“Fuck you, Doerr,” is what I say every time I read “The Hunter’s Wife.” My mouth presses into a frown. I shake my head back and forth until it feels loose on its hinges. I sweat. My breathing gets rapid and shallow. One time I threw his book across the room, where it slammed against the wall and fluttered to the floor like a broken-backed bird. Fuck him, I said. That lousy fuck.

And from me, that’s the highest kind of compliment.

These days, more often than not, I pick up a book and the running commentary in my head goes something like this: Quit starting your sentences with absolute phrases. Quit using exclamation marks as a crutch. Quit attaching adverbs to your dialogue tags (he said angrily). Quit mentioning what street you’re walking along in New York. Must you self-importantly capitalize words that shouldn’t be capitalized? Well, that metaphor went over like a lead tomato. Does anything happen in this story or is your character just going to contemplate his navel for the next twenty pages? Whatever happened to the fine art of the comma? Why are you wearing that ridiculous hat in your author photo? Will you stop using the word “float”?

Or—worst of all—why am I reading this?

It isn’t often that I crack open a story and feel profoundly jealous. There are a few exceptions. Anything by Cormac McCarthy, Daniel Woodrell, Richard Yates. Most of what Rick Bass puts on the page. Some Denis Johnson. Those guys, I hate them even as I love them. I read and reread their sentences in a trance of wonder and know that no matter how good I get, I’ll never get quite that good, damn it.

That’s what happens when I read “The Hunter’s Wife.”

How to choose between so many old friends? My life as reader and writer would be so much poorer without “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, “The Cask of Amontillado” by Poe, “Wingless” by Jamaica Kincaid, or “In the American Society” by Gish Jen, to name very different tales. Since those writers have had their due, I’m going with “Mrs da Silva’s Carnival” by Pauline Melville. I’ve been a big fan of Melville since 1999, when I read her second story collection, The Migration of Ghosts. Perhaps because she writes in Britain, Melville, who draws on her British and Guyanese heritage in her work, isn’t well known in the U.S.

One of the things I love about Melville’s stories is the deft and moving way she handles the clash of cultures; her characters are part of a broad and complex canvas. Melville is a precise jeweler of concise but evocative language. Most of the stories in The Migration of Ghosts range from serious to somber, but “Mrs da Silva’s Carnival” engulfs me in its world and makes me laugh out loud. I want to keep reading sentences to anyone around me.

The story sets things in motion with the first sentence: “The shop isn’t built that would sell a leotard Mrs da Silva’s size.” The occasion requiring such garb is London’s Carnival parades, in which competing teams, made up mostly of West Indian immigrants, vie for costume and dance prizes. The story starts on Carnival day with amply-sized widow Mrs da Silva, longtime matriarch of the Rebel War Band, on her way “to be garbed in a giant shimmering copper tent.” There’s a very economical backstory about Mrs da Silva’s recent romantic disappointment, which the Carnival season, “the beginning and end of the year for her,” begins to ease. Armed with this context, we’re off to a topsy-turvy day at the parades.