‘A Long Way Round’ by Delia Radu

A policeman, a translator and a Roma woman who’s been involved in an “incident” at Wimbledon tube sit in an interview room – but it’s not what it first appears. The tension between what’s said, heard and replied in this triple-layered conversation, everything that’s lost in translation, is intriguing and makes for a thought-provoking story about identity and survival which reads almost like a piece of poetry or a three-hander play. This one stands out for its underexplored but ever-relevant subject, formal innovation and its striking and unusual presentation on the page. Its brevity is a great strength, lending it a certain scriptlike succinctness, and the voices of all the characters, but especially those of Mrs Nadira and the impatient translator, ring clear. It’s an interesting angle on a hot topic, and a compelling, down-to-earth yet lyrical narrative voice for Nadira, especially at the end.

First published in Piccioletta Barca, and available to read here

‘The Manual’ by Beau Lee Gambold

A weirdly compelling monologue by an unnamed technician in a factory where wheeled machines consume gel to produce bricks, gradually turns into what I understood as a metaphor for life, art and existential meaning. Or maybe I’m reading it wrong – see what you think 🙂 The author glosses it thus: “A worker tries to unravel their place and purpose in an infinite factory, where nobody knows what the factory makes”. Nothing like anything else I read that year, so I had to share!

Winner of the 2021 Valhalla Fiction Award from Tempered Runes Press & published in Vol 1, No. 1 of Bluing the Blade. Available to read here)

‘Birth Plan’ by Uschi Gatward

Gatward’s debut collection English Magic, published only a few months before her tragically premature death at the age of 49, has generated a couple of other mentions, but since Liars’ League had the privilege to publish ‘Birth Plan’ first, it’s my pick. The story is narrated by a pregnant mother and told in the beguilingly novel form of a hospital birth plan: I read it when I was a week overdue with my first baby, and at the end I just completely dissolved. It has that wonderful mixture (which I also love in ‘Elephant in the Tower’) of humour and pathos: there are some superbly acid laugh-out-loud moments, and yet it ultimately, inevitably transmutes into something so tender, so tentative, so hopeful, so fearful, that anyone who’s had a child, or been one, can’t fail (I hope) on some level to identify with it.

First published on Liars’ League “Beginning & End” May 2014 and available to read here. Reprinted by Arachne Press in We/She, 2018 (ed. Cherry Potts & Katy Darby) – buy it here

‘Hope v Texas’ by Read Cook

Without spoiling it, this is a highly unusual piece (and pushes the sort of formal & [non]fictional boundaries I like to see dissolve) and stood out effortlessly from the crowd for its unusual format and style; it is a fascinating and compelling example of fiction masquerading as fact/history. The Atwood influence is clear, but the story remains highly original, with a genuine “gasp” moment about two-thirds of the way through. Some truly breathtaking and hard-hitting moments in this piece which, sadly, continues to be relevant.

First published in The Illinois Law Review, September 2021, and available to read here

‘Bodies of Water’ by Denise Heyl McEvoy

This is a slow burner, really blossoming for me on a second read, with some haunting and gorgeous turns of phrase. Beautifully and clearly observed, some lovely writing, and pleasingly eerie with the voices in the water. “Water desires water” – the personification of the water, trapped in a pool in the San Fernando valley is insinuating, haunting, and slightly sinister. The three family members’ separate consciousnesses are also explored: husband Eric, wife Lisa, an ex-dancer, and 13-year-old daughter, Camille, until an unexpected mini earthquake brings them together. By the end, it’s about desire and escape, solitude and connection, and it’s got some great lines: “With her family asleep, needing nothing from her, it is not possible for her to fall short. The burden of loving them feels lighter.”

First published in American Short Fiction, August 2022, and available to read here

‘The Box’ by Alistair Daniel

I love the way that the box is subtly anthropomorphised and cared for like a child from the start – its size and weight both recall an infant, it cannot get too hot etc. and how later it (and the loft in which it’s kept) transform into a substitute womb for the man. There’s humour in here, too – the way the woman enjoys the company of her nieces and nephews “for up to an hour” and the cliched gifts (the Give Peas a Chance bibs) the man buys for others’ babies. I also really liked the sinister absence of knives in the kitchen, which imply the possibility that the woman may self-harm if pushed too far … This story is so much about what is unspoken yet tacitly acknowledged between the two central characters: the impossible irreconcilability of their conflicting desires, expressed through the neutral and anonymising (“the man” & ”the woman”) third-person narrative voice. The voice reminds me somewhat of Carver or Hemingway: the way it presents the characters, their actions, thoughts and words, without comment or judgement is a very hard trick to pull off and still allow the story to carry its own significant emotional weight.

Bridport Short Story Prize: Highly Commended 2020. First published in the Bridport Prize Anthology 2020. Buy the anthology here

‘Galway Sinking’ by Claire-Lise Kieffer

Successfully combines a sort of Irish magical realism with climate dystopia (and a nod to recent history reminiscent of scenes from New Orleans after Katrina) in a tale of what happens when Galway Bay is flooded, and a “hold-out” community grows up around the disaster zone. In addition to the intriguing plot and premise, lovely precise descriptive writing and convincing characterisation won me over.

First published in Seaborne Magazine, Issue 2: October 2021. Buy the issue here

‘The Velveteen Rabbit’ by Margery Williams

When I was two, my family – Mum, Dad, and my new-born brother – left the UK, and settled in a suburban town around thirty miles from New York for a few years. We lived in a stocky, clapboard house; the garden was enclosed by tall strands of yews and firs. In winter, you had to use a shovel to excavate the car from the heaped-up snow. My memories of The Velveteen Rabbit – certain scenes, some intermittent sense of its tone and feel – have become so confused with the patchy impressions of childhood that when I re-read the story now, the narrative unfolds into those impressions – the terrible bonfire of toys is about to take place in that snowy, out-of-town garden; the woodland in the story – initially the site of the rabbit’s shame but where his final, joyful liberation takes place too – belongs both to Margery Williams’ description, and to some dim, watery sense of early life. Mum must have read the story to me again and again: the velveteen rabbit’s humility, his yearnings and disappointments, the finely judged material presence of the bedroom and garden settings – the “mechanical toys with their superior ideas” and “the games in the raspberry thicket” – the first story I consciously remember bringing with it some kind of atmospheric change.

First published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1921 and widely in book form since

‘A Painful Case’ by James Joyce

To Chapelizod’s “most quiet quarters” now (I lived in Dublin in my twenties) and Mr. Duffy and Mrs. Sinico’s late evening walks. Joyce lays the ground with exacting authority: Duffy’s aloofness and self-regard are tenuous buffers to a solitary, regimented existence (have a read of the description of Duffy’s monastic room, the assiduous itemisation of a solitary life, the lens moving closer and closer in…). The principal characters, too, are carefully and finely woven – this delicate work (although there’s a wonderful instinctual ease to Joyce’s prose here too) paves the way for subtle, human paradox. Duffy is haughty and dry – we’re told about his “unamiable mouth” and the “harsh” character of his face – but then we’re made to dwell on his gaze: “there was no harshness in his eyes which… gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others…” Similarly, Mrs. Sinico – a forty-three-year-old mother whose husband captains a boat which sails to and from Holland – is revealed by the almost anatomical investigation of her eyes: “their gaze began with a defiant note but was confused by what seemed a deliberate swoon of the pupil into the iris, revealing for an instant a temperament of great sensibility.” Mr. Duffy’s final wanderings in the park – that beautifully realised transition from age-old defensiveness into a hard and honest accounting of his “moral nature” – is a remarkable passage. All the while, below the crest of the hill, Dublin “burns redly and hospitably.”

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914, and widely republished since, including by Penguin Classics, 2000

‘Ping’ by Samuel Beckett

In a letter written about ‘Ping’ from Ussy in August 1966, Beckett explained that “months of misguided work have boiled down to 1,000 words.’” And that he’d written “something suitably brief and outrageous all whiteness and silence and finishedness.” Its outrageousness? No personal pronouns, very few conjunctions, definite articles, prepositions. Punctuation is winnowed down to a series of full stops. But in spite of the text’s brevity – its “whiteness and silence” – some sense of a “scene” emerges. A body (I imagine a man) lies in a white(ish) room of indeterminate size. The body’s parts – legs, heels, toes – seem to be “joined like sewn” or, in the case of the face, “nose ears white holes mouth white seam like sewn invisible over.” Only the eyes – “a pale blue”, a rare intrusion of colour – are perhaps operational and unfixed. They track momentary changes in the “grey almost white” surroundings: “blur”, “light”, “traces.” The terse descriptions (nouns placed side by side, the occasional adjective) are initially rooted in immediate sensory experience: dim, fleeting, impressionistic. An interior life, beyond the momentary and the physical, feels remote. Then comes line 21 (my copy numbers the sentences, separating them out on the page): “Murmur only just almost never one second perhaps not alone.” The brilliance of ‘Ping’ – aside from its formal audacity, Beckett’s smashing up of all the rules – lies in these tiny, vivid eruptions of feeling and memory, the flickering presence of some long-buried self, still somehow just about present, even as the body gets ready to let go.

First published in French as ‘Bing’, Editions de Minuit, 1966, and collected in First Love and Other Shorts, Grove Weidenfeld, 1974; also in That Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the Finest Short Stories, ed. David Miller, Head of Zeus, 2014

‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett

The only writer to appear in my list twice. Beckett wrote this essay in Paris during the summer of 1930, at the age of twenty-five. James Knowlson describes him working “feverishly in the Ecole Normale library or in his room, sometimes until dawn.” And Knowlson goes on to detail the rash (the “barber’s itch”) which surfaced onto his face – and about which Beckett felt acutely self-conscious – when he handed in the manuscript to Chatto and Prentice in London. What follows – an eighty-page response to In Search of Lost Time (he’d just read Proust’s megalith twice!) – bears some of the unruly flashiness of youth: it’s abstruse and trickily allusive but it’s also a sweeping and unguarded work. The preoccupations which Beckett would loop back to for the next sixty years are all here: his dissatisfaction with “literary conventions” and “geometry”; his distrust of neatly packaged intellectual systems (the “primacy of instinctive perception”, “the free play of every faculty”) alongside expansive – florid, excitable and ireful too – commentaries on what would become the taut through-lines of his later plays and prose: selfhood, memory, and “the poisonous ingenuity of Time”.

First published by Chatto & Windus, 1931, and by John Calder, 1999

‘Death in Venice’ by Thomas Mann

William Faulkner, on receiving the Nobel Prize in 1949, proposed that “the human heart in conflict with itself… alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” Death in Venice is a superlative (superlative!) example of the “heart in conflict with itself” but it’s also a meditation on the artist’s life – the mental and physical toll of literary production. Gustav von Aschenbach is a world-famous author. He lives in Munich, waking early every day, to his “cold, inflexible, passionate” writerly duty. He has, for the sake of “perfectionism”, ‘curbed and cooled his feelings.” We meet him in May – “a premature high summer” – as he wanders back from the Englischer Garten to Munich’s North Cemetery. There he notices a man – bold, wild, and, so Aschenbach assumes, from “distant parts.” The stranger leaves the cemetery but something in Aschenbach has changed, an “extraordinary expansion of his inner self.” He imagines a place – a tropical swampland: rank, fecund and riotous – with hallucinatory vividness. He understands this vision (Mann’s ironic treatment of Aschenbach’s psychological blindness is foundational to the story’s sinewy architecture) as “a simple desire to travel”. The writer journeys to Venice. He first notices Tadzio, a beautiful Polish adolescent, in the foyer of the hotel. And so begins the emotionalising of his life – the battle (although only fully acknowledged late on) between discipline and duty and sensuous, voluptuous desire.

First published in German by S. Fischer Verlag, 1912; first published in English translation, by Kenneth Burke, in The Dial, March-May 1924. Widely republished, including in Death and Venice & Other Stories, Vintage, 1998

‘The Ghost Birds’ by Karen Russell

It’s 2081. Some years have passed since the ‘Great Death.’ Even so, “still-burning fires” encircle the ruins of Portland. The wealthy live in “domed compounds” (my partner, the kids and I spent a rainy afternoon at the Eden Project recently; we stood on the tread of a metallic, zig-zaggy staircase, next to a sign which warned you about the time the queue was likely to take, due to the over-populated dome, waiting for the troop of people who had already gone up, to descend from the high-point of the tropical rainforest viewing balcony…). The “domed compounds” tuck in like “bubble-wrap” on the smouldering, scalded earth. Everyone wears “respirators”. Oxygen has been commodified. School? Of the permanently virtual kind. Starling – the narrator Jasper’s daughter, expertly characterised as a no-nonsense teenage girl – acquires knowledge via “the blue sinkhole of the Hololight.” “Your eyes cannot distinguish between a digital hallucination and a real ghost,” Jasper says. “A critical window is closing.” Even though living avians are long extinct, engulfed by the burning carbon sinks, Jasper is fanatical in his pursuit of the ghosts of birds – snowy owls and nightingales, tundra swans and geese – which are sometimes detectable to the human eye, or if not, to Jasper’s spectrograph. His singular wish? To take his daughter to Chapman Elementary School, the location of a recent sighting of a flock of paranormal swifts. On arrival at the abandoned building, a tomb of ash and dust, father and daughter read the engraving on the school’s door: “Send us Forth to be Builders of a Better World.” The ending – part thriller, part numinous elegy – is dazzlingly, achingly memorable.

First published in The New Yorker, October 2021, and available to subscribers to read here. You can also listen to Karen Russell reading the story here

‘The Death and Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy

Terror, humour, pathos, anguish, illumination: a full – and wondrous – house! Ivan Ilych, forty-five-years-old, leads a seemingly “straightforward, ordinary” life. He’s pursued “the path of duty” assiduously – a promotion to the Court of Justice (“all that mattered was five thousand a year”), “chit-chat with colleagues”, dinners, evenings spent playing whist. Small disturbances – the animosity between husband and wife; the cool relationships with his daughter and son – are put to one side. Afterall, the delights of Ivan Ilych’s working life demand his full attention. “The knowledge of the power that he wielded,” Tolstoy deftly explains, opening up a knowing distance between narrator and subject, “the possibility of ruining anyone that he fancied ruining, the gravitas (even if it was all outward show)…all of this gave him pleasure.” Then the swift – barely noticeable – turn of the cogs: Ilych falls awkwardly from a ladder in the drawing room of the family’s fashionable new home (notice the moment the accident happens: he is demonstrating to a “dull-witted” upholsterer how to hang draperies – more concern with “outward show”). A bruise appears; Ivan Ilych is wrong to be unconcerned. During the next thirty-nine pages, Tolstoy anatomises – while simultaneously inhabiting (the extraordinary intensity and mobility of the characterisation feels as much rooted in the author’s body as his mind) the dying man’s loneliness, his memories (my favourite passages include those hyper-charged visions which arrive from childhood) his terrors and regrets. As Ivan Ilych approaches the end, the tumults of his physical suffering intersect with a desperate and terrible moral awakening: “What,” the dying man wonders, his kindly servant Gerasim sleeping peacefully at his side, “if I’ve really been wrong in the way I’ve lived my whole life?”

(p.s. see also ‘This is Water’, David Foster Wallace’s address to Kenyon College in 2005)

First published in Russian, 1886. Widely available in translation, including as a Penguin Classic, 2006, and online, including here