According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, for the third year in a row, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free* to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend:
Lydia Davis, “Happiest Moment”
Lydia Davis hardly needs an introduction: a genius at her form, she is able to communicate, and devastate, in fewer words than seems possible. She is an excavator and a stylist, an anthropological writer with no fluff and no bullshit, who buffs down her stories, slashing dirt and excess, until they are just pearly bone gleaming back at you. So many of her miniature stories run through my mind all the time, “Head, Heart”, a classic, is always there. But “Happiest Moment” conjures so much with so little, a story within a story within a story, that lets the reader exist across time and space: we are talking with an author, we are in a classroom, we are on a vacation, we are happily remembering, we are listening, we are reading, we are eating the meal ourselves. It becomes our happiest moment too, getting to exist in this story, watching the husband smile to himself, getting to have a little taste, not of duck, but of what real love can be.
The story begins:
If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life.
Read it here.
*If you hit a paywall, we recommend trying with a different/private/incognito browser (but listen, you didn’t hear it from us).