My experiment with reading-stories-in-sevens continues. This group of seven, pictured alongside, includes fiction by Liliana Colanzi, Anne Enright, Mary Gaitskill, Catherine Lacey, Weike Wang, and Paul Yoon (and whoever is in that issue with the adorbs cat cover). Are these writers you’ve read? I’ve heard of all but the first (her story was very compelling) and have read novels by three others (not recently).

This is my third group of seven, so I think it’s possible some other number might work just as well, that it’s simply a matter of choosing a concrete and reasonable goal. (Not “read more magazines”. And not “fifty”.)

But it’s also possible that seven is imperfect. When it came time to choose again, thumbing through the stack of issues near my desk, I excavated—as a whole—the previous group of seven, their stories read but the remaining contents unexplored, those issues wholly untouched in the weeks since.

My small victory in recognising that I want to read short stories in a certain mood (not the same mood in which I peruse the rest of a magazine), the success of having invented a numbers game, had resulted in the stories being read. But further reading halted.

If one was serious about numbers games, that’s maybe 42 pages read, maybe 380 as yet unread. Even though I’m not mathy, I can figure where that trend is headed.

Sure enough, as I peeled downwards in the stack, there was the next stack of seven, but harder to spot, as I’d reset each issue to its TOCs (and in two issues, I’d actually read farther).

Now this is straining the limits of my mathyness, but that’s something like 84 pages of stories read and about 800 other pages not read. Just a little longer than a volume of Proust.

It’s embarrassing to admit this, but I feel like everyone struggles with gaps between how they imagine something could be and how it actually is, and that there isn’t enough ordinary chatter about how we work to narrow those gaps. About how often we try and fail: I know I’m not alone in struggling to balance the desire to read certain things with the reality of their being overlooked.

And, here’s where my plan worked. My reason for subscribing is to read the short fiction, and that’s secured (of late). I expect to enjoy them: but, I don’t always.

But it’s an imperfect plan, because my response to those stories is sometimes outshone by my response to other pieces (the profiles, the takes, the comics, the reviews). Those, I don’t expect to enjoy: but, often, I am happily surprised.

So—it makes sense to have first found a way to wriggle the stories into regular reading. (And reading three groups of seven means I’ve read 21 stories in a quarter, whereas potentially 13 issues arrive in a quarter… which means I’ll catch up eventually. Although “eventually” is a slippery term, given that at least one of these issues is from 2023.)

With some experimenting, another new habit seems to have solved the “rest of the magazine” concern. But that will have to wait, because I haven’t forgotten the books.

First, my goal of exploring more anthologies included Away from Home edited by Frances and Will Klein (2024), which is a collection about the moment at which the writer realised their own home was different from other people’s. It includes poetry and prose, and the story I remember best is the one about the young guy and girl who get paid $15/hour (and what they can carry) to empty a house after the owner has died, before it’s listed for sale: Matt Goldberg’s “The Hoard”. It’s a slim collection that’s packed with a surprising number of emerging writers’ works. My current anthology read is the 2025 O. Henry winners selected by Edward P. Jones. Alongside the new issue of Granta, dedicated to Scandinavia.

Mariana Enriquez’s The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (2009; Trans. Megan McDowell, 2021) intrigued me and then I found her contribution to a McSweeney’s issue irresistible. Her way of uniting the ordinary day-to-day with dark realities is gently disturbing, by which I mean that one of her core themes is fear (how we meet it, how we are affected by it, how we emerge from it) which is ubiquitous and ordinary, something we all experience in life, but it’s uncomfortable. Mostly I find her stories unsettling and disorienting, but sometimes they are shocking and bloody (and you see why some shelve her as horror). With some short story writers, endings are paramount (I mentioned this about David Park not long ago) but with Enriquez, it’s her beginnings. Consider the opening of “The Well”, an everyday scene with touch and scent pushed to their limits, that pulls me in straightaway.

“Josefina remembered the trip—the heat, the crowded Renault 12—like it was just a few days ago, and not back when she was six, just after Christmas, under the stifling January sun. Her father drove, barely speaking; her mother was in the passenger seat and Josefina was in back, stuck between her sister and her grandma Rita, who was peeling mandarins and flooding the car with the smell of overheated fruit.”

Contents: Angelita Unearthed; Our Lady of the Quarry; The Cart; The Well; Rambla Triste; The Lookout; Where Are You, Dear Heart?; Meat; No Birthdays or Baptisms; Kids Who Come Back; The Dangers of Smoking in Bed; Back When We Talked to the Dead

Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (2010) was inspired by reading a single story in the previous Group of Seven issues, reminding me of the reasons she’s a MRE (MustReadEverything) author in my books. There are not a lot of explanations in her fiction: even when remarkable things happen, readers simply witness them and experience the resulting disorientation. But she pays so much foundational attention to her characters, that you feel as though, if you simply pay attention too, you’ll be able to discern another layer of story, playing out behind the story. This is particularly true in her second novel, Kinder than Solitude, in which a young woman was poisoned and suffers physically from that her whole life thereafter; the novel is arranged around the question of who poisoned her, but which is an intense character study that plays out in the shadows lurking behind that question. No time for pity, focus on today. As in this passage from “Number Three, Garden Road”:

“Married twice, lost twice to mistresses,” she said. “No, you don’t have to feel sorry for me. the way I look at it—a bad marriage is like a bad tooth and it’s better to remove it than to suffer from it.”

Contents: Kindness; A Man Like Him; Prison; The Proprietress; House Fire; Number Three, Garden Road; Sweeping Past; Souvenir; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

Janice Lynn Mather’s Uncertain Kin (2022) showcases her facility with endings that are suspended with just the amount of height that you can choose to imagine where they land. Set in The Bahamas, focussed on women and girls, one stand-out for me was “Aunties”, which has Lydia going to Miss Petty’s house for tutoring after school but then staying later than the other kids while her folks finish work. After the book-learning is done, the names of planets recited, Miss Petty teaches her how to bake, which satisfies her yearning to learn something tangible. She invites Lydia to test finished goods, which satisfies Lydia’s literal hunger pains; but when Lydia sees something she shouldn’t—and Miss Petty understands what exactly Lydia has seen, but maintains the adults’ conspiracy of silence—Lydia is doubly betrayed. (When Mather’s endings are cinched close, as with this story and “Centipede”, they are quite satisfying, but I especially appreciated the ones that ended without fully securing the trajectory—the work on characterisation alone would see them land just fine.)

All day, clouds have hung around like boys on a street corner, shifting, waiting. “Fresh Milk”

Table of Contents: Other People’s Children (Centipede, Morning Swim, Glory, Boyo); Thin Water (Mango Summer, Love, Aunties, The Water, Visiting); A Bond Unseen (Malcolm’s Shoe, Planting Season, Princess, Floors); You Can Always Come Home (Bread, Night Fair, Switcher, Fresh Milk, Laundry)

Jess Walter’s We Live in Water (2013) is part of the Perennial Olive series of reissues, which is how I discovered Stephanie Powell Watts’ 2011 collection We Are Taking Only What We Need, which I thoroughly enjoyed (but it’s not the edition pictured here). Walter’s been a contender for my MRE list for some time, beginning with Beautiful Ruins. These stories showcase the same attention-to-detail and a capacity to balance many moving parts, seemingly effortlessly, until something like understanding settles. His dialogue consistently feels believable—skillful use of repetition and skipped words to mimic reality—regardless of the story’s setting. And the content reflects both curiosity and compassion (these characters are not the usual to feature in short fiction, and often things don’t work out for them, but the storyteller’s awareness that this is perhaps true-to-life but not as it should be in a just world…it’s company for the regretful reader).

Ricky grabbed a Taco Bell bag with his picker, flicked it into his garbage sack. “You’re like them scientists on TV explaining black holes. More you talk, less I get.”  “The Wolf and the Wild”

With my return to regular library borrowing, in warmer weather while walking and biking is uncomplicated, quite a few collections are midway.

Hopefully I don’t forget how to read in sevens!