Quarterly Stories, Spring 2025

However in recent months, I’ve had eight or ten collections in my stacks, so even though I’m reading just as many stories, I’m not finishing many collections. I’ve been wondering if reading more standalones in magazines, has contributed to my feeling more comfortable bouncing around between multiple collections. But I dunno if that’s it.

Sometimes it’s a little mysterious, how reading habits change; if this pattern continues, I will reconsider how I assemble these Quarterly posts but, for now, here’s a glimpse of the collections I’ve finished this spring.

Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River (1992) landed in my stacks because I realised that I’d not read her most recent two novels (Mr. Potter from 2002 and See Now Then from 2013) or these stories, seven of which were originally published in The New Yorker. In my stacks, these read more like poems than stories. Some, like “Girl” and “The Letter from Home” are just a couple pages long, but even the longer ones feel like poems arranged into paragraphs. The use of repetition begs for them to be read aloud, each sentence secured inside a bubble and rising collectively as you read on, until the story is held aloft. Lyricism is more prominent than narrative and, when you’ve finished, it’s easier to describe a feeling than what’s happened. But they feel deliberate, shaped. Perhaps only by an idea. Consider this passage from “What I Have Been doing Lately”, which seems to press all around the edges of time, particularly with the movement of the sun at the end:

“I walked for I don’t know how long before I came up to a big body of water. I wanted to get across it but I couldn’t swim. I wanted to get across it but it would take me years to build a boat. I wanted to get across it but it would take me I didn’t know how long to build a bridge. Years passed and then one day, feeling like it, I got into my boat and rowed across. When I got to the other side, it was noon and my shadow was small and fell beneath me.”

Contents: Girl; In the Night; At Last; Wingless; Holidays; the Letter from Home; What I Have Been Doing Lately; Blackness; My Mother; At the Bottom of the River

Dorothy Edwards’ Rhapsody (1927) was one of my earliest Virago Modern Classics, collected as much because of the musical theme as the imprint, which I’d barely begun to explore. It’s been on my shelves for so long that I had forgotten about her suicide, although it’s clearly mentioned on the back cover (her note reproduced in Elaine Morgan’s introduction), which I read when I was halfway through. Previously, her outside-looking-in characters had felt only bemused and unsure—sometimes lonely but, in that context, they suddenly seemed melancholic and isolated. But the other characters seem to be living in quite a different story, with plenty of talk of art and songs and symphonies, There are parcels wrapped in brown paper and mushrooms to forage, there are wildflowers gathered and presented, and neighbours to visit with granddaughters who fall quickly in love with visiting strangers. If you value seemingly simple stories that reward rereading, and you appreciate what’s left unsaid, Dorothy Edwards will suit you very well. (Pictured alongside: her biography.)

“She flushed a little and turned away. Of course he had no objection to lending her a book, but he knew that most women only talk about reading, and that is merely the preliminary to talking about love.”

Contents: Rhapsody, A Country House, The Conquered, Treachery in a Forest, Cultivated People, Summer-time, Sweet Grapes, A Garland of Earth, A Throne in Heaven, Days

The back cover of Agustina Bazterrica’s Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (2020; Trans. Sarah Moses, 2023) is plastered with praise for Tender Is the Flesh, which suggests that the collection was arranged after that slim novel’s tremendous success, rather than deliberately curated by the author. It’s clear that the stories are written with different artistic goals in mind. Some are very short and cultivate a particular mood, and several turn on an element of surprise; you can imagine these on the back page of a magazine. Some are longer, divided into parts, and designed to more fully explore an idea or situation; you can imagine these in the kind of anthology that gets published with a red ribbon as a bookmark. The girls and women in these stories are fierce; they field attacks from a variety of directions (even from within). In Bazterrica’s fiction, the kind of social commentary that characterises the horror genre is bent towards the risks that women navigate through misogyny (the first story is bloody, others less so). Sometimes there’s a whiff of fairy-tales-retold (as with Angela Carter) and sometimes a gentler-but-still-dark tone (as with Susanna Clarke). Always with an air of daring.

“But Anita was much more than that, which is why Pablo decided to fall in love with her, if only to confirm whether her apparent weakness could be hiding a mastermind capable of conquering the universe, or a tireless predator harassing the human race.”

Contents: Twenty stories (in only 154 pages), beginning with “A Light, Swift, and Monstrous Sound” and ending with “The Solitary Ones”

In other story reading, for this year’s #ReadIndies, I wrote aboutJann Everard’s Blue Runaways (2024), Danila Botha’s Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness (2024), and Cyril Dabydeen’s Forgotten Exiles (2025). And, in my bookbag, was Kristen Zory King’s Ladies Ladies Ladies (2025). I wrote about Susie Taylor’s Vigil, published by the Canadian indie Breakwater Press, which I really loved. And, of course, Bill and Bron and I are continuing to read through the Russian short stories that Saunders teaches in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (schedule here).

And, what about you, what’s the last short story you read? Or, from which of these collections would you choose to read a story, if it was just you and these three books in a locked room?