‘Love’s Executioner’ by Irvin Yalom

The psychotherapy case study genre was invented by Freud, but it was perfected by Yalom in the collection bearing this story’s name. The narratives by which we live – and evade life – are the subject of this weird, unsettling tale. An ageing woman comes to a therapist and tells him about her passion for a much younger man. We begin to see she’s trapped in a delusion, and the therapist realises it’s his task to set her free by murdering her love – that is, destroying her fantasy. We listen in on this most private and painful of conversations, rapt. Strictly speaking this is nonfiction: it’s an account of a real-life encounter from Yalom’s own psychotherapy practice. But only an expert writer could bring to life all the drama that takes place when two people sit together in a single room.

First published in Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy, Bloomsbury, 1989

‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking’ by Denis Johnson

Take this as a vote for the whole of Jesus’ Son, a book of linked stories about a sleazy, damaged drug addict called Fuckhead. Johnson rips the skin off Fuckhead’s life to reveal the beauty and anguish beneath the surface. In the justly famous opening story, the protagonist hitches a ride with a family on a dark, wet night, ominously telling us: “I’d known all along exactly what was going to happen.” After several readings I’m still at a loss to pin down how Johnson succeeds in being so transcendently gritty, so brutally compassionate. It helps that he’s one of the great prose stylists, as he proves from the opening sentences to the shocking conclusion, when the narrator seems to swivel from the carnage he’s just described to look us dead in the eye: “It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”

From Jesus’ Son, 1992, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

‘The Depressed Person’ by David Foster Wallace

Psychic torment is to Wallace what the Tuscan sky was to Hazzard. Here the protagonist is not only in “terrible and unceasing emotional pain” but feels that “the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror”. So Wallace, as he often did, invented a new prose style – affectless, paranoid, recursive – to imitate the inner workings of his character’s mind. The result is at once a story about the limits of expression and an act of expression that in its virtuosity is almost joyous.

First published in Harper’s Magazine, January 1998, and collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown, 1999, and The David Foster Wallace Reader, Little, Brown, 2014

‘Black Diamond Bay’ by Bob Dylan

A number of Dylan songs – ‘Hurricane’, ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’, ‘Brownsville Girl’ – are feats of narrative brilliance, but this is my favourite. It’s a song of close encounters and miscommunication set against a backdrop of impending apocalypse. If you doubt Dylan deserved his Nobel, try listening to (and reading) the opening verse, with its bravura lyrical scene-setting:

Up on the white veranda
She wears a necktie and a
Panama hat
Her passport shows a face
From another time and place
She looks nothing like that
And all of the remnant of her recent past
Are scattered in the wild wind
She walks across a marble floor
Where a voice from the gambling room
Is calling her to come on in
She smiles, walks the other way

And then there’s the final verse, which casts the action in bathetic relief, like one of Munro’s telescopic epilogues. No other writer has ever made storytelling sing like this.

First released on Desire, Columbia, 1976

‘Show Them a Good Time’ by Nicole Flattery

A failed actor returns to her home town to live with her parents and work an unglamorous job in a garage. Her manager has an optimism of the “terrifying, impenetrable variety” that “could burn through entire periods of history”. The garage contains “three tin cans of indiscernible origin” and a “feeling of forever melancholy”. The narrator feels as though “anyone could step in and play me, if they were supplied with the correct expression of anguish, the sluggish reactions of someone baffled by their own poor choices”. Any one sentence could almost belong in a world of skewed naturalism, but taken together they are like staring into a funhouse mirror of desperate, hilarious surrealism. Literary critics call this technique ‘defamiliarisation’. I call it an embarrassment of bizarro genius from one of the most exciting young writers at work anywhere.

First published in The Stinging Fly, Summer 2016, and available to read here. Collected in Show Them a Good Time, Stinging Fly/Bloomsbury, 2019

‘Mathematics’ by Wendy Erskine

Erskine’s protagonist is used to clearing up after other people. One day in the course of her work as a cleaner she finds a young girl alone in a house after a party. Deciding she has no choice, she takes the child home, hoping to locate her mother. But as the story progresses we come to suspect the mess she’s attempting to fix was made long ago, somewhere else entirely. I wondered if Dance Move, the soon-to-be-published collection which this story opens, could possibly surpass Erskine’s debut Sweet Home. It does: by the end of ‘Mathematics’ my eyes were wet. Like all twelve of my choices it made me feel, as Shirley Hazzard writes in one of her several perfect stories, “a momentary sensation that the world had come right; that some instant of perfect harmony had been achieved by two minds meeting.”

First published in Dance Move, Picador, 2022

Introduction

The best short stories make something of situation where there doesn’t seem to be a story at all. I’ve picked some that have helped me along the way to becoming a writer, while being safe in the knowledge that I can’t be sure of what influences me most. More simply these are the ones that have hung around in my head longer than others and, for a form so fleeting, I struggle to think of a better criteria than that. It’s a bit of a magpie’s nest and it seems I have a thing for ghosts.

‘Alvin’ by Jonas Eika, translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg

This story is from the best collection I’ve read this year, After the Sun by Jonas Eika. A systems administrator for a bank arrives in Copenhagen “sweating” and “halfway out of [himself]”, reflecting on a series of “fictional flights” he’s experienced. He remembers one in particular where he saw, through the plane window, a man running who fell to ground as if by shotgun. The rest of the story follows suit and has a fuzzy sense of jet lag where everything is blurred and slippery; a feeling pervasive in Eika’s fiction where things don’t have edges, bodies are without boundaries or thresholds.

The systems administrator, we don’t learn his name, meets another man’s reflection in a cafe window and the pair seamlessly enter each other’s lives. We learn this other sickly pale man is called Alvin, he orders five of whatever meal he chooses from fast food chains so he can pick the best one and he trades derivatives, or “ghosts from the future” as he describes them.

It’s clear that the pair’s amorphous relationship is something of a human derivative and when it shows signs of having a concrete future (I.e., not like a derivative) in the time of a glance the two part as quickly and as smoothly as they came together—like planes quietly taking off through “Broken air.” Eika’s visions of the future are both seductive and disturbing, a trick well practiced by the likes of Ballard which some of the dystopian writers working today seem to have forgotten.

First published in English in The New Yorker, April 2021, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in After the Sun, Lolli Editions 2018, originally published in Danish as Efter solen by Forlaget Basilisk 2018

‘The Vane Sisters’ by Vladimir Nabokov

I started getting to know more Nabokov after reading W. G. Sebald’s essay ‘Dream Textures’: a brief note on Nabokov in Campo Santo, his posthumous collection of essays. It’s more about ghosts and shadows rather than nocturnal sojourns and lead to me seeing ‘The Vane Sisters’ from a previously unknown angle.

The story is well known for its hidden acrostic, the ending that Nabokov said “can only be tried in a thousand years of fiction”. I like it more for showing VN’s skill as a topographical writer and there is an awful depth, something else Sebald wrote about, to the environment his narrator observes. He sees “icicles drip-dripping from the eaves of a frame house.” Where he’s “sure the shadows of the falling drops [will] be visible too.” And the “elongated umbra cast by the parking meter upon some damp snow”. Everything is infused with the spooky sisters of the title without the narrator even being aware of it. There is a wonderful phrase in Nabokov’s Transparent Things: “the secret life of detritus” and here we see the inanimate animated with full force.

First published in the Hudson Review, New York, Winter 1959, and then in Encounter, London, March 1959. Collected in Nabokov’s Quartet, Nabokov’s Congeries, Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, and The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

‘The Man Without Temperament’ by Katherine Mansfield

Mansfield is able to do things with pace that I’ve not experienced with any other writer. The best of her stories simmer along for a few pages and then a final few words will suddenly pull everything into a tight knot.

As with much of her fiction, on the first page it’s not quite clear where you are or who is present, or there is some kind of presumption that you already know this place, you’ve been living there for years. A man is standing at a door “turning the ring, turning the heavy signet ring upon his little finger”, and then, amongst a placeless assortment of people, another hand enters the scene, “A hand, like a leaf, [falls] on his shoulder.” The dynamics of anxiousness and frailty, captured in a subtle series of gestures and perspectival shifts, carry through right to the cool aggression of the final line, and there we find a husband unable to reconcile memories of romance with caring for his now sick wife.

First published as ‘The Man Without a Temperament’ in Art and Letters, vol.3, no.2, Spring 1920. Collected in Bliss and Other Stories, Constable, 1920. Now widely available, including in the Selected Stories, Oxford World Classics, 2008

‘The Birds Poised to Fly’ by Patricia Highsmith

With the publication of her diaries this year which, before editing, ran into 8000 pages, it’s clear that Highsmith was devoutly hypergraphic. Likewise, her work is so packed with apprehension and other mischief that it’s easy to miss her characters are also constantly, maniacally and compulsively, writing—letters, signing fake documents and scribbling dodgy wills on the back of cigarette packets and napkins.

It was while reading ‘The Birds Poised to Fly’ that I realised letters have something of a ghostly or phantom presence in Highsmith’s fiction. They often carry the words of a person who is already dead or pretending to be alive. They have little physical presence in the world of things, yet have the potential to wreak havoc in their recipient’s lives, like something of a poltergeist.

In this story a crank, Don, tires of checking his mail box for a message from his lover and, convinced that it may have been posted into the wrong one, breaks open his neighbour’s box. He finds a letter from a woman that his neighbour has ignored, and starts writing to her. Arranging to meet at Grand Central, the man arrives just for a glimpse of her disappointment when nobody turns up.

Highsmith wrote in her guide to suspense fiction that you should start a short story as near to its ending as possible, and here there is a brevity that cleverly suggests whole lives beyond that of this short piece of writing. It’s expansive and the ghosts just keep appearing in different ways.

First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1969, and collected in Eleven by Patricia Highsmith, Grove Press, 1970, now a Virago Modern Classic

‘Doppelgänger, Poltergeist’ by Denis Johnson

This is from a short story collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, that both sits lightly on the soul and then with hindsight crushes it. Writing, the narrator explains in ‘Triumph Over the Grave’, is like “filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie.” And this neatly summarises the surface ordinariness of Johnson’s fiction, a surface that camouflages a despair so tightly spun that it takes longer than the duration of the story to get you. These stories are the same as when someone asks if you’re ok and you say yes even though you aren’t. Comprising of just five longish pieces, it’s full of questions the narrators won’t let themselves ask and people casually unsure of whether they’re alive or dead. It also contains an epitaph that is far better than Spike Milligan’s ‘I told you I was ill’. ‘Starlight on Idaho’ ends a with gravestone that has ‘I Should Be Dead’ scrawled across it.

‘Doppelgänger, Poltergeist’ follows a lonely poet—who looks like Glenn Gould—and a disillusioned academic, charting their coincidental meetings across a massive time period—a heady mix of Austerlitz and The Big Lebowski (sorry for mixing mediums). There is a bizarre theory about Elvis being swapped with his dead twin brother during the war, but really the story unearths the similarities between conspiracy theories and creativity. It’s also about the cult of celebrity and how certain icons, like Elvis, can haunt us. They have a distant and ethereal presence yet they have the ghostly power to move our minds and bodies, they might even make us throw objects across the room. Are we all poltergeists?

From The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Jonathan Cape, 2018

‘Los Angeles’ by Emma Cline

Alice has recently moved to Los Angeles and gets a job in flagship fashion store selling provocative clothing, that may, or may not be, American Apparel. She meets an older, ostensibly more confident woman named Oona who describes how she’s been selling her dirty underwear for money. In need of some extra cash herself and wanting to fit in with Oona’s crowd, Alice does the same. It works for a while and then things take a turn for the worst. Paralysed, Alice dissociates from the situation and thinks about how she will fictionalise the story when telling Oona the day after. Here, fiction is not the saviour it’s often portrayed as, it’s a trauma. This is a fable about the perils of turning too much of life into short stories.

First published in Granta 139: Best of Young American Novelists 3, Spring 2017, and available to subscribers to read here, and collected in Daddy, Chatto & Windus, 2020

‘A Dark and Winding Road’ by Ottessa Moshfegh

Moshfegh is flawless generally, but is supersonic when reinventing the cliches of fiction. A man travelling to a dark hut in the woods, surely ripe territory for an American horror story? I guess it is a horror story for the narrator, who is running from the environment his as yet unborn child will create and his “life as [he’d] known it [is] forever ruined.”

Chekhov said that if a gun is placed in a scene it must at some point be used. Exploring the old house the man finds Chekhov’s gun, only its a large pink dildo. And it really does go off in a way I never expected. With an end game typical of Moshfegh’s, it’s unclear whether the characters have been liberated or debilitated.

First published in The Paris Review Winter 2013, and available for subscribers to read here. Collected in Homesick for Another World, Jonathan Cape, 2017