‘The Young Girl’ by Katherine Mansfield

From Maupassant I hopped via Penguin Classics to Chekhov then Katherine Mansfield. Oh, I could fill this tiny letter with Katherine Mansfield, but I’ve picked ‘The Young Girl’ because I nearly know it by heart. The narrator, who seems to be an older man, has the care of a teenage girl thrust at him by her mother, desperate to go back to the gambling halls in what seems to be Monaco. Nothing bad happens: just a dreamlike narrative with carriages and wonderful ice creams. The girl is very angry, but the story ends on a transformative image:

“Please,” she stammered, in a warm, eager voice. “I like it. I love waiting! Really really I do! I’m always waiting – in all kinds of places.”
Her dark coat fell open, and her white throat – all her soft young body in the blue dress – was like a flower that is just emerging from its dark bud.’

First published in The Athaneum, 1920. Collected in The Garden Party (1922) Available online here

‘You Should Have Seen the Mess’ by Muriel Spark

I grew up in Edinburgh and so with Muriel Spark. I still like her short stories best: she seems to be to get bored with plots even in novellas. ‘You Should Have Seen the Mess’ was a favourite of mine at sixteen: it’s about class, the artistic life, and untidiness – things which concern me still. A girl, her Edinburgh voice clear on every page – “we did not go to the full extent”, she says of sex – and trained like Spark, as a secretary, is taken out by an artist who we recognise as rich and talented, but she rejects him because he is not tidy enough for her. I always worried why the artist liked the tidy stupid girl though: I felt it didn’t bode well for me. (I was right.)

First published 1958. Collected in The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories and the Collected Short Stories (Canongate, 2011)

‘Livvie’ by Eudora Welty

Critical consciousness is a terrible thing for book love, and so are weekly essays. I didn’t adore many books at university but I did discover the Southern Gothics: Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty, my favourite of all because of that sensual, dream-like quality I am always looking for. I ate up all her stories, and realise that I actually internalised and re-wrote ‘Livvie’, which is the story of a young girl married to an older man who leaves him on his death-bed for her lover, in my novel Meeting the English. Welty manages to make not only Livvie but her husband and lover entirely sympathetic: like Idyll,it’s a story about the life force almost more than sex.

First published 1942. Collected in Thirteen Stories (Harcourt Brace, 1977)

‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid

Becoming a teacher did much to refresh my love of reading: it lets you go over and over small bits of text and share them too. I came across Jamaica Kincaid as a writer of teenagers, but actually she has a wide range and a startling biography.‘Girl’ is a very short story entirely in the imperative about the duties of a young girl in the Caribbean – another story about women, and cleaning. The voice, shape and details are all spot on: I love to teach this; it’s the definition of a rich text.

First published in The New Yorker, June 1978 and collected in At the Bottom of the River (FSG, 1983)

‘Love of Fat Men’ by Helen Dunmore

It took me a long time to start to think I could write myself, and even longer after I started to write poems to dare to break into prose. Helen Dunmore showed me you could do both. ‘The Love of Fat Men’ is one of her ‘Ulli’ stories: about a cool, but emotionally honest Finnish girl. I’ve spent a lot of time in Finland too and recognise the cold grey landscape and Ulli’s trenchant, open character. Helen Dunmore gave me my first good review and was unfailingly generous to me and many others throughout her career. She died recently and I miss her

From Love of Fat Men (Penguin, 1997)

‘The Devastating Boys’ by Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor was on my bedside table in the hospital when I gave birth to my first child. ‘The Devastating Boys’ is about a childless woman in a prim English village fosters who fosters two rough little boys from London just after the war. Nothing dramatic happens: it’s just a devastatingly real portrayal of what love is like, and how it will run its own roads through your life – a bit like ‘Livvie’ I suppose.

First published in McCalls, 1966 and collected in The Devastating Boys (1972) and the Virago Complete Short Stories, 2012

‘Friends’ by Grace Paley

Grace Paley’s stories should be in the birthing pack for new mothers, along with the muslins and nappy wrap. No one else is as a good at the way women talk to each other, especially in the mothering-places like the playground and the park. Her women are difficult, funny, fantastically diverse, frank and above all resilient, making the best of some hilariously bad jobs. The talk seems to go on through the stories, one to the next, in a never-ending stream, but I’ve picked ‘Friends’ because its ending – “I was right to invent for my friends and our children a report on these private deaths and the condition of our lifelong attachments” – has become a sentence that lives in my head, like Harriet’s eating or Mansfield’s budding girl.

First published in The New Yorker, June 1979. Collected in Later the Same Day (1985) and the Collected Stories (FSG, 1994/Virago Modern Classics, 2018)

‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’ by Lorrie Moore

I was late to the Lorrie Moore party, but I made up for it by discovering her just when my favourite collection, Birds of America, was published, and then consuming every word she has published since, fiction or not – in fact her lively intersection is one of the best things about her work. The story ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’ affected me profoundly: I read it over and over for weeks. It’s about a mother whose child develops a childhood cancer, and their experiences in the hospital. Her observation, her acuity, her humour, and above all her honesty and her confidence that these sort of experiences could make a story were liberating for me: a few years later, I drew directly on this story for an early one of my own, ‘The Not Dead and the Saved’.

First published in The New Yorker, January 1997 and collected in Birds of America (Knopf/Faber, 1998) and the Collected Short Stories (Knopf, Faber, 2008)

‘Here’s to Love’ by Anne Enright

I would like to be Anne Enright when I grow up, but I fear I may have missed my window. I love her sentences and perspicacity. I think she’s a short form artist really – her novels fall into segments, like oranges, and her essays are marvellous. ‘Here’s to Love’encapsulates many of the things I love best: the sharp dialogue, the unaffected, apparently artless structure, the gripping characters, the wit, and that pragmatic optimism which is also in the non-fiction.

“I still walk down the street most evenings. And every time I do this, I think about a bullet in the back – about the fact that most of the time, it does not happen to me,” says the protagonist: another mantra for me.

First published in The Guardian, December 2007 and collected in Taking Pictures (Jonathan Cape, 2008)

‘Evie’ by Sarah Hall

Reviewing can also be the opposite of absorption. Sarah Hall’s Madame Zero, though, knocked me right out of my critical pulpit. In fact it winded me: it took me a week or so to frame any thoughts at all. All the stories were great but I envied ‘Evie’ especially. It’s about sex and threesome, ostensibly “She always invited the other back in. He wanted to watch from the chair; he watched her being. touched, grasped, opened, watched her responding. He began to understand: jealously was only desire; it was wanting to do what he could see was being done to his wife.” But in fact it is about marriage, and death and illness and madness. I read it over and over: I hope to do as well one day.

First published in The Sunday Times, July 2013 and collected in Madame Zero (Faber, 2017)

‘What I Did on my Summer Holidays’ by Paul McVeigh

Paul McVeigh’s novel The Good Son (2015) conveyed to me more of the atmosphere of the Troubles in Northern Ireland than any number of factual accounts. Its hero, young Mickey Donnelly, was introduced to readers some fifteen years earlier in this short story. Mickey’s voice and his feistiness are there, loud and clear, and McVeigh is already showing his ability to navigate the geography of both the Ardoyne and the human heart with great precision. Remarkably, he says this was his first attempt at prose, never mind a short story!

First published in the anthology New Century, New Writing, ed by P-P Hartnett, Millivres Press, 2000, and available to read online here. Chosen by Cath Barton: read Cath’s Personal Anthology here

‘An Encounter’ by James Joyce

The summer holidays were near at hand when I made up my mind to break out of the weariness of school life for one day at least.

The narrator is either a precociously literate schoolboy or an older man recalling an earlier time – it’s hard to tell. He describes “a day’s miching” with another boy, Mahoney, in which the pair bunk off together, walking along the quays, eating currant buns and enjoying “the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce”. They cross the Liffey by ferryboat and head for The Pigeon House (with it implications of flight), roaming around the impoverished backstreets of Ringsend.As the day grows sultry they feast on biscuits and chocolate and bottles of raspberry lemonade. Too tired to reach their destination they rest in a field where they are approached by an old man “shabbily dressed in a suit of greenish-black”, a Beckettian tramp-like figure with a good accent who embarks on a series of unsettling monologues, first and innocuously about literature, then about “girls”.

He gave me the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by heart or that, magnetized by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit.

Like a priest reciting the liturgy? After this eerie monologue he retreats to the end of the field. The narrator does not see what happens next, but his companion Mahoney does:

“I say! Look what he’s doing!”
As I neither answered nor raised my eyes, Mahony exclaimed again:
“I say . . . He’s a queer old josser!”

Most readers will assume the old man is masturbating, as Bloom does on Sandymount Strand in Ulysses, although on first reading the story I assumed he was either urinating or defecating. Surely, I thought, if he’d actually been wanking the boys would have fled, perhaps hurling insults and rocks. It’s left to the reader to imagine the scene. Perhaps he’s praying.(In his version of the real-life encounter, Joyce’s brother Stanislaus calls the man a ‘juggins’ (a simple-minded or gullible person, a simpleton; the equivalent American term might be ‘doofus). Many years ago an English professor told me that ‘josser’ was once a slang term for God, which raises not a few questions. It’s a claim I’ve never been able to verify but am happy to pass on for your consideration. If the episode offers any epiphany, or sudden spiritual illumination, it is a particularly downbeat one.)

Fourteen other short stories make up Dubliners – the greatest of all short story collections, each exploring themes of loss, inertia, indecision and flight. They were published when the author was still in his early twenties. You could read one a day for two weeks.

From Dubliners, first published 1914. Read it online here. Chosen by David Collard: read David’s Personal Anthology here

‘Kid Sister’ by Yūko Tsushima, translated by Gitte Marianne Hansen

This story begins in medias res, as if, like Pegman on Google’s Street View, the reader is dragged and dropped into the narrative on a sizzling Japanese beach, “…and so my timing was thrown off. And so a space opened in my emotions.” These are the summers we all can’t quite remember – the summer of our burgeoning sexuality, of our changing bodies in our brand-new swimsuits, of our crushing crushes and fizzing desires, of being stung by jellyfish, burned by the sun and scorched by first love.

Yūko Tsushima (1947-2016) was the daughter of the extraordinary Japanese novelist Osamu Dazai (check out his No Longer Human in all its Japanese existential autobiographical angst). Her father had left the family home to live with his mistress and, just after Yūko’s first birthday, he and his lover had committed suicide by drowning themselves in the Tamagawa Aqueduct. There is a lot of water in Tsushima’s work, a lot of death, a lot of missing fathers, and her fiction concentrates on abandoned woman fighting their way in a misogynist society, a feminist viewpoint against a male-dominated society.

The story has similarities to Yukio Mishima’s ‘Death in Midsummer’, which also concerns sunburns, sandcastles, the sea, death, fathers and also has a character called Keiko. Tsushima’s work is sparse and incandescent, dreamlike while dealing with real problems. For further reading, go to Territory of Light and Child of Fortune, both Penguin Modern Classics. Another of her summer stories I could have chosen – ‘The Watery Realm’ – is in the pocket-sized Penguin Modern series along with ‘Of Dogs and Walls’.

First published in the short story collection Watashi (I), 1999. Its only English translation is online at Words Without Borders. Chosen by Steve Finbow. Read Steve’s Personal Anthology here

‘The Colossus of Rhodes’ by Chris Power

There is more than one summer-themed story in Chris Power’s sparkling debut collection. I could just have easily picked ‘Innsbruck’, the second of the three linked stories about a woman called Eva that give the book not just its spine but also its central nervous system – but I’ve gone for ‘The Colossus of Rhodes’. Power splits the story between a recent family holiday (his unnamed narrator is married, with two young children) and a long-distant one, when he was ten years old. There are delicately sketched pen-portraits of the various family members, and a couple of luminous ‘spots-of-time’ moments that suck the story into them like a whirlpool*, but what I really love is the elegant way it unpacks itself at the end, making this the perfect story for our autofictional times. It doesn’t matter how closely Power’s ‘real’ life and experiences might happen to align themselves with his narrator’s fictional ones; what matters is how deftly he teases away at that border, and the conundrum it poses, which is where we seem to be looking, most often and most closely, for our meaning in literature just now.

* One of these moments, serendipitously enough, makes direct reference to another story picked in this summer special. You’ll have to read it to find out which.

In Mothers, Faber, 2018. Chosen by Jonathan Gibbs. Read Jonathan’s Personal Anthology here