‘The Figure in the Carpet’ by Henry James

“‘I see–it’s some idea ABOUT life, some sort of philosophy. Unless it be,’ I added with the eagerness of a thought perhaps still happier, ‘some kind of game you’re up to with your style, something you’re after in the language. Perhaps it’s a preference for the letter P!’ I ventured profanely to break out. ‘Papa, potatoes, prunes–that sort of thing?’ He was suitably indulgent: he only said I hadn’t got the right letter.”

‘The Figure in the Carpet’ forces you to accept ambiguity, waking up your thoughts and giving them insomnia. This was one of the stories I couldn’t have omitted without ingratitude – I read it early and it’s become part of the furniture of my brain. It’s about a young critic who dedicates his life to learning the hidden meaning of an author’s work. Like Paul Auster’s City of Glass or any number of Borges’ stories, it captures something ineffable in concrete, only to sink it just out of view so that we really feel its absence.

I am often very sure that I know things – about myself, other people, the meaning of books and films and tv shows – right up until the moment that I try to articulate them to myself or others. Then I have that moment of terrifying undoing when I realise that nothing exists outside the how of my saying it, and if I don’t have that how, the knowledge recedes, and I’m left with nothing but a feeling of personal insufficiency. I think that’s what’s compelling about ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, more than it being a theorisation of ‘criticism’ or ‘authorship’ or whatever – it’s a story about the frustration of feeling like you ought to be able to know.

First published in Cosmopolis, 1896. Collected in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 1986; also available as a Little Black Classic, Penguin, 2015. Read online at Project Gutenberg here

‘Fragment of a Diary’ by Amparo Davila, trans. Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson

“I’ve always liked stairways, with their people who go dragging their breath up them and fall dully down them in a shapeless mass. Maybe that’s why I chose the stairs to suffer on.”

A man sits on the steps and practices suffering. He exercises his pains – moving from the 4th degree to the 9th of suffering, gaining mastery over remorse and jealousy. It’s a perfect portrayal of the paradox of the martyr – and of the artist. The hubris of trying to be in control of pain, thinking that if you just dwell on it enough, it won’t overwhelm you in the end. As long as you’re in love with suffering, you can never really suffer. Of course, ultimately, it’s love that gives the lie to this – because the most unbearable pain of all is the one that’s poisoned by the hope that things might stop hurting quite so much.

English translation published in The Houseguest and Other Stories, New Directions, 2018

‘On the Day of the Crucifixion’ by Leonid Andreyev, trans. Herman Bernstein

“On that terrible day, when the universal injustice was committed and Jesus Christ was crucified in Golgotha among robbers—on that day, from early morning, Ben-Tovit, a tradesman of Jerusalem, suffered from an unendurable toothache.”

This story begins my little trio of god texts. As I say in the introduction, I myself am not religious, but religious stories were some of the first texts I saw being talked about with reverence. Stories that were held up as something important, rather than your ‘Biff and Chips’ or Charlotte’s Webs, which were, as far as I could tell as a child at least, for play, or simply ‘educational’. Yes, I was indeed a fairly serious sort of child.

My grandpa on my mum’s side was a Church of England vicar, whilst my dad is a very atheistic Jew who tried sporadically to keep up the tradition of Shabbat and Passover. All this culminated in a personal sense that when people talked about god, it was a symbol for something foreign, distant, and outside the everyday.

The excerpted sentence above pretty much summarises the plot of this story. In the shadow of infinite suffering, Ben-Tovit has a tooth ache. The description of a man not noticing the immensity of something right beside him is as discomfiting as it is amusing. You get a prickling feeling that the sublime could pass you by and you wouldn’t even know it, because you’d been too busy explaining the details of your own personal gripes to notice that the irredeemable world was in the process of being redeemed.

English translation published in The Crushed Flower and Other Stories, 1916. Read online here

‘The Martyrdom of St. Edmund, King of East Anglia, 870,’ by Abbo of Fleury, trans. Kenneth Cutler

This kept popping into my mind when I was putting together my anthology, and in the end I just gave in to whatever it was my subconscious was trying to tell me.

It’s a hagiography of a King who’s martyred by invading Vikings for refusing to give up Christianity. It’s not a short story but I think it feels like one to read it today. What’s stuck with me is the way that it depicts (or rather, doesn’t depict) pain. The weirdness of it! The odd, affectless way that physical agony is described! There’s a line about him being pricked all over with spears ‘like a hedgehog’ that I think about weirdly often – it’s so impassive, disconnected – like his body is nothing but surface.

I read this at university and I remember not really knowing what to do with it academically. Now I’ve forgotten everything I learnt about hagiography and Abbo of Fleury, but the feeling of reading the text hasn’t budged – its bright, solid images, its refusal to go inside of things.

Perhaps this is what I like about reading it: that it reminds me of the uncanny fact of other lives and other times. Often stories give us the illusion of true empathy – of feeling with. But reading this, with all its meanings distant and its contexts inaccessible, I become aware of how many things have been, are, and will forever be alien to me.

Collected in Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer, Oxford University Press, 1882. Read online here

‘God’s Love’ by Sheila Heti

“Jenna, you better start loving God now, cause the years are passing, and when I screw you, I can see there are little hairs in your ass that weren’t there before, so I’m just telling you that you better find him soon.”

At her best, Heti is simultaneously deft playful and slight, and profound tragic and weighty. Sometimes her stories get a bit cute for me, but this one hits the note perfectly. Consisting of a man exhorting his girlfriend to stop sending emails to other men and to start loving God instead, it’s both funny and humiliatingly human. Is it cynical? Certainly it’s cruel, in the way only impeccably observed truthfulness can be. The speaker is so misguided that he’s almost endearing. At the centre of it there’s an interminable anxiety, and a stupid, stubborn, ridiculous refusal to believe that nothing’s ever going to calm it. And what is the speaker supposed to do with that? Heti doesn’t presume to know – only, not this.

Published in Mal Journal, 2019. Read online here

‘Good Old Neon’ by David Foster Wallace

“My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.”

I know at least one person whose life was saved by this story. I’m not exaggerating. My own experience – who knows? The effect it had on me was so intense, it’s certainly not far off. Reading it at 19, trying to work out why I couldn’t find a way of being alive that felt natural, or make connections that felt effortless, or have an emotion that felt pure – it put those experiences I saw as insoluble personal failings into the context of being a human subject and having to deal in the insufficiency of concrete things. I re-read it every couple of years, so I can confirm – it’s not just a late-adolescence thing. The stubborn sense of knotty anguish that forms at the beginning gives way to a struggling acceptance of the indignity of it all, and it’s so tender, so kind, so tremulously sublime, that every time I read it again, I feel it opening up inside my lungs. “So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.”

First published in Harper’s Magazine, January 1998, and collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown, 1999, and The David Foster Wallace Reader, Little, Brown, 2014

‘Artur and Isabella’ by Daša Drndić, trans. S.D. Curtis

“He watches grey-haired ladies weeing in their nappies and smiling. They smile tiny smiles and they smile broad smiles. When they give off big smiles, old ladies quiver. Old ladies in aspic. In buses they piss and smile to themselves.”

This is not a what I would call a fun story to read. It’s unflinching about the physical ignominy of aging. Lots of shit. Piss. Shrunken genitals. Atrophied genitals. Under surveillance by a police state, Artur and Isabella perform sex acts on each other and obsess about hats and garden gnomes and chocolate balls – bits of stuffthat they invest with meaning whilst their bodies degrade.

I’m really selling it, I know.

There’s something quite Beckettian about the grimness of this story – the highest praise I can give. It’s an exploration of the humiliation of embodiment, about whether souls exist without the inevitability of excrement. The end is weird and esoteric and offers no closure – just a different type of unease. I think it’s fantastic. But I suggest that you don’t read it over lunch.

English translation published in Doppelgänger, Istros Books (UK), 2018 and New Directions (US), 2019. Read online here

‘A Visitation’ by Bruno Schulz, trans. Celina Wieniewska

“In winter it would be still deep night when Father went down to these cold and dark rooms, the light of his candle scattering flocks of shadows so that they fled sideways along the floor and up the walls; his task to wake the snoring men from their stone-hard sleep.”

Most of the stories I’ve chosen for this list have been percolating in my mind for at least a year – some, decades. In contrast, I discovered Bruno Schulz a month or so ago and I’m absolutely giddy about it. It was a bit like finding out about a new spice – how did I not know that things could taste like Cardamom? Suddenly and inexorably there’s another flavour in the world.

All the stories in this book (is it a collection? Is it actually a novel?) are dark, funny, and intensely weird. This particular one is about a man in conflict with the Demiurge. Its images are often shocking in their potency – ‘illness settled like a rug in the room’, ‘suddenly the window opened with a dark yawn’, ‘father began to shrink day to day, like a nut drying inside a shell’.

There is just a tiny bit of shit again (sorry), but unlike the previous story ‘Artur and Isabella’, it’s defiantlyexcremental – a chamber-pot emptied into the darkness as a nose-thumb to the divine. A man’s heroic, insane, tragic refusal to submit to the dictates of form.

English translation published in ‘The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories’, Walker, 1963

‘House of Flesh’ by Yusef Idris, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies

“The ring is beside the lamp. Silence reigns and ears are blinded. In the silence the finger slides along and slips on the ring. In silence, too, the lamp is put out. Darkness is all around. In the darkness eyes too are blinded.

The widow and her three daughters. The house is a room. The beginning is silence.”

I wrote in my introduction about silences – this story is consumed with them. Huge gaps for things that can’t be said and can’t be looked at. Female sexuality here is a desperate, muffled thing, which creeps about secret and ravenous, stealing food like a neglected spaniel. Mellifluously told, it’s a dark fairy-tale that makes you feel the void that exists between people, and the ways that sex can close that void in unsettling and sometimes radically impersonal ways – a coming together of flesh which supersedes whatever else it is the body houses.

English translation published in Egyptian Short Stories, Hinemann Educational, 1978)

‘Savoir’ by Helene Cixous, trans. Geoffrey Bennington

“From then on she did not know. She and Doubt were always inseparable: had things gone away or else was it she who mis-saw them? She never saw safely. Seeing was a tottering believing. Everything was perhaps.”

This is my ‘if you like this, you’ll love…’ Clarice Lispector substitution, because I feel very strongly that Cixous deserves a Personal Anthology slot. I discovered Cixous from her writing on Lispector, and I think she’s devastatingly wonderful.

This story, for example. It is, quite literally, luminous. In it, a woman goes blind from myopia, then has an operation which causes her to regain her sight. On one Tuesday in January, everything that was obscured from her slowly comes back into view.

“What was not is. Presence comes out of absence, she saw it, the features of the world’s face rise to the window, emerging from effacement, she saw the world’s rising.”

The feeling of reading it is close to elation. But the woman’s euphoria is tinged with the tiniest hint of mourning (what elation isn’t!) – not for her blindness, but for the fact that the present moment is passing, the moment in which her blindness is still visible within the more solid things of the world. The felt sense of doubt amongst the certainties of seeing.

As a text about blindness, it manages to escape the trap that Sontag identifies in Illness as Metaphor, of making disability into a cipher for some kind of moral failing. Cixous herself had myopia, and this story is at least semi-autobiographical. I work as an audio describer, so I often speak with people who have visual impairments. It’s made me realise that there are things that sight hides from us – ambiguities that the rationality of vision refuses to let us see. Those of us with sight don’t live in the knowledge of the things that we don’t know – that’s why a magician’s misdirection works so well on us. We assume that everything is already revealed.

English translation published in Veils, alongside an essay by Jacques Derrida and drawings by Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Stanford University Press, 2001

‘The Instant of My Death’ by Maurice Blanchot, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg

“In his place, I will not try to analyze. He was perhaps suddenly invincible. Dead – immortal. Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship.”

This sparse little text is nonetheless vast and obscure. The story is about a man in the second world war, dragged out of his house to the sound of gunfire. He has rifles turned upon him – but then, abruptly, he’s released, to wander through the woods and see the farmlands burning around him.

Blanchot’s theories of literature as absence clarified a lot of things I’d felt about books, but never seen articulated. Both Lydia Davis and Paul Auster, two authors I adore profoundly, are amongst his foremost translators. Reading him I always have a sense that his writing is halfway between earth and heaven – but where ‘heaven’ is just empty oxygenless space where your organs would get crushed to nothing by pressure and you’d instantly expire just from your body being made so ridiculously small.

This story is no exception. It’s both philosophical and political, tying the injustice of war to the injustice of mortality. There’s critical speculation that it’s autobiographical and that Blanchot, like Dostoevsky, actually did have a near death-by-firing-squad experience. It’s unclear from the story how much is true – the narrator identifies with the ‘young man’, only to disavow their shared experiences. This is typical of Blanchot – there are never any certainties in his writing – not even death, which, always threatened, never actually arrives.

English translation published in The Instant of my Death along side Demeure by Jacques Derrida, Stanford University Press, 2000)

Introduction

As a moderately prolific short story writer who also reads a fair few, both by choice, and because my arm has been (oh so very gently!) twisted, you might think this personal anthology would be a simple thing for me to compile. A doddle.

It was not.

Remembering what I have read WOULD be easy, if I made a note of every short story immediately after reading it, and had started doing this some forty plus years ago. But who does that? Someone out there, I’m sure… I am both appalled and impressed. No doubt they’ve read bucket-loads more than I have, even as host, judge, and a first reader for the live literary event, Liars’ League.

Given the first page, or the first paragraph, or sometimes even the title, I might be able to conjure the rest, just as when I need to be reminded of someone’s name my sluggard brain merrily chips in their surname and expects a reward. But without that starting hint I’m left grasping at tattered fragments of memory.

What it was, was time-wastingly enjoyable. Hunting down stories that have somehow stuck with me, working out when and where I was first exposed to them, both for identification, and to remind myself why they linger so through the years, and trying not to be lured down too many rabbit holes along the way. There are stories that will have escaped, dimly remembered and difficult to search for, like one about a programmer writing and explaining an algorithm in an almost mystical, mythical manner…

With only a small shift in my starting point, I might have come up with an entirely different twelve. Or almostentirely. But there’s fun to be had in that as well, even if I may eventually have to apologise to those writers who only made the alternative anthologies.

So here it is, twelve short stories that have stayed with me. Perhaps they’ll stay with you, too.

‘Galley Slave’ by Isaac Asimov

On a sheer numbers basis, I’ve probably read more Asimov short stories over the years than anyone else’s, even if I hadn’t read or even reread one for about a decade before this. Modern readers can get a little sniffy about both Asimov’s style and how dated some of his views are/were. And perhaps that’s why it’s a well I haven’t returned to, but I have to admire the simplicity that others feel suggests shallowness. His writing is clean, and I’d be very happy if the same were said about my work. Having read them when I was young his originality was not diminished by countless imitations. Plus, and importantly, his short stories, involving robots or otherwise, are usually fun. Asimov wasn’t afraid to end (or indeed, to start) a story with a pun or a feghoot.

I’ve picked ‘Galley Slave’ because of the inevitable echo of the current AI ChatGPT debate/furore. In it, a robot (but why a robot? Except that’s what Asimov wrote about, able to imagine a human-sized robot with a positronic brain but seemingly unable to put that brain in a handheld device) is tasked with handling the more tedious chores of academic paper writing, but is suspected and accused of doing far more.

Asimov isn’t the only writer to imagine himself out of a job (Roald Dahl’s ‘The Great Automatic Grammatizator’most notably), except in Asimov’s case, the robot is designed specifically for proof reading and editing, and not for writing from a prompt. Yet that becomes the worry the user has, one which drives him to desperate acts, so Asimov certainly gets that aspect right.

I offer no apologies for choosing an Asimov to kick things off. It makes perfect sense, chronologically and personally. But the great thing about starting points is where you end up.

First published in the December 1957 issue of Galaxy, collected in The Rest of the Robots, 1964

‘Scrimshaw’ by Eley Williams

The difference between an Eley Williams story and an Asimov one couldn’t be much more extreme. And isn’t that the absolute delight of the short form? Eley’s stories are linguistically playful, they take the idea of a vignette and apply a meandering thought experiment to mere moments in time, moments that stretch to fill entire pages. Often wistful in nature, there’s communication at the heart of many of her stories, and the difficulty of that, especially when the medium is 4am text messages as it is in ‘Scrimshaw’, but I could have picked any of the stories in her wonderful collection, Attrib.

It’s not erudition for the sake of erudition. The wordplay is a definite way of thinking, or perhaps even of notthinking, of avoiding certain thoughts, certain worries. The narrator sets traps for themself, and has to back out of their own cul-de-sacs. It’s very human, a delight to read, and sufficiently original to stand out from any crowd. And totally, utterly different from anything I could ever write.

Shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2020; you can read an extract online here, or listen to the story as recorded by the BBC