Introduction

This is a selection of stories (and one song) that have lived in my memory since reading them, in some cases for twenty years or more, in others for a few months. They’re almost all funny in one way or another – dryly witty, outlandish, outrageous, laughter in the dark – and almost all concern that critical moment in their central characters’ lives when everything has shifted, or is about to. My novel Test Kitchen, set in the kitchen and dining room of a high-end restaurant, includes short stories of a sort – the narratives of the diners at each table – and each springs from a similar instant of recent, impending or concurrent change: a transformative realisation, an impetuous decision, a long-planned trap finally sprung. I can trace these in some way back to the stories I’ve chosen below.

Some of the authors here were certainties from the moment I decided to put together a personal anthology (and what a pleasure it was to reread swathes of their work in search of the story that spoke to me most). In other cases – among them John McGahern, Camilla Grudova, David Means, Lucia Berlin, Bora Chung, Petina Gappah, Timothy J. Jarvis, Lorrie Moore and Dennis Cooper – selecting just one story to represent their work felt impossible and I reluctantly had to omit them.