Year: 2019

‘No life’ by J. Robert Lennon

The story opens in a  park, with Edward and Alison sitting in their car, getting ready to join the meeting between prospective adopting parents and children. It starts there, but very soon the focus shifts from the children themselves to this couple and another. Harlan (a Texan judge –“a rich hick”) and Linda Breece happen to have spotted the same cute child, and soon it’s clear a competition has started. And when Edward and Alison are invited to dinner by their competitors, you can expect everything not to go smoothly. Lennon’s skill is in wrong-footing the reader. In his short stories, just like in his novels, he is at his best when crossing genres, moods.

First published in The New Yorker, September 4, 2000 issue. Collected in See You in Paradise, Graywolf Press/Serpent’s Tail, 2014

‘The Night Face Up’ by Julio Cortázar

(First a few words on publication: originally published in Spanish in 1956 in Final del Juego, and in English, as far as I can tell, in Blow Up and other stories (1967), a selection from different collections. I first read it in French in a collection called Les Armes Secrètes (1959, like the Spanish edition). My edition, a later one, collected under that name eleven stories instead of the original five. Show some respect, publishers!)

How do you express the unspeakable horror of a road accident? Of the trauma of hospital? Of being sacrificed to some blood-thirsty god, your heart torn out of you chest? Well, a careful writer might safely keep away, but Cortázar takes all of these face on and juggle them into a blur.

First published in English in Blow Up and Other Stories, Random House, 1967. Read online here

‘Three Indignities’ by Brian Evenson

This is pretty real-world horror for Evenson, who often strays into more supernatural territory. People who’ve been around hospitals a bit might get a familiar tingle. Evenson is a master of unease. Read his whole collection A Collapse of Horses to see how he can use the most innocuous thing, the slightest speck, to open the door a crack to terror.

First published in Unsaid. Collected in A Collapse of Horses, Coffee House Press, 2016. Read online at The Center for Fiction here

‘Oestrogen’ by Mike McCormack

McCormack has long, or until recently at least, been considered by many as a greatly underrated writer. His recent novel Solar Bones might have changed that, considering the coverage it got, but I wonder if it will lead to his stories being re-read over. I must say I haven’t read a novel of his yet (that Solar Bones says hi from my TBR pile), but I loved both his collections, Getting It In The Head (1996) and Forensic Songs (2012).

‘Oestrogen’, from his first collection, tells us of a young farmer who one day lands at his sister’s in Galway, intent on spending a couple of months there “to grow a pair of tits”. From this seemingly wacky premise McCormack touches interesting and difficult questions, such as mental health issues in rural Ireland (and beyond, really), and what it means to live both in a changing society and west Mayo. It is also, to me, a surprisingly touching story.

First published in Getting It In The Head, Jonathan Cape, 1996

‘Eastmouth’ by Alison Moore

Alison Moore’s stories inhabit a corner of the UK akin to Shirley Jackson‘s and Kit Reed’s own backyard, with their quiet horrors building up until you choke on them, silently, afraid to make a fuss. Eastmouth in particular looks into the mundane horror of meeting your partner’s parents, and the particular pull one’s hometown can have.

First published in The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, Spectral Press, 2014. Included in Best British Short Stories 2015, Salt, 2015

‘Schwarzschild Radius’ by Connie Willis

Willis here gives us, in Le Guin’s words, a story about “the idea of science,” more than about science itself. It takes places in the German trenches on the Russian front during the First World War, and follows a handful of characters who try to survive by fixing a wireless, because that’s the only thing standing between them and the front. Muller stays sane by making up theories. Schwarzschild is corresponding with Einstein (who introduces the general theory of relativity the same year), but he’s not in good shape:

We are all of us – Muller, and the recuit who is trying to put together Eisner’s motocycle, and perhaps even the doctor with his steady bedside voice – afraid of the front. But our fear is not complete, because unspoken in it is our belief that the front is something separate from us, something we can keep away from by keeping the wireless or the motorcycle fixed, something we can survive by flattening our faces into the frozen earth, something we can escape altogether by being invalidated out.

But the front is not separate. It is inside Schwarzschild, and the symptoms I have been sending out, suppurative bullae and excoriated lesions, are not what is wrong with him at all. The lesions on his skin are only the barbed wire and shell holes and connecting trenches of a front that is somewhere farther in.

First Published in The Universe, Bantam Books, 1987. Collected in Impossible Things, Bantam Spectra Books, 1994. Read online here

‘Green Boots’ Cave’ by Jim Hinks

I read this story, thanks to some dark serendipity, not long after reading a good few pieces about climbing Everest, and more specifically the gruesome fact that there are a lot of dead people out there, that are staying there, up where shit becomes tough and if you’re up there dying is not a remote possibility for you either. I was (morbidly, maybe) fascinated by the fact that people who chose to climb Everest in effect accepted not only that they might die, but that people they loved might die, and that they might have to leave them behind up there in the 29,000-foot blizzard to die. By the fact, and this isn’t potential but certain, that they will have to find their way by the de facto signposts of abandoned bodies, recognisable and talked about by the colours of their coats, their boots.

As a writer I was starting to try to work out how could one possibly approach such a subject, such horror, when I came across Hinks’ story. And I had this most welcome sensation: that of finding someone else has written about what you wanted to write, and so well that you don’t have to try yourself; shouldn’t, really. Hinks up to his Cortázar tricks. Go read it now, it’s pretty short.

First published in Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, Volume 4 Issue 1. Included in Best British Short Stories 2015, Salt, 2015. Read online here – you’ll have to download the story

‘Cowboy Pile’ by Andy Mozina

Talking about surprise, there is a lot to be said for picking up a book at random. I used to live in Cork, Ireland, which still hosts an International Short Story Festival, and used to have the Frank O’Connor Award, the biggest award for a collection (which Carys Davies’ The Redemption of Galen Pike won, by the way – it’s all connected!). So charity shops there often had a good few collections on their shelves, from the copies sent to the judging panel, I assume.

Anyway, I picked Andy Mozina’s book without knowing the first thing about it, and it was good. ‘Cowboy Pile’, the first story in the book, a five-page funny piece, starts like this:

Out on the ranges, out West, you get cowboy piles. Mounds of human cowboys. A cowboy lies on the ground (for no reason, it seems), and then someone lies across him, and then a third guy piles on. Then one after another. Sometimes you’ll see a pile from the Interstate. If the wind’s right and your window is down and your engine’s running gently, you might hear six guns fired into the air or the barely audible hooting and yowling of a  convocation of cowboys. If you’re lucky, ahead of you on the highway you’ll see a pickup with a pair of men wearing ten-gallon hats. Follow those gents. Exit.

First published in Beloit Fiction Journal. Collected in The Women Were Leaving The Men, Wayne State University Press, 2007. Read online here

‘Honeymoon’ by Maureen McHugh

McHugh’s stories fit very well within the Small Beer Press list, a two-folk team (the incredible Kelly Link, whose stories you have obviously already read avidly, and her husband Gavin J. Grant) one of the most consistently good publishers I can think of. These stories of disasters small and big, personal and/or world-wide, navigate genres picking tools from the literary and speculative according to their needs.

‘Honeymoon’ is one of the least speculative stories of this collection. It starts with a marriage failing from the start – as in the very night of the wedding – and the disappointed bride moving on to do drug trials. It’s a weird story that doesn’t go where you might expect it to, one of those that travels quite a long track and kind of circles back nicely, that make you look in the rear-view mirror to ponder the road taken.

First published in After The Apocalypse, Small Beer Press, 2011

Introduction

This is part of a series of special Personal Anthologies celebrating the literature of the 27 other member states of the European Union, alongside the UK.

In British political discourse today, the hundreds of thousands of Poles who have lived and settled in the UK since 2004 figure – along with all other incomers from nations east of the Oder-Neisse Line – largely as ghosts or ciphers. They serve as silent marionettes, abstractions summoned as spectral cannon-fodder to support one domestic argument or another. Thus real people become shadow-puppets recruited into a war of ideas waged by fantasists and narcissists.

On the one hand, this disembodied rhetoric fits all too neatly with the dehumanising politics of Brexit. Yet, poignantly, classic Polish fiction since the late 19th Century itself abounds with characters and entities who doubt their identity, question their status, and hover on the brink of non-being. Poland itself was, in geopolitical terms, no more than phantom between the country’s Third Partition (among Russia, Prussia and Austria) in 1795 and the restoration of autonomous nationhood in November 1918.

Explore Polish writing and you frequently traverse a borderland where shapes change and outlines blur; where the boundaries of selfhood, or perception, or genre, may change at any time. My selection, a baker’s dozen of stories by Polish and Polish-born writers, tramples formal fences in itself. I have chosen some self-contained sections from mosaics of linked tales that have been published as “novels”. One story comes from a work of documentary reportage but deploys all the stylistic armoury of fiction. And one of my Polish writers is a long-term UK resident. Two others grew up in historical Poland but made their literary names as migrants who wrote in other languages: Yiddish and English. Pay attention to the alien, the freak, the outsider: you never know what outlandish form your own secret sharer may adopt.

‘The Ugliest Woman in the World’ by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

“Anyone who hasn’t got a mother hasn’t got a mother tongue either.” The itinerant circus impresario who narrates this misshapen love story comes across as something of a freak and a misfit himself. So when he recruits a grotesque-looking lady as a lucrative sideshow, the stage is set for a tragicomedy of mishandled passions and mistaken identities. Through her, he discovers “a secret – that everyone is in disguise”. Quieter, perhaps quirkier, than Angela Carter, though rich in comparable neo-Gothic tropes, Tokarczuk’s story investigates her abiding theme of our inherent strangeness – not only to foreign persons and other cultures, but to our very selves.

Published in Best European Fiction 2011, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, Dalkey Archive Press

‘The Mask’ by Stanisław Lem, translated by Michael Kandel

‘The Mask’ stands out for its eerie prescience, even among the plentiful parables of artificial intelligence and its relation to our fractured human consciousness composed by Poland’s science-fiction maestro. The inorganic “female” entity who narrates the story wrestles with the puzzles of her origin and destiny, and of her possible relations with another kind of being. As so often in Lem, scientific advance coexists with a feudal, backward social order. A fantastic or futuristic scenario enables him to delve deep into our present dilemmas of autonomy, freedom, conditioning and choice.

First published 1976; collected in Mortal Engines, Penguin Modern Classics, 2016

‘The Waistcoat’ by Bolesław Prus, translated by Bill Johnston

A threadbare cousin to Nikolai Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’, this Warsaw waistcoat circulates among shivering hands in the courtyard of a tenement building. The narrator, observing his neighbours like James Stewart through Hitchcock’s Rear Window, pieces together its heart-rending back-story. Prus’s social-realist tendencies collide with a more speculative and visionary mode of writing. The result blends the gritty and the ghostly: compassion for the poor and their burdens, combined with an unearthly sense of the inanimate existence that underpins, and outlasts, our frail human striving.

First published 1882; collected in The Sins of Childhood, and Other Stories, Northwestern University Press, 1997