Small Odysseys

by Hannah Tinti

Genres: Anthologies; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

“Lovers of the short story, rejoice! There’s something for everyone in this anniversary collection . . . The collection makes the argument that time and again, it is stories that save us.” —Booklist 

Thirty-five literary luminaries come together in this stunning collection of all-new works.

A must-have for any lover of literature, Small Odysseys sweeps the reader into the landscape of the contemporary short story, featuring never-before-published works by many of our most preeminent authors as well as up-and-coming superstars.

On their journey through the book, readers will encounter long-ago movie stars, a town full of dandelions, and math lessons from Siri. They will attend karaoke night, hear a twenty-something slacker’s breathless report of his failed recruiting by the FBI, and travel with a father and son as they channel grief into running a neigh­borhood bakery truck. They will watch the Greek goddess Persephone encounter the end of the world, and witness another apocalypse through a series of advertise­ments for a touchless bidet. And finally, they will meet an aging loner who finds courage and resilience hidden in the most unexpected of places—the next generation.

Published in partnership with beloved literary radio program and live show Selected Shorts in honor of its thirty-fifth anniversary, this collection of thirty-five stories captures its spirit in print for the first time.

FEATURING
Rabih Alameddine * Jenny Allen * Lesley Nneka Arimah * Aimee Bender * Marie-Helene Bertino * Jai Chakrabarti * Patrick Cottrell * Elizabeth Crane * Michael Cunningham * Patrick Dacey * Edwidge Danticat * Dave Eggers * Omar El Akkad * Lauren Groff * Jacob Guajardo * A.M. Homes * Mira Jacob * Jac Jemc * Etgar Keret * Lisa Ko * Victor LaValle * J. Robert Lennon * Ben Loory * Carmen Maria Machado * Juan Martinez * Maile Meloy * Joe Meno * Susan Perabo * Helen Phillips * Namwali Serpell * Rivers Solomon * Elizabeth Strout * Luis Alberto Urrea * Jess Walter * Weike Wang

Release date: March 15, 2022

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

On the Isle of Skye, in western Scotland, is a cave, used and inhabited by people from 7000 years ago until 2000 years ago, and when archaeologists went in, they found, along with evidence of prehistoric habitation, the ashes, many feet deep, of a fire that had burned continually for a thousand years. In the ashes of the long-dead fire they found treasures, including a burned fragment of a stringed instrument, a lyre, the oldest stringed instrument ever discovered in that part of the world. Someone, 2500 years ago, had thrown the lyre into the flames. Perhaps it had already been broken beyond repair. Perhaps there was a fight back then, and the lyre was burned, or the burning of the lyre was an act of revenge.

I wonder about the lyre, and I build stories about it in my mind, I think about the fire that burned in that cave for a thousand years, and I ponder on the people who tended the flames. Perhaps they gave fire to those who came to them and asked for it: starting fires in the wind and the wet weather of Skye cannot have been easy, after all. There are so many things we do not know about that cave and the people who lived there, or about that fire.

But I know one thing, deep in my bones. And it’s this: in the dim orange light of the fire, in the warmth of the flames, in the smoky safety of that cave, people told each other stories. Songs were sung and tales were told, and perhaps there was no difference between the two. And where you have a tale told, you have listeners.

I was raised to love radio. I was a child in the 1960s in the United Kingdom, and my grandparents existed in a world where the radio was only turned on whenever there was something they specifically wanted to listen to. The radio wasn’t on all the time, and was never background—perhaps that would have been a waste of electricity. But they would put on Listen with Mother when I stayed with them, and I would listen to someone telling me a story. The story always began with the reader saying, “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.”

Sometimes we would listen together to the adult shows, broadcast on one of the two BBC radio channels. These were half-hour comedies for grown-ups, The Men from the Ministry, Round the Horne, The Navy Lark, and the rest of them. I didn’t mind that I didn’t understand them. I loved what stories on the radio did: the feeling that I was taking part in the stories I was being told, that I was building them in my head.

The BBC channels renamed themselves and I continued listening to BBC Radio 4 for drama, and for short stories. That was where I first encountered Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where I first encountered Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, being respectively performed and read on the radio.

I moved from the United Kingdom to the United States in 1992, back before there was an internet and you could take your local news and culture with you wherever you went. I was in the Midwest, and public radio became my lifeline to the world.

I don’t remember when in the nineties, on which trip to which city, Selected Shorts entered my life. It was exotic, being broadcast all the way from New York, and it was a delight. World-class actors, reading short stories in front of a live audience. It was the simplest use of radio, and the most profound.

Voices told stories. You, as the listener, collaborated with the storyteller to build a tale into something you could experience, just as we did when we sat around the fire in the dawn days.

Recorded civilization started a few thousand years ago, but people have been walking, talking, fire-using, tool-making hominids for a vast span of time—before we began writing our histories. And in that time before time began, over those hundreds of thousands of years, we told each other stories. There are satisfying places where stories go, where stories take us: in our minds, on journeys we will never make, with people we will never otherwise meet, voyages that take us East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and leave us satisfied when the story is over and yet we have not moved, and are still sitting beside the fire.

There are stories that are still told that we can date from geological events they refer to that are older than any city, older than any country, older than the oldest living thing we know of on this planet (it’s a five-thousand-year-old bristlecone pine tree in California).

Stories are currency. Stories are the way we interact, the place that groups come together. Stories unite us. We look out through other eyes, imagine ourselves in other skins, experience lives we wished we could lead or are relieved we never will.

So I lived in America, where the radio pickings were slim, and I listened to and loved Selected Shorts. I was thrilled when they chose a story of mine to be on the show. (The story was “Chivalry,” the story of an old lady who buys the Holy Grail in a charity shop, and of the knight on a quest who visits her, and it was read by Christina Pickles.)

And then Jennifer Brennan and Katherine Minton, producers at Selected Shorts, reached out to me, and invited me to perform.

Soon enough I was standing onstage in New York’s beautiful Symphony Space, reading a story I had written aloud to an audience. Then I was invited back, and we programmed some evenings together. I loved suggesting stories—some of them mine, some of them just stories I loved—and I reveled in watching actors like John Cameron Mitchell and Kirsten Vangsness, performers whose work I admired, standing there on the stage, reading stories that I had written or stories that had resonated inside me and changed me.

I loved the audience reactions: the silence when suspense grows, the intake of breath or the laughter at its release; when people shuffle or cough; the various noises of enjoyment they can make; how they applaud.

I had been adopted into the Selected Shorts family. I loved the people who work on Selected Shorts, from Symphony Space and from the public radio station WNYC. They are good people, and I wish they were all still with us: we lost the co-founder of Symphony Space, Selected Shorts host Isaiah Sheffer, in 2012, and Katherine Minton in 2016.

Following Isaiah’s death in 2012, I agreed to guest-host several episodes of the radio show, and I was welcomed into the offices of WNYC, where I read links on the air and talked about stories I loved and why I loved them, and why it mattered that you were going to listen to them and not read them: I got to introduce Stephen Colbert reading Ray Bradbury’s chilling “The Veldt” and the late Leonard Nimoy reading James Thurber’s perfect short story “The Catbird Seat” and I felt real joy at knowing that, for some listeners, this would be their first encounter with stories that would change them.

As I write this, I was meant to be back at Symphony Space, hosting a Selected Shorts to celebrate the centenary of Ray Bradbury’s birth with Bradbury stories. It never happened. 2020 was the year the world fell apart. The world closed down and all the theaters went dark. But now the lights are going back on, and the people are coming out, and we need stories as much as we ever did.

Selected Shorts began over thirty-five years ago. There are thirty-five stories in this book, to celebrate thirty-five years of stories in Symphony Space; to celebrate the joy and the magic Selected Shorts has brought to so many of us, the waking dreams and the laughter and the tears and the anticipation, not to mention the gooseflesh and occasional moments of awe. Thirty-five original stories, each one a gem.

Here’s to the stories that lie ahead of us . . .

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

—Neil Gaiman, 2021



When I was in my early twenties, I worked seven days a week (double shifts on the weekends) in order to save money and move to New York City and become a writer. It took about an hour for me to drive from my 9–5 job as a cashier at a bookstore to the restaurant where I waited tables at night, and in that hour from 5–6 p.m. I listened to Selected Shorts. Driving in the dark with the radio on, the headlights illuminating the road, I was transported from the interior of my old Dodge to a red velvet seat at Symphony Space, where BD Wong or Sigourney Weaver was standing onstage and reading a short story. I laughed, cried, sighed, and gasped along with the audience. Then I pulled into the parking lot and waited with the engine running to hear the end of that night’s gripping tale. There was always a pause by the actor after the final word, a silence that echoed through the theater. I floated in that moment on a raft of connected human feeling. And then the audience would applaud and I’d turn off the engine and tie my apron and head to work.

Many years later, when I was living in New York, I got the call that I’d always dreamed of—Selected Shorts was going to perform a short story that I had written. The producer of Selected Shorts, Katherine Minton, invited me to WNYC to record an interview, and it was there that I met longtime Selected Shorts host Isaiah Sheffer, the voice I’d been hearing on the radio for so many years. I told Isaiah how Shorts had kept me company on the road at a time when I felt very far away from the life I’d hoped for. “And now here we are in the same room,” I said. “I feel like I’m meeting David Bowie.” Isaiah laughed and shook my hand. He said, “Thanks for listening.” Then we put on our headphones and started to talk. After we finished recording, Katherine asked me to join Selected Shorts as a literary commentator, and my voice became a part of the radio show each week, interviewing authors and chatting with Isaiah about the magic of these small worlds.

Since then, Selected Shorts has continued to thrive, grow, and change, with new music, new hosts, a spin-off podcast called Selected Shorts: Too Hot for Radio, and now, this book: a celebration of the short story. The writers featured in these pages were all chosen by Selected Shorts and commissioned to create brand-new works of fiction. With works from a mix of established authors and emerging literary talents, the collection reflects the suspenseful and surprising tales presented each week on the program, with language that is rhythmic, generous, and economical, grounding imaginative situations with genuine human triumph and tragedy.

As a listener over the years, I’ve often sought out printed versions of the stories on Selected Shorts, so it’s been a thrill to bridge the gap between performance and the written word while editing this anthology. I’ve always felt that reading is like an expedition. You meet the author on the page and step into the fictional world together. An editor’s job is to ease the way and act as a compass. With this in mind, I’ve divided Small Odysseys into three thematically linked sections—Departures, Journeys, and New Worlds—to guide your voyage through the book.

Part one, Departures, focuses on the first step of any adventure: leaving home and saying goodbye. It kicks off with “The King of Bread,” by Luis Alberto Urrea, a story of a father and son in mourning who channel their loss into a bakery truck, selling cookies and donuts and winning over the hearts of the people in their neighborhood. Meanwhile, in another part of the city, A. M. Homes’s “Goodbye to the Road Not Taken” eavesdrops on a couple parting ways on the streets of Manhattan, a conversation that includes a confrontation over lox, as well as a wink at Robert Frost. “The Double Life of the Cockroach’s Wife” by Helen Phillips is another literary send-up, using Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” (and the tenacious nature of NYC roaches) as inspiration to explore a painful loss that refuses to be erased.

Edwidge Danticat’s powerful “Cane and Roses: A Manifesto” pushes against a different kind of erasure, detailing all the ways a person can be driven toward a desperate act. Carmen Maria Machado delivers the apocalypse, imagining Greek gods in “Persephone Rides at the End of Days,” while Elizabeth Crane summons another mythical creature to guide a struggling divorcée in “Unicorn Me.”

Some goodbyes are teachable moments, such as in Jai Chakrabarti’s “Lessons with Father,” where a daughter learns to paint from a fading artist; Patrick Cottrell’s “The Hole,” which recounts the struggles of a high school teacher leading up to spring break, or Weike Wang’s “iPhone SE,” narrating the final words of wisdom delivered by a dying cell phone. These farewells connect us to the past, just as the people in Namwali Serpell’s “Noseless” can still summon the lost smell of their favorite foods and the woman in Jac Jemc’s “Infidelity” can’t forget a lost friend and the stories she used to tell. Memories are often the balm that heals us, and as the narrator in Mira Jacob’s “Death by Printer” discovers when she recalls the beauty of her late wife, they can lead us to a guiding star.

Part two of this collection is titled Journeys and follows characters in a state of transition and movement. We begin with a coming-of-age story in Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “Options,” tracking a young girl facing a stark revelation as she sets course from Nigeria to America. In Michael Cunningham’s “Sleepless,” two men in love and a woman they’ve rescued from a Dunkin’ Donuts stop and dance before deciding which fork in the road to choose.

At the next way station is Aimee Bender, weaving a story of fathers, mothers, and hot-air balloons in “Un-Selfie.” Susan Perabo’s “The Project” continues the exploration of parenthood through the question, hypothesis, research, results, and conclusion of a school science fair presentation. In “Home” by Elizabeth Strout, a mother suffering from dementia is moved into assisted living, the children now the parents, the parent now a child.

Crossing into the world of genre, “Love Interest” by Jess Walter gives us a digital detective story, as a computer expert tracks down hackers for an aging movie star. A bookseller solves the case of a missing encyclopedia (and finds another mystery on the shelves) in Joe Meno’s “Books You Read.” J. Robert Lennon blasts us into outer space with “Escape Pod W41,” a hilarious riff on language from the point of view of a modern-day HAL, and Omar El Akkad takes us on “A Survey of Recent American Happenings Told Through Six Commercials for the Tennyson ClearJet Premium Touchless Bidet,” using forcefully gleeful advertising copy to reflect the psyche of a country in crisis.

The landscape begins to change in “Conquistadors, on Fairchild” by Jacob Guajardo, which focuses on the unpredictable nature of relationships, while Maile Meloy’s “Period Piece” follows nature’s change—menopause—and one woman’s roller-coaster ride of hot flashes and hormones. The brakes come on at last with Marie-Helene Bertino and her “Woman Driving Alone,” who checks the rearview to see how far she’s come and understands that the heart is an engine.

The final section of Small Odysseys is titled New Worlds and investigates arrivals, those strange and exciting first steps into unfamiliar territory. The townspeople who inhabit Ben Loory’s “Dandelions” find themselves blessed (or perhaps cursed) by a sudden explosion of flowers that transform their village. Boundaries continue to be tested in Lisa Ko’s “Nightlife,” as an old relationship is tentatively redefined during a round of karaoke. Borders are completely broken in Jenny Allen’s whimsical “Scaffolding Man,” when an unexpected lover climbs through an apartment window.

America can often feel like the great unknown, especially for immigrants. “Cerati After Cerati” by Juan Martinez is a moving portrayal of Venezuelans struggling to find their footing in Chicago through music and memory. Digging into misconceptions of the Arab community, Rabih Alameddine’s “The Prom Terrorists” delivers a rollicking single-sentence narrative about the unsuccessful recruiting of a twenty-something slacker by the FBI.

The pandemic shifted everyone’s axis and left many uncertain about the future. “Bedtime Story” by Victor LaValle describes New York City at the start of lockdown, where a father and son camp in the hallway of their abandoned apartment complex. Patrick Dacey’s “All That’s Gone Is All That’s Left” captures the anxiety of citizens left to fend for themselves, as a plucky grandmother and her grandson do their best to care for one another while society starts to crumble. And disguised as academic ephemera, Rivers Solomon’s “A Brief Note on the Translation of Winter Women, Written by the Collective Dead, Translated by Amal Ruth” introduces a new language (translated from a haunted place) in the voices of those we’ve lost.

Our final entries shine a light on the world to come. A young girl is transformed over a summer at the beach in “Such Small Islands” by Lauren Groff, first by her half sister, and then by jealousy that burns inside her like a flame. In Etgar Keret’s “Almost Everything,” a man desperate to find the perfect fiftieth-birthday gift for his wife looks to the stars for inspiration. And finally, in Dave Eggers’s “Where the Candles Are Kept,” an aging loner acting as guardian for troubled teens in the wilderness finds courage and resilience hidden in the most unexpected of places—the next generation.

At the end of each story in this collection you’ll find a note from the author, sharing the inspiration behind their contribution. These insights give a rare peek behind the curtain at the creative process, revealing how much thought and effort went into each piece included in Small Odysseys. Like a song or a poem, the words in a short story carry more weight, allowing for a complete artistic experience in a brief span of time, distilled into a package tiny enough to fit in your hand that will later unfold inside of you, like a map to a whole new world.

—Hannah Tinti, 2021



  Luis Alberto Urrea  

Papa reached back to grab me in the back seat when that car ran the red light on Wabash and plowed into us. We spun out on two wheels and slammed into a street sign. The old man steered with his left hand and held me with his right as I lifted off. For a moment, I was flying.

Man, that car was his pride. It was a ’49 Ford. An anvil of a machine. We stood in the road and watched as it died, steam flying high, car blood spilling onto the blacktop. The woman who hit us stood like a statue of a woman, with glass in her hair, calling, “I never saw you! I never saw you!” It was the only time I ever saw him cry, even when Mama left us.

The crash was especially hard on him because he was between jobs. How was he supposed to go out and find one now? Or buy a new car? Even a junker, which is how we’d gotten a ’49 Ford to begin with.

You’d never know he was down on his luck unless you watched his moods, which he kept hid like the nudie magazines under his mattress. I’d define his demeanor as jolly rage. But that was no different from all the men I saw around me in the barrio. It was a scramble for everybody.

He had lost his job at the tuna cannery. And he was going to try for a job at the bowling alley in Chula Vista when the car died. So rage hung like a haze in our apartment as his money ran out. It was just the two of us in the apartment. He got madder the more he had to clean it, to wash dishes, to make me do homework. My things he found tossed around were a personal insult to him.

It took me a while to learn to do chores. What did I know? I liked him being home when I didn’t hate it. I was happy he didn’t come home stinking of fish anymore . . .

I missed that Ford, too. But I could walk to school at St. Jude’s by myself now, so I didn’t need rides or anybody with me. Besides, if some of the crazy vatos or bloods from down the street punched me, Pa would expect me to fight back. This way, I could just run. He’d never know. In those days, his advice was simple: “If they hit you, beat them till they’re in the dirt. And when they’re down, kick them in the pinche head.” I didn’t think I could do that and live. They always got back up.

His problem was that he couldn’t survive without something to drive. He didn’t walk down the street like some peasant. And he hated taking a bus. “Un hombre don’t take a bus,” he said. “I’d rather ride a burro.”

Pa was a driver for sure. A driver and a worker. It didn’t take him long to get a job at the big bakery down near the dry docks. He showed me the want ad: “Drivers Needed. Clean driving record required. Bakery Truck. Must have selling skills. Good with people a must! Apply in person.”

“What’s it mean?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Mijito, but I get a truck to drive.” He lit one of his Pall Malls. “And I like bread.”

“Me too.”

“Pues, it’s perfect, then.”

He did that Mexican one-shoulder-shrug-while-tipping-his-head thing. Hung out his lower lip, closed his eyes, raised his eyebrows. As if he was acknowledging the mysteries of the universe and also suggesting that no one with any sense would turn down a shot at a job that included a truck. And bread. People who try to learn Spanish don’t know that half of it is silent. They never seem quite right when they speak because they don’t use their faces and hands and shoulders and lips enough.

So one day he came home with a two-tone ’61 Chevy panel truck, black fenders, creamy body paint, and the bakery’s logo on the sides. They also gave him a uniform and a snappy bread-dude cap he wore like some bomber pilot in those old movies. All tipped down over his right eye.

“I get to keep it here, Mijo!” he called as he turned into the dirt alley. “Our new troka!”

Of course, it seemed gigantic to me, and Pa looked about twenty feet tall in the driver’s seat.

Then he confided, as if it was a dirty secret, “It’s a loaner.”

He squinched his nose a little, like the admission had a bit of stink on it. You know what I was saying about Mexican Spanish? Well, he was showing the expression for his favorite old-school word for stink. Which is fuchi. If you said it with enough verve, you couldn’t help but make that monkey-face. So if you made that monkey-face, you really didn’t have to say the word out loud at all, but all your paisanos would know exactly what you hadn’t just said.

The back of the truck had two doors that opened on wooden drawers he’d fill every morning at the bakery: bread and donuts and cookies and maybe a pie or two. If the moms on his route ordered one in advance, he could bring them a birthday cake. There were paper bags and wax paper sheets back there for picking up the stuff and handing it over.

Pa wore a silver changemaker on his belt with tubes full of pennies, dimes, nickels, and quarters, and he’d work a toggle to count them out. He had a zipper pouch for dollar bills, but the ladies on his route didn’t often have paper money. Some wrote checks. Some had welfare chits. Pa actually took IOUs from many moms, which was to be his downfall.

. . .