‘Grey Matter’ by Stephen King

My Auntie Susan introduced me to Stephen King when she gave me a copy of The Stand in around 1978, when I was 12, and that was what was great about books in the seventies, before home video and when cinemas didn’t let you in to the scary stuff unless you looked like you could pass for 18 – there were no such walls around books. And because this is Stephen King I can’t help feeling that this was in some way a possession, like the demon that jumps from partner to partner in the movie It Follows. King has been with me ever since, and I now feel that the rest of the world has finally caught up with my own opinion, that he is as fine a writer as we have, and would be far more feted if his material wasn’t so damn entertaining.

King has always had a nice line in short stories, and I’ve picked ‘Grey Matter’ from his first collection, Night Shift, because it so perfectly captures a boy’s relationship with beer, this strange stuff which, on first taste, is absolutely disgusting but which can take its own hold on you (possession, again). Suffice to say, in this story, the beer takes hold in rather a different way. The story is also a great example of King’s masterful eye for the inflections of everyday speech, particularly the speech of his home state, Maine. The narrator is believable from the very first line, because he speaks like what he is, an old man shooting the shit with his friends in a windswept smalltown grocery store in the depths of winter. He’s full of magnificent proverbs and aphorisms which ring entirely authentically, in my ear at least, my favourite being ‘when you get up to seventy without an oil change, you feel that north-east wind around your heart.’

First published in Cavalier, October 1972. Collected in Night Shift, New English Library, 1978

‘The Devastating Boys’ by Elizabeth Taylor

Another story from 1972, and could it be any more different? Elizabeth Taylor is one of those writers who are shared among fans with a passionate adoration. I discovered her through social media, where a group of writers, all female, were waxing absolutely lyrical about her novel Angel, which I picked up and read in two days. I’ve since read most of her novels and short stories. They are all, without exception, exquisite, darkly funny, and delivered with the kind of precision only a genius of wit and observation can muster.

The short story Taylor is perhaps best known for is ‘The Fly-Paper’, which has the same speechless horror about it as ‘The Lottery’, by Shirley Jackson (who I sometimes think of as the dark American cousin to Taylor’s sharp-edged Englishness).

But I’ve picked ‘The Devastating Boys’. It’s a fairly challenging read to begin with, because the language describing the two Black boys who come to stay with a middle-class couple in Oxfordshire in the sixties is very much of its time. If you can’t get past that, then perhaps avoid. But if you *do* get past it you’ll find a novel’s worth of characterisation in barely 20 pages, as well as perhaps the best description of the tendency we’ve come to call ‘white saviourhood’ I’ve ever read. It is gloriously funny and just gorgeous. I can’t say better than that.

Collected in The Devastating Boys, Chatto & Windus, 1972

‘Amundsen’ by Alice Munro

I thought I’d read this story decades ago, but it turns out to only have been published in 2012, so I suppose it’s become mixed-up with one or more other Munro stories from over the years. She is such an encompassing presence that the stories do seem to merge together into a sense of a single person, a kindly presence who has known great sorrow and is far more passionate than she appears.

‘Amundsen’ tells the tale of a young teacher arriving in a small Canadian town to work in the classroom of a sanatorium dedicated to those suffering from tuberculosis. It has the precise world-building of a refined historical novel but that’s only the background – the foreground, of the narrator and the doctor with whom she falls in love – is told with an exquisite eye for gesture, nuance and speech and what they say about character. It’s an utterly delightful and softly tragic thing, as are all the Munro stories I’ve read.

PS: I’ve just looked Munro up on Wikipedia, and I find the bookshop she founded with her first husband James is still open. It’s a grandly opulent place, oddly out of keeping with her stories. The website is https://www.munrobooks.com

First published in The New Yorker. Collected in Dear Life, Chatto & Windus, 2012

‘She and I Walking’ by Isaac Marion

Marion’s novel Warm Blood, about a zombie who develops feelings for a living girl, was a massive worldwide hit, and was even turned into a successful movie. So there was something glorious about this collection of self-published stories emerging at around the same time – you could only order it directly from him, and he signed each copy.

Every story in the collection is weird, wondrous or wacky, and sometimes all three. You’re never quite sure where you stand, or even what you’re standing on. This story is a perfect example – a boy and a girl meet in a bar and then spend the evening walking along power lines and robbing banks. Are they not human in some way? Vampires? Lizard people? Or is this all just a metaphor for being high on someone else when you first meet them?

Marion continues to be super-interesting. He seems to have been burned by his fliration with Hollywood and Big Publishing, and now produces lovely music and videos from a shed he has built on land he bought in East Washington State. Look him up on YouTube. You’ll be intrigued.

Collected in The Hungry Mouth, self-published by Marion, 2012

‘Thunderstruck’ by Elizabeth McCracken

I have just reread this because it’s been nearly 10 years and once again it completely knocked me off my feet. Elizabeth McCracken is the first writer I’ve discovered on social media not through personal recommendation, but through just liking her so much. Her Twitter account has for years been a font of delight, affection and humour.

So it was a shock – albeit a pleasant one – to discover that McCracken’s short stories are mini-masterpieces of pain and love. Or rather, the pain that comes from love, but is assuaged by it.

The story ‘Thunderstruck’, which closes this volume, is a perfect example of this. It’s about an American family – wife, husband, two daughters – who travel to Paris and suffer a tragedy which reframes their entire existence. If you’re a parent, it describes your darkest fears, but also your most intense joys. Love and pain, in fact.

First published in Story Quarterly, collected in ‘Thunderstruck and Other Stories’, Random House 2014

‘Wodwo’ by Mark Haddon

I could have picked almost any of the stories from Haddon’s collection The Pier Falls. It’s a masterful set of tales, and I find Haddon to be extraordinarily interesting – a poet, a novelist, a short story writer, and an artist, he seems to ooze a frenzied creativity which is paradoxically under iron control. ‘Wodwo’ tells the story of a middle-class family settling down for Christmas Eve, with their complex power structures and and rancid complacence beautifully rendered with telling detail after telling detail, when they are interrupted by a terrifyingly earthy figure at the French windows, carrying a gun and offering a game.

Rereading it just now I realised that I did not know what ‘wodwo’ even means. An Internet search reveals a Ted Hughes dramatic monologue which I have not read, and the information that a ‘woodwose’ or ‘wodewose’ is Middle English for a ‘wild man’, a staple of Medieval literature who can often be found carved into cathedrals alongside the Green Man.

That should give you a flavour of what is going on here – a social satire surging on waves of deep myth. It’s a fabulous story.

Collected in The Pier Falls, Jonathan Cape, 2016

‘Omphalos’ by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is an unclassifiable phenomenon. His second collection, Exhalation, is recommended by both Barack Obama and Alan Moore. How do you file someone who appeals to minds as different as those? His short stories are magnificent thought experiments, packed with precise erudition, as if Borges had written a series of Black Mirror.

The story I’ve chosen, ‘Omphalos’, asks what the pursuit of science would look like in a world where God was definitively, provably real; that the Creation could be dated, and evidence of it was everywhere. What would it mean to be a scientist in a world like that? Chiang makes this feel astonishingly vivid, and when doubt intrudes into the cosy scientific world he sets up it lands with frightening intensity. But the collection is full of moments like this. It is just beautifully done.

Collected in Exhalation, Picador, 2019

‘Love Letter’ by George Saunders

I can vividly recall reading this when it was first published, when Trump was still president, when we all thought Biden could never take the fight to him, when four more years seemed a probability, not just a possibility. And then what? What would he have done with four more years?

‘Love Letter’ gives one possible answer to that. A loving, beautiful letter from a grandfather to his grandson in a future America, where the Trump family has stolen the presidency, where letters are opened and read and keyboards are tracked. My new book, After London, describes a Britain under a surveillance government, and this does the same for America, but in only three pages, and with Saunders’s exquisite eye for human love and pain.

I’ve just reread it and it is still chilling. How close American came to disaster. And how close it may come again.

Published in The New Yorker, April 6 2020, and available to subscribers to read here

Introduction

If you ever edit an anthology of prose poems, people will ask you: “What’s the difference between a prose poem and flash fiction / micro-essay / other sub-genre?” For The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018) I had two rules: it had to be written without line breaks, and it had to have been published as poetry. The second was necessary because it stopped me, for example, weighing chunks of Virginia Woolf on the poetry scales.

In general, though, my attitude is: you tell me! To think of genre as the answer, rather than the question, takes the fun out of reading in-between things. So for this personal anthology, I thought I would choose ‘short stories’ that sit somewhere between prose and poetry…

‘Scarbo’ by Aloysius Bertrand

As far as I can tell, there has only ever been one English translation of Aloysius Betrand’s mysterious work Gaspard de la Nuit (1842), which appeared from an academic press and is long out of print. The absence of a version for the general reader is strange, because Gaspard is widely regarded as a founding text of prose poetry as a genre — Baudelaire cites it admiringly in the preface to Paris Spleen — and also a highly original work in its own right, ranging from evocations of Dutch painting to lightning-flash Gothic horror. So when translations of individual Bertrand pieces appear, I treasure them. In my anthology, I used “The Madman”, by the American horror writer, Thomas Ligotti, the text of which appeared in a little magazine, once available online, but now [candle blows out] vanished. It featured Bertrand’s demonic gnome Scarbo, as does this piece, which Maurice Ravel set to fiendishly jittery piano music, and which Patrick McGuinness translated for his Penguin Book of French Short Stories (2022). McGuinness, a prose writer and poet, brings a beautiful mix of magic and precision to Bertrand’s hallucinatory sentences, which glitter like Ravel’s glissandos: “How often have I seen him land on the floor, pirouette on one foot and roll through my bedroom like the spray from a sorceress’s wand!”

First published in French in Gaspard de la Nuit, 1842; translated into English for The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: From Marguerite de Navarre to Marcel Proust, 2022, Volume 1

‘Horn Came Always’ by Samuel Beckett

The achievement of Beckett’s plays and novels means that his short prose — which stands at an angle to the French prose poem tradition — tends to get overlooked. But here you can find his wicked sense of humour in very pure doses. This is one of his “Fizzles”, written in French and self-translated into English, and it reads like a miniaturised version of the already-brief monodrama, Krapp’s Last Tape. The opening sentence — “Horn came always at night” — establishes the deadpan double entendre of this monologue by a bed-bound speaker who, for some reason, is visited in the middle of night by a man (Horn) who tells him about a remembered woman from a notebook illuminated by a torch. That’s about all you need to know: the rest is the exquisitely tragi-comic unfolding of physical misery (“What ruined me at bottom was athletics”). The last sentence has stuck in my head ever since I first read it. It is a melancholy flourish, made funny and sad by the absurd return of phallic symbolism and the sudden vivid timbre of Irish colloquialism: “My fortieth year had come and gone and I still throwing the javelin”.

First published in English in For To End Yet Again, John Calder, 1976, subsequently collected in The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989, Grove Press, 1995

‘Calling Jesus’ by Jean Toomer

“What happens if W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is considered the first hybrid poetry collection?” asks the poet Terrance Hayes in his recent critical book, Watch Your Language. The slave spirituals of the South echo through Du Bois’ study, making it an important influence on Jean Toomer’s hybrid work Cane (1923), which mingles verse, prose and drama to imagine the same lives. Originally published as a magazine piece called “Nora”, “Calling Jesus” comes in the second part of the book, which is concerned with the African American migration from the agricultural South to the cities of the North. It describes a woman whose soul is like a cowed, “thrust-tailed dog”, left outside the large house in which she lodges, longing at night for the “dream-fluted cane” she has left behind. There is something almost clairvoyant about the way that in Cane — his only work of fiction — Toomer seems to catch perceptions that had never been written down before (“sensitive things like nostrils, quiver”). The verbal music of this three-paragraph portrait — which follows Toomer’s extraordinary lyric of the electric age, “Her Lips are Copper Wire” — trembles with tenderness for its subject and her soul left out in the cold (“filled with chills till morning”).

First published as “Nora” in The Double Dealer, September 1922, and reprinted as “Calling Jesus” in Cane, Boni and Liveright, 1923. Available to read here

‘Calypso’ by James Joyce

“I am not begging the question in calling Ulysses a ‘novel’; and if you call it an epic it will not matter”, said T.S. Eliot of Ulysses. There’s also an argument for calling it a collection of spectacularly detailed short stories. Joyce said that it began as an idea for one of the tales in his debut, Dubliners (1914): a man wanders the city streets in a way that echoes The Odyssey. This eventually gave Ulysses its episodic structure, which plots the day of Leopold Bloom on 16 June 1904 onto the adventures of Odysseus. Epic as the later episodes are, they all technically take place inside an hour, and at their heart have the same mundane encounters that inspired Dubliners. What Ulysses adds is an amazing sort of colorization technique, whereby the black-and-white cinema of Joyce’s early realism suddenly engages all the senses simultaneously. In the virtually perfect “Calypso” — Joyce used the Homeric titles for magazine publication, but removed them from the final book — Bloom goes out to the butcher’s to buy breakfast, cooks and serves it to his wife in bed, then heads to the loo at the bottom of the garden. Its mouthwatering sentences make rich poetry of domesticity: “Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray”. I would happily re-read them every morning forever.

First published in The Little Review, June 1918, and revised and expanded for Ulysses, Shakespeare and Company, 1922. Available to read here

‘A Favorite Colour’ by Gertrude Stein

I don’t know if Gertrude Stein was ever left in charge of children, but I imagine she would have been a somewhat Mary-Poppins-ish combination of severity and mischief. Most of her work is not for children, but the engine of its genius is a relentless questioning of why things are as they are, and even at its most austere it rarely strays far from a storytelling cadence. So I was delighted to discover that Stein had written a book for children, which became a favourite of my daughter when she was about four. This tiny chapter has the sound of poetry and concerns the big subjects of the small child: their names, their favourite things, and what they know about the world. “Her name is Rose and blue is her favorite color. But of course a lion is not blue. Rose knew that of course a lion is not blue but blue was her favorite color.” It used to work a charm at bedtime — something about its patient cadences completely settled her mind.

First published with illustrations by Clement Hurd in The World is Round, William R. Scott, 1939; new illustrated editions published by Shambhala in 1993 and Harper in 2013