October report

Short stories for a short little attention span

November 01, 2023

Absolutely unhinged month for me. I looked through my camera roll to try to reconstruct my life as though the photos are tattoos and I’m Guy Pearce in Memento (2000).1 The pictures made it even harder to reconstruct my memory!! It’s because I was l-i-v-i-n-g, which is to say I was helping friends move, and dissociating in the crowd at The Met on a Saturday, and cleaning things I’ve never cleaned before (I pulled the stove out 👹), and barreling upstate to see leaves and do Fall Things with Friend of the Report, Meaghan, and otherwise just vibing. To that end, short stories served me well this month, giving me something to read and think about without too much commitment!

What I read in October:

Jhumpa Lahiri, tr. Jhumpa Lahiri with Todd Portnowitz, Roman Stories (2023)2—I don’t know why I find it surprising that I’ve read every book Lahiri’s ever published. Maybe it’s because I’m not even a completist of oeuvres by authors I’m absolutely feral about,3 and if asked to name my top 10 favorite authors, I don’t know if she’d automatically be on that list. And yet, with this second book written in Italian and translated into English, maybe she should make the list!

IDK! I think I am really loving Lahiri in her middle-aged, thinks/writes in Italian era! Her earlier short story collections aren’t particularly verbose but they do have a density about them and a greater volume of detail than the ones in Roman Stories. What I especially appreciate about the short stories in this collection is how Lahiri is able to convey just as much as before, though differently and with powerful economy.

She brings the same observations and insights to present-day Rome that she brought in her 1999 and 2008 short story collections, which variously explored experiences of immigrating to a new country, usually the US. In those collections, as in Roman Stories, Lahiri reveals what is universal and timeless to the event as well as what is unique to the time, place, and person. This is to say that in Roman Stories she captures the particular violence and degradation that non-White immigrants to western Europe have encountered in recent decades. The collection contains many different stories that highlight the perspective of native and non-native Romans, but there remains throughout an emphasis on the experience of the outsider.

This is such a quiet set of stories. It’s not all doom and gloom, either. The pervasive strains of melancholy, nostalgia, and looking back, are balanced against those moments of peace and connection that I can’t get enough of in fiction of the everyday.

Lahiri's book, which has trees on the cover, rests on a wooden table next to a dish shaped like a fish. Below the table is a black-and-white striped rug and a pair of fluffy slippers.

Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger: A Novella and Stories (1998)—I love when a browse around a bookstore leads me to a book I hadn’t heard of and that is exactly as good as its blurbs say it is.

The titular novella—it’s perfect? It’s riveting. It packs so much into 100-odd pages and reads like what it is, a literary wonder.

The other stories—also perfect. Like, say what you will about Big MFA (it’s true), Lan Samantha Chang wrote an incredible collection of short fiction.

As Alexander Chee says in his introduction to the new twenty-fifth anniversary edition, “It is a wise book, for the way it is full of the sorts of mistakes people make and cannot take back . . . You as the reader come to understand . . . the stories as being about people lost inside a system indifferent to their survival, and indifferent about their beliefs about what it takes to succeed (11-12).” I don’t want to say too much about the details of the stories because I think that if you want to read them, you should go into them with as little knowledge as I did, for maximum impact.

What I started reading in October:

Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017)—Times like these, I’m thankful to the past version of me who bought books like this as well as all the past versions of me that held on to theory books long after she left the academic world.

I’m reading it now like I read books back then: intro, relevant chapters, conclusion (maybe, if applicable).4 

If I’m being honest, these days, the minute I read news (especially if I’m being a sicko and reading the Times), my brain short-circuits and immediately re-routes to developing a personal syllabus comprising:

And more, of course, if I really put my mind to it.

The point is, I’m finding it personally productive at the moment to think about how States bring people “into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury” and what it might mean for all of us to live in a world where policies of mass debilitation are so heavily supported.

What I’m looking forward to reading in November:

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (2023)

Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience (2023)5

Adania Shibli, tr. Elisabeth Jaquette, Minor Detail (2020)

Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao (2022)