‘Inventory’ by Carmen Maria Machado

An unusual apocalypse story, structured in segments where the main character recounts all the sexual relationships she’s ever had. As she describes the physical attributes of each man or woman, the narrator casually tosses out information about the ways in which a new virus has been spreading throughout the world. It was an unnerving story to read in 2017, and even more uncomfortable to read post-Covid (though I’d argue we’re still peri-Covid in many respects); current readers may be all too familiar with this sense of creeping unease, as well as the loneliness and despair caused by severed intimate connections.

“In the master bedroom, I caught my reflection in the vanity mirror as I rode him, and the lights were off, and our skin reflected silver from the moon and when he came in me he said, ‘Sorry, sorry.’ He died a week later, by his own hand. I moved out of the city, north.”

First published in LitHub, 2017, and collected in Her Body and Other Parties, Graywolf, 2017)

‘White Fang’ by Jack London

This is the first part of the famous novel, but I’ll argue that it’s a wonderful, standalone short story unto itself. Henry and Bill, two men almost as stoic as the surrounding Yukon wilderness, are discomfited by the sound of a wolfpack in the near distance. Six dogs haul their sled, which contains the third, already casketed, member of their party. Night after night, a single dog disappears from the camp. The men squabble over various topics: the disappearances, the lack of coffee, the constant, pervasive cold. It’s set up almost like a murder mystery, though the first disappearance is met with derision and irritation rather than concern.

By the time Frog, their strongest dog, disappears, the men realize the problem is serious. A beautiful she-wolf with a reddish tinge to her coat turns out to be the culprit; seducing the sled dogs one by one and leads them into the maws of the hungry pack. With fewer dogs to push the sledge, and only three bullets remaining, Bill and Henry’s chances of survival are slim, and the tension is running high.

“It looked at them in a strangely wistful way, after the manner of a dog; but in its wistfulness there was none of the dog affection. It was a wistfulness bred of hunger, as cruel as its own fangs, as merciless as the frost itself.”

First serialized in Outing Magazine, 1906, and published as White Fang, Macmillan, 1906

‘Need for Restraint’ by Janice Galloway

Scottish author Galloway’s work veers between matter-of-fact and surreal, and her ability to disrupt her own story in a way which brings the reader further into the world is a marvel; her introductory sentences are often startled, as if you’ve caught them midway through an ongoing conversation.

         “suddenly
         they were both on the ground clutching up
         gouging and hacking with hands pulling at cloth and
         snatches of hair wound on fingers the flat of flesh slapping
         dull on tile”

Inside a shopping centre, narrator Alice observes men beating an unnamed victim up—though she tries to break the fight up herself, it’s the intervention of another passerby which finally finishes the incident. Alarmed by what she’s seen. Alice scours her memory, struggling to remember who she is and why she’s there in the first place. Information arrives in staccato drips, punctuated by strange, capitalised screams over the tannoy system warning her to stay out of other people’s business, and the reader begins to realise that Alice’s marriage to her husband Charles is perhaps as violent in its own way as the scene she’s just witnessed.

First published in the collection Blood, Minerva, 1991

Introduction

There’s something monstrous in selecting a dozen short stories, fashioning a list that seems merely to bring the absentees into relief. Emotionally, I found it like lining up my children (were I to have any), announcing who was staying and who should beat a path to the orphanage. In the end I opted for stories that have flayed me, pieces with an ineffable voltage and bravura at their core. A world without these stories would be irredeemably bereft. Sincere apologies to the orphans.

‘Manifest’ by ’Pemi Aguda

“The third time your mother called you Agnes, she hit you in the face with a Bible.”

There are moments in Nigerian author Aguda’s story when breathing becomes a challenge, the lungs corralled into paralysis as she winds us repeatedly with a sentence, a concept, an image. Told in the second person (which somehow permits both displacement and great intimacy), the piece escalates as its young narrator, a woman whose mother believes she is possessed by the spirit of her own mother, commits increasingly wicked, cruel acts. African horror stories tend to occupy more nuanced territory than their often glib Western counterparts: tension is hewn not from hyperbolic gore, but by evoking our primordial fears of what lies just beyond the veil of reality. The violence, when it comes, avoids grandiose pyrotechnics, the understatement rendering it ever more chilling. A beautifully written, inimitable and extraordinary story.

First published online in Granta, October 2019 and available to read here

‘A Romantic Weekend’ by Mary Gaitskill

“Despite their mutual ill humor, they fornicated again, mostly because they could more easily ignore each other while doing so.”

There’s coruscating irony in Gaitskill’s title, which dawns on the reader as her two characters indulge in a pre-arranged union of consensual sexual violence. Roles and power, however, soon shift, their weekend of sado-masochism rapidly unravelling into discomforting incompatibility. It’s an uncomfortable read at times, with Gaitskill holding a mirror to the reader, forcing us to squirm as we contemplate what it means to offer and take pleasure from sexual encounters when desires are misaligned.

First published in Bad Behavior, Simon & Schuster, 1998; collected in The Granta Book of the American Short Story, Granta Books, 2007

‘The Half-Skinned Steer’ by Annie Proulx

“On the main road his tire tracks showed as a faint pattern in the pearly apricot light from the risen moon, winking behind roiling clouds of snow.”

In this reconfiguration of an Icelandic folk tale, Proulx occupies territory I tend to discourage students from: having a character spend long periods alone; freighting the work with considerable backstory; employing character introspection rather than just narrating what’s happening. But the author’s genius of course renders such ‘rules’ irrelevant. Her protagonist journeys to the harsh, unforgiving American west to attend a funeral, a hostile landscape he’d escaped as a young man, one of decay, violence and inexorable legacy. At its heart, a story embedded in a story about the (mis)treatment of animals and a disillusionment with the pioneering American Dream.

Strangely, Proulx, in interviews, doesn’t much rate this one of hers. I think she’s wrong.

First published in The Atlantic, November 1997, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Scribner, 1999

‘Gravel’ by Alice Munro

“I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture.”

A remembered life, as Munro reminds us in this exquisite meta-fictional story, bears as much resemblance to the truth as we allow it. From the relative sanctuary of adulthood, the narrator trawls her childhood, a terrain of innocence and naivety, to make sense of a nebulous, tragic event and its attendant guilt. She recalls playing with her older sister and the family dog, moving into a trailer beside a gravel pit with a new step-father, their mother pregnant. A wolf loiters at the edge of the narrative. Beyond this, we are uncertain what to trust, as the fragility of memory blurs into a series of constructs that ponder the nature of storytelling itself.

First published in The New Yorker, June 2011, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Dear Life, McClelland & Stewart Limited, 2012

‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“You wanted to feel disdain, to show it as you brought his order, because white people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same – condescending.”

As with Proulx’s story above, the American Dream again proves a fallacy, or at least prohibitive for some. An unnamed narrator leaves Nigeria for Maine, seeking new opportunity as she stays with an ostensibly helpful uncle who isn’t an uncle, until he abuses her. ‘America is give and take,’ he tells her. Amid the diasporic disorientation a romance ensues, her white boyfriend attentive yet blind to the insidious prejudice or effusiveness that flanks them everywhere. ‘…the nasty ones were too nasty and the nice ones too nice.’ She sends money home, an illusion of success bestowed, but the cultural disconnect is irreconcilable, the death of her father in Lagos luring her home, perhaps forever.

First published in Prospect, June 2004, and available to read here; collected in The Thing Around Your Neck, Fourth Estate, 2009

‘The Dressmaker’s Child’ by William Trevor

“She came out of the blue cottage and ran out at cars.”

The story (and collection) responsible for seducing me to the form, beguiled and astonished as I was by Trevor’s ellipses and obliquity, how less could be so much more (than the bloated novels I was growing weary of). A young Irish mechanic is hired to drive a pair of credulous Spanish tourists on a pilgrimage to a statue, the Virgin of Pouldearg, after they hear rumours – furnished by a man in a bar they buy drinks – of it miraculously weeping. The events that follow chart a forlorn yet poignant course, navigating guilt, self-delusion and penitence, the sheer serendipity of the trials that befall us. Life’s path in Trevor’s stories often alters in a heartbeat, a moment of recklessness, a quiet betrayal. And yet, as here, tragedy can also birth hope. The audacious arc of this piece still astonishes me.

First published in The New Yorker, October 2004, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Cheating at Canasta, Penguin Books, 2007

‘She Murdered Mortal He’ by Sarah Hall

“The ocean wind was strong. Grains of sand stung her arms and face. Her dress fluttered. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps they were not in step.”

I once read someone bemoaning their fortunes in one of the big short story prizes: ‘How it works, basically, is everyone enters and Sarah Hall wins.’ Beneath the cynicism, there was also a grudging respect, acknowledgement that such success was deserved. I often tell my students that the best short story writers are Irish, or American, or African. Canadian. Rarely British. Hall being one of the few exceptions, her deep understanding and execution of the form almost unrivalled.

A quiet story, this, until, as with all the great ones, it isn’t. A couple holidaying on the coast of an unnamed African country, their relationship collapsing, take a break from hostilities and each other, the female narrator fleeing along the beach. A stray dog approaches her, threat and menace palpable. What follows might peter out in mere mortals’ hands, but of course Hall sustains the tension right up to the shocking finish, which is all the more impactful when we realise what has occurred off-stage.

First published in Granta 117, October 2011, and available to read here; collected in The Beautiful Indifference, Faber and Faber, 2012

‘The Edge of the Shoal’ by Cynan Jones

“The water beneath him suddenly aglut, sentinel somehow, with jellyfish.”

Jones’s short novels pulse with a quiet, brooding tension, made tauter by the spare, cadenced prose, which approaches its subject matter obliquely and with great understatement. This story, extracted from one of these books – Cove, presides over a kayaker struck by lightning, battling injuries, fear and the elements, buoyed only by thoughts of his pregnant partner ashore, his late father. Crucially, Jones’s sentences are never mere fact conveyors, but also impact us on an abstract and affective level, the ellipses and shifts in tense and point-of-view mimicking the kayaker’s disorientation and desperation. Time distends and lumbers, skews and stills in this claustrophobic tale of oceanic survival.

First published in The New Yorker, October 2016, and available to subscribers to read here; also available to read at the Guardianonline here. Winner of the BBC National Short Story Prize 2017 and collected in The BBC National Short Story Award 2017, Comma Press, 2016

‘Terroir’ by Graham Mort

“When you drank wine, Gaultier had said, you’re sipping time and weather, the rising and setting sun, even tasting your own mortality.”

An ambitious young enologist is hired by an entitled, largely absent vineyard owner to oversee that season’s harvest, setting in motion a cascading sequence of tragic events. Mort transports us deep into Bordeaux country, its traditions and rhythms, its heady concoction of toil and passion, a pulsing heat that loosens morals and fosters incaution. At its heart is a story of love, lust and revenge, of temptation and consequence. I typically prefer stories less crafted than this, but Mort’s brilliance as both poet and skillful storyteller wins me around.

First published in Terroir, Seren Press, 2015 and available to read online here

‘The Intensive Care Unit’ by J.G. Ballard

“As we undressed and exposed ourselves to each other the screens merged into a last oblivious close-up . . .”

With typical Ballardian prescience, this harrowing dystopian story reveals how contact with other people is restricted to screen-time only (sound familiar?) with humans isolated in their homes in solitary confinement (even the couple’s wedding night takes place apart). We are never told why this separation is necessary – seasoned storytellers know to shun explanatory neatness – but instead witness the aftermath of what occurs when a family (Ballard’s intensive care unit) decides to flout the draconian rules and meet in person. (Oh, how life imitates art.) Bookended by the present tense carnage is the story of how the couple met (via a screen of course), the ensuing domestic bliss and arrival of children (conceived via AID – which we presume to be a version of IVF). Amid the dark humour lie meditations on our desire for physical connection with others and what we become when this is removed.

First published in Myths of the Near Future, Jonathan Cape, 1982; collected in The Complete Stories, Vol 2, Fourth Estate, 2014 and English Short Stories from 1900 to the present, Everyman Classic, 1988