Introduction

These are not the best short stories ever, nor are they representative of anything apart from themselves. I’ve read hundreds of others that clamoured to be listed, so in the end this is, as much as anything else, a list of Great Omissions. There are no stories in translation—nothing by Borges, Maupassant, Chekhov, Babel, Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Clarice Lispector, Julio Cortázar, or Eileen Chang. And nothing by Henry James, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, Henry Green, Virginia Woolf, Edward Upward, Dorothy Richardson, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle…oh, I’ve hardly got started on who’s not on this list. Let alone all the many brilliant living writers, old and young, who deserve a look in, and who (with one exception) I’ve excluded. The few stories that remain, the ones that are on the list, are just twelve of the stories that have obstinately stuck in my head, for one reason or another, at various points in the last fifty years or more. I’ve listed them alphabetically, for fairness.