Year: 2018

Story 2 by David Szalay

There’s no necessity to love equally all the stories in a collection. (I know this was billed as a novel anyway.) Purely my personal prejudice, but handsome, high-cheekboned teenagers like Simon in Story 1, going inter-railing round Europe while reading Henry James to enhance their Oxbridge prospects, aren’t so much my thing. Story 2 however I simply adore. It’s glorious. Pot-smoking university dropout Bernard who lives in the suburbs of Lille goes on holiday by himself to Cyprus where he meets Charmian and her mother Sandra. It’s an Apollonian-Dionysian opposition, configured through selling windows, sitting Biochemistry exams, holding down a job versus getting the sack, sex, freedom and sun: “Mind empty. He is aware of nothing except the heat of the sun. The heat of the sun. Life.”

I also loved Story 3.

From All That Man Is, Vintage, 2017. Also picked by Philip Hensher in his Penguin Book of Contemporary Short Stories, Penguin 2018

‘Maggie’s Day Out’ by Frances Molloy

After six years of marriage Maggie decided to have a day out. To be more correct, I should say that after she had been married for six years her mother decided that it was high time Maggie had a day out.

And so Maggie goes off to a nearby town, leaving her husband to look after the three children. The children enjoy the stew their father makes and like his way of serving it straight from the pot to save on doing any dishes. They appreciate too the freedom he gives them to roam. They jump on the corn in a field and find a bottle of crude oil which they mix with water on the ground, marvelling at the myriad colours, the ‘unicorn puke’ as my own kids call it. The father’s response to these activities ensures that Maggie does not go away for another fourteen years. It is said that Frances Molloy worried about being a ‘proper author’, that she wanted to write about ‘big issues’ and events. And yet in a story like this, dealing as it does with rural South Derry, there is beauty and control and violence and pain. There is nothing limited about it at all.

From Women are the Scourge of the Earth, the White Row Press, 1998

‘The Babysitter’ by Robert Coover

In these days of digital radio perhaps you are nostalgic for the times when, caught between frequencies, you could simultaneously hear opera and a cricket commentary. If you hanker after simultaneous multiplicity you could do worse than read ‘The Babysitter’, which is probably the most anthologised story I have chosen. One evening a teenage girl looks after the children of Harry and Dolly Tucker, a couple who are heading out to a party. But there are multiple lines, alternatives and versions. What’s a happening? What’s an imagining? Which of the various narratives can co-exist? Exhausting, because no consideration of Coover’s story can be exhaustive.

From Pricksongs and Descants, 1969, and now available as a Penguin Modern Classic, 2011. The story is also available from Penguin as a digital single and in a Modern Classics mini)

‘Wolf and Rhonda’ by Jamel Brinkley

The high school hero, the former hottie – “the odd lumps of her figure bulged like the scutes of a turtle’s shell” – and the overweight girl, still overweight as a thirty-seven-year-old, are some of the people at the St. Paul’s Class of 1991 reunion at the Tavern on Bruckner in the south Bronx. The narrative shifts between Wolf, now known as “plain old Wilfred Jones” and Fat Rhonda who had “long ago decided it wasn’t worth it to pay much attention. The world was too awful.” The two in their youth had once had sex in a church. At the reunion it looks for a moment as if it will happen again, but it doesn’t. Brinkley’s complex and patient consideration of what has made them what they are creates people not characters. Wolf and Rhonda were on my mind long after I had finished reading.

From A Lucky Man, Graywolf Press, 2018

‘The Fly-Paper’ by Elizabeth Taylor

The TV series ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ provided my introduction to the short story. How wonderful after a Sunday night bath to watch a macabre tale involving perhaps murder, human taxidermy or people turning into bees. A bit of grand guignolbefore getting your school-bag ready for the next day was always welcome. My favourite was an adaptation of an Elizabeth Taylor story. An unhappy child, Sylvia, is harassed on a bus by a strange and overbearing older man, but a woman comes to the girl’s rescue and takes her home. The tale moves to a deeply shocking conclusion which involves the careful laying out of three tea-cups. The child observes a fly-paper hanging in the window: “Some of the flies were still half alive, and striving hopelessly to free themselves. But they were caught forever.”

First published in The Cornhill Magazine, Spring 1969. Collected in The Devastating Boys, 1972, and Complete Short Stories, 2012, both Virago Modern Classics

‘Till September Petronella’ by Jean Rhys

When I go for a drink by myself, something I enjoy, I always entertain the fancy for at least a few minutes that I am a woman in a Jean Rhys story. Living in a Bloomsbury bed-sit perhaps, or soon to be chucked out of my lodgings in Paris. I’m an ex-chorus girl. My friend was killed by her gigolo lover. I’m tired of men and being poor and lonely. Can I have another drink? In this particular story Petronella Gray recounts a series of encounters with not very satisfactory men, the last of whom was nothing more substantial than someone in the front row at the theatre when she was on stage and forgot her lines. An endearing, funny heroine, Petronella too knows what it is to be immersed in the world of a story, in her case French or German or Hungarian romantic novels: “[you] go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards – perhaps all your life, who knows? – surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls… the old wicked, hard-hearted women and the old sad women, the waltz music, everything.”

First published in The London Magazine, January 1960 and available online here. Collected in Tigers are Better-Looking, Andre Deutsch, 1968 and The Collected Short Stories, Penguin Classics, 1987

‘Vacancy for the Post of Jesus Christ’ by B. Kojo Laing

In the summer of 1997, I resigned in a temper from my job as a sub-editing, proof-reading, writing, picture-editing, chain-smoking dogsbody at the London-based magazine Africa Business. I had learned a lot, but it was time to move on. I had a few hundred quid in my bank account when I walked into Black Star travel agency and asked for the cheapest return flight to West Africa. I was offered Lagos, Burkina Faso or Accra. I chose Accra and spent the next twelve months based there, travelling up and down Lake Volta, taking tro-tros into Burkina Faso and further north to Niger’s capital, Niamey. I wrote for all sorts of magazines, I did an appalling interview with Nadine Gordimer, I met Bernardine Evaristo for the first time, and I fell in love with one of Robert Mugabe’s nephews. I also started reading Ghanaian writers like Ama Ata Aidoo, Ayi Kwei Armah and B. Kojo Laing. The B is for Bernard. It is also for Brilliant.

I am reluctant to provide a summary of ‘Vacancy for the Post of Jesus Christ’. I will, however, give you the first few sentences:

When the small quick lorry was being lowered from the skies, it was discovered that it had golden wood, and many seedless guavas for the hungry. As the lorry descended the many layers of cool air, the rich got ready to buy it, and the poor to resent it. The wise among the crowd below opened their mouths in wonder, and closed them only to eat. They ate looking up while the sceptical looked down. And so the lorry had chosen to come down to this town that shamed the city with its cleanliness. The wheels were already revolving and, when they shone, most of them claimed they were the mirrors of God. The lorry was quick but the descent was slow. So many wanted to touch it.
Laing has been described as an Afrofuturist, and his work as African magical realism. I’m not entirely sure what either of those terms means and instinctively I dislike them. What I do know is that Laing writes with a freedom that resists categorisation. If I was pushed, I’d probably say he writes jazz – say Sun Ra meets Thelonius Monk meets Manu Dibango. He lets loose his imagination and his knowledge and trusts his instinct to produce stories. He writes tight sentences that can veer in the most unexpected direction. He is political, he is poetic, he is funny and he is fearless. As of last year, he is also dead. It is curious that, in his lifetime, he did not gain more critical attention. I think he’s one of the best.
From The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories edited by Chinua Achebe and C.L. Innes, Heinemann Africa Writers Series, 1992. Also included in The Big Book of Science Fiction edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer, Vintage, 2016

‘Don’t Pay Bad for Bad’ by Amos Tutuola

I’m ashamed that I only came to the Nigerian author Amos Tutuola a decade ago. My friend Eleanor Crook, a sculptor and ferocious reader, was surprised that I had never read or even heard of his 1946 novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard. It was acquired by T.S. Eliot and published by Faber in 1952. The following year Gallimard published the French translation by Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau. When I read it in English, I felt tremendously satisfied. I also found myself feeling frustrated that his work wasn’t better known beyond Nigeria’s borders. And just as Picasso took so much inspiration from artists across the African continent, I wondered how many European writers had failed to acknowledge Tutuola’s influence.

‘Don’t Pay Bad for Bad’ is – like nearly all of his short stories – a very tight number, covering a lot of time in a little space. The first three paragraphs span the harmonious childhood friendship of two girls, Dola and Babi, through to their marriage to two brothers. As their lives progress, so their relationship is tested. What happens in the second half of the story is so unexpected it makes me gasp every time I read it. I confess to feeling an evil pleasure at this point and a desire for the most gruesome ending. I won’t tell you what happens, but I will say that Tutuola’s stories push me right out of my comfort zone. I’m not even sure I like them. Yet, whenever I read one, days later I am still questioning my attitudes to life and death, to right and wrong, to peace and violence. Equally, I am aware that his characters stay with me, chatting away inside my head, for days on end. The delayed effect comes, I think, from Tutuola’s spare and acute prose and his understated approach to narrative.

From The Village Witch Doctor and Other Stories, Faber & Faber, 2014. Originally published by Faber in 1990

‘I Did It’ by M John Harrison

I was sitting in a bedsit in east London in 2001 when I was introduced to the work of M. John Harrison. The bedsit belonged to Julian Richards, who also took me to my first Forced Entertainment show. So, yes, reader: of course I married him.

Now, I could have chosen a dozen M. John Harrison stories for this anthology, but that would make me look like a stalker and might embarrass him. I have picked ‘I Did It’ because the last sentence of the opening paragraph is one of my favourite sentences in print. I’d like to own it and frame it beneath glass so no else can ever touch it. It is: “Axe in the face.” Even taken out of context like this, it thrills me. “Axe in the face.” Like crunching on cubes of ice when you are close to the equator. “Axe in the face.” Harrison’s ear for dialogue is so bang on it’s uncanny. His observations of white, middle-class Londoners – both men and women – are so sharp, they hurt. I’m still laughing as I read, yet again, the conversation between Alex and Nicola.

from Things that Never Happen, Night Shade Books, 2003. Originally published in A Book of Two Halves, editor Nicholas Royle, Gollancz, 1996

‘Guts’ by Chuck Palahniuk

I think it was Mike Harrison who nudged me in Palahniuk’s direction. He’d read ‘grow and grow and grow‘, a short story I wrote for Barbara Campbell’s durational performance 1001 nights cast. In an email, he’d said something about it having traces of splatterpunk and suggested I might like ‘Guts’. He was right: I love it. It’s outrageous. “Grody to the max,” to borrow from Moon Zappa in the 1982 hit single, ‘Valley Girl’. And I like it even more having discovered, via Wikipedia, that over 70 people have fainted in response to it. Although I don’t know whether they fainted in response to the subject of the story or because they obeyed the commands of the first four sentences:
Inhale.
Take in as much air as you can.
This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then just a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can.
From here, my fifth story should probably be taken from Harry Mathews’ Singular Pleasures, but I think one reference to masturbating is enough for this anthology. Less is more etc.
Available online here and forms part of Haunted (Doubleday, 2005) but originally published in Playboy, March 2004

‘At the end of the day’ by Barbara Campbell using prompts and endings by several other writers

This brilliant project was developed by Australian artist Barbara Campbell. Each sunset for 1001 nights, from 21 June 2005 to 17 March 2008, she performed a new story, streamed live into the ether. The stories were written by writers across the world. Each sunrise, Campbell would send a single prompt to a single writer, who would have a few hours to create a story that could not exceed 1001 words. The prompts were lifted from daily newspaper stories about events in the Middle East. If you read the very first story, performed in Paris shortly before 10pm, you will discover the tragedy at the root of this extraordinary project.

I learned a lot while writing for this, and was astonished by the results that were produced from simple prompts and a ticking clock. I was also lucky to encounter a number of writers I have come to admire deeply, including, among many others, Tony White.

Available online here. Originally read live as the 1001st story for Campbell’s durational performance, 1001 nights cast. All of the stories are available online here. If you open the Index of story writers, you can see which stories they wrote and you simply need to key in the number of each story at the end of the URL, for example https://1001.net.au/story/1001/

‘Into the War’ by Italo Calvino, translated by Martin McLaughlin

This is an understated story. It is also such a brilliant insight into war, I experience a little shock each time I read it. The narrator is recalling his adolescence in the summer of 1940 in an Italian city. Italo Calvino would have been seventeen years old that year. “It was a time in our lives when we weren’t interested in anything.” The boy goes to the beach with his friend, Jerry Ostero, and a girl “with blondish hair and a long neck”, who “was Fascist in her opinions”. After the beach, they part. When they meet again, it is early evening. The war has begun. There is no sudden drama and no exaggeration of violence. The writing continues in steady rhythm, observations are made as matters of fact. French planes fly over, sirens are heard, and the rural poor, now displaced inside their own country, arrive in town. But the nature of people continues, the same as ever. Everything changes but everything stays the same. I love this story because it echoes my experience and understanding of war. It is Calvino at his best.

From Into the War, Penguin Classics, 2011. First published in Italy as L’entrata in guerra, Einaudi, Turin, 1954

Family Heirlooms by Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares, translated by Daniel Hahn

I am cheating a little with this one. It was published as a novella, not a short story, but at 57 pages of well-spaced text, I think it can be squeezed in. And I simply couldn’t write this list without including Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares, a singular Brazilian writer, who died this year.  I would not have heard of her were it not for Wasafiri Magazine, who invited me to review this fantastic little book in 2014. So I’m going to cheat again by giving you the first and last paragraphs of that review:
Maria Bráulio Munhoz is a widow and an aunt. She lives in a spotless ninth-floor São Paulo apartment where she is waited on by her maid, Maria Preta. Her life is one of order and routine. Every day, she has soup for lunch followed by something sweet. Then she rings a silver bell and her maid appears carrying a finger bowl, ‘the crystal dish with the rose petal floating in the scented water’. Yet beneath the surface of this highly privileged but boring bourgeois existence lies layer upon layer of deception. What makes this intelligent book so riveting and so impressive is that the deception shifts continually, almost imperceptibly, from one character to another, like the tide turning on a beach.
[…]
Some reviewers have said that they read Family Heirlooms in a couple of hours. Beautifully translated by Daniel Hahn, it is a smooth and enjoyable read. But it took me several days of reading and re-reading, seeking out the signs in the text that, earlier, had been flown over in such hurried excitement. While the ruby, or fake ruby, works beautifully as a metaphor for the flawed characters and their excruciating relationships with one another, Tavares pushes the parallels much further than a lesser writer would dare. Folding them in on themselves, again and again, she squeezes every last drop of her characters’ hypocrisy, snobbishness and self-delusion onto the page. It’s thrilling and tragic and incredibly more-ish. By the end, the significance of the ruby, like everything else, has shifted. Uncanny absences and moments of silence come out of the shadows, and the book seems to change shape. The reader, to twist Tavares’ own words, has been ‘inoculated with doses of fantasy’.
Published by Frisch & Co, 2016. Originally published in Brazil as Jóias da Família, 1990. Republished by Companhia das Letras, 2007)