‘Where the Door is Always Open and the Welcome Mat is Out’ by Patricia Highsmith

The title is a promise whose unravelling, during a familial visit, is what drives the story forward, but isn’t what makes it linger. A young woman, living in a tiny New York apartment, rushes to prepare for a visit from her sister from Cleveland. Highsmith’s mastery of building tension out of absent-mindedness (did she leave the eggs on the stove or not?) is as enjoyable here as it is in any of her novels, but it’s the moment when Mildred, the city-dwelling sister, rails, mildly and politely, against her sister’s haughty assessment of New York’s unfriendliness that the story’s generosity breaks open. The description of her watching a police parade in the rain is a very beautiful moment: “Why, they even call them New York’s Finest!”

Included in Nothing that Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories, Bloomsbury, 2005 and Selected Novels and Short Stories, Norton, 2010

‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’ by Vladimir Nabokov

This story, written in 1937 and set in a parallel Germany of enforced leisure and institutional bullying, might easily be passed over as a straightforward political allegory, were it not for the fact that it’s by Nabokov, and is therefore studded with precise observations that remind us of his greatness as a comic writer: the cigarette butt Vasili is made to eat, for instance, or the lacquered nose of the trip’s leader. Vasili, the somewhat Pnin-like central character who’s clearly an authorial avatar – he’s introduced at the beginning as “my representative”, and at the tale’s end, “of course, I let him go” – is obliged to take a tiresomely upbeat journey with a bunch of grotesques who first won’t let him read in silence, then chuck his prized cucumber out of the train’s window. On the trip, Vasili sees the scene of the story’s title, which looks, in the mind’s eye, a little like a Claude landscape, whose transcendent beauty is the source of the story’s spring of joy and horror. The title’s cadence and rhythm captures that imprinting of a sight upon the memory. It stays with you as though it’s your own.

First published in The Atlantic, June 1941, and collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, 1958 and Collected Short Stories, 1995, and available online here

‘The Musicians of Bremen’ by the Brothers Grimm, retold by Philip Pullman

“The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put a robin redbreast in a cage.” This is from Philip Pullman’s introduction to his great book of Brothers Grimm retellings. His ‘The Musicians of Bremen’ is, then, built to be embellished, localised, extended or truncated, but, thanks to his brilliantly economical characterisation of the animal characters, it’s not nearly as flattened as fairy tales are (by his own reckoning) supposed to be. A donkey, a dog, a cat and a cockerel, all recently laid off, form a band and decide to move to Bremen to make it in the local music industry. They never make it to Bremen nor launch their musical careers, but live happily ever after in spite of – or perhaps because of, since they’d have been hounded, sorry, out of the city had they made it there – the title’s suggestion. There is a bronze statue in Bremen of the four animals, stacked on top of each other, which is quite an odd choice for a public sculpture if you’ve read the story.

Included in Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, Penguin, 2012

‘Diary: Morrissey: My Morning’ by Craig Brown

Not that parodying Morrissey’s prose style is itself a great challenge – it mostly does that by itself – but Craig Brown’s Morrissey diary manages to build a world of grandiose self-pity that is almost as affecting as Brown’s evocation of Princess Margaret in ‘Ma’am Darling’. A bottle of champagne “chilled as an unborn baby’s grave”. A royalty cheque falling out of an envelope like “a fallen soldier of the Somme, sent out to die on a foreign field by the uncaring upper classes”. Tears falling “like so many sad people from the top floor of a skyscraper onto the unforgiving ground below.”

Published in Private Eye, October 2013, available online here

‘The Impresario of Human Drudgery’ by Ben Katchor

Ben Katchor’s short comic strips (for lack of a better term) take place in a parallel Manhattan of fleapit cinemas and bizarre small businesses, which, as in Nicholson Baker’s fictions, pay homage to the act of attention itself: there are strips on liquid soap thievery, an opium den-style ‘Nail-Biting Salon’, the romance of the take-out menu. Katchor’s nervy, scratchy line is part of his work’s focus on the shabbily pre-owned, as is, somehow, his arcane, lovely prose. “The faint odor of a month’s worth of wanted posters under glass taints the otherwise thrilling scent of yet-to-be-delivered mail.” “A number of dramatists have turned to the sightseeing tour bus as a unique and affordable method of realising a theatrical spectacle in the midst of a depressed economy.” “The milk of human kindness, condensed into a dented sixteen-ounce can, turns up on a shelf outside the men’s room.”

Included in Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, Little, Brown, 1996

‘The Swan as Metaphor for Love’ by Amelia Gray

The amount of time it will take for me to describe exactly what makes this story so great could be much better served actually reading it, because nothing need be explained: you will read it and know, almost straight away. It’s also full of brilliant, oddly-phrased and very precise details that open up avenues of thought that will make you want to read it again, almost straight away. Go.

Included in Gutshot, FSG Originals, 2015, and available online here

‘Going for a Beer’ by Robert Coover

It’s over before you know it. That might be a criticism of the short story form. It might imply something else, though. Coover’s story pits form against content, rattling through a character’s life as though against his will, with nothing but Kewpie dolls and crutches to cling to. If the short story form is about compression (and maybe it is, sometimes), Coover’s is like a car crusher, squeezing its poor protagonist, who only wanted a beer, into a helpless cube.

Originally published in The New Yorker, March 2011, and available online here. Collected in Going for a Beer: Selected Shorter Fictions, Norton, 2018

‘On the Marionette Theatre’ by Heinrich von Kleist, translated by Idris Parry

Two friends meet in the park, and, because it’s early 19th Century Germany, they immediately launch into philosophical chat. The conversation, which is really a sequence of anecdotes, is about the idea of grace: a condition found, according to one protagonist, not in humans per se but in human surrogates – statues, animals, puppets. What emerges is a kind of horror story about human consciousness, which is of course not about early 19th century Germany at all, but about right now, whenever you happen to be reading it.

First published in German in The Berliner Abendblätter, December 1810 and available online here. Collected in Selected Writings, Hackett, 2004, in a translation by David Constantine

‘The Laughing Man’ by JD Salinger

Many if not all of the stories I’ve chosen for this list are themselves about stories and storytelling, and the way in which such things operate within a person’s life. The young protagonist of ‘The Laughing Man’ is a nine-year-old member of an informal group called the Comanche Club, which meets every schoolday afternoon to play various sports under the watchful eye of their leader, the 22 or 23-year old law student The Chief. After each session, The Chief tells a long, improvised adventure story called The Laughing Man. (The transformation of The Laughing Man, and of The Chief, and of the protagonist, is what’s happening in the story, and all are woven together). I can’t imagine a more perfect argument for why stories matter than this story, this part especially: “It was a story that tended to sprawl all over the place, and yet it remained essentially portable. You could always take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub.”

Originally published in The New Yorker, March 1949, and included in Nine Stories, Little, Brown, 1953

‘On The Town’ by Helen de Witt

Out-of-towner moves to the big city and on his first day sees Harvey Keitel eating pancakes in a diner. “Dude!!!!!!!!! I saw Harvey Keitel eating pancakes!!!!!!!!!”, he says to his indifferent flatmate. This and many other delights awaits the reader of Helen de Witt’s story, which, like everything written by Helen de Witt (and there isn’t much, and it’s all excellent), slinks in and out of languages (the institutional, the technical, the corporate) to find previously unexplored areas of human dumbness and desire. Gil, the out-of-towner, wows feckless New Yorkers with his competence in DIY, speaker installation, PowerPoint, data visualisation. It is, as Sheila Heti says in her introduction, a parable that “one simple man might swoop in and make order out of the chaos and stupidity of the world”, which, if you think about it, is actually the greatest story ever told!!!!!!!!

First published in Electric Literature, June 2018 and available online here and in Some Trick: Thirteen Stories, New Directions, 2018

‘N’ by Arthur Machen

Arnold, Perrot and Harliss, three old men, gather one winter night in Arnold’s comfortable second floor rooms, to rehearse shared—and not so shared—memories of London streets. It all goes quite slowly. They make punch, they maunder on “about the old-fashioned rather than the old”, and suddenly they’re arguing about Stoke Newington, that “wild no man’s land of the north”, and N. What is N? Well, N is a park, a park which according to one testimony has long been built over, and is now just a lot of dull once-prosperous streets with names like “Park Crescent”; but according to another is like

finding yourself in another country. Such trees, that must have been brought from the end of the world: there were none like them in England, though one or two reminded him of trees in Kew Gardens; deep hollows with streams running from the rocks; lawns all purple and gold with flowers, and golden lilies too, towering up into the trees, and mixing with the crimson of the flowers that hung from the boughs. And here and there, there were little summer-houses and temples, shining white in the sun, like a view in China

Perhaps N as glimpsed is an earlier state of the world, visible from unlikely angles. Or perhaps N is Stoke Newington, full of the deep alchemical plasticity of the ordinary. Arnold, briefly obsessed, searches vainly through records written and oral: he even visits Stoke Newington. But the more he pursues it, the more N, so briefly held in superposition between the memories of Harliss and Perrot, slips out of view. There’s no one left to ask if it was ever there, not these days, now the three old men are gone. Machen was 75 when he wrote this.

First published in The Cosy Room, 1936. Widely collected, including in The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories, Oxford World’s Classics, 2018, and available online, including here

‘Rayme’ by Jayne Anne Phillips

Nothing more unlike ‘N’ could be imagined. The prose is clean and see-through, yet heartbreakingly lyrical; the content unfailingly experiential. The viewpoint is autobiographical. Just enough has been learnt from these experiences, it implies; just enough hasn’t. Rayme lives in a house with her friends, of whom the narrator is one. They take care of Rayme, because, as we’ll see, she is a little adrift. Not that, in those days, which we take to be the 1970s, they aren’t all a little adrift, “consulting a series of maps bearing no relation to any physical geography”. But Rayme, who has baggage that makes theirs look light, goes off the Thorazine and takes it all the way, and soon the whole scene evaporates. Looking back, the narrator remembers everyone the last time they were together, swimming at dusk in a lake somewhere in Arizona. “Our destinations,” she concludes, “appeared to be interchangeable pauses in some long, lyric transit.” There was a point when I thought this the perfect model of a short story, with all its movement and causalities and conclusions packed somewhere the reader couldn’t quite find them, yet informing every sentence of the text; and I think I might still say that if you backed me into a corner. Nothing further needs to be told about Rayme or her friends; they’ll be caught as they are, in the cold Arizona lake, in the twilight, in between lives or worlds, forever; suspended in time, pellucid yet still moving, the crucial elements of a novel that no longer needs to be written, a movie that doesn’t, now, need to be shown.

First published in Granta 8: Dirty Realism, June 1983 and available to subscribers here. Collected in Fast Lanes, Faber & Faber, 1987

‘The Voices of Time’ by JG Ballard

Like Truth (though, whatever anyone says, it rarely deserves a place in that category, and a good thing too), the best imaginative or fantastic fiction comes up out of the well in a bad mood, from a place of struggle, rage and uncontrollable, deeply unsentimental weirdness, ready to sort you out. In ‘The Voices of Time’, the clock is running down. The genetic code, so recently discovered, is wearing out. Powers the doomed neurologist watches as his specimens–a brain damaged monkey in a jet pilot helmet, a sea anemone that has built itself a new nervous system, a spider that can only see gamma radiation–evolve to deal with a nascent yet still unimaginable future. Meanwhile, the great bowls of the radio telescopes sieve the sky for clues to the real time in the Universe. There’s a drained swimming pool and a woman called Coma. At the age of seventeen I couldn’t imagine anything more savagely exciting. This story doesn’t try to be science fiction. Instead it tries to make science fiction a poetics, and infuse it into the reader’s way of getting knowledge. This is the thing Ballard did so well. I was sad when he moved along, but contemporary fiction needed a sardonic, threatening, intelligent–if by then more easily measurable–darling, and from the 1970s on he was perfect for the part.

First published in New Worlds, October 1960. Collected in The Complete Short Stories Vol 1, Flamingo, 2001

‘Odd Behaviour’ by Lydia Davis

Davis begins this forty-six word story, “You see how circumstances are to blame”, and ends it with, “when I lived alone I had all the silence I needed.” Anyone else would have placed a novel between the two and still dealt with less along the way.

First published in Conjunctions 24, Spring 1995 and available online here. In The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Hamish Hamilton, 2009