This has been a rich year for short stories. Some collections I’ve enjoyed without making notes, like Venita Blackburn’s How to Wrestle a Girl (2021); her stories are vivid and will appeal to readers who prioritize voice, as well as readers who admire a certain playfulness that’s delicately balanced with acuity. So, there’s a story structured like a crossword, and a grief log presented in chart form, along with more traditional forms.

Another that I read unexpectedly quickly was Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s My Monticello (2021), in which the titular novella takes up nearly all the room in the slim volume (it’s preceded by five short stories). “In the midst of the storms there’d been a hunkering down, but afterward, people pooled what they had and made their choices to stay or go.” With an enduring interest in the Hemmings’ family, this story of a family who takes refuge in the historical site that preserves the home and estate of Thomas Jefferson would have drawn my attention anyway, but with one of the characters a descendant of Sally, well, I was hooked.

Hao by Ye Chun (2021) contains a series of delicately constructed droplets, simple but refracting inwards. With the delicacy of Vi Khi Nao and the depth of Yiyun Li, readers are mesmerized, as much by the stories’ stillness as their motion. Consider this: “On the thin rice paper, she draws, with fewer and fewer strokes, a bird flying from white to white, river grass ascending the air, a fish swimming across seasons. They are still and they are in motion. When winter arrives, she draws a little plum flower at the end of a sword-shaped branch. She comes to stand by it and, for a moment, her heart feels like a scroll of moon white space that opens, and is edgeless.”

Two of my favourites were enjoyed in such a variety of reading locations that I made extensive notes from some stories and none from others. This seemed decidedly unfair with Yoon Choi’s Skinship (2021), which I absolutely loved. In only eight stories, Yoon Choi seems a contender for my MustReadEverything list. I warmed to her love of the library, in “A Map of the Simplified World” but, more than that, to the style, which manages to be both simple and satisfying. With the attention paid to language and belonging, I’m reminded of Souvankham Thammavongsa and Madeleine Thien’s short fiction. Every word matters, as in snippet of “Solo Works for Piano”: “He does not dial Sasha’s number, or he does not dial Sasha’s number yet.”

I read at least a couple hundred short stories each year, so you can imagine how unusual it is to recognize, from the opening sentence, a story I’ve read before—but that’s what happened when I started reading “The Erlking” in Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s Likes (2020). Her stories feel familiar, in the sense that, even though the characters’ lives bear no resemblance to my own, I feel bound to them somehow. Perhaps this bit from “The Young Wife’s Tale” hints at an undercurrent of empathy that, seemingly effortlessly, pulls me close: “A paradox of growing so close to another person was the doubt that you could impart to them the very closeness that you felt.” I also really loved the depiction of friendship in “Many a Little Makes.”

I also read some collections of stories as preparation for writing reviews of the author’s recent novel, including Lauren Groff and Carol Bruneau. Bruneau’s collection A Bird on Every Tree (2017) is sure to satisfy fans of her booklength works. In some ways it’s quintessentially Canadian—“ Pockmarks in the snow showed where a sprinkling of salt tried to make the walkway safer”—but really this collection has a universal appeal. “Watching the docks from their window, seeing the boats that would take you all over—to St. Pierre, St. John’s, Quebec City, Boston, New York.” Buoyed by confidence and clarity, these stories unfurl with tenderness. Several would particularly satisfy readers who love artworks as much as books.

In working through Groff’s stories, I also dabbled in some collections to which she contributed introductions. Including Nancy Hale’s Where the Light Falls (including a story Mel admires), for which Groff immersed herself in more than a hundred of her published stories (ten of which won an O’Henry Prize and over eighty having been published in TNY).

And the Everyman’s Edition of Lorrie Moore stories, in which Groff explains: “Writers are solitary beasts, but not one of us has ever entered a life of writing alone, and most of us can identify the voice that guided us through the blind and treacherous tunnels that we must enter when we go from being a reader to being a writer. Lorrie Moore was this for me.”

I’ve read a couple of Moore’s collections and thought I would browse a little beyond the introduction. I chose to begin with “Joy”, which was foolish, because it made me cry, so hard, when the children’s cat leaves the vet’s office in a cardboard box coffin. Maybe I’ll reread some others another time.

Zadie Smith’s Grand Union (2019) contains eleven new and unpublished stories. Her first collection also gathers stories that fans will recognize from The New Yorker and other magazines. As with Sherman Alexie’s War Dances, there are some stories which will appeal particularly to writers. Like “Parents’ Morning Epiphany” (which is too fun to summarize) and “Kelso Deconstructed”: “Kelso is from Antigua, originally. He is a carpenter. Olivia is a trainee nurse from Jamaica. They are engaged to be married, although they will never marry: by the time the next sentence arrives it will be Saturday, 16 May 1959, the last day of Kelso’s life.” Zadie Smith deftly manages readers’ expectations with a writer’s control of story and time. Is she too clever sometimes? In “Sentimental Education”, “she wrote and rewrote her thesis on eighteenth-century garden poetry” because “Monica’s life was work” but readers with knowledge of the original text won’t have to work so hard to appreciate its layers. And in “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets”, Millennials are described like this: “Always ‘on’. No backstage to any of them—only front of house.” But sometimes ordinary things happen: “Then the rain came down hard and washed all this Manhattan tomfoolery into the drains.” (In “Words and Music”) And the observations are succinct, revealing character, like this: “Miss Steinhardt sat on the very edge of her desk, working her nails with a bobby pin for the subway grime underneath.” (In “Just Right”) And there is a lot of New York City in here, but a lot of everywhere else too: “A mother is the backdrop against which a child’s life is played out.” (In “For the King”) Grand Union is a collection best enjoyed over time, with an appreciation of detail.

Contents: The Dialectic; Sentimental Education; The Lazy River; Words and Music; Just Right; Parents’ Morning Epiphany; Downtown; Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets; Mood; Escape from New York; Big Week; Meet the President!; Two Men Arrive in a Village; Kelso Deconstructed; Blocked; The Canker; For the King; Now More than Ever; Grand Union

I randomly read a couple of stories in the second half of Samanta Schweblin’s Mouthful of Birds (2019) because the first sentence in the first story contains the word ‘fate’—it turns out that this word gives me pause, in a year when I’ve read dozens of books about the climate crisis. Publishers and editors and authors take care to arrange stories in a particular order, so it’s unusual for me to set that aside and read willy-nilly. But I felt like I’d been lagging with this recommended collection. and I didn’t want to return it to the library unread—having waited so long—all because of a single word, that didn’t rest with me on a single evening. So, I sampled. And, immediately, I was drawn in. Schweblin’s language is direct—not spare, because her word choice (and these stories are translated by Megan McDowell) is vivid and complex—but her prose is lean, so it retains that colour easily. Most impressively, the stories swing on a hinge; if you read the first few sentences, it’s as though you have no choice but to finish reading. I swung back to the beginning of the collection and read the first eight stories. They reminded me of Kelly Link, with more interactions between characters. But, when it came to “The Test”, all the reasons to admire Schweblin’s storytelling were the reasons I set the book aside. Not before finishing the story—I couldn’t stop myself. Could be that, in a different reading mood, I might have focussed more on their intelligence, on the element of surprise. Instead, I felt haunted by “The Test” and maybe I failed because I just felt alone and sad. And that’s probably the point. Perhaps ‘fate’ was more of a clue than I realised.

Dantiel W. Moniz’s debut collection Milk Blood Heat (2021) considers the horrible and wonderful things that people survive and thrive through, the ways people hurt the ones they love and love the ones they lose, and the conundrum of girlhood—what makes girls fragile and what keeps them fierce. The title story is particularly striking on that theme. I love this passage from “Outside the Raft”: “That summer we were nine and ten, our birthdays rolling over one another as if playing leapfrog—first hers, then mine, five days apart.” How it captures the strange intimacy of childhood’s ordinary accidents of time and space. The open love of language in “Feast” is character-driven, but it resurfaces frequently in the collection. Sometimes stories feature a direct and strong narrative voice but the authorial voice punctuates that worldview (in the title story, for instance, the vocabulary occasionally feels a little over-wise and we slip from the girls’ perspectives) but the scenes are so vivid and Moniz has a remarkable eye for detail in memorable scenes. I also really enjoy the way that she allows the ordinary to hold sway, centres the kind of experiences that another writer might cut from the narrative entirely. For instance, the way that the narrator of “Feast” is captivated by the “real work [of] the practice of forgetting through sleep”.

Contents: Milk Blood Heat, Feast, Tongues, The Loss of Heaven, The Hearts of Our Enemies, Outside the Raft, Snow, Necessary Bodies, Thicker than Water, Exotics, An Almanac of Bones

I read M. G. Vassanji’s collection of stories When She Was Queen shortly after moving to Toronto. At the time, I had a long commute across the city to work, and I read a story each morning; there, on the subway and on the streetcar, I thrilled to the idea that the characters in these stories were so ordinary that they could be sharing a seat with me. There’s a similar slice-of-life feel to the stories in What You Are (2021), his neighbourhoods described as richly as David Bezmozgis’ and Carrianne Leung’s. But this time I felt even more keenly the relationship between memory and reality, and how complex matters of belonging are for these characters, many of whom are from Africa but culturally are Asian. Many of them are “Canadians, almost, and beginning to settle and to dream”, even when they have been in Canada for some time. Often there’s a tender melancholy twinned with a sort of inner reconciliation, the language almost prayer-like, and verbs so layered that it’s hard to distinguish between past longings and present-day resignation. “She did not miss him, but she realizes that he’d been there somehow in the shadow of their life together. She had appreciated that he had not called her, that he had left her alone.”

Contents: Fifteen stories, beginning with “The Send Off” and ending with “An American Family”

Carolyn Ferrell’s debut, a collection of stories from 1997, Don’t Erase Me, landed in my stack because of her vivid and arresting novel Dear Miss Metropolitan. It lingered because of the sharp focus on vulnerability and girls’ coming-of-age experiences typical of early Mary Gaitskill’s stories, the cultural density of John Edger Wideman, and the precision of Marlon James for cadence of language. These stories are compact—every word counts—and I savoured them. (I started reading them before Dear Miss and was still reading them afterwards.) In “Proper Library”, a single sentence creates an entire mood: “Lasheema and Tata come in and want their hair to be like Layla’s and they bring in the Vaseline and sit around my feet like shoes.” A few sentences, as in “Miracle Answer” create an entire life: “Mother made us go to the movies as a family. What made it worse was that we walked all the way to the theater. What made it the worst was the way Mother was walking: happy, almost skipping, like a lot of years in her life had never happened, like this was the start she’d dreamed of as a girl.” I hope she’s been working on another collection.

Contents: Proper Library; Country of the Spread out God; Don’t Erase Me; Can You Say My Name?; Tiger-Frame Glasses; Wonderful Teen; Miracle Answer; Inside, a Fountain

Jaime Cortez’s Gordo (2021) will appeal to readers who love short story collections dedicated to one narrator’s view of the world, like Brian Washington’s Lot and those with an affinity for the American southwest, like Kirstin Valdez Quade’s Night at the Fiesta. And, like Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties, the collection opens with donuts (a subgenre of stories that I love, as it turns out), but with open yearning rather than lonely striving. Cortez focuses on quiet moments that are unseen or partly obscured and on the shifting leverage of power in ordinary relationships. A girl tries and fails to quell her homesickness: “I thought the voices from home lived inside the radio, and I could bring them to Watsonville.” And Gordo observes his changing understanding of belonging: “Even his eyelashes are red. Most of the garlic toppers at Gyrich Farm are Mexicans, like us. The women, the men, the kids. Heck, even the dogs all have Spanish names, so they’re sort of Mexican too. That’s why seeing a gringo here is surprising, like a Bigfoot.”  What he is not supposed to talk about, he writes about: “Ma is always telling me to mind my own business. Says I’m like some nosy old lady. Black eyes are top secret. Two times Ma got a black eye from Pa, and nobody said nothing about it. I guess you’re supposed to shut up like nothing happened and swallow the story.”

Contents: The Jesus Donut; El Gordo; Chorizo; Cookie; the Nasty Book Wars; Fandango; Alex; the Pardos; The Problem of Style; Raymundo the Fag; Ofelia’s Last Ride

And, of course, I’ve been reading through Alistair MacLeod’s stories, too. Next month, my reviews of David Huebert’s Chemical Valley and Rachel Rose’s The Octopus Has Three Hearts will be published in a west-coast Canadian litmag. And I have Casey Plett’s new collection to finish, yet, in the next few days. (I loved her first collection, so I wonder if this one has a chance of making my list of stand-out reads for 2021.)

It has been an amazing reading year for short fiction and it’s inspiring me to make even more reading time for the form in 2022.

Which of these have you read, or which do you think you’d be most likely to pick up?
(Other Quarterly Stories? Spring 2021, Summer 2021, Autumn 2021)