‘Fishtank’ by Bindu Bansinath

‘Fishtank’ is a story about systems. It’s hard to say more about it, in part because the story is so heartbreaking, but more so because of its elegance. Its economy. Several weeks after reading it I learned that was a teen when she wrote this, which makes that clarity of vision, her masterful absence of exposition, all the more moving.

There’s something undeniable about each exhalation of this story, and in just over ten paragraphs its author manages to use that instrument of askance: a final scene that the reader doesn’t see coming, but is, of course, the only ending there could possibly be.

First published in Smokelong Quarterly, September 2013, and available to read here

‘Laika’s Dream’ by John Haskell

I tried so hard to be into the zombified-carnage-apathy vibe of the Brat Pack, Ellis and narcotic wastelands and all that, before I fell in love with the ‘McSweeneyites’. It’s a funny term for those in and around the orbit of Dave Eggers and McSweeney’s in the early Oughts, and their now-nostalgic brand of tender lucidity, especially because John Haskell’s debut collection I Am Not Jackson Pollock was not actually published by McSweeney’s. And yet it feels like a crowning jewel to that scene and that oeuvre, and ‘Laika’s Dream’, included in the collection, allows us into the mind of the real Soviet dog who went into space in 1957 and, as anyone with access to Wikipedia might know, never came back.

When I think of this story I think of awe and homecoming, and the vastness of space as a very warm blanket. It’s generous and heartbreaking and course-correcting for a young writer like I was then, who was looking for a way into emotion and could never quite reach lift-off. (Get it?)

Listen to Laika’s Dream on Studio 360, New York Public Radio. First published in I Am Not Jackson Pollock, Pan Macmillan, 2003

‘Night Guard’ by Jack Vening

A few years ago I took a seminar by the brilliant multimedia artist Season Butler on ‘Reimagining Dystopias’, where I was introduced to Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarisation, and his (or was it first Novalis’s?) axiom: “Make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” It really rocked my world, which is a little odd because I was a full-grown adult calling myself a writer by that point, and the feedback I got from friends and respected peers was: Wait, you really hadn’t heard of that before? Wow don’t tell people that.

In ‘Night Guard’ a caretaker provides a taxonomy of wealthy children’s peculiarities and patterns, and paints a picture of the slippery, anarchic game which is childminding: Julie was squinting at my phone, from which she was streaming videos of civil unrest at tremendous volume. I gathered she was terrified of being injured in a terrorist attack. Occasionally she screamed. The waiters looked at her like she was a crow I’d taught to speak by feeding it meat out of my hand.Jack Vening is one of the funniest people on the famously crowded Internet, and I waited too long to dive into his fiction, which is so, so good at delivering that defamiliarisation thing. Once he has a collection I’ll keep it within arm’s reach, especially while temping, or when the shrieking children from the school near my house flood the street and hold me hostage in the late afternoon.

Published by The Nervous Breakdown, August 2019, and available to read here

‘Rusties’ by Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu

I’ve often heard that when doomsday comes we’ll all be rushing to riff on it. Put our glib little depression humour spin on it. i’m about to get crushed by a comet, classic pisces behavior tbhlmao. That kind of thing.

I’ve occasionally seen this flavor of voice depicted in prose, and ‘Rusties’ brings something related to it, but far more artful. It’s a gorgeously thrilling sci-fi story with action and twists, but also a groundedness in a fully-formed vision and thought-patterns, even while its hero is ushered into a robot apocalypse. Dotted with likes and what the heck?s, relationship politics, and the annoying ubiquity of social media bleeps, it feels distinctly modern and also true to the heart of classic sci-fi.

Rusties are traffic robots installed in cities like Kinshasa, Lagos, Nairobi, and Cairo who strengthen local economies by troubleshooting urban roads. When they start to simultaneously undergo upgrades, and be harvested for interior parts, a cascade of social and technological tumult unfurls. It reads, somehow, like your favourite action film and your favourite shoegaze novella:

Rusty Ndege and I had a bond. Ever since that day when I was five. It would sometimes play my favorite songs and even update itself about new interesting tid-bits of news and gossip so it could chat with me. We’d had whole conversations. Sure, people noticed. That’s why Kevo called it ‘The Tin Man’ and joked that I was the heart it had been looking for.

First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 121, available to read here and listen here

‘The Haunting of Hajji Hotak’ by Jamil Jan Kochai

Having just finished The People in the Trees, I’m wary of stories that end with an announcement of love. They’re out to get you. More specifically, they’re out to scar you. And although Kochai’s narrator is a vaguely menacing, unseen presence in the life of one family, whose members battle paranoia (is it though?) and the debilitating pain of both lived and inherited trauma, a love does indeed emerge, and certainly must be spoken.

But unlike stories within the whole ‘trauma-plot’ discourse, every beat of this story is syncopated in a way that loosens the reader’s grip on what they’re seeing, and – more importantly – how they’re seeing. That device does something really interesting to the reader, which I won’t give away here, but I’ll say that ‘The Haunting of Hajji Hotak’ should be required text for anyone trying to break out of their own patterns; both in terms of crafting fiction, and in terms of relating empathetically to strangers.

First published in The New Yorker, 8 Nov 2021, and available to subscribers to read here

‘That Boy’ by Reneé Bibby

I picked up Issue 1 of Splice in Burley Fisher, one of east London’s most beloved indie bookshops, and whenever I find myself in spaces like that, I tend to move toward my homeland: America, and often the west. Maybe it’s subconscious. But I latched onto Reneé Bibby straight away. Her story describes a biracial man’s hair speaking aloud in his daily life, bringing into contrast the way he’s grappled with his own blackness, particularly in his majority-white workplace. The mag includes an introduction to the story, in which Dana Diehl describes Bibby as something of the beating heart of the writing community in Tuscon, Arizona. It’s a loving tribute to an unflinchingly potent voice: nowhere is a shlocky Twilight Zone reveal of the talking hair in question. It’s there from the first line, a natural and tesselative companion to the story’s protagonist and his complex personal history in an inherently, occasionally invisibly, discriminatory national ecosystem.

“You’re fooling yourself if you don’t know that everything is about race,” the hair said.
Kingston pointed at his hair. “I’m picking up fresh razors on my way home.”

First published in Splice: Anthology #1, 2019. An excerpt is available here

‘Pillar of Salt’ by Shirley Jackson

In my early twenties I made a bad decision: I followed a boyfriend to New York, a city where I had no job and almost no friends, from London, where things had sort of started happening for me. I assumed, at 22, that things happen everywhere, so the plan seemed faultless. What followed was a time so bad that I developed a sort of cottonmouth when I tried to articulate the pain. In ‘Pillar of Salt’ a couple visit Manhattan from their quiet New Hampshire town, and wife Margaret begins to experience bouts of hallucinatory anxiety as she clashes with the city, seeing danger and collapse (sometimes real, sometimes imagined) atop balconies, on shorelines, and in the throes of chic parties. Of course, her husband experiences none of this.

It’s got Jackson’s trademark grotesquerie, and her unmooring of characters from the realities in which they’ve become comfortable. But it’s also a fuck you to the idea that a place’s inherent ‘badness’ requires explanation. There are notes of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ in it, but also something more terrifying: that the claustrophobia and madness of a locked room like Gilman’s might bleed into the vastness of The Greatest City In The World™.

I wish I’d read ‘Pillar Of Salt’ two weeks into my time in New York, rather than many years after I’d started the exhausting process of re-emigrating to the UK. But the way in which fiction can step in for you, to unburden you of the responsibility to rationalise your interiority, is something timeless. And that’s nice.

First published in Mademoiselle, 1948, collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, Penguin 1967

‘The Role of Music in Your Life’ – a questionnaire by Five Dials

I co-teach a module on digital fiction with a friend who is one of the most intelligent people I know, and we disagreed about whether to include this in the syllabus. I was pro, she was con, in part because undergrads don’t want to do questionnaires, and half the battle with young students is getting them on-side.

But I find the eeriness of this type of experimentation to be exciting beyond words (of course it’s not really a questionnaire), and the text-based adventure nerd in me has a hard time believing anyone wouldn’t become enthralled in this ‘story’. Give it a go.

(Note: I reached out to Penguin Random House for any information about who authored the questionnaire, but received no response. Cue spooky synths.)

First published on Five Dials in 2016. It’s available here

Introduction

When I was asked to contribute to A Personal Anthology I had a grand plan to go through my small library of collections over the Christmas holiday. It was going to be my motivation to finally finish all my short story collections and anthologies. As you’ve most likely already guessed, I didn’t exactly succeed. However, what I did do was spend the period reflecting on the form, and what short stories I’ve remembered reading in the past, and why I’ve remembered them above everything else I’ve read.

I had hoped this would be a good exercise to make me love the short story, as I’ve had my qualms with the form in the past. I am still trying to unpick what makes me resistant to it, why I prefer novels. I did realise that I think it is much harder to ‘pull off’ a short story. However, I also realised that what I value in novels is similar to what I value in short stories, which is that I am usually most enamoured with the craft of writing, with how the words sound in my head.

In 2020, I published a short story anthology, edited by Alice Slater, called Outsiders. Like this project, that book solidified for me what I think makes a great story, what the purpose of short fiction is and what I am going to look for going forward. It wouldn’t be fair for me to just list the stories in the anthology, but I would be lying if I said that the publication of that anthology didn’t inform my choices for this. I owe a great deal to Alice Slater, and her depth of knowledge about short stories. I hope that I’m allowed a small mention of her work, which I didn’t include because it is my favourite story of hers, ‘The Alligator’ is one I’ve had the honour of publishing.

This all said, this project really became a personal anthology. I spent a lot of time churning up old memories of stories I studied and writers I have loved for many years, and I was astounded, and delighted, to find that I love so many short stories.

‘The Witch’ by Shirley Jackson

I have a very strange and uncomfortable relationship with Jackson, mainly because I think she’s excellent, but I do not want to deal with what she is revealing about human nature. I like ‘The Witch’ so much because it is, on the surface, a very funny story, but of course it reveals something more about human nature and our childlike glee for horror and our fascination with gore and ghost stories, and our capability for great cruelty. In it a little boy meets a man on the train who tells him a horrible story, to the little boy’s delight, and his distracted mother’s annoyance. It is very short, and Jackson writes with such a deft touch you do not notice that the dark has crept in.

First published in 1948 and collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, Penguin 1967. Also available as a Penguin Modern Classic for Kindle, 2014

‘White Nights’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett

I studied this story in a class on ‘Petersburg’ in Literature at a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts in the middle of winter. This is the class that changed my life, so whether this is the best short story by a Russian writer, I cannot and will not say. But this class and this story, along with Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, and the western Massachusetts’ winter prompted me to move to London. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the exact translation I read, so I’ve listed here the translation I came across recently by Constance Garnett, whose translations Janet Malcolm holds in some regard. Often presented as a story of love and then eventual disillusionment, I will always read ‘White Nights’ as a love story to a city. A city, like all cities, which is capable of taking you to great soaring heights but equally capable of breaking your heart. Smashing you to smithereens. Really recommend reading it when you are a depressed 19-year-old in the middle of winter at a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts to experience its full effects.

Original first published 1848, translation in 1918. Collected in The Gambler and Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2010, and as a Penguin Little Black Classic, 2016. Available to read online at Project Gutenberg

‘Mirrors’ by Patricia Grace

Patricia Grace is one of my favourite writers, and I know most of her work because I wrote my MA dissertation on her book Cousins. Grace is a part of the Māori Renaissance movement that began in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1970s. I read her first collection, Wairiki, during my studies, notably the first book to be published by a Māori woman back in 1975. ‘Mirrors’ is from her second collection, The Dream Sleepers, published in 1980. In it the narrator walks outside in her slippers and steps in dog shit. And within a very simple story, Grace explores themes of domesticity and family. I love it so much because it is funny, and also because it demonstrates in a few pages what a beautiful writer Grace is, the way she turns words into sounds you can hear, even if you do not speak the words out loud. She conveys longing and grief better than any writer I can think of.

First published in 1975 and collected in The Dream Sleepers, Longman Paul, 1980, and in One Whale, Singing: Stories from New Zealand, The Women’s Press 1985

‘Love Silk Food’ by Leone Ross

I was first introduced to Leone Ross because Alice Slater commissioned her to write a short story for Outsiders. Her recent novel, This One Sky Day, published by Faber (and titled Popisho in the US) is a marvel. Ross is a very humane writer who is very skilled at capturing small moments between people. I picked this story mainly because of how it conveys London lives. In it, a woman, whose philandering husband and grown children disappoint her, meets a man on the tube and helps him find his daughter’s house in Wood Green. It is a small moment but it is also big. Like Shirley Jackson in ‘The Witch’, Ross has captured the uniqueness of an interaction on public transport. Those minutes with a stranger captured in a few pages, that will be remembered years later.

First published in Wasafiri Magazine in 2010 and collected in Come Let Us Sing Anyway, Peepal Tree, 2017

‘You’ by Alice Ash

Alice Ash in many ways reminds me of Shirley Jackson, except that within the landscapes of horror, Ash investigates the surrealness and mundanity of living life in the margins. Ash’s collection Paradise Block is all set around the same housing estate, and characters recur and connect throughout. ‘You’ plays with the reader in the opposite way to the way Jackson’s ‘The Witch’ does. In it a woman goes to a nightclub after a break-up. The narrator is funny and playful, but the reader begins to expect the very worst when she goes home with a man after a night out, who she hopes will be ‘you’ and instead is confronted with the abject loneliness of looking for love. Ash conveys, like Ross, a very human moment that so many of us will relate to.

Published in Paradise Block, Serpent’s Tail, 2021