Welcome to the website of A Personal Anthology. This online project exists in the first instance as weekly Substack email, sent out on Friday afternoon. Each week a guest is invited to pick and introduce twelve of their favourite short stories and, where possible, link to them online. Since starting in 2017 the project has featured over 300 guest editors picking over 3,000 short stories written by over 1,400 different authors. You can browse guest editors and featured authors in the sidebar, or just start reading below. Click here to sign up for the mailout. A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs.

Introduction

Having been a keen reader and writer of short stories for thirty years, I find myself quite unable to produce a list of the twelve best. Possibly I could manage this several times over, if I set up particular categories: best science fiction, best horror, best naturalism, and so on. But how do you compare J.G. Ballard to Claire Keegan, or Ursula K. Le Guin to David Constantine? How, more importantly, do you choose between them if it’s the very diversity of the form that most appeals to you? Chewing my pencil over this, I decided to change tack. I read a lot of short stories and often enjoy them (I’m easily pleased), but most of the time I can’t remember much about them a few months later. Perhaps my criterion for selecting a personal anthology ought to rely on memorability: on choosing stories that, for one reason or another, have made a lasting impression on me. Most writers want to leave a dent in the reader’s mind; here are twelve stories that have done that with mine.

‘In The Ravine’ by Anton Chekhov

George Saunders, in A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, his extended study of how Russian short stories work, makes a watertight case for Anton Chekhov’s genius within the form. Saunders chooses for his title piece a story that encapsulates one variant on the literary story: the slice-of-life or epiphany narrative, built around a small cast and taking place in a concentrated unit of time. Such stories (Raymond Carver is perhaps the modern master) allow a moment to speak for a human life or personality. Often these moments incorporate a choice or decision, a pivot in someone’s life journey. My Chekhov selection does something quite different. ‘In the Ravine’ is novelistic in scope, a portrayal of provincial life built around a grasping, sentimental family of shopkeepers. There are multiple characters, but the essence of the narrative concerns itself with two daughters-in-law. One of them, the innocent and kindly Lipa, suffers abominably; the other, Aksinya, murderously take power. Beyond the shop, there is a highly polluting factory, a drunken and despairing peasantry, and a general atmosphere of hopelessness. There are episodes within episodes that could, in themselves, furnish a story. Even minor characters have inner lives and longings, however impoverished. Yet inarticulacy and a kind of ethical bewilderment stunt the lives of everyone in the village. Kindness and fellow feeling exist, but they are largely ineffectual before the avarice, corruption and selfishness in which everyone seems mired. When the story was published in 1900, it shocked the reading public, and with good reason: the fate of Lipa’s new baby is one of the most harrowing things you are likely to encounter. As the socialist journalist Vladimir Posse wrote in a letter to Chekhov: ‘What a merciless, cruel revelation. Nothing theatrical, but the effect is immense, all-pervading, and continues to grow long after the story has been read.’

First published in the January 1900 issue of the Russian literary magazine Zhizn. English language translation by Constance Garnett first published in The Wife and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov, Chatto and Windus, London, 1918. Widely collected thereafter, including in In the Ravine & Other Stories, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2019

’They’ by Rudyard Kipling

However unfashionable or ‘problematic’ he may be, Kipling remains one of the great exponents of the short story. He was more than a writer of empire: he could turn his hand to psychological naturalism, historical fiction, supernatural fantasy and satire. Having started life in India, he considered England “the most marvellous of all foreign countries that I have been in”, and it’s this outsider’s perspective that allowed him to find spiritual magic in the rural Sussex where he made his home. ’They’ is a ghost story of sorts, in which a motorist stumbles on a blind woman who appears to offer a refuge to the spirits of lost children. Or rather, her house and garden do. Kipling wrote several stories about the ‘soul of a place’, how it may have good or unhappy colours. He was no less haunted than his characters when he wrote ’They’, for he was mourning the loss of his young daughter, Josephine, who had died in 1899. The narrator is charmed by the unseen, laughing, affectionate children in the garden, and it’s only late in the story that he realises that they are not what he assumed. Kipling, at least in his later stories, is a subtle writer who asks some effort of his readers. That effort is well rewarded with ’They’. Admirers of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets may recognise the source for some of its famous imagery:

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
– T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’

First published in August 1904 in Scribners Magazine. Collected in Traffics and Discoveries by Rudyard Kipling, Macmillan & Co., London, October 1904

‘Sredni Vashtar’ by Saki

In the 1980s, I attended a preparatory school in Surrey. We learned Ancient Greek and played rugby bare kneed in the snow. We also had story time, when old Mr Lovelock would read to us. Understanding his audience, he gave us M. R. James ghost stories and Grendel slaughtering men in the mead hall. But the story that made the greatest impression on me was by the humourist Hector Hugh Munro, better known as Saki. (Like Kipling, Munro was born in the Raj – Burma rather than Bombay. He enlisted as a private in 1914 and was killed at Beaumont Hamel two years later.) Saki’s stories take place in, and satirise, Edwardian high society. He reads like an arch and acid uncle to P.G. Wodehouse. ‘Sredni Vashtar’ is perhaps atypical in that it doesn’t feature a wit lampooning the country house set. It has, instead, Conradin, a sickly boy living with an overbearing cousin, Mrs De Ropp, who seems intent on draining her charge’s life of hope and joy. Like a later master of the macabre short, Roald Dahl, Saki understands the fantasies of oppressed children. Sredni Vashtar is the name Conradin gives to a polecat-ferret that he keeps and secretly worships in the garden shed, alongside a beloved pet hen. When Mrs De Ropp discovers the pet hen and sells it, Conradin asks his captive deity for a favour: “Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.” What follows is intensely dark, a victory of the imagination over sanctimonious oppression, with one of the most satisfying final paragraphs in fiction.

First published in May 1910 in The Westminster Gazette. Collected in The Chronicles of Clovis, John Lane, London, 1911 and widely thereafter

‘Daughters of the Late Colonel’ by Katherine Mansfield

You find all the modern literary virtues in the stories of Katherine Mansfield: brevity and concision, acute psychological insight matched with subtlety of expression. She died a century ago, yet the manner of her writing – its weighted ironies, its poise – makes it feel as fresh today as when it was published. Mansfield left behind letters and journals in which she lamented her inability to write novels; I wonder if a lifetime in longform fiction would have produced as valuable a body of work. Virginia Woolf, who rather disliked her, confessed that “I was jealous of her writing… the only writing I have ever been jealous of.” ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ is a study in decaying gentility and arrested development, as we join three spinsters (it takes us time to understand that they are not as young as their talk and behaviour suggests) in the days after the death of the patriarch. Their resolute girlishness, even as middle age lengthens their odds of marriage or change, protects them psychologically from their financial troubles even as it worsens them. This is a poignant character study that exemplifies the ‘show don’t tell’ dictum of creative writing workshops. How skilfully Mansfield skims into the perspectives of her characters, even as she dwells, elsewhere, on the surface where our imagination must do the interpretive work. Few writers choose their words with such precision. Consider this moment, where their contemptuous servant brings the sisters dessert:

And proud young Kate […] came in to see what the old tabbies wanted now. She snatched away their plates of mock something or other and slapped down a white, terrified blancmange.
‘Jam, please, Kate,’ said Josephine kindly.
Kate knelt and burst open the sideboard, lifted the lid of the jam-pot, saw it was empty, put it on the table, and stalked off.
‘I’m afraid it’s empty,’ said Nurse Andrews a moment later […]
Constantia looked dubious. ‘We can’t disturb Kate again,’ she said softly.

First published in the London Mercury, May 1921. Collected in The Garden Party and other stories by Katharine Mansfield, Constable & Co., London, 1922, and widely thereafter

‘First Love’ by Samuel Beckett

In his sly and funny critical study, Beckett’s Dying Words (1993), Christopher Ricks draws our attention to a key feature of Beckett’s existential and linguistic vision: exhaustion. This isn’t just the exhaustion of his increasingly decrepit characters, but the exhaustion of language, the way it drags along the dead weight of cliché and hackneyed phrases. Beckett is our great zombie fiction writer, only his zombie is language itself. This makes him the diametrical opposite of the mad scientist of literary prose, James Joyce, whom he served as amanuensis in the thirties. Beckett’s first two novels are heavily influenced by Joyce. In order to replace his mentor’s exuberance with lethargy, and profusion with scarcity, Beckett took the drastic decision to write in French. He imposed constraints on himself. And it was in French that he created his best fiction: several short stories and the novel trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable). Beckett’s short story ‘First Love’, originally written in French towards the end of the war, wasn’t published until the 1970s, by which time Beckett’s valedictory manner had desiccated to a knotty and rather tedious minimalism. Unlike those late works, ‘First Love’ is intensely entertaining, a low comedy of failure, inertia and bewilderment. Its title makes you expect a touching coming-of-age stake in the manner of, say, Turgenev. But love, to Beckett’s narrator, is as remote a prospect as regular employment.

First published as Premier Amour by Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1970. First published in English, translated by the author, by Calder and Boyars, London, 1973

‘Witch’ by George Mackay Brown

What Alasdair Gray was to Glasgow, George Mackay Brown was to Orkney: a tutelary creative spirit. He lived most of his life in Stromness. ‘Orkney,’ he claimed, ‘is a small green world in itself,’ and his imaginative engagement with this world spans centuries. He can write about modern crofters in one story and about their Viking forebears in another, as if what happens now and what happened in the distant past are equally newsworthy. There is a poetic compression and simplicity to his prose that harkens back to the Orkneyinga Saga. (The same is even more true for his poetry, which rises from the same source as his fiction: verse narratives that encompass all generations.) I’ve chosen ‘Witch’, from Mackay Brown’s first story collection, because it exemplifies the qualities listed above. It’s a masterful instance of historical fiction: a genre we tend to associate more with the novel than the short form. In what reads like a contemporaneous account – officially dispassionate, yet contextually indignant – we follow the fate of Marian Isbister, a servant girl accused of witchcraft. Mackay Brown dwells on the surface of gestures and speech, inviting us to interpret the action and its injustices. This is fiction as act of restorative justice. If you haven’t read any George Mackay Brown, Polygon Books have issued a Selected Stories that would add lustre to your bookshelves.

First published in A Calendar of Love by George Mackay Brown, The Hogarth Press, 1967

‘The Axe’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

“Of all the novelists in English of the last quarter-century,” writes Philip Hensher, “she has the most unarguable claim on greatness.” As a Fitzgerald completist, I can’t disagree. It can be hard to convey to anyone who hasn’t read her quite how she achieves this greatness. She can write about desperate things – power and powerlessness, cruelty and betrayal – with a lightness of touch and a deftness of exposition that prove oddly exhilarating. There’s a luminous sense of a hinterland to her people and their behaviour, such that even peripheral characters, in the instant that they claim our attention, wholly convince us of their quiddity. Penelope Fitzgerald wrote few short stories: her one collection, The Means of Escape, was published posthumously. I’ve selected ‘The Axe’ for the simple reason that it’s one of the few ghost stories to have given me a frisson since I fell for the genre as a teenager. (Fitzgerald was good at ghosts: see the M. R. James pastiche in her novel The Gate of Angels and an alarming poltergeist in The Bookshop.) Part of the effectiveness of ‘The Axe’ lies in its dingy, everyday setting. It has psychological and emotional truth. It’s one of the most memorable iterations of her recurrent theme, as defined by her biographer Hermione Lee: “the courage of those who are born defeated and the weakness of the strong.” The story takes the form of a letter addressed by a junior manager to his superior concerning the professional fate of his clerical assistant, W.S. Singlebury, whose sacking he has been charged with. The context in which this letter is being composed is revealed in the final paragraph. It’s a creepy ending to a story whose long-term resonance in the imagination depends not so much on the supernatural as on our glimpse of a narrow and endurable life made intolerable by callous authority.

First published in The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories, Jonathan Cape, London, 1975. Collected in The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald, Flamingo, London, 2000

‘My Dear Palestrina’ by Bernard MacLaverty

I met Bernard MacLaverty when he was the guest of honour at a literary festival in Kikinda, Serbia, in the spring of 2011. I found him kindly and genial, without a trace of literary hauteur. Most writers, in my experience, are decent sorts; though martinets and snobs exist, generally the qualities of the person inform the qualities of the writing. Reading MacLaverty, you are in the company of a decent human who is giving of the best of himself. I have been moved by all of his novels and many of his short stories, even as I’ve taken aesthetic pleasure in his shrewd, limpid style. “His prose is invisible,” wrote one critic for The Observer, “free of tricks, as though it was your own thoughts.” ‘My Dear Palestrina’ is the story of Danny, a musically gifted boy from a working-class family who is sent to have piano lessons with Miss Schwartz, a Jewish Polish refugee living in 1950s Ulster. Miss Schwartz is one culturally peripheral character in this society; a socialist blacksmith whom Danny befriends is another. The outsider outlooks of these misfits – one living for music, the other for social justice – begin to set Danny on a path to alienation from his home culture and its assumptions. He is drawn to Miss Schwartz and her sensibility, her valiant yet failing efforts to keep despair and, later, disease from annihilating her. At the same time, the religious and political tensions that will shortly to the Troubles are bubbling under the surface. Can music and art protect us from the pain of exile, or shield us from our self-destructive urges? This is a sad and painful coming-of-age story that packs a novel’s worth of material and themes into thirty pages. MacLaverty himself adapted it for a 1980 television play – such are the riches it contains.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 1980. First published in A Time to Dance by Bernard MacLaverty, Jonathan Cape, London, 1982

‘Next Term We’ll Mash You’ by Penelope Lively

The short stories assembled in Penelope Lively’s Pack of Cards (1986) constitute, for my money, one of the strongest single author collections out there. Lively is one of those rare authors who has, over a long career, bridged the gap between literary ambition and popular appeal. This, alongside the middle-class, domestic settings of most of her fiction, has tended to put her work, in critical minds, in the company of the likes of Joanna Trollope and Rosamund Pilcher. No shade on those two, but I think this undersells Penelope Lively. At her best, she is a technically exemplary writer: I have used this short story with creative students to demonstrate perspective, withholding and revealing, and adjectival and adverbial word selection. ‘Next Term We Will Mash You’ is exactly the slice of life, moment in time variant of the short form that I described in relation to Chekhov. We are taken to a specific day, a specific place, with backstories unexposed but hinted at, as a small boy is taken by his parents to visit the boarding school to which he will be consigned in the near future. The narrative moves from one character perspective to another (the bluff and insensitive father, the mother assessing the class indicators in the headmaster’s study, evaluating him and his wife). It’s the perspective of the child that haunts the memory after reading. His partial understanding, his already half-cauterised sensibility that, we know, will be further blunted once he enters the casual cruelty of the boarding school environment. Lively delineates all this with admirable economy; her word choice is nearly faultless (just once, when the headmaster rests – this is the 1970s – his hand on the boy’s head and we are told ‘it was as though he had but to clench his fingers to crush the skull’, does she overegg the pudding). In just over four pages, Penelope Lively skewers an entire class and culture, leaving us with its latest impending victim, sitting in the car home, ‘his face haggard with anticipation’.

First published in Nothing Missing but the Samovar by Penelope Lively, William Heinemann, London, 1978. Reissued in Pack of Cards, Stories 1978-1986 by Penelope Lively, William Heineman, London, 1986

‘John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ by Angela Carter

Everyone knows, or at least has heard of, Angela Carter’s postmodernist interrogation of fairy tales and the Gothic in The Bloody Chamber. I haven’t selected from that book. My choice isn’t the best short story Carter wrote, but it remains the first of hers that I read and it was a creatively liberating experience. ‘John’s Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ revealed to me, in my early twenties, that the short story can be pretty much anything you want to make it. It can encompass all genres but it can also borrow from, or cannibalise, other forms, from the screenplay to the essay. Carter takes the plot of the Jacobean tragedy by John Ford and imagines it reconfigured as an American Western by a later John Ford, the filmmaker. The result is a taste of a cinematic project that never was… and never would have been. (What Hollywood studio would have backed a story about murderous incest?) Carter intersperses straight prose narrative with excerpts from the original play and fragments of the fictional screenplay. This collage strategy might have an alienating effect on the reader, yet I find the story, at least until its denouement, surprisingly affecting. Postmodernism can offer ways into story as well as exposing story’s artifice. Carter liked to get under the skin of popular genres, from fairy tale to American Gothic. Her imagination was fed by books and films, as ours tend to be. But her writing is never bloodless. And she proves that, contrary to the cliché, you don’t have to confine yourself, as a writer, to ‘what you know’. For what you have read, watched, or imagined, are also known, and portals to the imagination.

First published in Granta 25, Autumn 1988. Collected in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders by Angela Carter, Chatto & Windus, London, 1993, and again in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1995

‘Last Journey’ by A. L. Barker

Not to be confused with A. L. Kennedy or Pat Barker, A. L. Barker was one of those authors who can find consolation for mediocre sales in the admiration of their peers. Auberon Waugh and Rebecca West both considered her exceptional. She published eleven novels, one of which earned her a place on the 1969 Booker shortlist, yet she was also a prolific writer of short stories. Many of these engage with horror and the supernatural. Though far from callous towards her characters, she tends to view them and their motives with scepticism. In ‘Lost Journey’, her young narrator falls for the sexy sidekick of a seemingly demented and impossibly ancient woman, Gerda Charles, who claims to the cousin of Queen Elizabeth I’s favourite, Robert Dudley. Like the ‘strange stories’ of her contemporary, Robert Aickman, ‘Lost Journey’ follows a hapless protagonist drawn by erotic yearnings to the edge of disaster. But there is more overt comedy here than in Aickman, as the supernatural and the everyday converge. A.L. Barker liked to think of her shorty stories as ‘dark explosions’, and this is one of the best of them.

First published in Element of Doubt, Vintage, London, 1992. Reissued as a standalone title by Galley Beggar, Norwich, 2014

‘Sometimes You Think You Are Alone’ by Alison Moore

Sometimes you think no fiction can unnerve you. You have, after all, been in this game for some time. As a writer, as a reader, you know the ropes and the tropes. A sinister tale could really haunt you when you were a child but now the thrill is gone. Just occasionally, however, and this very rarely, a story can still crawl under your skin. Your tedious impulse to anticipate a twist, to look for the card up the author’s sleeve, is not always up to the ingenuity, or the technical skill, of a really effective writer. Alison Moore is one of these. Her stories are lean, polished – perhaps you should say whetted – and disquieting. This particular piece makes very skilful use of the second person narrative. At first, you assume that you, the reader, are being invited imaginatively into the action. This is what those choose-your-adventure books in the eighties did. (‘You meet a goblin holding a bag of gold. Do you speak to the goblin? Go to page 73. Do you cut off its head and steal the gold? Go to page 102.’) But this is not what’s going on here. Gradually, you realise that there is a narrator who is also an antagonist. As you get deeper into the intrigue, you come to understand the significance of what you have already read. Small details and episodes come into new focus. You are in terrible peril, and for some time you have had no inkling of it… The second person point-of-view is hard to sustain unless you, the writer, have a very good technical reason to use it. Alison Moore has a very good reason. Which is also a very nasty reason. You have read this story in writing workshop, and it’s quite a thrill to watch the class as the penny drops. Is it a profound work of literature? Perhaps not. Has it etched itself into your memory? Most certainly. And that is why it sits at the end of your personal anthology.

First published in The Screaming Book of Horror, Screaming Dreams Press, 2012. Collected in The Pre-War House and other stories by Alison Moore, Salt Publishing, Norwich, 2013

‘Stone Quarry’ by Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane is my favorite writer and I reread his work often. He has been called a grounded visionary who writes mystic fictions. His prose is virtuosic, with grammatically precise, beautifully constructed, yet oftentimes complex sentences that may require rereading. Merve Emre has praised the “technicity” of his writing. In discussing his work, Murnane has said, “behind a simple seeming image can lie a dense network of meaning.” He talks about a “country on the far side of fiction”, whose “setting is place after place in the invisible world”. This “invisible world”, which can be equated with our mind, contains a “richly detailed map of an immense landscape.” There are many dichotomies at play in his work: visible vs invisible; actual vs. possible; communication vs silence; presence vs absence.

These all come into play in ‘Stone Quarry’ and any attempt at unearthing the import of this story will be but a feeble effort. I can but only offer some brief glints of light as I have discerned them. It is about a most unusual writing workshop, the amusingly named Waldo school, whose avowed purpose is to communicate the seriousness of writing fiction. Participants are not allowed to talk to each other; communication is done by exchanging fiction they have written during the day. Writing is destroyed at the end of the workshop, suggesting that when we write it is primarily for ourselves. An amusing scene which should resonate with every writer is of a participant still revising his work as he is preparing to throw it in the bonfire. As in many of Murnane’s stories there is also an unapproachable, inaccessible woman.

For me, the essence of the story is about the solitary nature of reading and writing. My favorite quote about writing comes from this story. “A writer’s precious resource is the belief that he or she is the solitary witness to an inexhaustible profusion of images from which one might read all the wisdom of the world.” The narrator senses that he must approach the actual obliquely, looking inward into the solitude of the self to become a “starer into the fog” and a “mutterer of the names of islands on the wrong side of the country”. It might then be the case that words might be found where “the invisible was on the point of becoming visible”.

First published in Meanjin, 1986, and available to read here. Collected in Stream System: Collected Stories of Gerald Murnane, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018