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.
A Personal Anthology of Debuts
In a slight departure from tradition, Jonathan has allowed me to submit a selection of short stories that mark their author’s first appearance in print, presented (more or less) in chronological order. This may be of interest to those who, like me, have a predisposition to completeness, at least when it comes to the work of the writers we most admire. I wanted to include Jonathan himself, whose inclusion in A Personal Anthology is long overdue. Alas his fiction debut ‘Nightswimming’, which appeared in All-Nighter (published by Pulp Fiction), is unavailable to read unless he digs it up for us. So over to you, Jonathan. But there are two outstanding novels: Randall, or the Painted Grape (Galley Beggar Press, 2014) and The Large Door (Boiler House Press, 2019), and the epic pandemic poem Spring Journal (CB editions, 2020). Read them all.
My selection below is highly subjective because this is a personal anthology. But I could quite easily do another list, featuring a dozen other writers making their debut. Perhaps somebody else would take up the baton?
‘The Sisters’ by James Joyce
The Irish Homestead was the weekly publication of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), a co-operative run for the benefit of farmers. Its enterprising editor George William Russell invited an unknown young writer to contribute a short story which the author, then aged 22, duly did. ‘The Sisters,’ James Joyce’s first published work of fiction, appeared on 13th August 1904 and began thus:
“Three nights in succession I had found myself in Great Britain-street at that hour, as if by Providence. Three nights also I had raised my eyes to that lighted square of window and speculated. I seemed to understand that it would occur at night. But in spite of the Providence that had led my feet, and in spite of the reverent curiosity of my eyes, I had discovered nothing. Each night the square was lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. It was not the light of candles, so far as I could see. Therefore, it had not yet occurred.”
You can read the rest of this 1904 version here.
A revised version of ‘The Sisters’ would later feature as the opening story in Dubliners(1914) and it’s a great improvement over the original. It explicitly introduces the theme of paralysis that permeates the entire collection; the political, religious, social and moral stagnation of Ireland’s ‘priest-ridden, god-forsaken race.’ Here’s the revised opening:
“There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: “I am not long for this world,” and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis.”
You can read this later, final version, here. The two drafts reveal the startling development of Joyce’s precocious genius.
First published in The Irish Homestead, 13 August 1904, and collected in Dubliners, Grant Richards Ltd., 1914)
‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ by D. H. Lawrence
Ford Madox Ford, editor of the English Review, picked this manuscript from the slush pile late one afternoon and, after reading the first page, told his secretary ‘We’ve found our new genius.’
Many years later Ford, recalling that moment, subjected Lawrence’s opening paragraph to a very close reading, one which serves equally to confirm Lawrence’s genius as a writer and Ford’s as a reader and editor. All writers need readers like Ford; some deserve them. Everyone with skin in the game should read Ford’s compelling account.
Four different versions of Lawrence’s text appear in the University of Nottingham’s online archive. Best of all is Lawrence’s marked-up proof copy, viewable here.
I repeat: everyone with skin in the game should read Ford’s analysis of what it was that snagged his interest in the Lawrence manuscript. And that includes readers, of course. Because Ford only had to read the first page to be secure in his conviction that Lawrence was, or would become, a great writer.
First published in The English Review, July 1911, and collected in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, Duckworth, 1914, and widely anthologised since
‘Sense of Humour’ by V. S. Pritchett
Pritchett started out as a journalist and travel writer for The Christian Scientist Monitor, his first stories appearing in the early 1920s in London-based literary periodicals such as the New Statesman, which published his ‘Rain in the Sierra’ in 1923. He would continue writing for that magazine for the next fifty years.
In 1927 his marriage failed, he was fired by the Monitor and he decided to walk across Spain, a journey which led to his first published non-fiction book, Marching Spain (1928) and his debut collection The Spanish Virgins and Other Stories (1930). He would become and remain a prolific writer, publishing novels, travel literature, essays, journalism and many more short stories. Pritchett identified ‘Sense of Humour’ (featured in his 1938 collection You Make Your Own Life) as the one that established his signature style. You can read it online here. As there’s no definitive bibliography it’s impossible to confirm what his first story to appear in print was. His long life (he died in 1997 aged 96) meant that he spent decades as a literary elder statesman at a time when such a role seemed increasingly outmoded. But the stories remain fresh and vital. The aforementioned archive also features what is for my money his best short story, ‘The Sailor.’ It’s been frequently anthologised and bears repeat readings because this, one feels, is How It’s Done.
First published in You Make Your Own Life, Chatto & Windus, 1938
‘Assumption’ by Samuel Beckett
Beckett’s first short story was published in issue 16-17 of Eugene Jolas’s magazine transition in June 1929. He was in good company — the same issue featured a section of James Joyce’s ‘Work in progress’ (later to be published as Finnegans Wake in 1939). The title of Beckett’s story refers to The Feast of the Assumption (15th August) which celebrates the entry of the Virgin Mary into heaven.
Usually described or dismissed as an apprentice work, or juvenilia (the author was 22), it may be (as some critics have claimed) that this short fiction is a parody of the Künstlerroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, something intended to amuse Beckett’s literary mentor. Another reading is that Beckett is debunking the myth of the artist as incarnated in Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, which he does by degrading the aesthetic priorities of his protagonist, who experiences romantic agony but in a form that may be no more than post-coital depression. It’s a fascinating debut, with many Beckettian tropes already in place.
First published in transition, June 1929 and collected in Samuel Beckett: the Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, Grove Press, 1995
‘A Bit of a Smash in Madras’ by Julian Maclaren-Ross
When Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon magazine first read this story in 1940 he was struck by the opening sentence: “Absolute fact, I knew fuck all about it.” This would appear in print as the milder profanity ‘damn all.’ (Issue 6, June 1940) Connolly, impressed by the authentic tone and detail of the story assumed that that the author had spent time in India and was astonished to discover on meeting him that this wasn’t the case. Maclaren-Ross was a threadbare bohemian, barely keeping afloat in a world of booze, bailiffs and benzedrine… He was also among the very best writers of the 1940s, much admired by better-known contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. When the latter praised him as ‘a writer’s writer’ Maclaren-Ross gloomily responded: “No. I’m a writer’s writer’s writer.”
In this debut story Adams, an army officer back in Britain after serving in colonial India, describes his involvement in a hit-and-run accident and the ensuing red tape, bribery, obfuscation and trial. His first-person narrative — gruff, entitled, rather stupid but supremely confident — is utterly convincing, and an impressive act of mimesis. Adams is wholly oblivious to the consequences of his actions and entirely callous in his complete lack of remorse. His breezy account offers an unwittingly ferocious critique of colonial rule and a powerful indictment of injustice.
First published in Horizon, June 1940, and collected in Better Than a Kick in the Pants; Short Stories by J. Maclaren Ross, Lawson & Dunn, 1945, and in Memoirs of the Forties, Cardinal, 1991, which is warmly recommended
‘The Geranium’ by Flannery O’Connor
O’Connor wrote two fine novels: Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). Her 31 short stories were collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965). Her first story to appear in print was published in Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature. ‘The Geranium’ (1946) is one of six stories gathered in her 1947 master’s thesis The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories, and it later appeared in the posthumous anthology The Complete Stories (1971).
In ‘The Geranium’ an elderly white Southerner moves to New York City, where he is surprised to find that the local blacks treat him as their social equal, a loss (form his perspective) of social status that prompts and increasing sense of his own inferiority and powerlessness. O’Connor reworked the story several times over the years and in 1993 four versions of the story were published together in Flannery O’Connor: The Growing Craft. These were ‘The Geranium’, ‘An Exile in the East’ (1954), ‘Getting Home’ (1964), and ‘Judgement Day,’ which was the last thing she ever wrote and the only one she approved for publication in her lifetime.
First published in Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature, 1946, and available to read online here; collected in The Complete Stories, 1971
‘Marina’ by M. John Harrison
“With the discovery of God on the far side of the Moon, and the subsequent gigantic and hazardous towing operation that brought Him back to start His reign anew, there began on Earth, as one might assume, a period of far-reaching change.”
That’s the opening sentence of the first short story in the anthology Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020 (published by Comma Press in 2020), and it shares its title with the collection. Published in 1970 it’s not the earliest of Harrison’s fictions, and in many ways untypical, but is a favourite of mine partly on account of its majestic premise: in the wake of God’s new reign on Earth a civil servant named Oxlade travels from London to investigate the sudden appearance of a twenty-lane freeway that emerges from the Thames estuary in Southend-on-Sea (the town where I grew up) and runs inland to the Midlands, its purpose uncertain. Deserted by day, there is intense movement after dark, with enormous driverless trucks transporting elements of colossal statuary to serve some unknowable Divine purpose. The story becomes ‘a complicated business, with a solution perhaps more metaphysical than actual.’
But Harrison’s first published story was not ‘Settling the World.’ That distinction goes to ‘Marina,’ which had appeared four years earlier in the magazine Science Fantasy(issue 81, February 1966). This was published under the pen name ‘John Harrison’ and has, alas, proved elusive. It doesn’t appear to have been anthologised. Can anyone share a copy? [Ed.: Former Personal Anthologist Ray Davies shared this link to read Harrison’s ‘Marina’ online.]
Harrison’s first novel, The Committed Men, would appear in 1971. Many novels and short story collections have followed and his latest novel, The End of Everything, was published recently to huge acclaim and is currently shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is (I think) as good as anything he has written in a long career.
First published in Science Fantasy issue 81, February 1966
‘The Sylvan Life’ by Jonathan Meades
Meades has featured only once in A Personal Anthology, and it’s for this story, chosen by his long-time publisher John Mitchinson.
Meades has parallel careers as a journalist, essayist, critic, broadcaster and novelist, which may explain why his short stories, once widely acclaimed, are now overlooked and undervalued. ‘The Sylvan Life’ first appeared in the genteel pages of Harpers & Queen in November 1982 and later in his debut collection Filthy English (Jonathan Cape, 1984), published when Meades was employed as Features Editor at Tatler. As well as four hefty collections of his non-fiction writings, two novels would follow: Pompey(1993) and The Fowler Family Business (2002), both (to my mind) overwrought and overlong. As a fiction writer he’s at his best in small doses.
Filthy English made quite a stir at the time. Seven short stories, all as dark and transgressive and as disturbing as anything by Ian McEwan. ‘The Sylvan Life’ was set in the 1950s and is an account of impoverished rural life and incest in the New Forest. It opens thus:
“A chicken that is killed by being swung round and round by the neck will evacuate itself and so leave a thin cloacal trail all across the walls and the ceiling (the colour of a diseased lung) and across the bursting sofa and the happy family gewgaws and the nicotine brown photo of the Saints and the pin-up photo of the girl in the peanut adverts (dead now – tuinoll and gin) and the poker-work antimacassar stapled to the door and across the matted slab of carpet and the ragged hairy moist rug pile where the cats slept and the meat- encrusted plates they ate off and the mallets and the axes and the right across the mirror whose lost silvering already gave it the look of a slide constellated with gonococci.”
The matchless squalor, precisely and almost lovingly catalogued, culminates in the show-off flourish of “constellated with gonococci,” the young Meades flexing his literary muscles. Things get really nasty after that because the author, like Dickens’s Fat Boy, ‘wants to make your flesh creep.’ This he does, gleefully and repeatedly.
First published in Harpers & Queen, November 1982, and collected in Filthy English, Jonathan Cape, 1984
‘The Auctioneer’ by David Hayden
First published in The Yellow Nib: The Literary Journal of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, (Volume 5, November 2009). The same story, slightly altered, appears in Hayden’s outstanding debut collection Darker with the Lights On (Little Island Press, 2017). Few books have carried heftier recommendations, with cover endorsements by Eimear McBride, Kevin Barry, Sinéad Gleeson and, er… myself. ‘The Auctioneer’ is narrated with measured formality by a man at a turning-point in his life. It has (like many of Hayden’s short fictions) a haunting, universal quality. Kafka, of course, comes to mind:
“When my wife departed I moved to this bungalow, which is very comfortable in a modest way. I prefer modesty now that humility has been forced upon me. The auctioneer arranged for a cash advance on the balance of those belongings that Ellen did not take with her and with which I no longer wanted to live. He believed that he would achieve a better price for the paintings and furniture at the twice-yearly metropolitan auction; and so it turned out.”
First published in The Yellow Nib: The Literary Journal of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Volume 5, November 2009 and collected in Darker with the Lights On, Little Island Press, 2017
‘Still Turning Slowly’ by Sara Baume
Now an established Irish writer of both fiction and non-fiction, Baume is also an artist. Her breakthrough as an author came with the short story ‘Solesearcher1’ which was awarded the Davy Byrne Prize in 2014. But before that she had published a handful of short stories in The Stinging Fly, the first of which appeared in the winter 2010/2011 issue. ‘Still Turning Slowly’ opens thus:
“Once it was a butchers shop with bloody aprons on the coat hooks and a queue of smartened housewives out the doors and down the main street, queuing for their turkeys at Christmastime. But the old signboard is long gone now, along with the slicers and cleavers and ratchets, the smell of slopped guts and marinated chops. And Tabitha Byrne can never be sure, when she puts the key in the switch and jerks it to twelve o’clock, whether the shutter will open or not. It is rusted raw and paintless – frayed in the middle like an overwalked step. The objects displayed inside the shop front judder to its rhythm and it groans like a thing possessed as it climbs. The fact that it has never once faltered in two- and-more decades does nothing to reassure Tabitha. She knows only that, one day, it will.”
What follows is a precisely observed, gently-paced description of failure and a miserable marriage. The rains fall constantly, torrentially, and there is a threat of flooding (a subject Baume would later revisit). In a nearby funfair an empty ferris wheel rotates slowly above the rooftops, while in the failing pet shop she manages for her awful husband, hamsters scamper feverishly towards Syria, turning their own little wheels, getting nowhere. Tabitha, the wife, keeps a small wad of emergency banknotes in an urn containing her mother’s ashes. A sense of inertia, of lives stalled, recalls the social paralysis of Joyce’s Dubliners.
First published in The Stinging Fly, Issue 11, Vol 2, 2010, and available for subscribers to read here
‘Czech Mate’ by Drew Gummerson
In 1999, returning to Britain from a. Trip to Australia, Drew bought the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook which confirmed that Women’s Weekly paid for stories. He wrote ‘Czech Mate’ and posted it on spec to the magazine. They accepted it and promptly sent a cheque for £100. A hundred quid in 1999 went a long way – it’s equivalent to around £230 today, which doesn’t go nearly as far. Drew doesn’t have a copy of the magazine of the story. But it’s sobering to think that it used to be this easy for a first-time author to get into print. As I write this I learn that the popular and hugely profitable UK magazine Take a Break is about to generate all its published fiction by using AI.
Drew tells me his very first short story in print was in his school magazine in around 1986. He wrote a series of crime stories called ‘Tod Towski Investigates’ which carried on into sixth form college. He resurrected Towski earlier this year, 40 years after his first appearance, in a flash fiction piece for Pistol Jim Press called ‘Zoran’s Flea Circus.’ You can read it here.
‘To All Their Dues’ by Wendy Erskine
This, Wendy’s first short story, appeared in the May 2016 issue of The Stinging Fly and would later feature in her debut collection Sweet Home (2018). Her second collection Dance Moves (2022) supports a claim that she has done for contemporary Belfast what Joyce did for Dublin a century earlier. I thought long and hard about sharing a representative paragraph from one of the stories but couldn’t bring myself to dismember (as it were) such perfectly-crafted prose. If you know Wendy’s work you’ll understand; if you don’t you have a revelation in store.
Her debut novel The Benefactors (2025), among the very best novels of the year, met with popular and critical acclaim. Will there be more short stories? Let’s all hope so.
First published in The Stinging Fly, Issue 34, Vol 2, 2016, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Sweet Home, Stinging Fly/Picador, 2018
‘Theme of the Traitor and Hero’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley
A story about reputation, the relations between truth and spectacle and the prison space of the ideal reader, story and telling are both so daring you gasp with delight. Borges is convinced that a short story can be absolutely anything he wants it to be – and why not. The tale concerns the dramatic assassination of a much-loved national independence hero, or rather the unravelling of what ‘really’ happened by the hero’s great grandson who is compiling his biography. The idea that stories should be, if not exactly original, then at least different from other stories, is demolished:
“The action transpires in some oppressed and stubborn country: Poland, Ireland, the Republic of Venice, some state in South America or the Balkans … Has transpired, we should say, for although the narrator is contemporary, the narrative related by him occurred towards the middle or beginning of the nineteenth century. Let us say, for purposes of narration, that it was in Ireland, in 1824. The narrator is named Ryan …’
This is not only a story that could happen in many times and places and has. It also bears uncanny resemblances to famous historical events and literary texts, as Ryan discovers. These likenesses both ground the story as the tale of a ‘true’ hero, and suggest complex, near-unbelievable duplicity.
First published in Spanish in Sur in February 1944. First published in English in Fictions, Jupiter Books, 1965, translated by Anthony Kerrigan. Also available, translated by Andrew Hurley, in Collected Fictions, Penguin, 1999
