A long story. A short novella. About Valentino, for whom his family hold high hopes. But Valentino seems incapable of anything really, other than being loved. And it is love for Valentino, which Ginzburg makes impossible to resist, that creates and destroys, starts and stalls and continues … everything. A queer tragedy, a comedy, an Italian masterpiece, a heartbreak, and a joy.
From Valentino and Sagittarius, NYRB Classics, 2020
By us we mean us. I’ve never been to Mexico City, but this is familiar. This slice, this throat-cut cross section, of the city’s queer scene, its hook-up scene, its murdering, cock-sucking, clubbing scene, its infectious, paranoid scene, its bathhouse scene, its gossiping, drinking, fucking, living, breathing, loving, exhilarating scene. Familiar like vertigo. What are we like?
Published online in The White Review, June 2018, and available to read here. Collected in Frank Wynne’s anthology Queer, Head Of Zeus, 2021
We’re like this. No one writes sexual tension like Gombrowicz, and this surreal story of a ship full of horny sailors becalmed but bestirred on a voyage to Valparaíso is bizarre, embarrassing, ridiculous, accurate, enviable, outrageous, and very funny.
First published in Poland in 1933. This translation from the collection Bacacay, Archipelago Books, 2004
Of course I’m serious. A perfect plot, immaculately paced, beautifully rendered. The boy detective and his alcoholic friend host opera diva Bianca Castafiore, her entourage and her diamonds at Marlinspike Hall. There is hilarity, cleverness, intrigue, a sense of justice, romance, deft characterisation – all of it as preposterous and as entertaining as an aria from Rossini. A master class in story creation.
First published in 1963
Aballay decides to stay on his horse. He has killed a man, and he has heard of holy saints who sat atop pillars and columns, and he has decided to stay on his horse, never to dismount, out of penance. Like all good stories it reminds me of other stories. Ultimately it reminds me of Oisín, returning to Ireland from Tír Na nÓg. Death is always a sudden ending.
From the collection Nest in The Bones, from Archipelago Books, 2017
Dávila’s writing puts you somewhere slightly outside the world as it is, and directs your attention back towards things previously unacknowledged and unnamed. It’s like looking through a window into your own home and seeing a monster fold your bedclothes. Here, the monster comes to stay, and does not leave. And we can’t have that.
From the collection of the same name, New Directions, 2018. The story is available to read on LitHub, here
Only Vila-Matas could write a lovely, funny, startlingly moving story about a paedophile barber who tap dances his way through the streets of Seville, past the locals who know him as Nosferatu, to the Cathedral, to see one last time the altar boy he loves. I mean, it would only occur to Vila-Matas to write such a story. And we should all be grateful.
From Vampire In Love – Selected Stories, And Other Stories Press, 2016
Difficult to say what this story is about, other than a fathers and sons camping trip, fishing, a first kiss, a tiger, and the repetitive slaughter of loved ones who want to save you. You tell them to stay away. But they come anyway. Everett looks like he doesn’t care, that he writes like no one is reading. But he does care. He considers the reader. And he knows us better than he lets on, better by far than we realise. It’s a large part of his power. This is a strange story, but like the strangeness in all great fiction it finds the strangeness in its reader, and embraces it. It comes anyway. And it’s a very beautiful thing.
From the collection Damned If I Do, Influx Press, 2020
I started this Personal Anthology in the usual manner – weighing my Nabokov against my Böll, playfully contrasting my Adichie with my Murakami, pitting Carter against Carver in a Thunderdome-style literary cage-fight. Isn’t that what, faced with the immense choice and variety of English-language short fiction, we all do, secretly imagining how delighted Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway would be to get the thumbs-up from us?
But then I remembered how I spent 2020 as a slushpile reader for Granta (as well as teaching, attempting to write, homeschooling two small kids etc.) and a daydream I’d entertained as story after story which I personally loved were (often reluctantly) turned down. I fantasized about starting up a fancy, high-paying print magazine for these wonderful stories by new, yet-to-be-famous authors, so that I could not only boast of finding them first, but pay them the professional rates their talent and hard work so richly deserved. It would be called SLUSHPILE: A journal of beautiful rejects. And at last they’d see print.
Fast-forward a couple of years, and inspiringly (but unsurprisingly), many of them now have – proof that persistence and quality really do win through even in a crowded, competitive market. As a fiction editor for over a decade now, of anthologies, literary magazines and of course Liars’ League, the live short story event I run, I want to encourage writers to submit, submit, SUBMIT (perhaps to the next Liars’ League theme, Heroes & Villains,) – because if it’s good enough, it will get there in the end.
Almost every story on this list has been rejected at least once in its career, often many times – and every story is unique, extraordinary in some way, and thoroughly deserves its eventual success. (Also, most of them are free to read online: win! And they’re all by 21st century authors – a first?) Enjoy.
The mother of a toddler is horrified by her husband’s introduction of a disturbingly lifelike, animated doll to the household: her son loves it, but she finds it terrifying and threatening, and secretly plots to get rid of the horrible thing. This story has stayed with me for almost three years since first reading it, gasping as I realised exactly what was going on. It demands to be read at least twice – the second time with entirely fresh eyes. It’s wrenching and frightening and soul-destroying and heartening and absolutely unforgettable.
First published in the Fall 2022 issue of Snarl. Buy the issue here
All you need to know is that this is about a bunch of nuns in mediaeval France going bonkers for a litter of kittens – and that hysteria, and, inevitably, murder ensues. It’s comedy, it’s historical fiction, it’s satire: it’s got felines and feminism and perhaps best of all, an inspiring origin story: Lauren (whom I know) was feeling very down about her writing, and after a few rejections lacked the confidence to send even this belter out, so I offered to do it for her – that way, she wouldn’t have to hear about it again until she got an acceptance. I picked The Cincinnati Review because anything with Review in the title often indicates the three Ps of Prestige, Print and Payment – and a few months later a superb story of which she’d despaired not only appeared in a very respectable journal, but was named as an Other Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories 2021. Also, I’m chuffed to have suggested the title: the previous working title, Cat Nuns, being too on the nose 😊
First published in The Cincinnati Review, June 2020, and named an ‘Other Distinguished Story in The Best American Short Stories 2021. Read an extract here
The lyricism of the writing and the hotbed intimacy of the relationship between the girls is what really impressed me about this piece, as well as the tantalising mystery of Antoinette’s antecedents and true name. Set in postwar Australia, it initially hints at being a fictional reworking of the famous New Zealand case where two girls murdered one of their mothers, filmed as Heavenly Creatures – however, reading on, it develops into very much its own story, curious and unsettling, with a memorable and compelling voice.
Winner of the 2020 Morton Prize, published in The Ex-Puritan: Issue 51, and available to read here
Elegant writing and a great title: a killer combination for any short story. It’s historical fiction, which I write and which I love to read, set during WWII and flashing back to a devastating 1871 firestorm in Wisconsin. The protagonist Ansel designs (conventional) bombs, but the shadow of the A-bomb hangs over the whole piece like a mushroom cloud. The relationship between Ansel’s son Ritchie and daughter Claire, and his wife Caroline are delicately drawn, poignant and credible. A keeper.
First published in The Boston Review, February 2023, and available to read here
The elephant narrator, wrenched from the side of his beloved King Louis, finds himself in the Tower of London as part of Henry III’s royal menagerie. The other animals hate his stuck-up attitude, and the zookeepers end up feeding him red meat and barrels of wine as he slowly descends into lonely alcoholism. My absolute favourite stories – the ones I can neither resist nor forget – are those which manage to combine profound pathos with moments of genuine humour (or arguably, the tragedy’s concealed inside the comedy all along, like a bitter literary Creme Egg), and this little gem of a story does it with gutwrenching brilliance. McGrath has just appeared in The Stinging Fly’s Debuts issue and is one to watch. I’m also very fond of Ed Cooper Clarke’s sublime performance of this story, complete with Cockney Polar Bear.
First published on Liars’ League “Kings & Queens” in July 2013. Read for free here; Reprinted by Arachne Press in Weird Lies, Winner of the Saboteur Award for Best Anthology) 2014 – buy it here
A Personal Anthology 