‘The Demon Lover’ by Elizabeth Bowen

August is a strange time of year, especially in the city. It is the listless countdown to the end of summer: leaves droop tired and tawdry on dusty trees; a whiff of something subtly off-key hangs in the air. School holidays bring exodus and an emptying out for a few weeks until a new, brisker season returns: on the Continent, the great urban destinations such as Rome and Paris sensibly shut up shop, ignoring hordes of tourists descending like greenfly onto roses. In culture, August gives a sense of playing truant from reality and from the self, such as in Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film Celine and Julie Go Boating, a cult classic about two young women who swap identities and tumble down a phantasmagorical rabbit-hole one languid Paris summer.

I first saw it at the old Renoir cinema in London’s Brunswick Square, the same August I started my first ‘proper’ job – at the British Library, then part of the British Museum on Great Russell Street. My job, as a researcher on a seemingly endless project to digitise the library’s vast holdings of 19th-century books, allowed me to wander freely among the book stacks and dust motes. Here, on stiflingly hot afternoons, I read prodigiously – and not only three-decker Victorian volumes. At some point I discovered the wartime writings of the Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen – The Heat of the Day, her superb novel of the Blitz and betrayal – and short stories of forsakenness shot through with horror.

The most uneasy of these is ‘The Demon Lover’ (1941), in which the backdrop of a bombed-out London sets the scene for a fatal promise extracted during an earlier war. Bowen rapidly creates an atmosphere of claustrophobia and menace: late one sultry August day, with the weather about to turn, a middle-aged woman, Mrs Drover, makes a brief foray to her family’s boarded-up London house in a quiet square to pack up a few essential items before returning to the country where they have been evacuated away from the bombs. Though Mrs Drover is alone, we and she sense that she is being observed by someone, or something: “a cat wove itself in and out of railings, but no human eye watched Mrs Drover’s return”.

The emphasis here is on the ‘human’. Inanimate objects have taken on the suffering and disappointment of the war years and all is weirdly askew: “in her once familiar street, as in any unused channel, an unfamiliar queerness had silted up.” As “the unwilling lock” on Mrs Drover’s front door relents to her key, Bowen gifts us the entire arc of the story in the last, leaden sentence of its opening paragraph: “Dead air came to meet her as she went in.” The ensuing ghostly tale is as much about the psychological trauma of war (a period of “lucid abnormality” according to Bowen) and the passing of time, as it is conventionally supernatural. In the house – to which only she and a part-time caretaker have a key – a hand-delivered letter awaits Mrs Drover, apparently from the barely known soldier fiancé who has been missing presumed dead since they last set eyes on each other on a gloomy August evening in 1916, exactly twenty-five years before. It curtly reminds her of a promise made, an hour of meeting, an appointment which must be kept.

In a 1944 postscript to the first publication of The Demon Lover and Other Stories,Bowen explains how in these “between-time stories” “the past discharges its load of feeling into the anaesthetised and bewildered present.” The individual is all but smothered in an atmosphere of confusion and upheaval, where every positive has its reliably sinister negative. Thus Mrs Drover recalls “with dreadful acuteness” the “complete suspension of her existence” during the final days she had spent with her former lover, a passive deferment similar to the annihilating torpor of war. A long impasse has a way of turning against those who cease to be watchful: for, as it turns out most terribly for her: “You have no time to run from a face you do not expect.”

First published in The Listener, November 1941. Collected in The Demon Lover and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1945 and The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, Vintage Classics, 1999. Chosen by Catherine Taylor, who is a critic, editor and writer. A former publisher and deputy director of English PEN, she has been a judge on prizes from the Guardian First Book Award to the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate and is part of the team behind the new Brixton Review of Books. She is writing a non-fiction book about the dark side of South Yorkshire in the 1970s and 80s. You can read Catherine’s full Personal Anthology here.

‘Waiting for the Sun’ by Elspeth Davie

What did we do before selfies? We approached strangers. We asked them to capture the moment, to memorialise our presence at this temple, that statue. Twenty-four images in a standard roll of film. You had to think about what you were going to snap. Twenty-four pictures to sum up your holiday of a lifetime. Now we might take twice that in an afternoon at the park. In ‘Waiting for the Sun’, Mr Shering is a man on ‘perpetual holiday’. He likes to have his photograph taken. Over the years it has become an obsession, a kind of never-ending pilgrimage. Sicily, Marseilles, “palm-trees, flags, ruins and mountains”. He does not so much photograph his holidays as go on holiday in order to be photographed. “It was the necessity to combine being somebody with doing nothing which led him to this new interest.” (Perhaps something similar could be said about the vagaries and vulgarities about life in the online realm.) Mr Shering is always on the hunt for likely photographers: he eyes them up, assesses their potential. These holiday snapshots define him. “All the same, he was hard put to know what he was himself …”

Early on, we see him passing between two mirrors, “diminished but shining”. He thrives on the gaze of others. He needs the sun, of course: “His casual encounters were made only in its light”. When he climbs a hill at the end of a holiday in the south-west, searching for another photo opportunity, another defining tableau, he is dismayed to find that he has been upstaged by an eclipse and its crowd of gawpers.

There is always the sense of a life slightly askew or adrift, or even on the edge of disaster, in Davie’s stories. Witty and poetic, she takes the ordinary, the overlooked, and reveals in them something transcendent, macabre, beautiful. Under heavy skies he lived from hour to hour, dulled and diminished in his own eyes, making few contacts, seeing and hearing little of what was going on around him … Elusive as its shining was, the sun was the only dependable in his monstrously unreliable life.

First published in The High Tide Talker and Other Stories, Hamish Hamilton, 1976. Also collected In The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books, Canongate Classics, 2001. Chosen by Stephen Hargadon, whose short stories have appeared in Black Static, Confingo, Tales from the Shadow Booth, Structo, LossLit, Cafe Stories and Crimewave.

‘An Unmarried Man’s Summer’ by Mavis Gallant

Maybe the summer, if you want to be all seasonal about it, is a good time to open up Mavis Gallant’s Selected Stories and turn to page 284. Here you will make the acquaintance of Walter Henderson, “a stripling to his friends”, who are the elderly folk of the French Riviera. They look at Walter, and listen to his sociable stories, but see a long-lost loved one, whether that means a lover or “an adored but faithless son”. But this is how Walter spends his winters (driving his car “gaily, as if it were summer”). His summers are a different matter, as he “lolls on a garden chair, rereading his boyhood books”. Only, in Walter’s forty-fifth year, a complication arises, in the form of a family visit…

The details are craftily, cattily observed, the intrigue of the story leisurely. Walter, so used to reading and telling stories of his own, has to acknowledge the discomfiting existence of other people’s. Meditations on age take place against the drowsy backdrop of a “breather” for his guests that they seem reluctant to end. The good news is that Gallant’s Selected Stories runs to nearly 900 pages, making it a pleasantly Walter-like companion for train journeys, sojourns in the sun.

First published in the New Yorker, 1963 and available online to subscribers here and collected in The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Bloomsbury, 1997. Picked by Michael Caines, who works at the Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2013) and the editor of a TLS bicentennial celebration of Jane Austen. He is writing a short book about literary prizes, and a slightly longer book about Brigid Brophy. He is founding editor of the Brixton Review of Books. You can read his full Personal Anthology here.

‘Yport’ by Lauren Groff

A mother takes her young sons to France to escape the Floridian heat of August. She believes the trip will release the writer’s block she’s experiencing, like a fish bone in her throat. Also, she hopes that the boys will pick up French the way they pick up dirt. The mother’s expectations, drawn from memories of a youthful summer spent in France, contrast both subtly and harshly with the reality of their adventure. I love how the writing balances the ferocity of maternal love with the banality of everyday tasks and the relentless thought-processes and decision-making it requires. Groff peels back the surface of this steely, independent mother and invites us to relate to the neuroses and unexpected joys that come with parenthood. But, you don’t have to be a parent appreciate it; ultimately, it’s a story about ambition and outlook altered by time and changed circumstances.

First published in Granta 139: Best of Young American Novelists 3, April 2017 and available to subscribers to read online here. Collected in Florida, Riverhead/William Heinemann, 2018. Picked by Clare Rees, who is a graduate of the MA Creative Writing: First Novel programme at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. She is a copywriter by day and a writer of fiction by night, and is currently working on the first draft of her second novel.

‘The Pier Falls’ by Mark Haddon

This is the title story of Mark Haddon’s 2016 collection, published by Vintage. It’s the one that has stayed with me since I read the book. It’s vivid with life (and death) and telling details. You can see it all happening as you read. As with any horrific event you witness, time seems to stretch and what you see etches itself on your retina, drills into your brain and replays itself over and over. It’s a story that’s definitely pertinent to the summer, and even to reading on the beach, but it may well make you cautious about stepping foot on a pier. And however warm the day, you will definitely shiver.

First published in The New Statesman in 2014 and available to read online here. Collected in The Pier Falls, Jonathan Cape, 2015 and The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, ed. Philip Hensher, Allen Lane, 2018. Selected by Cath Barton, whose prize-winning novella The Plankton Collector is published by New Welsh Rarebyte. Her second novella, In the Sweep of the Bay, will be published by Louise Walters Books in September 2020, and her short story collection, The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Retreat West Books in early 2021. You can read her full Personal Anthology here.

‘Family Ties’ by Clarice Lispector, translated by Katherine Dodson

‘After the dinner we’ll go to the movies,’ the man decided. Because after the movies it would be night at last, and this day would shatter with the waves on the crags of Arpoador.

I love my family, but have no desire to be in a car with them. Consequently, I’ve chosen this, very short story which begins as the holiday ends. It was first published as part of a larger collection by Francisco Alves Editoria In 1960, although I encountered it via Katrina Dodson’s translation in one of those slim pistachio Penguin books entitled ‘Daydream and Drunkeness of a Young Lady’ (2018). Little happens in ‘Family Ties’ besides an unnamed woman saying goodbye to her mother, and feeling relieved to think that the ‘cautious tact’ that has prevailed throughout her visit will soon be over. At the same time the woman’s warmth, both towards her mother and her own, somewhat distant child are depicted with the utmost tenderness. It only takes a minutes to read, but always leaves me with a lump in my throat.

First published as the title story in Laços de família, Francisco Alves, 1960. First published in – a different – English translation in Family Ties, Texas Pan American Series, 1984 and more recently in The Complete Short Stories, New Directions/Penguin Classics, 2015 and Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady, Penguin Modern, 2018). Chosen by Susan Finlay, who is author of, most recently, Indole (The Aleph Press) and Our Lady of Everything (Serpent’s Tail)

‘Wings’ by Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore’s stories are about the abrupt and the absurd. In ‘Wings’—which is either about a woman and the men who trip her into the rest of her life, or about the unit of a couple and its inner dreaming, depending on how you read it—time curdles down to a haze of everyday coffees, dinners, music, walks and swims. KC and Dench are unfunny but earnest, like all lovers. They are hemmed into loneliness, their conversations scratching hard and daily on the same, brazen grooves of youth. “Patience was a chemical. Derived from a mineral. Derived from a star. She felt she had a bit of it. But it was not always fruitful, or fruitful with the right fruit,” writes Moore. The story ends on a perpetual summer. Moore never dims the light on their interior boredoms, or on the question of what lies beyond a young life—a feat which is exhausting but wondrous to witness, like the first hot day of the year.

First published in The Paris Review, Issue 200, Spring 2012, and available to read online here. Collected in Bark, Knopf/Faber, 2014. Chosen by Sharanya, who lives, writes and teaches between Essex and London.

‘Stage Fright’ by Lisa Natalie Pearson

One of my top-ten all-time favourite short stories, ‘Stage Fright’ was published in 1995 and I must have read it at least once a year every year since. In which case, why do I still find it so difficult to remember what happens in it? Beyond saying that it’s about a woman who on summer nights watches a couple in the apartment across the street, and that the perspective shifts from the watcher to a police photographer to the neutral gaze of a possibly imaginary screenplay, I’m always a bit stuck. Pearson – who latterly dropped the middle name – published a handful of excellent short stories (one or two of which I was lucky enough to help into print) before moving into publishing. Since 2008 she’s been running the outstanding Siglio Press.

First published in Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction (FC2) edited by Cris Mazza & Jeffrey DeShell. Recommended by Nicholas Royle, who is the author of seven novels, most recently First Novel (Vintage) and three collections of short stories, most recently Ornithology (Configo Press). Reader in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met, he also runs Nightjar Press and is head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize. You can read Nicholas’s full Personal Anthology here.

‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ by JD Salinger

‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ by JD Salinger portrays a certain, quintessential 1950’s summer’s day: stifling Florida heat, a chic beachside hotel, a woman in a silk dressing-gown paints her nails, waiting for a long-distance New York call. A gossiping mother spreads sun cream lotion on her daughter’s back. Bathrobes are removed, martini’s drunk. It is “the perfect day for banana fish,” the main character Seymour informs a little girl, while they play in the waves. Yet, everyone talks, but no one is listening. Freud’s Unheimlich, the uncanny, permeates every page. Layers of chit-chat about sunburn, cruises and green dinner dresses, barely cover the sense of impending doom. Seymour, the main character, has just been released from military hospital with post-war trauma, he seems to be losing his mind. The familiar becomes unsettling, the banana fish disturbing. Something is deeply wrong. I first read this story over 25 years ago, and this terrible feeling of strangeness has stayed with me, a Hitchcockian atmosphere captures glimpses into the double of this perfect summer beach day, what is not quite there, what has been there: death, folly, greed and war.

First published in The New Yorker, January 1948, and available online here. Collected in Nine Stories, Little, Brown, 1953. Picked by Susanna Crossman, who is an Anglo-French writer. She has recent/upcoming work in Neue Rundschau (S. Fischer), We’ll Never Have Paris (Repeater Books), Berfrois and The Lonely Crowd. She regularly collaborates on international hybrid arts projects. Currently, she is showing the multi-lingual prose film, 360° of Morning, with screenings and events across Europe and USA. @crossmansusanna

Introduction

There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be…

I’ve always thought John Lennon was being profoundly fatalistic when he sang that line 52 years ago, and I’ve always been fascinated by songs, poems and stories about fate and free will.

Maybe it stems from reading the ‘Appointment in Samarra’ fable at Junior School. You know the one: a wealthy merchant visits the marketplace in Baghdad; he spots Death apparently beckoning him and flees to Samarra on his fastest horse. Later that night, Death calls at his house in Samarra and explains he had not beckoned the merchant, merely expressed astonishment at seeing him in Baghdad: ‘For I knew tonight we had an appointment in Samarra.’

Here are my twelve favourite stories about fate, free will and predestination. Several are mystery tours to destinations which, when ultimately revealed, prove shocking and yet inevitable. Some concern people crushed by a sense of impending doom; others celebrate characters who struggle to escape a tragic and apparently inevitable destiny.

I hope you’re fated to read and enjoy them.

‘Beggars Would Ride’ by Beryl Bainbridge

Beryl Bainbridge pursued an obsessive quest for concise and musical language. She was celebrated for her alchemical distillation of a dozen typed pages onto a single sheet, and for her relentless process of reading aloud until her words sounded properly ‘tuned’. Bainbridge’s fiction relies on wit, precision and intricate detail to explore a wide range of human experience, and she was one of those writers who took greater risks with form and style in her short fiction than in her novels. This is reflected in ‘Beggars Would Ride’, a sharply observed social satire framed by incidents, 300 years apart, involving an artefact imbued with supernatural power. A pair of vain, middle-aged, middle-class, financial service managers suddenly discover they have mysteriously transcended their customary mediocrity on the tennis court and become seduced by their new-found prowess. It turns out that unearned power brings unexpected risks. Terse, unsettling and funny: the story’s shadowy vitality is counterpointed by pithy observations of everyday urban existence.

First published in Winter’s Tales #26, edited by Alan Maclean, 1980. Collected in Mum and Mrs Armitage, Flamingo, 1987

‘Death and the Compass’ by Jorge Luis Borges

A tale of murder, scholarship and the flawed nature of inductive reasoning, ‘Death and the Compass’ takes liberties with the conventions of detective fiction and, I would argue, provides one of the earliest examples of a story based on a semiotic quest for meaning. Borges exposed readers to the idea that the extensive and obsessive collation of sinister information might reflect a quest for meaning and pattern in a world that seems absurd, random and arbitrarily cruel. The idea has been rendered familiar by some great novels –White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, The Crying of Lot 49, Illuminatus! and Foucault’s Pendulum– but Borges tackled the theme first and in a more concentrated form. The narrative follows the efforts of celebrated detective Lönnrot to solve a series of murders involving cryptic messages, Kabbalistic philosophy, the geometry of the built environment, the detective’s nemesis Red Scharlach and the tetragrammaton – the sacred four-letter name of God. As Lönnrot solves the case, the lines between hunter and hunted are blurred and distinguishing between actions of will and destiny becomes increasingly tricky. A ludic tale with philosophical twists, it’s as entertaining as it is erudite.

First published in Sur in May 1942 and collected in Labyrinths, various editions. Also available online here

‘Don’t Look Now’ by Daphne Du Maurier

For most people the phrase ‘don’t look now’ evokes a Nicolas Roeg movie. The story that inspired the cinematic masterpiece is very different in terms of detail, tone and structure, but packs a similar emotional punch and offers its own set of puzzles, ambiguities and weird set pieces. A carefully crafted tale of self-deception, misperception, sex and mystery, it’s also a compelling portrait of overwhelming loss and a relationship under pressure. The central characters, John and Laura, are adroitly realised: it’s easy to sympathise with Laura’s desperation and John’s impatience, as well as their shared grief, wit and sarcasm. The other key character is the city in which the story is set – Venice. The city’s canals, bridges and cramped, labyrinthine streets are key to the way events are foreshadowed and tension is ratcheted. The story couldn’t possibly be set in any other city. Du Maurier’s ability to create fear and wonder from conventional interactions in familiar places is key to this story’s well-deserved reputation as a classic of the modern gothic.

First collected in Not after Midnight, Victor Gollancz, 1971. Currently available as the title story in collections from Penguin Modern Classics and Pocket Classics, Virago Modern Classics and NYRB Classics

‘A Quiet Game of Chess’ by Maurice Richardson

‘A Quiet Game of Chess’ pushes the notion of determinism to its limit: to disclose how would be to spoil the story. What I can reveal is that Maurice Richardson is a dazzling comic writer – the equal of Richmal Crompton, PG Wodehouse and Stacy Aumonier – and this story is typical of the series featuring Engelbrecht, a surrealist wrestler who fights clocks rather than people, and risks losing time rather than a purse. Terse and inventive, these Chronicles of the Surrealist Sportman’s Club are a hybrid of The Pickwick Papers and Calvino’s Cosmicomics. The club’s membership plays surrealist golf, using the whole planet for a single hole; surrealist rugby, in which Earth takes on Mars for the Interplanetary Challenge Cup; and, in this case, surrealist chess in a game involving human kings, queens, bishops and knights; real machicolated castles; and newly introduced pieces such as the tank, fighter plane and atomic bomb. The game is played across several cosmic dimensions and the Surrealist Sportman’s Club is crammed with cheats who want to win at any cost. What could possibly go wrong?

First published in Lilliput in January 1948 and collected in The Exploits of Engelbrecht, various editions