Introduction

Twelve stories. Only twelve? At first I wondered whether it would be possible to limit myself to twelve, but as it turns out stories are such recursive things that almost every time I started writing about one in particular, it led me to another, and instead of suppressing that urge I embraced it. Each story, after all, contains an anthology of its own, consisting of all the stories that influenced it and all the stories it has gone on to influence in turn. If all those links were to be explored twelve stories wouldn’t be too few at all. In fact it would be too many.

But still, it’s hard to pick twelve. With all the material available to us, as long as we keep on reading then any list of favourites has the potential to change. To reflect that, I’ve decided to divide this list in two: six stories I’ve been reading for a long time, and six I have discovered in the last two years. I hope you enjoy them.