‘Aberkariad’ by Thomas Morris

“When Father fell pregnant with us, Mother visited each day, checking up and making extensive enquiries about his well-being. Was he eating enough? Was he comfortable? Did he want her to scratch his back with her snout?”

This sensational story about a family of seahorses is the showstopper from Thomas Morris’s second collection Open Up. Narrated by a young male seahorse with five brothers, the story pivots on his mother’s decision to abandon her fry, leaving their father to raise the family alone.

Seahorses are one of the only creatures (along with pipefish and sea dragons) where the males give birth. Through the lives of seahorses, Morris has found the perfect portal to explore the effects of parental abandonment, how it shapes people’s lives and capacity for love. “I think: if love is an inheritance that I’ve been given something faulty,” says the narrator. And yet this story swells with an ocean’s worth of love.

The title of the story, ‘Aberkariad’, is an invented word for the mating place for foals and fillies. The boys’ father thinks they’re too young for Aberkeriad, yet Uncle Nol urges the boys to outgrow their father.

‘Aberkariad’ is as playful as a Pixar movie and as profound as the finest literary fiction. Much of the reading pleasure comes from Morris’s descriptions of seahorses, how they join their tails together, click their mouths and twirl in celebration.

The profundity of ‘Aberkariad’ rises up in waves, catching the reader off guard with moments of exquisite pain. While the father waits for his wife to return, he paints her portrait using a reed dipped in octopus ink. “Many such portraits lined the whalebone shelves of our home,” says the narrator, “and in each picture Mother looked so warm and so friendly I felt as if I knew her.”

Collected in Open Up, Faber, 2023

‘Ms Ice Sandwich’ by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Louise Heal Kawai

“Ms Ice Sandwich’s eyelids are always painted with a thick layer of a kind of electric blue, exactly the same colour as those hard ice lollies that have been sitting in our freezer since last summer.”

This 92-page novella is a masterpiece of voice, narrated by a young boy infatuated with a girl who works on the sandwich counter in his local supermarket. In this charming story, Kawakami conjures the vocabulary and grammar of a child, a skill that’s rare in much contemporary fiction.

Queuing to buy his egg sandwich, the boy is extremely nervous. “Then when she finally takes my money and gives me the change and her eyelids turn upwards and I can see those great big eyes again, without any warning that squishy, yellowy, orangey stuff inside my head becomes extra bright, then that hollow place right under my chin, above my collarbone, feels like it’s being squeezed really tightly. It’s like that feeling you get when you swallow rice without chewing it properly first.”

The simplicity of the language, with all its endearing innocence, makes the book a deceptively easy read. Beneath the child-like sentences are all of life’s joys and hardships, from first love to parental grief to the confusions of friendship.

Kawakami’s coming-of-age novella is a love story but it’s also a child’s-eye-view of grief. What amazed me about this story was how the author made me feel different emotions at the same time. From the strange joys of shared grief to the agonies of love, it’s all there in the simple tale of one boy’s life.

First published in Japanese in Shincho, 2013, and in the novel Akogare, 2014. Published in English by Pushkin Press, 2017

‘After Rain’ by William Trevor

“In the dining-room of the Pensione Cesarina solitary diners are fitted in around the walls, where space does not permit a table large enough for two.”

Told in the present tense, ‘After Rain’ by William Trevor is a tender story about solitude. Harriet is on holiday in Italy, following the end of a love affair, and we meet her as she dines alone in a hotel restaurant.

Observing the other diners, Harriet wears an “unadorned” blue dress and “earrings that hardly show”. We’re told that a holiday to Skyros with her lover has recently been cancelled, giving her an “empty fortnight” to fill.

She chose the Cesarina because she’d stayed there in childhood, before her parents separated. Tinged with sadness and nostalgia, ‘After Rain’ explores how our upbringing shapes our own romantic encounters. But more than that, the story is a meditation on being alone.

In understated prose, Trevor shows us the quiet virtues of solitude, how it makes us more attentive to our surroundings and our inner lives. As Harriet wanders the Italian streets, she’s attuned to architecture, nature and changes in the weather. She visits the Santa Fabiola, a church with a version of The Annunciation by an unknown artist. Looking at the painting, she zones in on details – the Virgin’s feet, the angel’s wings, the sky and hills in the distance.

For Harriet, observing the world is a form of healing. She’s heartbroken yet she gives herself the space she needs. As the title suggests, ‘After Rain’ is a story about change. Harriet’s “private journey” isn’t grand or dramatic, it’s subtle and humane, and so beautifully told.

First published in The New Yorker, 1995. Collected in William Trevor: Selected Stories, Penguin Books, 2009. Read it online here

‘Losers Weepers’ by Donal Ryan

This six-page story from Donal Ryan’s collection A Slanting of the Sun centres on the search for a lost wedding ring. ‘Losers Weepers’ is a monologue, like much of Ryan’s work, a tidal stream-of-consciousness, dipping into someone’s soul.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator tells us how his neighbour lost her wedding ring while walking with her child. “Its worth seven grand. I know because she told me in a desperate whisper as I helped her search for it earlier.”

The search for the ring creates a common purpose for the local community. “We sifted through patches of gravel and pebbles with our fingers. We braced the sting of kerbside thistles. We were forensic about it.” Threaded through the story of the lost wedding ring are insights into the narrator’s life and family. The different strands whirl together, back and forth in time – it’s a rambling story, a kind of scavenger hunt.

What I love most about Ryan’s work is the sensibility of the prose, the way that it ebbs and flows, swelling up with secrets. Several years ago, I went to one of Ryan’s readings, where he discussed his first book, The Spinning Heart, a polyphonic novel made up of monologues. He described The Spinning Heart as “a book of silences”, the pages filled with things the characters couldn’t say. There’s something of this quality to ‘Losers Weepers’ – it’s unclear who the narrator is speaking to, if anyone. And yet there is an urgency to his monologue, a need to tell the truth, if only to himself.

Collected in A Slanting of the Sun, Transworld, 2015

‘Inextinguishable’ by Lucy Caldwell

“Three days before my daughter died she comes running into the kitchen, Mummy, Mummy, you have to listen to this piece of music.”

It’s hard to find words for this story because it explores the limits of language, its inability to convey the inexpressible. Narrated by a bereaved mother, ‘Inextinguishable’ orbits around a piece of classical music loved by her daughter. Through the music, her child lives on and the mother searches for the words to tell us how that feels.

“We weren’t a classical-music sort of family,” she says. “Her daddy’s tone-deaf, and as for me, I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket with a lid on it.” Despite this, the classical piece breeds a sense of communion.

The tone of ‘Inextinguishable’ is perfectly pitched, the mother’s voice colloquial and movingly authentic. Caldwell’s story rings true because it tries and fails to put words to grief. This is the true magic of art, in all its various forms, to give expression to things that are unspeakable.

In an interview, Caldwell said: “A short story has almost nothing to do with a novel: don’t be deceived by the fact that they’re both prose forms. A short story has much more in common with a poem or a play. For me, even more than either of those things, it is a spell: a series of rhythms, of images, to conjure a feeling, an emotion, an atmosphere…” Like many of Caldwell’s stories, ‘Inextinguishable’ has that spell-like quality, a story that envelops you with all of its power.

First commissioned and broadcast by BBC Radio 3, February 2013. Collected in Multitudes, Faber, 2016

‘The Astral Plane’ by Mary Costello

“She had never met this other man, or heard his voice, and she had tried not to love him.”

This exquisite story by Irish author Mary Costello explores the loss of faith in marriage and the temptation to stray. On holiday in Co. Clare, a woman spends time with her husband while plagued by thoughts of another man.

Known only as E, the man lives in New York yet recently visited Dublin. While attending an author reading, he found a novel with the woman’s email address inside the back cover. A prolonged correspondence begins between E and A: “He sent her quotations, lines from songs; he sent her poems. Did he not know the effect such words, such lines, such poems might have on a woman?”

Described as “an affair of the mind”, their correspondence feels somehow more shameful than a sexual liaison, testing the woman’s religion as well as her marriage. I fell in love with this story from the first reading and always enjoy returning to it. Costello plumbs the depths of romantic relationships, the virtues of commitment and the meaning of happiness. The story is also very funny, its humour delivered with an elegant touch.

Recalling Elizabeth Taylor’s tragicomic classic ‘The Letter Writers’ (which I recommended in A Personal Anthology’s collaborative summer special), ‘The Astral Plane’ weaves together embodied scenes with epistolary fragments. Both stories dramatise the space between life and writing, highlighting the joys and the limits of literature.

First published in The China Factory by Stinging Fly Press, 2012. Collected in The China Factory, Canongate, 2015

‘The Blush’ by Elizabeth Taylor

“Something had not come true; the essential part of her life. She had always imagined her children in fleeting scenes and intimations; that was how they had come to her, like snatches of a film.”

The first page of ‘The Blush’ is one of the most affecting openings I’ve ever read. Mrs Allen mourns the children she wanted but wasn’t able to have. Meanwhile, her housekeeper, Mrs Lacey, grumbles about her own children, drowning her sorrows after work in The Horse & Jockey.

One Monday morning, Mrs Lacey is late for work due to morning sickness. Bitter with animosity, Mrs Allen goes for a walk, “trying to disengage her thoughts from Mrs Lacey and her troubles; but unable to.” The dynamic between the two women – the mutual envy – is darkly comic and always compassionate.

In her lifetime, Taylor wrote four collections of stories and twelve novels. Kingsley Amis described her as “one of the best English novelists” and she’s widely regarded as a master of the short story.

Deploying an omniscient point of view, Taylor’s prose roves between characters with such lightness and fluency. How ‘The Blush’ develops is a stroke of genius – this is a story that expands in the reader’s mind.

First published in The New Yorker and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Blush, Peter Davies, 1958

‘Forever Overhead’ by David Foster Wallace

“Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognise that important things are happening to you.”

Written in the second person, David Foster Wallace’s breathtaking story ‘Forever Overhead’ puts us in the body of a young boy at a swimming pool. “Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right.”

The boy is at the pool with his family for his thirteenth birthday, his sister playing with her friends, his parents sunbathing in deckchairs. As the boy strays from his family, walking towards the diving board, we go deeper into his skin, feeling his heartbeat rise, seeing his footprints disappear on the hot concrete.

Queuing to climb the ladder, he pretends to look bored while looking at the older girls’ bodies. “The bottoms are in soft thin cloth, tight nylon stretch … The girls’ legs make you think of deer. Look bored.”

Capturing the acute self-awareness of puberty, ‘Forever Overhead’ is an incredibly visceral story. As the boy slowly climbs the ladder up to the diving board, his feet hurt on the thin metal rungs. Foster Wallace gives us such fine detail, from “the wind that makes a thin whistle in your ears” to the “constellations of blue-clean chlorine beads” on the boy’s skin. The use of the second person perspective brings us so close, adding a sense of intimacy, an aching tenderness. Each time I read this story I experience it anew.

First published in Fiction International, 1991, and collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown, 1999

‘Lion of the Afternoon’ by Brian Moore

“Jack Tait was an achondroplastic dwarf, twenty-four years old, with a handsome head and a normal torso, but tiny arms and legs. His partner, Davis, was a melancholy young man, six feet six inches tall. They were billed as The Long And The Short Of It, and were to be paid twenty-five dollars for this afternoon’s work.”

This unforgettable story by one of Belfast’s all-time greats gives us a day in the life of an acrobat named Tait. Dressed in baggy checked trousers and a “tiny tailcoat”, Tait paints a clown grin and star-shaped dimples on his face, readying himself for the afternoon’s performance.

The audience comprises eight-hundred children with a range of physical disabilities. (The terms used to describe the children are hugely outdated and offensive, the story first published in 1957). In addition to Tait and his acrobatic partner Davis, the day’s line-up includes: Tommy Manners, an overweight accordionist whose “great rump bumped against Tait’s forehead”; Len the balloonist, wearing “a magenta suit with silver lapels”; Arnoldi, the alcoholic magician, and his partner Doris, who distracts the men with her “black-meshed legs and comely hips”.

Top marks to Moore for the character line-up, each perfectly poised on the tragicomic tightrope. As Tait prepares to go on stage, he’s verbally abused by his fellow performers. Davis and Doris call him “Shorty” while Arnoldi calls him “runt”. Moore’s unflinching prose is clean as a bone. The discrimination is awful – and far too believable.

What’s wonderful about this story is the awe with which the disabled children observe Tait on-stage. They watch him with wonder, smiling at “the pratfalls, the somersaults, the running and the catching.” Tait was the children’s favourite – “the lion of the afternoon” – and this story by Moore brings him to life.

Moore was a multi-award-winning novelist, shortlisted three times for the Booker prize; as a short story writer he’s renowned as one of the masters of the form. ‘Lion of the Afternoon’ is a shocking story about a complex character. With empathy and courage, Moore somersaults onto terrain most writers wouldn’t dare to tiptoe.

First published in The Atlantic, November 1957, and available to read here. Collected in The Dear Departed, Turnpike, 2020

Introduction

When Jonathan asked me to do this, I thought I was going to struggle, to be honest. I’ve never really considered myself a committed reader of short stories. I read a lot of longform fiction and not a lot of the shorter stuff.

Or so I thought. But a quick visit to the bookshelves at home changed that view, because it turns out I have a lot of pretty strong impressions created by short stories I’ve read – visual impressions, mostly, that have stuck inside my lizard brain like Rush song lyrics from when I was 13 years old.

So I’ve picked those stories which have left me with the strongest visual memories, which has meant recalling recent joys like Elizabeth McCracken, Henry James and Elizabeth Taylor, but it’s also rather joyously led me to stuff which I haven’t read for perhaps four decades, trying to find that story with that thing, you know, that thing I used to dream about.

And yes, this has also meant reliving those years when, alongside Rush albums, I was devouring SF, fantasy and horror with all the enthusiasm of a fan unencumbered by what other people thought.

So this, like my memory bank, is very much a mixed bag. It’s sort of in publication order. I tried listing the stories in the order in which I read them, but found the filing system unreliable.

‘The Story of a Masterpiece’ by Henry James

Henry James is my favourite author, I think. He’s certainly the one I’ve spent the most time with, apart from perhaps Stephen King (they would not have got on). My favourite novel is, unquestionably, The Portrait of a Lady, which I re-read every few years and still find dark depths in, because it is such a dark novel. So perhaps King and James would have got on. I certainly find James to be a much, much darker writer than he is often painted.

Talking of painting – I’ve picked one of James’s earliest published short stories, from before he wrote his first novel (Watch and Ward, best avoided, in truth), when he was still oscillating between Europe and Massachusetts and trying to find his true voice.

Which is strange, because the true voice is undoubtedly here, in this strange tale of a man who commissions an artist to paint his fiancée, only to be horribly disturbed by what the painting says – or might say – about his future wife. James’s obsessions with trust, surfaces, art and even the nature of evil itself are all present in here, and it’s a cracking story to boot. It would make an exceptional play – but then James thought that about a lot of his work, and the belief served him poorly.

First published in Galaxy, January-February 1868. Collected in The Complete Tales of Henry James, Volume 1: 1864-1868. Available to read online here

‘As the Fruitful Vine’ by Mollie Panter-Downes

Mollie Panter-Downes was a reporter and correspondent for The New Yorker throughout the Second World War, and published 21 stories in the magazine during the war, alongside a fortnightly ‘Letter from London’ and 18 long articles about life in England during the war. All in all she wrote 852 articles for The New Yorker, mostly from a secluded writing hut in the gardens of her country home where she lived with her husband and children.

‘As the Fruitful Vine’ tells the story of Lucy Grant, who discovers she is pregnant soon after marrying her husband and seeing him leave for the Far East with the Royal Navy. Her family fuss around her and encourage her to move away from London to live with relations in the country, as the great fear of a German invasion grows and grows. As in all the stories the point is that lives are continuing to be lived, even while the sounds of bombs from the other side of the Channel grow louder and louder.

But Lucy is less concerned about this than about her competitive older sister Valerie, though she comes to realise that Valerie has wanted to fall pregnant for years but has been unable to. This is the most important achievement in Lucy’s life, this ability to do something her sister cannot. Panter-Downes paints ordinary lives such as these continuing, with all their petty grievances and empty victories, even while the backdrop grows steadily more grim. It’s worth reading the whole volume as an alternative history of WWII, told through lace-curtained windows and enduring, ordinary lives.

First published in The New Yorker, 31 August 1940. Collected in Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, Persephone Books, 1999

‘The Day it Rained Forever’ by Ray Bradbury

Ah, Ray Bradbury. Has there ever been a writer so capacious? You don’t finish Bradbury, you live within him. I’ve been reading him for decades, and I still come across stories I’ve never read before, or perhaps had forgotten reading. Wikipedia reckons he wrote 600 short stories, and 11 novels, some of which were ‘fix-up’ novels, stringing together short stories into a narrative whole. The stories run the gamut from those collected in The Martian Chronicles, as fine a set of colonial parables as I know, to those in From the Dust Returned, based on a family of ghouls and ghosts, who live in Illinois, and are called the Elliotts.

The story I’ve picked is ‘The Day It Rained Forever’, which gave its name to a collection of stories published by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1959. It tells the tale of three old men living in a hotel in an America desert, waiting for the rain that always comes on January 29^th. But this year, the rain doesn’t come – something else does, driving a car and carrying a harp. It’s classic Bradbury – warm-hearted, human, off-to-the-left-of-things, and thrumming with mystery. It’s also full of quite beautiful lines and images, many of which would read like poems if they were to be laid out in the right way: “The rain fell on the rooftop and fell on hissing sand, it fell on rustling car and empty stable and dead cactus in the yard.” A sentence made all the more remarkable by the fact that he isn’t actually talking about rain.

The collection is dedicated to Rupert Hart-Davis himself. In a nice piece of symmetry Hart-Davis also published the collected tales of Henry James.

First published in Harper’s, July 1957, and collected in The Day It Rained Forever, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959; also in The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Knopf, 1980; Everyman Library, 2010

‘All the Sounds of Fear’ by Harlan Ellison

When I was 12 or 13 my Dad signed me up to The Science Fiction Book Club, which sent an SF novel through the post once a month. I was introduced to Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (later filmed, stupefyingly, by Tarkovski as Stalker), An Infinite Summer by Christopher Priest, and Blackpool Vanishes by Richard Francis, but there was also a short story collection by the hack writer (I use the term with admiration) Harlan Ellison, called (and I beg forgiveness for Harlan here) Ellison Wonderland. The story that stuck with me was ‘All the Sounds of Fear’, which tells the tale of the terrible fate awaiting actor Richard Becker, known to the world as ‘The Man Who IS The Method’. The final scene left a visual impression which remains through to the present.

Ellison is maybe best known for his screenwriting, which included the classic Star Trek episode ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’. He cultivated a tough-guy, straight-talking writer-for-hire persona, personified by him sending a copy of every story he ever published to an Ohio State University professor who had denigrated his writing. Ellison punched him and was expelled. But this was a story Ellison told, and the boundary between Ellison the self-imagined writer and Ellison the living man is forever blurry. His short stories are madly imagined, overwrought and passionate. Perfect teenage reading, in other words.

First published in the UK in The Saint Detective Magazine, 1962. Collected in Ellison Wonderland, Paperback Library, 1962