‘I Sing the Body Electric!’ by Ray Bradbury

I never knew any of my grandparents; the last died when I was eighteen months old. So this story hit me hard when I found it in a collection of his, probably one I browsed and bought in Belfast Waterstones, looking for ways out of my childhood Doctor Who obsession. We’re talking late eighties. Bradbury’s SF stuff is great, of course, but it’s the straight domestic pieces that have really stayed with me. Decades later, I can still feel the precise quality of shiver I got from stories of his I’ve never read since. This one is a vision of artificial unconditional love, maybe prefiguring what we’re finally getting close to now in AI. But I don’t think Bradbury’s is a cautionary tale; I remember it as a celebration. I might be wrong, though. I haven’t looked at it since my teens. No need. I know exactly how certain moments in that story make me feel, and how much they mean to me, so why would I want to go back? I’ve got it locked up inside.

First published in McCall’s Magazine, August 1969, under the title ‘The Beautiful One is Here’; adapted from his Twilight Zone screenplay, first broadcast 1962. First published under this title in the eponymous collection, 1969. Collected in Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1, HarperVoyager, 2012, and The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Everyman, 2010

‘77 Pop Facts (You Didn’t Know About Gil Courtney)’ by Wendy Erskine

Wendy Erskine talks about meeting people in Belfast who insist they knew the real man she’s writing about, or his mother, or his music. Maybe’s it’s the comforting familiarity of the mode of writing, or the delicate precision of the detail; or maybe it’s just her profoundly humane imagination, and her love of the that particular side of Belfast, one that’s never been written about enough. Until Erskine came along, that is; and now, I doubt it’ll ever be written about better.

Published in the collection Sweet Home, Stinging Fly, 2018/Picador, 2019. Available online here

‘A Country Doctor’ by Franz Kafka

By contrast, this is a story I read maybe once a month, because I never know how it’s going to make me feel. It’s more of a full-on anxiety dream than many of Kafka’s, and I’ve already deleted a couple of attempted summaries of what happens, because there’s no point. I can’t get to the bottom of it, probably because there is none. I only started into Kafka about ten years ago, but it’s become a total addiction. I’m not especially interested in the man himself, though that stage of the disorder may well be coming. For now, I just marvel at what he uncovered and left us with, and how much of the writing I love from the hundred years since has its source in his remarkable spirit.

First published in German in the eponymous collection, 1917. Widely translated and collected, including in The Complete Short Stories, Vintage Classics. Available online here, translated by Ian Johnston

‘Boy Blue’ by Gerald Murnane

A few years ago Murnane had a moment, after being tipped for the Nobel in a splashy New York Times profile, and being a sucker for that kind of fuss, I bought loads of his stuff and got in deep. I don’t think he’d mind me saying it’s very hard work. And if you like that game, the whole Beckett-Bernhard-Knausgaard obsessive lone male routine, then he’ll be your cup of tea. I do, and he is. But a lot of it leaves you flailing and gasping for a drop of liquid on your tongue to leaven the punishment.

This one is an exception. It uses the relentless monotony of the style and voice to push towards an extraordinary moment of emotional release, one that also illuminates something essential and unexpectedly moving at the root of Murnane’s very weird style. (Pro tip: this story works much better if you read it aloud to yourself. I do, more often than I should admit, and I’m available for the audiobook, if anyone’s interested. In fact, it’s my very dear ambition to learn the whole thing off by heart as a party piece, and I’m not even joking; though if that backfires, you might well find me huddled in the corner of the pub in twenty years, giggling to myself and muttering “The chief character of the story was a man who was referred to throughout the story as the chief character of the story.” I suppose there are worse ways to go.)

First published in the journal World Literature Today, Summer 1993 and available via JSTOR here. Collected in Collected Short Fiction, And Other Stories, 2020

The Paper Dolls by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Rebecca Cobb

Probably the saddest story I know. At bedtime, I could never get through it without crying, much to my children’s bemusement. I have a gut feeling it’s based on a true story, which makes it worse. Just heartbreaking, and not in a good way. I love it so much.

Macmillan, 2013. Available online here, read by the author

‘Gospodar’ by Garth Greenwell

Greenwell’s Cleanness is a really a novel, not a collection of short stories, but many of the sections were previously published as such. Either way, it’s a sensational book, probably my favourite of the decade so far. I wasn’t sure if I should include this one, as its impact comes, in part, from its place in the sequence. Out of context, I fear it may present as too unrelentingly intense; even so, it contains the most brilliant sex writing you’ll find anywhere. Considering the skill it takes to render any sexual encounter with narrative clarity, never mind this level of emotional insight, Greenwell’s achievement here is off the scale. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

First published in The Paris Review, Summer 2014 and available online here – in full for subscribers, with an extract for free. Collected in Cleanness, Picador, 2020

‘The Choise of Valentines, or The Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo’ by Thomas Nashe

A nice counterpoint to the Greenwell, what we have here is a classic boy-meets-girl, boy-goes-to-visit-girl-in-the-brothel-where-she-works, boy-ruins-the-moment-by-coming-too-soon-and-girl-ends-up-using-a-dildo story. I first encountered this long-suppressed Elizabethan erotic poem at university, and a few years later, I read it live on stage in Belfast while being interviewed in a ten-foot bed. Nashe’s poem is as filthy as it sounds, and still very funny. What’s not to love?

Written around 1593, first published privately in 1899. Collected in The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works Penguin Classics. Available online at Project Gutenberg

‘Emergency’ by Denis Johnson

There’s no better subject for fiction than terrible people doing terrible things. I’ve been trying and failing to find a quote from Johnson I noted down a few months ago, along the lines of, “Some of us like to read stories about people shooting at each other, and some of us really are shooting at each other.” He made no secret that the stories in Jesus’ Son are from his life, or the lives of those close to him; all you really need to know is that the central character’s nickname, Fuckhead, was also Johnson’s. This is the story of his I keep circling back to, and to be honest it’s really only the first half I’m interested in – the stuff with the rabbits always feels like it’s trying a bit too hard. But what do I know? It’s obviously a masterpiece, and I could live in those opening pages for a long time.

Originally published in The New Yorker September 1991, and available to subscribers to read here. Subscribers can also listen to Tobias Wolff read it here. Collected in Jesus’ Son, Granta Books 2012. Also available to read online in Narrative Magazine)

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Fine, this is a novel. So what? My only definition of a short story is that it invites you to read it in one sitting, so this fits the bill. And everything about it says short: the fragments it’s made up of; the weird formatting; the bluntness of the plot; the diffident compression of the style. Plus, it’s really very short. And it’s probably my favourite thing I have in the house, apart from people and animals. You can often find me hanging around near the Os in bookshops, hoping I can vibe browsers in its direction. At home, I usually have one of my several copies within reach, and I read the whole thing a couple of times a year. I’ve started teaching it now, but even that hasn’t helped, and me and the students just end up sitting there reading our favourite bits out to each other. Offill said somewhere she was trying to emulate Johnson in Jesus’ Son, but that Johnson used to say he was ripping off Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel; so I bought that too, but I still haven’t read it, and I’m not sure I actually know where it is. Never mind, let’s just read Dept. of Speculation again.

Granta Books, 2014

Introduction to an askance Personal Anthology

I wanted to craft a personal anthology of speculative fiction, but that proved impossible. There is no more speculation in fiction. Or rather, there is only speculation.

I won’t list our shared moments of bewilderment that have defined the past decade-ish, because we’re sick of reading about them, and because I simply don’t have to. You know ’em. The dictators, the diseases, the technologies. Though shocking global events are not unique to the 21st Century, our own ennui, our ability to process that shock into something ambient, might be. And I now find that I look at fiction that deals with impossibilities and implausibilities differently than I might have done in another period, in another life.

When I had a chapbook published by Tangerine Press in 2021, my brilliant editor Michael Curran kept returning to the same word to describe a particularly strange story of mine: askance. I liked it. It didn’t specify premise or plot of voice, but only a mood, a cinematographic glitch, and the phrase has stuck with me.

These stories share that glitch: A dog is shot into space, and there, we are given the soft observations of a gracious mind. A questionnaire wants to know if you enjoy alternative music, before you find yourself gazing into a dark basement. And in a time when science-fiction was made up largely of steel blasters and pulpy vixens, ‘The Anything Box’ reminds us of the precarity of childhood, and the duty we have move through the world with compassion, even when that world hurls perplexing new objects our way.

So here it is, my anthology of what might once have been called speculative, now perhaps para-speculative, or, rather, askance fiction. Some of the stories sit within the parameters of traditional sci-fi and some are far from it. But each has helped me feel understood in a world which defies understanding.

‘The Veldt’ by Ray Bradbury

Do you remember when you were a child and you encountered, for the first time, a piece of art or writing that left you shaken? Not just moved, but a little disturbed. For me, that feeling was always coupled with secrecy, a belief that if my parents knew something had gotten under my skin it would cause them undue worry. The first time I remember feeling this was with (as any astute member of the literati might guess) A Goofy Movie. In the 1994 animated film, there’s scene where father and son face their own mortality as their raft veers toward a waterfall, and in the moments before their presumed death, they are left only with their love for one another and a bald and desire to survive. (Pretty goofy if you ask me!) I insisted on returning to see it in the cinema again and again, until something of that semi-shameful fixation had released its grip on me, and I probably got really into Polly Pocket or something.

The next time I felt that morbid fascination was after reading ‘The Veldt’. We’d been made to read Dandelion Wine in my middle school English class and it was so goddamn boring it became a bit of a family joke among us. My dad – a sci-fi obsessive – made it his mission to give us different, better Bradbury. Before I knew it there was a copy of The Illustrated Man in my hands, and in the collection’s opening story, ‘The Veldt’, children grow increasingly immersed in their home VR unit, which places them in a rendering of the African plains. The simulation becomes more and more real, until the story-perspective shifts – to the childrens’ parents – and, uh…yeah it gets pretty grim.

What felt stirring and secret to me wasn’t ‘The Veldt’s implied violence, but rather that an unhappy ending could enrich a story. And in early adulthood, when traumatising oneself with disturbing prose is sort of the name of the game (the time Less Than Zero ruined Christmas is a story for another time) I’m grateful for ‘The Veldt’ and Bradbury’s gentle ushering into the world of weird fiction.

First published as ‘The World the Children Made’ in The Saturday Evening Post, September 1950. Collected in The Illustrated Man, Doubleday, 1951 and widely anthologised, including in Collected Stories Volume 1, Harper Voyager, 2008, and The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Everyman, 2010

‘Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre’ by Seth Fried

Oh my God this story is so fucking funny.

It also grapples with that implausibility thing, and mankind’s unyielding tendency to normalise and to acquiesce. Seth also worked with Michael Curran, coin-er of askance, and I’m honored to be in the same catalogue as this absolute crackerjack of a bizarro storyteller.

First published in One Story 124, Fall 2009, excerpt available here. Collected in The Great Frustration, Soft Skull, 2011

‘Introduction’ to The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

This is not a standalone short story, but the opening pages of Yoko Ogawa’s cult novel, which depicts a world where an authoritarian government is able to collectively delete items from the mind of its citizens. This intro exists as its own cohesive work, and at the risk of sounding controversial, the rest of the novel feels like an afterthought to this gorgeous, poignant tableau. A young girl comes to learn that her mother is not only immune to the erasures of memory that everyone else in their world experiences, but that she’s been hoarding the ‘deleted’ objects (a bell, perfume, more) in hidden drawers.

First published by Kodansha, 1994. First English translation by Pantheon/Harvill Secker, 2019

‘The Anything Box’ by Zenna Henderson

My dad read this story out loud to my family while we were driving from our home in the north Bay Area to visit family in Ogallala, Nebraska when I was seven or eight years old. I remember the fugue we’d been in, driving for days across empty beige land in Utah and Wyoming, start to dissolve as I became captivated by the unsettling story: a teacher in a small town finds that one of her sweet, quite students has come into possession a box which holds visions of the viewer’s deepest desires. Of course, things become complicated when the box goes missing, and the teacher must grapple with duties to children, the cost of escapism, and the question of whether anyone, regardless of age, is entitled to innocence.

First published in the Magazine Of Fantasy and Science-Fiction, 1956, and collected in The Anything Box, Avon Books, 1977