by Junot Díaz
Was there some moment when I chose the novel over the short story? Dark Side or Light? Nope. I’m not sure I even thought about it. I chose to be a novelist . . . because that’s just what a normal person did. Didn’t matter that three of my biggest literary heroes at the time—Los Brothers Hernández and Sandra Cisneros—were short story writers. Didn’t matter that in those days Carver was ascendant, that Where I’m Calling From was prominently displayed in every bookstore and on every fiction writer’s shelf. Didn’t even matter that my undergraduate writing professor was a storywriter by trade and a damn good one. I’d heard the rap about how the story wasn’t going to get you shit and swallowed it whole hog. (Didn’t help that when my mentor went up for tenure on the strength of his stories he got denied—no pass go.) The simple fact was that stories were treated then as they are treated now—like daughters are treated in third-world patriarchies—and when you’re a kid who grew up trapped on the margins, the last place you want to be is on the margins. As unthinking as an insect turning toward a flame, I went straight for literature’s big fat brass ring: the novel.
Only problem was I reached my MFA with my Great Dominican Novel still in its “development stage” (a condition from which it never recovered). Since I was obligated to hand in writing for my workshop at a regular clip, my plan was to draft a couple of short stories to cover my ass while I got my novel game up to speed. Bang a few of these bad boys out and by the end of the semester my novel would be up and running and I’d never look back.
Yeah, that was the plan. But you know what they say about plans. Those first September weeks in Ithaca, when a balm seemed to hover over the place and the students still splashed in the gorges, I churned out my first story and handed it in to my workshop. I didn’t expect a lot of problems. To be honest, I was so confident that the story was good that I didn’t give it much thought at all; was more caught up reading about Trujillo and the U.S. invasion of 1965—you know, doing my real work, my novel work. Workshop rolls around and I still remember the feeling on my face as I watched my story get gutted. I’d caught beatdowns before, but this one was a graduate workshop beatdown and I felt those lumps for days. Sure, there was some mild praise about the setting and a few of my lines got checkmarks next to them, but the overwhelming reaction was negative. Even the students of color I felt affinity for were underwhelmed; one of them wrote extensive notes about everything that was wrong with my story. Like, three pages, if I remember. In little type.
All right, a bad first story—that can happen to anyone. It wasn’t like I had plans to be a storywriter anyway, so it would have been easy to switch to the novel and fuck short stories forever. But try as I might I couldn’t quite get over my embarrassment at that first attempt. My own prejudice turning on me. I thought you said stories are bullshit—so why can’t you write one? Pure dumbness—writing good stories don’t make anyone a great novelist and vice versa, but that’s where I was at. (The fact that my peers were turning in excellent short work only added to my burn.)
So after a lot of deliberation, I decided to write another story—mostly to clear the bad taste out of my mouth. (Translation: pride.) But this time I went, as the kids like to say, in. I attacked the form with a fury—like my life depended on it. Started eating breathing shitting short stories. I’ve always had this immigrant’s ability to turn it on in times of trouble, but that first semester at Cornell I didn’t just hit beast mode; I went Super Saiyajin. Not only did I read my peers’ work with a Talmudic intensity, writing up long-ass reports on what they did right, but I began locking myself up at the Olin Library every single morning after my run, with the mandate to read at least a hundred pages of short fiction minimum. I got recommendations from my peers, from my professors, picked up names from the discussions in workshop and from prowling around the stacks and the new arrivals shelf. If there was a short story collection, I pulled it and read it. Didn’t matter who wrote it or if it was any good. I devoured everything.
What happened during that intense blaze of reading was that a new aesthetic standard began to establish itself in me. I went from a grudging tolerance of the short story to a surprised admiration. It dawned on me finally that this was no intermediate form, a step en route to the novel, but an extraordinary tradition in its own right, not easily mastered but rich in rewards. I started yammering on to my friends about the form’s surprising complexity, its power, its mutability—how structurally instructive it was.
And when I wrote my second story and it didn’t go over so well in workshop, instead of giving up I ended up doubling down. By then it was already too late. I was too hooked to quit. My enthusiasm had kindled into a purer form of devotion.
Call it love.
It’s the classic love story turn. We start assured of what we want and don’t want, only to have life turn our desiderata upside down and inside out.
On my way to the novel I fell in love with the short story. That’s the absolute shortest version. Naturally I didn’t forget my dream of a Great Dominican Novel—some shit is too deeply entrenched to be cured of easily—but I didn’t feel the passion for it anymore (not yet). For my next three years I wrote strictly stories, nothing else. It took a while for me to improve. When my first book, Drown, came together and got picked up and was about to be published, my editor suggested very diplomatically that we might consider calling the book a novel. It wouldn’t have been a big stretch. I’d seen plenty of less coherent works earn that appellation. And it sure would help the sales of the book, I was told. After all, not a lot of people read story collections.
I refused, of course . . . for a number of reasons. But one of biggest was simply that I was proud of the form and didn’t want to see it shortchanged like that.
Changes.
A lot of what I’ve just written was on my mind as I read the 120-odd finalists for this year’s Best American. It had been a long time since I’d read that much short fiction in one jolt and in a way it was something of a homecoming. Brought back the old days (has it been twenty years already?), when I hadn’t yet published a word, when I was still figuring it all out, the marathon reading sessions in that corner of Olin Library, the faith I had that reading could save me from my troubles. Brought back the thrill of encountering a story that had something to teach me, that I knew was about to take up residence in my head and my heart awhile. And it brought back above all else the many reasons I fell so hard for the form in the first place.
It’s always better to let the stories speak for themselves, for the introducer to get out of the way, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer a few remarks. There is, after all, much to marvel at here. Take Louise Erdrich’s masterful “The Flower,” which packs a novel’s worth of incident and character into a taut tale of colonial love and colonial murder on the Ojibwe frontier. Also the spectral head of a poisoned trader makes an appearance. “Sometimes it propelled itself along with its tongue, its slight stump of a neck, or its comically paddling ears. Sometimes it whizzed along for a few feet, then quit, sobbing in frustration at its awkward, interminable progress.”
The dead return (isn’t that their way?) in Karen Russell’s “The Prospectors.” They also dance, kiss, pose for photographs, and burn the knowledge of their own deaths “like whale fat.” “Perhaps the knowledge of one’s death, ceaselessly swallowed,” Russell’s grifter narrator muses, “is the very food you need to become a ghost.” Russell’s story, like Erdrich’s, begins in the precise empirical language of realism, and how both writers pivot into the fantastic is an act of literary legerdemain worth reflecting on.
The uncanny also underpins Ben Marcus’s “Cold Little Bird.” A child suddenly turns into a suburban Midwich Cuckoo, cold, intelligent, and hostile to his parents’ affections. As chilling an allegory of “family bonds” as I’ve ever read.
Love and its discontents are an evergreen in short fiction; you’ll certainly find them here, but the stories that are the biggest heartbreakers describe intimacies at their phantom stages�
�love, in other words, at the lowest frequencies. Andrea Barrett’s “Wonders of the Shore”—another master class in compression—tracks the unconventional friendship of Daphne and Henrietta, two unmarried “naturalists” at the turn of the century. “Firmly rooted” Henrietta walks away from a suitor who turns out to be her last chance at a family, “so that for barely more than a week, she could feel” a painter’s “hair against her lips.”
Héctor Tobar’s quietly affecting “Secret Stream” touches upon a similar decision. Here is Nathan and his tentative attempt to connect with Sofia, a self-proclaimed “river geek” who is mapping the surviving traces of LA’s waterways. Both a love letter to LA and a tough look at how we are often our own worst enemies: “The hour of their meeting came and went and Nathan didn’t leave home. It was the way he’d handled relationships with women since his wife left him; he preempted disappointment.”
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s powerful “Apollo,” our middle-class Nigerian narrator recounts with a devastating clarity his adolescent infatuation for his family’s former houseboy, Raphael. Despite the vast distance in circumstance, the boys bond over a shared love of Bruce Lee and martial arts until a bout of pinkeye—the story’s Apollo—exposes the yawning gulf that determines the lives (and the deaths) of Nigeria’s haves and have-nots.
Set in the darker pits of neoliberalism’s economic abyss, Tahmima Anam’s “Garments” follows Jesmin, an impoverished sweatshop girl on the verge of being evicted. Desperate to secure a room from a landlord who prefers married tenants, Jesmin agrees to become the third wife of a coworker’s boyfriend. That this scheme qualifies as “not bad” speaks volumes about these women’s straits. “Jesmin decides it won’t be so bad to share a husband. She doesn’t have dreams of a love marriage, and if they have to divide the sex that’s fine with her, and if he wants something, like he wants rice the way his mother makes it, maybe one of them will know how to do it.”
There is so much to recommend. Meron Hadero’s “The Suitcase,” which dramatizes perfectly the politics of immigrant luggage and how the smallest of gifts crammed inside a suitcase helps hold diasporas together. Caille Millner’s depiction of an academic meltdown in “The Politics of the Quotidian” absolutely sizzles; this is a writer I cannot wait to read more of. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s canny tale of a William James scholar, recovering from a miscarriage, is as eerie as it is fine. Smith Henderson’s bruising portrait of brotherly rage in “Treasure State” and Mohammed Naseehu Ali’s depiction of a coup in “Ravalushan” play for keeps, as does Lauren Groff’s unsparing “For the God of Love, for the Love of God.” Then there are the newer writers—Lisa Ko, Yalitza Ferreras, Daniel J. O’Malley, Yuko Sakata, and Sharon Solwitz—whom I expect we’ll be seeing much more from.
Clearly it’s time for me to go, but since this is an anthology about “the best,” let me finish with two stories that were arguably “my best”: John Edgar Wideman’s “Williamsburg Bridge” and Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence.” Wideman is one of the nation’s literary treasures, and his contribution is a dazzling, delirious achievement: as his narrator, perched on edge of the Williamsburg Bridge, prepares for suicide, he delivers a cri de coeur that ranges from Sonny Rollins to the Yalu River and becomes nothing less than a meditation on the extraordinary resilience of ordinary black lives in the American Century.
Chiang’s profoundly moving story is another farewell letter, but this one from a most unlikely source: Puerto Rican parrots driven to the point of extinction by human activity. (The first story I ever tried to write was about a parrot, so there’s something fitting about this being the last story I read.) As they contemplate the Great Silence that will soon extinguish their voices forever, Chiang’s parrots reflect on the irony of the nearby Arecibo telescope. “The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe.
“But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?”
Querida reader, ultimately I hope these stories do for you what they’ve done for me—at the very least I pray they offer you an opportunity for communion. A chance to listen, if not to the parrots of our world, then to some other lone voice struggling to be heard against the great silence.
JUNOT DÍAZ
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
Apollo
FROM The New Yorker
TWICE A MONTH, like a dutiful son, I visited my parents in Enugu, in their small overfurnished flat that grew dark in the afternoon. Retirement had changed them, shrunk them. They were in their late eighties, both small and mahogany-skinned, with a tendency to stoop. They seemed to look more and more alike, as though all the years together had made their features blend and bleed into one another. They even smelled alike—a menthol scent, from the green vial of Vicks VapoRub they passed to each other, carefully rubbing a little in their nostrils and on aching joints. When I arrived, I would find them either sitting out on the veranda overlooking the road or sunk into the living-room sofa, watching Animal Planet. They had a new, simple sense of wonder. They marveled at the wiliness of wolves, laughed at the cleverness of apes, and asked each other, “Ifukwa? Did you see that?”
They had too a new, baffling patience for incredible stories. Once my mother told me that a sick neighbor in Abba, our ancestral hometown, had vomited a grasshopper—a living, writhing insect, which, she said, was proof that wicked relatives had poisoned him. “Somebody texted us a picture of the grasshopper,” my father said. They always supported each other’s stories. When my father told me that Chief Okeke’s young house help had mysteriously died, and the story around town was that the chief had killed the teenager and used her liver for moneymaking rituals, my mother added, “They say he used the heart too.”
Fifteen years earlier, my parents would have scoffed at these stories. My mother, a professor of political science, would have said “Nonsense” in her crisp manner, and my father, a professor of education, would merely have snorted, the stories not worth the effort of speech. It puzzled me that they had shed those old selves and become the kind of Nigerians who told anecdotes about diabetes cured by drinking holy water.
Still, I humored them and half listened to their stories. It was a kind of innocence, this new childhood of old age. They had grown slower with the passing years, and their faces lit up at the sight of me, and even their prying questions—“When will you give us a grandchild? When will you bring a girl to introduce to us?”—no longer made me as tense as before. Each time I drove away, on Sunday afternoons after a big lunch of rice and stew, I wondered if it would be the last time I would see them both alive, if before my next visit I would receive a phone call from one of them telling me to come right away. The thought filled me with a nostalgic sadness that stayed with me until I got back to Port Harcourt. And yet I knew that if I had a family, if I could complain about rising school fees as the children of their friends did, then I would not visit them so regularly. I would have nothing for which to make amends.
During a visit in November, my parents talked about the increase in armed robberies all over the east. Thieves too had to prepare for Christmas. My mother told me how a vigilante mob in Onitsha had caught some thieves, beaten them, and torn off their clothes—how old tires had been thrown over their heads like necklaces, amid shouts for petrol and matches, before the police arrived, fired shots in the air to disperse the crowd, and took the robbers away. My mother paused, and I waited for a supernatural detail that would embellish the story. Perhaps, just as they arrived at the police station, the thieves had turned into vultures and flown away.
“Do you know,” she continued, “one of the armed robbers, in fact the ringleader, was Raphael? He was our houseboy years ago. I don’t think you’ll remember him.”
I stared at my mother. “Raphael?”
“It’s not surprising he ended like this,” my father said. “He didn’t
start well.”
My mind had been submerged in the foggy lull of my parents’ storytelling, and I struggled now with the sharp awakening of memory.
My mother said again, “You probably won’t remember him. There were so many of those houseboys. You were young.”
But I remembered. Of course I remembered Raphael.
Nothing changed when Raphael came to live with us, not at first. He seemed like all the others, an ordinary-looking teen from a nearby village. The houseboy before him, Hyginus, had been sent home for insulting my mother. Before Hyginus was John, whom I remembered because he had not been sent away; he had broken a plate while washing it and, fearing my mother’s anger, had packed his things and fled before she came home from work. All the houseboys treated me with the contemptuous care of people who disliked my mother. Please come and eat your food, they would say—I don’t want trouble from Madam. My mother regularly shouted at them, for being slow, stupid, hard of hearing; even her bell-ringing, her thumb resting on the red knob, the shrillness searing through the house, sounded like shouting. How difficult could it be to remember to fry the eggs differently, my father’s plain and hers with onions, or to put the Russian dolls back on the same shelf after dusting, or to iron my school uniform properly?
I was my parents’ only child, born late in their lives. “When I got pregnant, I thought it was menopause,” my mother told me once. I must have been around eight years old, and did not know what “menopause” meant. She had a brusque manner, as did my father; they had about them the air of people who were quick to dismiss others. They had met at the University of Ibadan, married against their families’ wishes—his thought her too educated, while hers preferred a wealthier suitor—and spent their lives in an intense and intimate competition over who published more, who won at badminton, who had the last word in an argument. They often read aloud to each other in the evening, from journals or newspapers, standing rather than sitting in the parlor, sometimes pacing, as though about to spring at a new idea. They drank Mateus rosé—that dark, shapely bottle always seemed to be resting on a table near them—and left behind glasses faint with reddish dregs. Throughout my childhood, I worried about not being quick enough to respond when they spoke to me.
