Introduction

In selecting the stories that have been most important to me over the years, it’s slightly disconcerting to note how many of them deal with instances of cruelty, in one form or another. More than half of them do this. Perhaps it’s better not to linger on why this might be, but perhaps it says something about the need of short stories to have some sharp, defining emotion at their heart – the sharper the better. While some brilliant authors can cover a complex emotional terrain in a short story, for most it is a more concentrated, focussed experience, and the jeopardy, the sense of what is at stake, needs to be apparent and immediate. Or perhaps I’m just drawn to these scenarios because they deal with an aspect of humanness that we have to strive harder to make sense of, and asks us more questions of ourselves. We can recognise and understand love quite easily, but what explains cruelty? It’s one of the greatest puzzles of life.