9 striking works of short fiction you can read in an afternoon

Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman

Goodman's story is about a cancelled man in the countryside looking for a foothold and a way forward. He zeroes in on an enchanting real estate potential.

Goodman is a restless writer – her prose will find ways to radicalise until it finds a new plane of understanding. House Hunters meets Cusk's Outline trilogy, insofar as new interlocutors, and the stories they wild upon the novel (or house), move the foundation out to sea.

Frisk by Dennis Cooper

It would be a great challenge to attempt to devour this whole short novel in one afternoon and in public – I'm afraid I might pass out, as its scenes are troubling, and gross. Yet, for the student of ironic representation (if also ironic narration), this tale of "Dennis Cooper" and his search for happiness in Holland, in a converted windmill, via a series of crimes, has it all! Akin to the aesthetic experience of viewing Haneke's Funny Games: you'll have to think through if representations of cruelty have their own power, or not (or if they're funny), in our cruel world.

Happiness, As Such written by Natalia Ginzburg and translated by Minna Zallman Proctor

It makes perfect sense to me Ginzburg was an Italian translator of Proust, and that she was a woman, as her novels are like Proustian compressions, with full casts, machinations of households and towns, utterly fluttered through with sensitivity – but short, short, the way female writers have, historically, not assumed that they would be heard at length.

This is one of my favorites, an epistolary novel that has a secret plot that jumps out at you only at the very end, this thing it was always ever about.

The Sea and Poison written by Shusaku Endo and translated by Michael Gallagher

An astonishing and strikingly stylised novel about the human vivisections that took place in Japan during World War II on American POWs, rehearsed by Endo a mere 12 years after these crimes (amidst so many). A reckoning, and one that renders humans as cogs in machines, in societies that juice from us violence and despair. Always, with Endo, there is something to stay for, to witness or to be with – ways towards something like prayer – but not without touching the bottom.

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

This novel stopped me in my tracks, with its level of sophistication (its deceptive simplicity). A woman and her mother share a touristic visit to Japan. Every paragraph in this book is diverse and poignant. It is calm and steady, open and plain, and yet there are stories within stories within stories, lies within truths within lies, digressions tacked into the fog. How is this novel so slim?

A Woman's Battles and Transformations written by Édouard Louis and translated by Tash Aw

I've become an Édouard Louis completist, or whatever, so far, has been translated into English. This is absolutely an afternoonish novel (very brief) and, with its story of the narrator's mother and her move from country to city (to a kind of later-years reclamation of joy) it does what all Louis books do – it risks seeing and saying too much about the ones in our lives we are meant to look at with blind eyes. It risks spilling out all of its knowing, to the ones that made you know (by being your obstacles). Louis has, one by one, turned all of his obstacles (members of his family, his upbringing, the town, society, France, state capitalism) into the icons of his literature.

My Phantoms by Gwedoline Riley

Riley is a serious writer of mothers and her work is upsetting and funny. Maybe Riley is a great, great writer of enmeshment. And, dialogue. Her novels are quick and full of back and forths that blister.

Lynne Tillman wrote a brilliant non-fiction book, Mothercare, about what it meant to take care of a mother (manage the end of her life) whom she did not love. This is its novel, as Riley traffics in feelings of disgust, exasperation, all the distance one might feel paradoxically for that impossible person of all initial intimacy.

The Book of Ramallah: A City in Short Fiction edited by Maya Abu Al-Hayat

I am a fan of Al-Hayat's novel No One Knows their Blood Type, recently translated into English, which shares the treachery of childhood in a treacherous (and various) place. It is, I think, a great tribute to the canon of Palestinian literature, as Al-Hayat's work does so much more than lay bare the Palestinian struggle – or, it somehow does this without draining complexity from the lives of regular Palestinians, who must live as victims but also, as people.

Al-Hayat is also the editor of a great volume from the UK's Comma Press, with stories (hers included) that stay both quick (serious, needing to say something) and complex.

Walking written by Thomas Bernhard and translated by Kenneth J. Northcott

Try not to leave the house without a Bernhard! Especially if you have soured on humanity but still find levity in creation. And, if you believe in the sentence as material. Walking is about what anything Bernhard wrote is about – a series of riveting sentences made out of Pluto's gas; or, the dire pain of tolerating others, including yourself.