‘Dentaphilia’ by Julia Slavin

‘Dentaphilia’ is one of the first short stories that I fell in love with; I read it during my undergrad degree and was blown away by its delightful weirdness. Told from the perspective of her husband, it’s about a woman who spontaneously grows teeth all over her body until every inch of her is covered in pearly whites. It’s a true exercise in the “What if?” approach to storytelling and Slavin explores the body horror of unexpected teeth (a nightmare for this dentaphobe) with an unflinching dedication to realism. It’s like examining the already wild concept of vagina dentata and taking it to an extreme. ‘Detaphilia’ is an off-beat and bittersweet story about beauty and fidelity, loyalty and change, and about the weirdness of teeth and bodies, love and blood. The line ‘Watcha looking at, Hel?’ will never stop breaking my heart.

First published in the Crescent Review, and collected in The Woman Who Cut off Her Legat the Maidstone Club, Henry Holt, 1999, and The Burned Children of America, Hamish Hamilton, 2003

‘The Evolution of my Brother’ by Jenny Zhang

Zhang’s short stories explore themes of family and immigration, and my favourite is ‘The Evolution of My Brother.’ We’re introduced to a pair of Chinese-American siblings that, like many of Zhang’s characters, have grown up close yet distant; they have quite a large age gap between them, and their closeness waxes and wanes over the course of the story. As the narrator – also named Jenny, which feels like an excellent two-fingers-up to the cliché that women writers are diarists – watches her younger brother grow up, she slowly realises that she has no idea who he is. He’s a little odd around the edges, with anxieties and compulsions that his family struggle to understand. What really gets me about this story is the reflection on not just the evolution of the individual, but also of the meaning of family: “there would come a point when in thinking about ‘family’ we would think of the ones we made, not the ones we were from.” I find that so incredibly sad, and yet so beautifully true.

First published in Rookie, 2011 and collected in Sour Heart, Lenny/Bloomsbury, 2017

‘Head to Toe’ by Abigail Ulman

In ‘Head to Toe’, jaded teenagers Jenni and Elise decide to withdraw from the keg parties and awkward sexual encounters of their peers and return to the horse-riding camp of their middle school summers. There’s this sense of quiet acceptance that life isn’t as exciting as they thought it would be, when they were kids lying in their sleeping bags, imaging their future of dating, of parties, of high school. The girls have to share a cabin with three pre-teens, and they enjoy sliding into the role of big sisters – as experienced mediators – when their roommates have a tearful row over an inconsequential truth-spilling game. Later, however, our protagonists find themselves struggling to adapt when the twenty-something riding coach tries to talk to them as peers over dinner. When they return home, after camp, they go to a party and slide right back into place. They aren’t quite adults, but they no longer feel like children. It’s the perfect story about the liminality of growing up.

Published in Hot Little Hands, Spiegel & Grau/Penguin, 2016

‘Shu Yi’ by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Stories about children making bad decisions always make my toes curl and leave a devasting impression on me. In ‘Shu Yi’, our narrator is Ava, a young and somewhat lonely bookworm. Her mother, who “worked tirelessly to fit [their] brown-skinned family of five into conservative white suburbia” asks her to befriend new girl Shu Yi. Although Ava describes her as “the most beautiful creature I had ever seen” and “exactly what I would have been like, if I were a little less me” she recognises Shu Yi not as a kindred spirit, but as a social burden in a school whose racism permeates the very air around them. Caught in a net of internalised racism and with the strong desire to slip through school unseen, Ava shuns Shu Yi, with devastating consequences. A must-read about racism, fitting in and peer pressure.

First published in Peril, 2010, and collected in Foreign Soil, Hackette Australia, 2014/Corsair 2015

‘Sundaes at the Tipping Yard’ by Lara Williams

This is a story about “a girl who quits her job, her boyfriend, her flat and does a Creative Writing MA” only to find that she can only write about girls who quit the aforementioned to do Creative Writing MAs. It’s written in the second person, which I always love, and it has a kind of hopeless rhythm to it as the narrator consistently succeeds at nothing but mediocrity. It’s a story about gentle disappointments, about washing diazepam down with warm white wine and “thinking about the air.” If it sounds navel-gazey, that’s because it absolutely is – and I love it for that exact reason. Returning to the story to write this, I was shocked to discover that it – like many others in the collection – is incredibly short: just six pages, and it has left as lasting an impression on me as any novel. It reminds me of some of my favourite recent books about lost millennial women: The Idiotby Elif Batuman, Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (in fact, everything by Sally Rooney), All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg and many of the stories from Abigail Ulman’s Hot Little Hands.

Published in Treats, Freight Press, 2016

‘Synaesthete, Would Like to Meet’ by Eley Williams

It was hard to pick one story from Attrib., because the whole collection fizzes with the fresh, addictive energy that made it such a hit. It feels impossible to play favourites. While I often reread the alphabet paragraph from the opening story, I chose ‘Synaesthete, Would Like to Meet’ for my Personal Anthology because I think it best captures Williams’ playful spirit whilst also fitting into my loose theme of relationships. The story introduces a character with synaesthesia before, during and after a strangely successful date. The narrator has synaesthesia, which means as they interact with the world, words, sounds and images are paired with flavours, scents, colours and sensations in an overwhelming cacophony of stimulation. By dating the right person, the narrator discovers a way to numb the overwhelming clash of the senses and the general sensory noise is slowly turned down. Every story with Williams is an adventure in a brilliant linguistic gymnasium and I love her writing to death.

First published in Night and Day, 2011, and collected in Attrib. and other Stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘When the Year Grows Old’ by Amy Bloom

‘When the Year Grows Old’ introduces a sensible, practical suburban housewife in the midst of a nervous breakdown. No longer prepared or able to meet the demands of her controlling husband, Laura sets up a camp bed in the basement of her neat suburban house and regresses to her barefoot, black-clad student days. Her daughter observes this sudden change in her mother from the side-lines as Laura develops a penchant for Dunhill cigarettes and quoting Blake. Loss is a constant theme in Amy Bloom’s work, and this story about loss of youth, loss of love, loss of life, is wonderful. I love the juxtaposition of mother and daughter, and the temptation to regress to what is arguably a more complicated and yet ultimately freer time of life.

First published in Story, 1992, and collected in Come to Me, HarperPerennial, 1993, and Rowing to Eden, Granta, 2015

‘Who Will Greet You at Home’ by Lesley Nneka Arimah

Motherhood, whether tender or terrible, is touched upon often in Lesley Nneka Arimah’s spellbinding collection. Although What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky is all killer, no filler, I’ve chosen ‘Who Will Greet You at Home’ as my stand-out story. In a matriarchal society, young women must craft their children from found materials, like yarn, raffia or clay, in the hope that their mothers will breathe life into their handmade effigies. Before that can happen, they must carry these dolls like babes in arms and keep them safe for a full year before there’s any hope of them coming to life. The narrator, Ogechi, struggles with the task of self-made motherhood, but after multiple false-starts she finds success with a somewhat unusual material. It’s a story about the pressure on women to be mothers, and to be perfect mothers at that, with perfect children, as well as covering themes of fertility and infant mortality.

First published in The New Yorker, October 2015, and collected in What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Tinder Press 2018

Introduction

These are the stories that came to mind as I was thinking about my personal anthology, the ones that have stayed with me the most in recent years. I guess this selection is pretty representative of my reading these days – mostly writers from the mid-20^thcentury, some pieces in translation here and there, and a fondness for character-driven fiction. I hope you find something of interest across the mix.

‘A Glutton for Punishment’ by Richard Yates

Few writers capture the crushing pain and disillusionment that can accompany everyday life quite as well as Richard Yates, and this story illustrates it beautifully. Here we have a classic Yates protagonist, Walter Henderson, a rather unassuming young man who works in a Manhattan office in the heart of NYC. A graceful and gracious loser all his life, Walter is convinced he is about to be fired from his job, and in spite of his wife’s best efforts to make their home life as bearable as possible, the weight of this expectation hangs over Walter on a permanent basis. In writing this story, Yates exposes some of the anxieties of life, the sense of pride and respect we all crave from those around us. Moreover, it also highlights the different roles a woman was expected to play back in the late 1950s/early ‘60s, the various modes she had to adopt irrespective of how taxing or frustrating they proved to be. A period piece that still has some relevance today.

Collected in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Little, Brown and Co. 1962, currently available as a Vintage Classic

‘The Letter-Writers’ by Elizabeth Taylor

While this may not be Elizabeth Taylor’s best story (I’m still working my way through them, slowly but surely), it’s certainly one of her most memorable. A lonely middle-aged woman named Emily is preparing to meet a man she has been writing to for the last ten years. Over the years, she has confided such intimacies in Edmund – he had always seemed so approachable and attentive at a distance, perhaps overly so. As she waits for Edmund to arrive at her cottage for lunch, Emily worries that their meeting will be a mistake. Can she live up to the impressions created by her letters? Will Edmund be disappointed by the real Emily once he meets her in the flesh? Will he ever write to her again? Somewhat inevitably, the lunch is rather strained – the atmosphere made all the more difficult by the most awkward of starts and the interference of a nosy neighbour, the pushy Mrs Waterlow. The story itself is quietly devastating, and yet there is a glimmer of hope at the end.

First published in Cornhill Magazine. Collected in The Blush and Other Stories, Peter Davies 1958, republished by Virago Modern Classics, 1986. Also in Complete Short Stories, Virago, 2012

‘Verochka’ by Anton Chekhov

What can I say about Chekhov that hasn’t been said before? Probably not a lot other than to reiterate his genius as a master of the short story form. In ‘Verochka’, a twenty-one-year-old country girl by the name of Vera declares her love for Ivan Ognev, a somewhat naïve statistician who has been visiting Vera’s father on business. When Ognev leaves the country to return to the city, Vera accompanies him to the outskirts of her village where she makes her feelings as clear as decently possible. It’s a story of missed chances, pain and regret as Ognev struggles to respond to Vera’s advances. There is a sense here of individuals’ lives turning on the tiniest of moments as the choices they make set the direction for their future.

First published in New Times. Collected in In the Twilight, 1887, available in a new translation by Hugh Aplin from Alma Classics 2014. Available online in Constance Garnett’s earlier translation here

‘It’s the Reaction’ by Mollie-Panter Downes

Back in the days of WW2, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote stories featuring ordinary British people – mostly women – trying to cope with the day-to-day realities of life on the Home Front. Panter-Downes’ style – understated, perceptive and minutely observed – makes for a subtly powerful effect. She is particularly adept at capturing the range of emotions experienced by her characters, from loneliness and longing to fear and self-pity. In this, my favourite of her stories, a lonely young woman is buoyed by the camaraderie of war when she finally gets to know her neighbours as they shelter together during the Blitz. However, once the sequence of air raids is over, life in Miss Birch’s apartment block reverts to normal – and when she tries to rekindle her new friendships, Miss Birch soon discovers the fickle nature of relationships, even in times of hardship and war.

First published in The New Yorker, 1943, available to subscribers here. Collected in Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, Persephone 1999

‘Sally Bowles’ by Christopher Isherwood

Undoubtedly the standout piece from Isherwood’s novel in short stories, Goodbye to Berlin, this story features Sally Bowles, a young English girl who has come to Berlin in the hope of finding work as a singer/actress. By the time she meets Christopher, Sally is just about scraping a living, singing (quite badly) at one of the city’s bars. Nevertheless, she makes quite an impression on Christopher, dressed as she is in black silk “with a small cape over her shoulders and a little cap like a page-boy’s stuck jauntily on one side of her head”.Fairly soon after their first meeting, Sally invites Christopher to tea at her lodgings, a gloomy semi-furnished place presided over by a rather eccentric old matron. Before long the pair strike up a somewhat unlikely friendship, spending time with one another on a fairly regular basis – much to the delight of Christopher’s landlady, Frl. Schroeder, who imagines Sally as a possible partner for her favourite boarder. It’s an utterly charming story, a wonderful tribute to a provocative character from Isherwood’s past.

First published by the Hogarth Press in 1937, and then in Goodbye to Berlin, The Hogarth Press, 1939 and The Berlin Novels, both currently available from Vintage