proulx
Barbara The Slut by Lauren Holmes
Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
Please do add your own faves in the Comments!
BITS
An extremely eclectic mix this week
A lot of great interviews coming out of the Times stable recently: Mischa Barton spoke poignantly about the PTSD she experiences as a result of the paparazzi hellscape of the early 00s; Gail Porter revealed that FHM did not tell her or ask her permission to project that nude image of her on the Houses of Parliament; and I screenshotted every other paragraph of the one with Dawn French. The bit where she says she wishes she had more hours in the day because there’s so much she wants to do resonates so much. She’s a joy.
Obviously I watched the Beckham documentary - this jammy bitch even got to go to the premiere - and whilst I am conflicted over Beckham as a character (Qatar does not sit well with me) the doc is extremely well done: the archive is evocative (for the first time ever I found football enjoyable to watch!), the music choices are excellent and the editing is witty and sharp: “I don’t think I changed” says Beckham, spliced next to Alex Ferguson pronouncing “aye, he definitely changed”. What the series really shows is how much Beckham pre-empted Ronaldo et al to be the first sports influencer. It’s undeniable that Beckham has buckets of charisma, but VB (or do I mean Gary Neville?) was the real hero of the piece.
A reader recently recc’d The Storygraph (like a less chaotic Goodreads) for keeping track of the books you’ve read. I have not downloaded it yet, but I plan to try it. LMK your thoughts if you’ve used it!
I am having an L Word revival, thanks to Freevee (Amazon’s new ad-heavy channel). I loved this show the first time I watched it, I love it just as much the second time. Once I’ve re-watched all the early 00s eps I am going to treat myself to the reboot which somehow (SOMEHOW!) passed me by when it dropped in 2021. Can re-affairm that Jenny is creepy, Alice is fizzy and Shane has the kind of screen presence that casting directors dream of.
I’ve just finished Finding Britain’s Ghost Children, Terri White’s audio series about the vulnerable children who never returned to the classroom after lockdown lifted (between 70,000 and 100,000) and my god, I’m still reeling. It’s categorically not an easy listen (TW: child abuse) but it’s a brilliant piece of journalism. Particularly affecting is when White shares her own experiences in the care system and how vital the school day was in keeping her safe.
Another piece of journalism I consumed with an aching heart was this New Yorker piece on the Austrian ‘villa’ which experimented on kids. Highly influenced by Nazi Germany and Austria’s psychological obsession with ‘repression’, the abusive ‘child observation centre’ in Innsbruck was run by Dr Maria Nowak-Vogel, who believed that “Kids who didn’t explore their own bodies, or wet the bed, or talk or laugh or cry or run around too much, would grow up to become socially compliant workers.” The centre, which traumatised some 4,000 children, did not close until 1987 - the year I was born.
On a (much) lighter note, I typed ‘lip balm’ into my phone the other day and it autocorrected to ‘lip bacon’ which is absolutely accurate because my lips feel like they have been dried and smoked 95% of the time. Anyway my lip bacon led me to Hailey Bieber’s highly publicised beauty collection and whilst I worship at the altar of Jess DeFino and do not think that the human face should be glazed like a donut, I must confess that I am carrying Rhode’s lip peptide (fancy word for lip balm) everywhere in my back pocket right now, like teenage me with a Juicy Tube.
Did I mention I’ve been cooking? I shared a picture of my lunch the other day on Instagram (christ that’s an embarrassing sentence to type) and lots of people asked me what the recipe was and one person even accused me of ‘gatekeeping’ it, which is hilarious because most people who know me would categorically not come to me for recipes. But maybe this is changing! Because this self-imagined lunch was delicious. It was hot chilli roasted salmon, broccoli, roasted kale, fried gnocchi (bit rogue) and creme fraiche but the key part is the peanut rāyu by White Mausu on top. It. Is. Insane. I want to put it on everything even my cereal.
After years of attending catwalk shows for my job, I don’t keep up with fashion collections anymore - but I was deeply moved by Sarah Burton’s last show for McQueen. Burton said it was about femininity and womanhood, which is something oft parroted in fashion but which really held here. Consummate showwoman Naomi Campbell said it all, when closing the show in a sublime silver dress, she dashed a single tear from her perfect cheek.
Finishing on my No.1 meme of the week (hotly contested spot) via my personal meme curator, my husband: the good and naughty otters of the week from an otter sanctuary in Dartmoor.
Total bliss.
C U Friday!
As not a short stories lover, I loved and read twice Murakami’s Men without women.
I too have unintentionally reduced the amount I read, and similarly I have two young toddlers and wonder if I was reading so much as a form of escapism from the stress of everything? Who knows, I'm no longer putting pressure on myself to read a certain amount of books by the end of the year, I'm enjoying books but less often and going with it for now - and I am glad you are too!