‘The Night Face Up’ by Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn

This is another short story that I remember from my studies. I think I read it in my first year, nearly 15 years ago, and I still remembered it very clearly. Some elements have worn such grooves in my memory, that I found no surprises when I reread it for this. Cortázar is an astounding surrealist writer, and my introduction to him shaped my taste in literature and my expectation for fiction. In the story, a man has a motorcycle accident in contemporary time, and goes to sleep in the hospital ward where he dreams he is being hunted by Aztecs. Cortázar pushes the reader’s expectations for storytelling and for fiction to the limit in this story; in it he doesn’t write an unreliable narrator so much as he makes the case for an unreliable truth.

First published in Spanish as ‘La Noche Boca Arriba’ in 1956. Published in translation in The New Yorker, April 1967, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Blow Up and Other Stories, Random House, 1967

‘Bliss’ by Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield had to be on this list, there are so many short stories of hers I could list as favourites. Mansfield was a firm favourite of my grandmother, who was keen to point out many times that, like me, Mansfield moved from New Zealand to London in her twenties. Now that I’m 34 I hope the comparison ends there. ‘At the Bay’ was the story I initially thought of including, it is the first story in a treasured copy of The Garden Party and Other Stories that my mum gave me, which belonged to her, with her name and the year 1973 written on the title page. I own a handful of short story collections with Katherine Mansfield in them including Persephone’s beautiful The Montana Stories and not one of them has the story I ended up choosing. The thing is, ‘Bliss’ has been rattling around in my brain ever since I read it. Mansfield has captured longing perfectly as well as that first pinprick when one realises a betrayal. It is a sublime story, and like Virginia Woolf, I think Mansfield is the greatest modernist writer.

First published in the English Review, 1918, now in Selected Stories, Oxford World’s Classics, 2002, and other Mansfield collections, including Strange Bliss, 2021 Pushkin Press. Available to read online here

‘Kiteflying Party at Doctor’s Point’ by Keri Hulme

When Keri Hulme passed away, I was reminded of a short story of hers I read pretty recently. There are two Hulme stories in the anthology One Whale, Singing (named for one of the Hulme stories) and ‘Kiteflying Party at Doctor’s Point’ was a revelation when I found it. It touches on many of the themes in Hulme’s Booker Prize-winning The Bone People, mainly environmental anxiety (something that Patricia Grace’s writing also contends with) and, well, general anxiety. Hulme beautifully describes the beach, the sky and the sea. And her narrator is fearful of what will be lost and what she has already lost. It has in it an aching, a longing for something that isn’t possible. The fact it was first published 44 years ago is horrifying to me, as it so perfectly demonstrates our current moment.

First published in 1977 and collected in One Whale, Singing, The Women’s Press and Te Kaihau/The Windeater Victoria University Press, 1986

‘Literary Quartet’ by Jen Calleja

Jen Calleja is a wonderful writer. I have been reading her reviews and personal nonfiction for a long time. I love her slightly surreal, both befuddling and clarifying collection, I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For, published by Prototype in 2020. My favourite story in the collection is ‘Literary Quartet’, because it’s a story I often reference, something I’m not sure I can say for most short stories. In it a narrator is up for a prestigious award along with other writers, the story takes a turn for the strange, and frankly stressful, as the nominees are required to make a case for why they ought to win. Calleja lampoons the ridiculous theatre of prize-givings and, sadly oftentimes, how meaningless literature and art becomes when dressed up in ceremony.

Published in I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For, Prototype Books 2020

‘Swans’ by Janet Frame

It takes a lot for me to recommend a story in which a cat dies. I hope I’ve not spoiled this one, but I think it is obvious that the cat will die after the first few lines. I would only ever recommend a story in which a cat dies if it were written by a superlative writer, and I consider Janet Frame one of the best writers. Frame’s short stories tend to be more realist than a lot of her other work, although she is best known in the UK for her more realist novels like Owls Do Cry and Faces in the Water as well her memoirs. Personally I prefer her at her most strange such as in Scented Gardens for the Blind and The Edge of the Alphabet. Frame muddles reality in a way that most writers would never dare, she takes what isn’t clear and she pushes through, she won’t coddle you, you have to meet her where she is in her mind. In ‘Swans’ (another gem from a book once owned by my mother, several decades ago) a mother takes her children to the beach, but they end up at the wrong beach. It’s a very short story, but in it Frame gives the reader all the proof and tools needed to dissect, and eviscerate, the mother for the simple mistake of getting off the train at the wrong stop. She sows tiny seeds of doubt in the mother’s ability and possibly sanity throughout and all the while plays with language the way a child might. She has the rare ability to make words on the page reverberate in your brain, sounds playing off one another. I equally admire Frame so much for the way she writes mental illness and also children’s perspectives, which perhaps only possible given her own history.

First published 1951 in The Lagoon and Other Stories and collected in The Secret Self: Short Stories by Women J.M. Dent & Sons 1987

‘Quadraturin’ by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull

I had to call in reinforcements to remember the title and author of this story, I had it in my head that it was by Yvegeny Zamyatin. I tweeted, ‘What is that Russian short story where the guy’s room keeps shrinking’ (details obviously not perfectly clear) and was steered in the right direction by a lot of good folks. I was taught this symbolist story in my undergrad and like Cortázar, it just got stuck in my brain. In it, a Soviet man is offered an experimental concoction that will make his ‘match-box sized’ room grow, but when he is smearing it on his walls he accidentally spills it and his room grows far bigger than he could have imagined. Every time he returns to his room, it is still bigger. This is a darkly funny story which encapsulates the duality of humanity. I think I remembered it, more than a decade later, for the same reasons certain scenes in Andrei Bely’s Petersburg and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita have stuck with me – this story shares with them a sort of visual slapstick humour that belies something much darker.

First published possibly circa 1920s, English translation collected in Memories of the Future, New York Review of Books, 2009. Available to read online at The Short Story Project, here

‘Smote (or When I find I cannot Kiss You In Front of a Print by Bridget Riley)’ by Eley Williams

I am certainly not alone in thinking Eley Williams’ collection Attrib. and Other Stories is phenomenal. In fact, I looked through to see if anyone else had picked her and of course they had, and several had picked this story. But I make no claims to be unique, this story is near-perfect for me and I’m glad I’m not alone. I first read it in her collection, and it has stuck with me since then. When I realised I wanted to include it, I delighted in rereading it. It showcases Williams’ love of language and her insights into what we think of when we pretend we aren’t thinking of anything at all. It is, on the face of it, just the inner dialogue of someone in a gallery with the person they fancy, and who they would like to kiss. Williams hurls at the reader a torrent of language and concludes with the loveliest of lines that read like poetry:

You have leaned in, and have kissed me without even thinking about it
Like it is the easiest thing in the world
and you stark me
and I am strobe-hearted…

It is the only love story in this personal anthology and it is a story that I love.

First published in The White Review online, 2015 and collected in Attrib. and Other Stories, Influx Press, 2017

Introduction

Choosing twelve stories was enormous fun, and got me thinking about our impulse to carve experience into slivers of narrative. We hear stories – more or less true – in jokes, political speeches, TV ads. And if we could listen in, we’d overhear them in therapy lounges, confessionals, beds where lovers lie.

I thought about pointing to this heterogeneity by including ‘Raised on Robbery’, Joni Mitchell’s story about an attempted seduction via story. Or ‘John Allyn Smith Sails’ by the band Okkervil River, a retelling of the poet John Berryman’s suicide (which a popular streaming service tells me I listened to an appropriate 77 times last year). Or one of Adrian Tomine’s graphic stories from Killing and Dying, or a short film from Kieslowski’s Decalogue. Or, at a stretch, James Wood’s critical essay ‘Serious Noticing’, a story about re-reading which, I confess, I’ve always preferred to the Chekhov tale it’s largely about.

Which is all to say that – although there are books about three- and five-act narrative structure, and the seven basic plots – the faculty that allows us to tell and understand stories is surely innate, and can be found wherever you look.

So even though I finally decided to stick – with two exceptions – to the established literary genre known as the ‘short story’, thinking about narrative as an inborn instinct helped me understand why I love these pieces. It’s not that they’re the greatest stories ever written: I’d be willing to contend that some of them are, but that list would have to include ‘The Dead’, ‘Metamorphosis’ and something by Alice Munro. Are they my favourites? It would depend which day you asked me. It’s just that, when I read them for this piece – even when I couldn’t easily articulate why I found them so moving, or funny, or beautiful, or disconcerting – they seemed the work of born storytellers. They just landed somehow, and made me want to tell you about them.

‘Mysterious Kôr’ by Elizabeth Bowen

For the evocation of sheer atmosphere, try reading (and rereading) the perfect opening paragraphs of Bowen’s wartime story. Early-hours London is in blackout, and moonlight “drenched the city and searched it”, not unlike the bright beam of the author’s prose. There’s no noise except that of the underground and, as we watch a young woman and an off-duty soldier head towards a confused almost-tryst, Bowen helps us hear every subterranean rumble emanating from their battened-down night-time hearts.

First published in 1942. Collected in The Demon Lover, Jonathan Cape, 1945, and Collected Stories, Vintage Classics, 1999

‘Who Knows What’s Up in the Attic?’ by Jean Rhys

Rhys was approaching the end of a tumultuous life when she wrote this story. A woman living alone in a remote English town receives a visit from a man she’s only met once before. She wonders how things might have turned out in a different time and place. And so do we: it’s impossible not to think of the author’s early novels and their doomed, wrenching affairs. This time, nothing much happens. The action is all in the opening and sudden closing of the woman’s heart as she contemplates where one last voyage in the dark would surely take her: “The abyss. Despair. All those things.”

First published in Sleep it Off, Lady, André Deutsch, 1976, also in the Collected Short Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2017

‘A Romantic Weekend’ by Mary Gaitskill

Nobody writes about sex – its passion, pathos and comedy – better than Gaitskill. A man and a woman set off for a planned weekend of sado-masochistic lovemaking. But they barely know each other, and everything goes wrong. They can’t stick to their pre-assigned roles: the supposedly dominant man is needy and petulant, and the supposedly submissive woman is inconveniently assertive. Gaitskill’s wry, benevolent gaze captures every nuance of the shifting power dynamic as the couple fumble towards each other through the exchange of several different kinds of pleasure and pain.

Collected in Bad Behavior, Simon & Schuster, 1998

‘Evolution of a Breakup’ by Etgar Keret

Perhaps my favourite short story. The sequence of events leading to the separation of a married couple is traced from the beginning of life on earth. To say any more would be to ruin it, and I wouldn’t know what to say in any case. No matter how many times I read it, I can’t quite put into words why this single-paragraph, two-page miracle of prose has such a devastating hold on me.

Collected in Fly, Already, Granta, 2010

‘The Worst Moment of the Day’ by Shirley Hazzard

There are too many brilliant things in this story for me to do it any justice, so let me just draw your attention to what Hazzard sees when she raises her eyes, and her writing, upward. Of a character holidaying in Tuscany, she tells us:

He had never experienced such a sky. In England, where heaven is a low-hung, personal affair, thoroughly identified with the King James Version, a sky such as this would not have been tolerated for a moment. It was a high, pagan explosion of a sky, promising indulgence for all kinds of offences to which he had not the slightest inclination. He felt, beneath it, exposed and ridiculed…

There’s so much in the air here: the man’s ambivalence about judgment and pleasure; his longing for, and shrinking from, freedom. In one glance we see more than a page of exposition could reveal. And some of us would simply have written that the sky was bright, or blue.

First published in The New Yorker, September, 1961and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Cliffs of Fall, Knpof, 1963. Now available as a Virago Modern Classic, 2005 and 2011

‘What I Feel’ by Lydia Davis

A theory: the contemporary short story is defined by the opposing poles of two genius writers. Alice Munro is the great expansionist, Lydia Davis the great minimalist. It’s hard to choose one of Davis’s stories: they somehow work on you together, like the notes of a lovely dissonant chord. For instance the page-long ‘What I Feel’ – which teases a thought about solipsism almost to death – is enriched when read alongside the somewhat longer ‘Therapy’ and the even shorter ‘Head, Heart’. The best way to read Davis, I think, is to start one of her collections – or, even better, the Collected Stories – at the beginning and to finish, flushed and exhilarated, at the end.

First published in Conjunctions 17, Fall 1991, and available to read here. Collected in Almost No Memory, FSG, 1997, and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, FSG/Hamish Hamilton, 2009