eat my shorts (i'm sorry for this title)

How are you guys? It’s spring in England and the sun has fundamentally altered my brain. I, like Zendaya, am at Gail’s every morning for my iced coffee, except that instead of a chic cropped jacket I am in sweatpants and a pair of absurdly thick turquoise glasses (once, a girl I barely knew saw me in these glasses and said, “It’s wild how certain pairs can make you look so much older, right?” LOL. Some of us are going for a particular Western-Massachusetts-art-teacher-aesthetic, okay?!).

Anyway. I recently read this great reflection by Jayne Marshall, who was inspired by Maria Glymph to pull together a “personal anthology” — essentially, the short story or essay collection that would collectively tell something about your history or self. I like this idea so much precisely because short form pieces have meant so much to me. In so much of the writing and publishing world short stories are treated as stepping stones to your “real work,” i.e. novels. Which is shenanigans. I love writers like Grace Paley or Danielle Evans who are so committed to the short form on its own merits. They do earth-shattering things with this supposedly tiny form!

So here is my personal anthology. The short stories that shaped and made me! Deliciously, you can read almost all of them online.

Total Eclipse - Annie Dillard (essay)

I once drove hundreds of miles to see a total eclipse, solely on the strength of this line: “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.”

Orange World - Karen Russell

Karen Russell was one of the first contemporary writers I remember deeply identifying with, probably because when I was in college and she was a debut writer all her books had this huge photo of her looking super young and red-headed and her author bios always had a first sentence like “KAREN RUSSELL IS 25 YEARS OLD.” I saved up my sweaty barista tips for the hardcover of ST. LUCY’S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES which to be fair did have fabulous cover art. She was simply very cool to me!

But it’s one of her more recent stories, “Orange World,” that makes this list because it has all the juicy, spooky, speculative elements I loved in her earliest work, now sharpened and leveled by the years. It’s one of the few fiction pieces I’ve encountered that really captures something about the terror of pregnancy and the potential loss inherent to parenthood.

Boys Go to Jupiter - Danielle Evans

My favorite thing about reading a Danielle Evans short story is that she almost always pulls off something I didn’t know you could do. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reached the last page of a story by her and immediately flipped back to the beginning to be like … Wait, how?? In this case, she tells an insanely timely parable about a college girl getting canceled for wearing a Confederate flag bikini — which somehow feels like classic literature instead of a hot take or a morality tale. I think of it a lot!

You’re Ugly, Too - Lorrie Moore

So many Lorrie Moore stories could make this list, but this was my first, and has a special place in my heart because the title is the punchline to a joke one of the characters tells, a trick I absolutely copied for one of my first published stories. People either love Lorrie Moore or hate her, and if you hate her it’s because you find her stories too dense with cleverness, and honestly that’s too bad for you! Choke me with cleverness, Lorrie!

The Harvest - Amy Hempel

Begins as a voicey but fairly straightforward story about a woman in a horrific motorcycle accident. Then halfway through, the narrator says: “I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story. I’m going to start now to tell you what I have left out of ‘The Harvest,’ and maybe begin to wonder why I had to leave it out.” Reader, the effect this sentence had on me the first time I read it was like that part in Fleabag when the Hot Priest looks into the camera. I will stan Amy Hempel forever.

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? - Joyce Carol Oates

Before JCO took to Twitter and shared all her opinions that we truly never needed to hear, she wrote this short story and dedicated it to Bob Dylan for reasons I still don’t understand. Either way, it is a masterpiece and is simply more terrifying than half the horror movies out here! The way she slowly reveals that the visitor is not what he seems to be has stayed with me for YEARS. To this day every time I try on a pair of boots that is even slightly too large for me I think of Arnold Friend. Cursed!

Wants - Grace Paley

One of her very best for dialogue, which is saying something. A woman returning her long-overdue books to the library runs into her ex-husband and in this brief moment sees her life with new clarity. I could list almost any GP story but this one is pound for pound the one that takes up most real estate in my brain.

No Place for You, My Love - Eudora Welty

A story almost entirely about atmosphere and subtext — we go on a suffocating drive further and further into the American South, with a couple we don’t fully understand. It taught me that plot is NOT the most important tool in your storytelling toolbox, not by a long shot.

There is Only One Direction - Samantha Hunt (essay)

Boy bands and mortality! A pairing so good I don’t know why someone hadn’t written this before. But Samantha Hunt did, and she did it stunningly. I have quoted it in this newsletter and I will probably do it again!

The Lottery - Shirley Jackson

A classic for a reason. A perfect final line. I dream of one day holding a writers’ retreat where we pick rooms by drawing little pieces of paper with dots on them.

55 Miles to the Gas Pump - Annie Proulx

This is an insane addition to this list, but for some reason I quote the final line of this micro-story with absurd frequency given its origin. It applies to more than you’d think!

What shorts do you love? I want to know!