‘Waiting Up’ by John Updike

The first of The Maples Stories, ‘Snowing in Greenwich Village’ beds in two years after Joan and Richard’s wedding; in the last, ‘Grandparenting’, the pair await the birth of their daughter’s child at Hartford Hospital (“it was the Sunday of the Super Bowl and the announcers were revving up”) although upon reaching this final knot in the rope, we learn that Joan has remarried, the pair long since divorced. And in between these two bookends: sixteen more rich, rangy, gorgeous, brutal interludes delineating the bit-by-bit fragmentation of Joan and Richard’s suburban Boston lives.

My choice, ‘Waiting Up’, lifts off somewhere near the middle. Richard – in the throes of an affair with close family friend Mrs. Mason (“her shoulders caped in the morning sun coming through the window, the very filaments of her flesh on fire”) – is nervously awaiting his wife’s return from an evening of recrimination at the Masons’ home. When Joan does finally arrive, the dialogue – and the seamlessly achieved modulations of mood – are pitch perfect. Wry humour and cool analysis (“all year she’s been dancing up to me with this little impish arrogance I couldn’t understand”) replace what would have become a lazily dramatic scene in lesser hands. And Updike’s prose – that finely tuned instinct for when to hold back and when to let fly; the apparently effortless conjuring of a solid, palpable world, finely selected details resonating beyond their modest presences – always a thing to relish and behold.

First published in Your Lover Just Called, Penguin, 1980, and collected in The Maples Stories, Everyman’s Library, 2009

‘The Surrogate’ by Tessa Hadley

The intelligence Hadley brings to her work is never showy or flouncy – she’s an exquisitely steely writer – both muscular and piercing, cooly authoritative too. ‘The Surrogate’, written in 2003, is perhaps a little looser than some of Hadley’s other stories (very occasionally, the prose feels somewhat less honed) but it’s structurally brilliant – and it does what Hadley does best: it welcomes in the female body, taking happy ownership of all of its fluctuating unpredictability. Clara, an undergraduate student, has fallen in love with Patrick Hammett, her English lecturer. “His looks were a power,” she tells us. “I felt physically ill.” The central section of the narrative pivots around a series of fantasies – each involving the object of Clara’s devotions, Patrick, and each an artfully constructed story of its own (“Nothing could happen in them that was absurdly improbable or out of character”). Every imagining is furnished with youthful, romantic detail: a “cathedral wood”, a “gate…washed silvery by the rain.” But then Clara meets Dave – Patrick’s physical double, the ‘surrogate’ of the story’s title (or is he?) – and fantasies of a different kind gallop over those first muddled dreams. The ending – with its shocking, clever inversion, its unabashed statement of philosophical intent – makes for a deeply satisfyingly whole.

First published in The New Yorker, September 2003, and available to subscribers to read here; and collected in Sunstroke and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 2007

‘-’ by Jay Bernard

The New Cross fire took place a mile away from where I live in south-east London. Jay Bernard’s author’s note at the beginning of the collection explains: “in the early hours of Sunday morning, on 18^th January 1981, a fire broke out at 439 New Cross Road. It was Yvonne Ruddock’s sixteenth birthday party, and she had arranged a party with her cousins to celebrate. The fire spread quickly, killing thirteen young people and injuring twenty-seven others.”

Surge is a fierce and formidable exploration of the events – and the injustices – set into train that January night. It is also a shining work – taut, tender, strange and otherworldly. Bernard’s gaze is unsparing: they return us to the night of the fire, dropping us down into the flat on New Cross Road. In ‘Songbook’ the exuberance of “the rum” and the dancing and the “green nails done nice” slips into sudden, vivid horror: “black smoke”, “screamin”, “flames ah furious red.” And a mother – shoeless – crying on the road. People look on but “to help dem refuse.” Those poems which re-animate the dead, voicing them, individualising their imaginations and deathly experiences are some of the most wrenchingly affecting. This from “–”:

“And then you came and I was calling out to you, dad – and I know you heard me because here we are, dad – come back – don’t bury me – I can’t stand it – I can barely stand it when the lights go off – and I’m here – and spend the whole night listening for you, dad – I want to crawl between mum and you – in your bed, in your sheets, dad – that’s the only kind of burying I want –”

Published in Surge, Chatto and Windus, 2019

‘Gold Watch’ by John McGahern

“It was happiness such as I’d never known,” proclaims the narrator during this stunning story’s airy opening. He and an old girlfriend (unnamed throughout; “beautiful as ever”) have been reunited on a “lazy Saturday morning” in Dublin. The pair soon move into a flat. The narrator buys “fruit or wine or a bowl and, once, a copper pan”. They marry quietly – “two vergers as witnesses” – in a Franciscan church down by the quay. But romantic love – all bliss and ease and freedom – is very much a counterpoint here, a foil to the story’s real centre of gravity – the dismal, grinding pull of the narrator’s family home.

“‘And yet you keep going back to the old place?’
’That’s true. I have to face that now. That way I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel anything.’
I knew myself too well. There was more caution than any love or charity in my habitual going home.”

The meetings between father, son, and stepmother Rose, in the “old place” re-enact age-old psychological battles (this unhappy domestic triangle make strained appearances in other stories too). McGahern portrays – with a touch at once light and grave – each stage of the internecine struggle: the vituperative aggressions, the “false heartiness” of the truces, the doleful silent retreats. And the story’s final, remarkable scene – hinging upon the gift of a gold watch – sees the terrible, eerie transubstantiation of the father’s cruelty into both physical and symbolic form.

First published in The New Yorker, 17 March 1980, and collected in High Ground and Other Stories, Faber & Faber, 1985, and Collected Stories, Faber & Faber, 2014

‘Tricks’ by Alice Munro

And to finish: Munro. Her short stories defy the form’s very own laws: “a glimpse of something viewed from the corner of the eye,” V.S. Pritchett tells us; “a certain unique or single effect,” Edgar Allan Poe instructs, while Carver emphasises narrative compactness too: “Get in. Get out. Don’t Linger. Move on.” ‘Tricks’ is slender, yes, (at just over thirty pages it’s not butting up against the ‘novella’ tag) but – as with so many of Munro’s works – it carries a disproportionate heft. Instead of singular ‘glimpses’, abrupt entrances and exits, characters are observed and felt at multiple points in space and time – whole lives fanning out in front of us amid remarkable sworls of detail (the name of the thing and the name of thing before it became the thing, an almost geological approach…). And yet, in spite of their stature, Munro’s characters feel stealthily – almost mystically – remote.

‘Tricks’ spans forty years of Robin’s life: her burdened youth (her asthmatic, snipy sister); her romance with Danilo, a Montenegrin who repairs clocks – the door opening to a new world of change, “the risk of her life”: “I will be here next summer in the same place,” Danilo promises. “The same shop. I will be there by June at the latest.” And then an interlude in Robin’s sixties (her hair, once “dark”, now “charcoal-gray”) in which she nurses patients at ‘The Sunset Hotel’, the town’s psychiatric ward. The story is in playful dialogue with As You Like It(Robin’s annual escape from her “makeshift, temporary’ existence sees her take a trip by train to see a Shakespeare play) but even though there’s a tying up of loose ends – the outing of confusion in the story’s final phase – ‘Tricks’ is less a comedy, more a troubling meditation on the incalculable impact of slights of fate, the longevity of shame, the stark disjunction between our public and private selves.

First published in Runaway, Vintage, 2019

Introduction

The in-theory brevity of the short story gives the form a particular ability to find you at the right time. This is perhaps even more true now, when short stories are constantly available, at your fingertips: able to be imbibed quickly on a commute or waiting in line to board a plane or while waiting at a hospital. There is a Personal Anthology all of its own in the unread short stories that can be found in the open tabs across my devices, happily residing alongside Wikipedia entries, long reads, recipes, listicles, obituaries, apartment lettings. The most (in)famous story of recent years, Kristen Roupenian’s ‘Cat Person’, was mistaken by many for a personal essay, its virality leading it to an audience unused to encountering short stories on a web page.

The right time for a short story, though, is never just about the when but also about where and how. Lately I’ve been paying closer attention to collections rather than stand-alone stories. (This, I have to admit, is quite an unhelpful impulse when it comes to the Personal Anthology task.) This is likely because, as I am putting together a collection myself, I’m trying to understand the essence of what makes something a story collection, as opposed to a collection of stories. Short stories have a lone quality, a spikiness that allows them to stand apart from what’s around them. Publications in journals, for example, can often feel encouragingly anonymous, safe ground to be experimental. But often the right story slipped in at the right point of a collection can feel equally hidden and surprising.

The stories I’ve chosen don’t have much in common beyond the fact that I like them and think about them a lot when I’m not thinking about short stories. Each of them probably taught me how to write the kind of stories I like writing. And yes, there are only eleven stories, not the usual twelve. As it happens, many of the collections I most admire have eleven stories in them—what is it about that number?

‘Jack in the Country’ by Lydia Davis

I’m a long-time reader, first time contributor, to the Personal Anthology series— and perhaps I read it with a slightly competitive edge. I drank in Jonathan’s recent deep-dive into the five years of the project, and was unsurprised to see Lydia Davis reigning supreme among the picks. I nearly picked her perfect-paragraph story, ‘The Mother’, but as she has so many bangers, why choose one that’s been picked before? (Reading it would take you less time than reading this Anthology anyway.)

Davis could write a story about anything — in a conversation for the International Literature Festival Dublin in 2021,I heard her speak of feeling inspired by overhearing the term “caramel drizzle” at an airport Starbucks. ‘Jack in the Country’ sits at just over a page, and centres around a couple swapping stories about their friend Jack. The only issue is that they’re talking about different Jacks, a misunderstanding with disastrous consequences. As is Davis’ signature, it’s brilliantly concise and deftly sad, a parable of the impossibility of complete communication in a relationship:

“Henry cannot know, since he will not speak to Laura, that in fact a third Jack has become involved in this story, to the distress of the second Jack, for Laura’s affections have already strayed from the Jack that Ellen knows only slightly and that Henry does not know, and fastened on a Jack in the country unknown to them all.”

First published in Almost No Memory, Picador, 1997. Collected in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Penguin, 2014)

‘The Willowdale Handcar’ by Edward Gorey

Something in the task of creating the Personal Anthology has drawn me towards early stories I encountered. I’ve been reading Edward Gorey’s work pretty much since I could read: do they count as stories? Certainly his tales are short in length, but illustrations make them more difficult to characterise, as they’re as much (if not more) integral to the stories than the words. And though they were mostly published in stand-alone hardbacks, I encountered most of them through the Amphigorey collections. While there are individual standouts (a favourite of mine is The Deranged Cousins), Gorey’s works are best experienced together, a full immersion into his irreverent, high-Gothic and high camp world.

In ‘The Willowdale Handcar’, three friends find an abandoned handcar and leave their lives behind for a life on the tracks. Non-sequitur encounters and tragedy just-hinted-at ensue, in typical Gorey fashion. But there’s a deep melancholy that courses through the story, and it’s stuck with me mostly because when I first read it, I didn’t understand it, and the way in which I didn’t understand frightened me. There is still something intriguing to me about this quite juvenile way of experiencing fiction, the fear and lure of something you don’t yet understand but feel you might in the future. Of course, I now realise I only don’t understand ‘The Willowdale Handcar’ in the way that I’m supposed to: but that unease is so valuable while you still have it.

Published by Bobbs Merrill, 1962. Collected in Amphigorey, Perigee Books, 2004)

‘Living on the Box’ by Penelope Gilliatt

Penelope Gilliatt shows no reverence for the artist-as-isolated from society, and holds back no acerbity here in her portrait of a nature poet so out of touch with everyday life that he refuses to waste his breath speaking, not even to his wife. Keeping her in silence and isolated in the countryside, he gets on with The Work while she composes notes (as concise as possible) that are never perfect enough to give to him.

I read Penelope Gilliatt’s collection, What’s It Like Out?, at the same time that I read Edna O’Brien’s A Scandalous Woman and Françoise Sagan’s Silken Eyes; while I remember the atmosphere of the latter two collections viscerally, I have only fleeting details of the stories themselves: a hat, an airport, a tower, a car. In contrast, I remember nothing about the rest of Gilliatt’s collection apart from this story. For years, I thought the poet of the story was a real figure, and the documentary which frames the story, one which I’d actually seen:

“‘They’ll be here all day. They’re sure to want the poet’s wife,’ he said tartly. ‘You can tell them how much you love the work, can’t you?’ He always spoke about his poetry as ‘the work’; it was this sort of dispassion that so excited the BBC.”

First published in The New Yorker, December 1966 and available to read here. Collected in What’s It Like Out? Secker & Warburg, 1968; also available from Virago Modern Classics, 1990)

‘Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU’ by Carmen Maria Machado

‘Especially Heinous’ is another story which satisfies my desire to be convinced of alternative realities. Or, if not alternative realities, then at least real fictions in our reality. Here, Machado details twelve seasons and 272 episodes of an alternative Law & Order, one which may be closer to the X Files than the source material, in which supernatural occurrences are de rigueur. Stabler and Benson contend with ghosts with bells for eyes, doppelgangers, and exorcist priests, and each of the 272 summaries is a Lydia Davis-esque short story in its own right.

““The Third Guy”: Stabler never told Benson about his little brother. But he also never told her about his older brother, which was more acceptable, because he didn’t know about him, either.”

At 16,000 words long, whether it counts as a short story or a novella is up to the reader to decide. The episodic summary form, however, compels ‘Especially Heinous’ not to miss a word. Perhaps long short stories are more interesting to writer-readers than lay-readers, but I’ve always been struck by the boldness, the audacity, of the long short story. It’s incredibly freeing as an artist; if you can rewrite an entire long running TV series and make it compelling, anything is possible.

Published in Her Body And Other Parties, Serpent’s Tail, 2019. Also available online in The American Reader

‘The Flimsies’ by Eve Babitz

Like Gilliatt’s nature poet, Babitz’s boyfriend in ‘The Flimsies’ is a soap actor who is obsessed with his career. “Have you finished your piece?” he asks her. “Practically,” she replies. “Work on something else then. When you’re down, you should always work.” Work, he says, “really is the most important thing for people like us… For anybody. But mainly for people like us.”

A quarter of my picks constitute material that would not traditionally be called short stories, and ‘The Flimsies’ is one of them. I love the lazy flow of this story, the meandering yet concise narrative Babitz gives to this very clearly interim relationship between people who fall together only because they both work in an industry many don’t understand. ‘The Flimsies’ are the summary versions of the soap scripts, compiled by the writers to outline dramas before they’re fleshed out, and notoriously, the medium through which soap actors learn of their characters’ fates. Does it matter that the relationship Babitz is narrating is one which she actually experienced? I don’t think so.

Published in Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. by Eve Babitz, Knopf, 1977l also available from New York Review of Books, 2016

‘The Promised Land’ by D.K. Broster

Ellen has been saving for a trip to Florence for a lifetime, partly to satisfy a never-realised desire to travel and see art, and partly to escape her bullying companion Caroline. Caroline strongarms Ellen into accompanying her on the trip, and proceeds to ruin the magic of the holiday with her overly sensible advice and complaints about certain sights being overhyped. Whether it’s through bloodlust, a kind of haunting or madness is never clear; but one night, Ellen is pushed to breaking point, and Caroline falls victim to a silk scarf round her neck. Broster sketches the violence of the scene with an elliptical impressionism:

“You can pull and pull at an artificial silk scarf. It stretches, but it does not break, even when you have your knee, your whole body, straining against the side of the bed for better purchase.”

Before the murder, we see Caroline through Ellen’s eyes, as a hateful bully sucking joy from the trip. But afterwards, when Ellen finally gets to enjoy her trip as she always wanted it, we see a new side to Ellen. She is spiteful, and relishes her chance to be cruel when she can. Broster delves into a certain kind of complicated friendship that exists between women, and was perhaps even more common in the past; one of single women pushed together more by circumstance than any love for each other, and where every slight and harsh word is begrudgingly stored for a future argument. While it’s nesting among a (broadly speaking) supernatural collection, it’s easy to ascribe Ellen’s act to something beyond herself; but Broster keeps it beautifully grounded, never allowing Ellen’s emotions to be anything but human.

First published in A Fire of Driftwood by D.K. Broster; William Heinemann, 1932. Collected in From the Abyss. Weird Fiction, 1907-1945, by D.K. Broster, Handheld Press, 2022

‘Chloé in the Afternoon’, written and directed Éric Rohmer

Some films are short stories. Other films are novels. Some still are plays, and others are albums. Occasionally films may also be paintings. This is nothing to do with the source material, and everything to do with the execution, the ambience. Éric Rohmer’s first film series, Six Moral Tales, was destined to be a short story collection until Rohmer realised that what he had written were not actually short stories at all, but films.

Six Moral Tales is, arguably, about as perfect and classical as a short story collection can be, with each film both distinct and tying into an overall theme and mood. At the heart of each is a man struggling with fidelity. (Interestingly, Rohmer’s future films tended to focus more on female points of view.) ‘Chloé in the Afternoon’ is not my favourite of the six, and it also feels less literary than its predecessors in the series. But watch the scene where the protagonist, about to finally succumb to Chloe’s advances, suddenly runs away, which we view via an overhead shot of a staircase. It’s the perfect short story ending, one many of us chase after.

Released 1972

‘Abortion, A Love Story’ by Nicole Flattery

Much as some films are short stories, some short stories can be films, or plays, or paintings, or all three. While ‘Abortion, A Love Story’ isn’t only a play, it pulls off the unbelievable (even after you’ve read it) task of incorporating an unperformable play (which is nevertheless still a play) into the flow of the story.

Natasha and Lucy are two dissociated, anarchic students with no respect for the college systems and even less for their theatre studies classmates. Lucy reads Natasha’s email and writes a play for them both to star in. Natasha rewrites and improves it, and agrees. The play they stage celebrates and rips on everything from their respective abortions to the history of women on the Irish page and stage. It’s 77 pages long and every one of them is a bizarre and utterly sincere joy. It really is the kind of story you have to read to believe how masterfully, and naturally, it works.

Published in Show Them a Good Time by Nicole Flattery. The Stinging Fly, 2019