‘Julia K’ by May-Lan Tan

The dark sexy glitter of May-Lan Tan’s writing blew me away when I first read this debut collection. Like Angela Carter, she’s excellent on atmospheric surface detail and, by that, I don’t mean she’s shallow; surface detail is what grounds a story. It was hard to choose my favourite from this collection as they work as a whole, but ‘Julia K’, about a mysterious alluring woman who lives upstairs from the narrator, is full of Tan’s characteristic hard-edged, occasionally hallucinatory imagery: “Kissing Julia was like kissing language. Her tongue was a flame, licking phoneme and diphthong. She swallowed me like a sword and her eyes were doves, her mouth a lake of fire.”

(from Things To Make and Break, CB Editions, 2014)

‘Future Digital’ by Anna Maconochie

Like May-Lan Tan’s collection, this debut was one of my favourite books of recent years. Maconochie’s writing is cool, pristine and observant, with surreal flashes. I totally identified with the narrator in ‘Future Digital’, who works in admin in a big corporation, while trying to pursue her writing ambitions on the side. It took back to me the angst of my late twenties and early thirties – internet dating, trying to find time to write, fearing that nothing is ever going to work out and envying colleagues who aren’t flaying themselves with creative dreams: ‘Oh, to be Sue and not have a creative care in the world. To chat about a million nothings, and not have a melancholy that flares up at will like eczema, unresponsive to any help.’

(from Only the Visible Can Vanish, Cultured Llama, 2016)

‘Notes on a Love Story’ by Philip Langeskov

The bulk of this incredibly clever and satisfyingly circular short story is written in footnotes, some of which are true and some of which are fiction. It’s a story within a story about another story, which also references other stories. It’s about art versus love/life, the nature of stories, and also about how the narrator, who is a writer, foretells how his relationship with his girlfriend will end right at the moment he meets her. He writes it down in a story entitled ‘How It Will End’, which, ironically, causes the end of his relationship when his girlfriend reads it. According to one of the footnotes, “In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes proposes that falling in love involves telling ourselves stories about falling in love…All stories are love stories…”. The final footnote ends with these words disappearing into nothingness: “Unlike love, the story never ends. It never ends. It never ends. It never ends. It never ends. It never ends. It never ends. It never ends.”

(from The Best British Short Stories 2011, edited by Nicholas Royle, Salt, 2011. First published in Five Dials Issue No. 9)

‘Monte Verità’ by Daphne du Maurier

A newly-wed couple go on a mountaineering holiday in a remote region of an unnamed European country. They are warned by the locals not to climb Monte Verità as the wife will be inextricably drawn into the mysterious monastery at the summit of the mountain. Many of the young women of the village have been lost to the monastery, never to be seen again. Of course, the wife, who already has the strange light of the ‘called’ in her eyes, disappears in the middle of the night, before her husband can stop her. This story is reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock, one of my favourite films, and is equally creepy and memorable.

(from The Birds and Other Stories)

‘Lavin’ by John McGahern

Lavin, an elderly blacksmith, ‘close to the poorhouse’, in a rural Irish backwater, where most of McGahern’s brilliant stories are set, is the local paedophile. He is taunted by the village kids, who are both frightened and fascinated by him. What’s most clever and disturbing about this story is that McGahern makes you sympathise with Lavin, who was once young and handsome but who had ‘taken no interest in girls though he could have had his pick’. You sympathise with a life wasted in hard work; as the narrator remembers ‘…hardly a day passes but a picture of Lavin comes to trouble me: it is of him when he was young, and, they said, handsome, gathering the scattered tools at nightfall in a clean wheatfield after the others had gone drinking or to change for the dances’.

(from The Collected Stories, Faber, 1992)

‘Spring in Fialta’ by Vladimir Nabokov

A beautifully constructed story about memory and loss, full of sensory detail and luxurious imagery. While on holiday in a fictional Mediterranean resort, the narrator, Victor, an exiled Russian, bumps into Nina, a fellow exile, for whom he has carried a torch since they first met at a party in 1917, just before fleeing their homeland. They first kiss in the snow: “Windows light up and stretch their luminous lengths upon the dark billowy snow…I was already kissing her neck, smooth and quite fiery hot from the long fox fur of her coat collar…”. She has flitted through his life ever since but, despite a mutual attraction, they have never quite connected. The tragic ending comes as a shock, although you suddenly realise that it has been foreshadowed throughout with clever little clues.

(from Nabokov’s Dozen, Penguin, 1958, or it can be read here)

‘My Wife is a White Russian’ by Rose Tremain

A perfectly plotted short story, which reaches far beyond its seven pages. The narrator is a boorish, elderly, extremely wealthy man, who has made his fortune from mining precious metals: ‘I’m a financier. I have financial assets world-wide. I’m in nickel and pig-iron and gold and diamonds. I like the sound of all these words…The glitter of saying them sometimes gives me an erection’. These little shocks are all the more powerful for being buried within the elegance of Tremain’s prose. The narrator’s gold-digging wife is a former prostitute of White Russian ancestry. The pair are entertaining one of the narrator’s employees and his wife in an expensive restaurant. We gradually realise the narrator has been severely disabled by a stroke and cannot talk or feed himself. The wife doesn’t help him to eat. The contrast between the younger couple, who are deeply in love, and the older couple, whose marriage has always been a coldly transactional arrangement, is stark. Even before the narrator’s stroke, he could not communicate with his wife and, now, he literally can’t speak to her. The story ends ambiguously with a stylish echo of the opening: ‘Why did she never love me? In my dreams, too, the answer comes from deep underground: it’s the hardness of my words’.

(First published in Granta Best of Young British Novelists, 1983, and collected in from The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories, ed. Malcolm Bradbury, 1988. Granta subscribers can read it online here)

Chapter 27 from The Devil’s Larder by Jim Crace

The Devil’s Larder is a collection of 64 stories about food. It’s billed as a ‘cumulative novel’ but in fact each story stands alone. Chapter 27 stands out, partly because of its arresting opening: ‘I am a pimp of sorts. I have a team of girls’. The narrator goes on to explain that he runs a seafood restaurant and the girls, who are still at school, gather razor clams for him at low tide. They describe the process of gathering clams as ‘prick-teasing’ because they pour salt into the clam’s burrow to encourage the clam’s pink, fleshy penis-like siphon to appear. The narrator is voyeuristic; he watches the girls through binoculars from the terrace of his restaurant. He also watches their alluring teacher, who one day goes out with the girls to experiment whether the clams will pop up for culinary items other than salt; vinegar, cinnamon, soda pop and so on. Through his binoculars, he sees her squatting to pee on the sand, and the clams ‘springing up between her legs’. Later he cooks her piss-soaked clams: “She liked the satisfying chewiness and swore she could detect the jam, the cinnamon, the pop, and many things besides”. Like ‘My Wife is a White Russian’ and ‘Lavin’ this story straddles a disturbing line between elegance and disgust. I like its uneasy quality.

(Viking, 2001)

‘To Feed the Night’ by Philip Hensher

Another story with, like much of Hensher’s work, an intriguingly uneasy atmosphere. This fable about property and greed in the 1980s is full of strange cool gems of expression: “Inside, there was one man, at an empty desk, running a pen along his lips like a harmonica, and watching”; “golden light, electric with dust”, “The colour of the house became paler as he went upwards, like blood draining from the head…”. Hensher excels at defamiliarization, so even the most ordinary things are seen anew: an estate agency is described as looking as if “it sold…nothing but photographs”, a pistol is “needle-neat”, uneaten food on a plate is “the brown and sordid ends”.

(from The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife, Vintage, 2000, or it can be read here if you have a subscription to Granta)

‘The Dead’ by James Joyce

Saying that this story is your favourite ever is a bit like saying the Mona Lisa is your favourite painting or Chanel No. 5 your favourite perfume, but who cares. The final story in my collection, Smoked Meat, is a homage to ‘The Dead’. The last lines are, for me, the most beautiful ever written in literature: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead”.

From Dubliners (first published 1914; it can be read here)

Introduction

Short Story Land wouldn’t be a nice place to live: tragedies abound, trauma and misery are rife, everybody’s lonely and the body count is high. Happy marriages do not exist; neither do happy endings. A few years ago, I realised I was drawn to stories that manage to transcend these wretched parameters; stories that offer some sort of redemptive moment, that keep characters alive and offer second chances. I’m interested in moments of connection and compassion – difficult to do well without being saccharine or disingenuous. But as Flannery O’Connor states: “There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored”.

These selected stories are hymns to the persistence of life, from Levi’s uplifting memoir sketches to Ruth’s acknowledgement in ‘Romantic’ that “One thing in my favour is I am alive”. This has become more important to me than ever over the last few years, when I have begun to read for therapy as much as for research or pleasure. I like authors who astutely nail the subtle tectonics of relationships, both between people and the relationships with ourselves, as exemplified by Grace Paley and Lucia Berlin. The desire to be truly seen or known, to have a voice, to be loved against the odds.

These stories made me a more compassionate writer. My characters used to die all the time; they were voiceless, vulnerable, weird, and the world hated them. But now I keep people alive and let the surprise of kindness in. As Paley says, “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the destiny of open life”.T

‘Listening’ by Grace Paley

‘Oh man in the very center of your life, still fitting your skin so nicely… why have you slipped out of my sentimental and carnal grasp?’

If I could only read one short story writer it would be Paley, whose stories, rooted in the immigrant experience of life in the Bronx in the 1970s, explore (as her obituary stated) “what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow’s men loved and left behind”. Many centre on a loose alter ego, Faith Darwin; in ‘Listening’, the last story Paley wrote, Faith’s sons are growing up (“trying the find the right tune for their lives”), her marriage is going through difficulty, she is involved with writing and activism, and is debating a new baby. The story presents the range of life choices opening up to people in the ‘70s and how this was both liberating and overwhelming – decisions on when to commit suicide, how to be a father, which arty sandwich to choose. Faith watches a young man cross the road and muses about his vitality. Her friend Cassie dismisses him as just a “bourgeois on his way home”. Faith responds: “To everyday life, I said with a mild homesickness”.

Her contagious, funny, beautiful prose is organic and highly personal; Paley was suspicious of plot and craft, preoccupied instead with how to be a good person, a good woman, a good citizen. The story ends with Cassie launching into a bitter rant at Faith that seems to suggest Paley did not feel successful in this quest: “Why don’t you tell my story? Where is my life? Where the hell is my woman and woman, woman-living life in all this?” Cassie owns the last line – “I do not forgive you” – not just the final line of the story and the collection, but revealingly, the final line Paley ever wrote.

In The Collected Stories (Virago Press, 1994)

‘Romantic’ by David Constantine

“Why should you hurry even through ugliness? You should come among beauties very gradually. I like climbing rivers at their vilest, to see where they began.”

Constantine’s stories offer a tender documentation of tiny unquenchable moments of compassion, in all its many intangible forms. He speaks of humanity’s capacity for kindness amidst cruelty, of the symbiosis of care and survival. ‘Romantic’ is the only story that makes me cry. It describes the ebb and flow of Ruth and Morgan’s relationship as they both strive to accommodate his tides; Ruth lets her troubled lover come and go, knowing that he needs to be on his own, walking the rivers, with faith he’ll come back – “It’s not a promise that binds me to you”. I love this story for its portrayal of the subtleties of mental health and of the prevailing power of faith in human connection, both between the two protagonists and between Morgan and strangers he encounters on his walks: “They tell me their life stories, they look at me as though I know what they should do next. They only tell me things because I’m passing through… nothing they say, however intimate, is binding.” It is about the pilgrimages we make with one another and the implicit rules we create and subscribe to, no matter how absurd they might seem to others. There are so many tonal layers to this story and my respect for it deepens with every read.

In Tea at the Midland (Comma Press, 2012)

‘The Bloody Chamber’ by Angela Carter

Surely the greatest ‘Fuck yeah!’ moment in all short fiction, I cannot read this story without getting totally and breathlessly sucked in, turning the pages in horror even though I have read it so many times, getting to my feet as the gallant mother gallops across the surging waves, her white hair wild behind her. At the climax of the story, she describes everything stopping ‘like a clockwork tableaux in a glass case’ before action recommences, ‘as though a curious child pushed his centime into the slot and set it all in motion’. Carter herself is the curious child with the centime in the slot and this story is her at her indomitable best. In redefining our bloodiest myths, she inadvertently creates new myths for the psychotherapy generation: that your happiness, like that of the young protagonist, depends on a lover that unconditionally ‘sees’ you and a mother who telepathically ‘knows’ you.

In The Bloody Chamber (Gollancz, 1979)