‘Hauptbahnhof’ by Joanna Walsh

Talking of clichés, couples meeting in train stations is one of the most well know, and ‘Hauptbahnhof’ by Joanna Walsh gives a wildly new take on it. Berlin Hauptbahnhof is a whole sterile ecosystem, a walled city laced with tracks and it was the first monster train station I visited. I was at the age where I could just look up at the departures board and pick an interesting sequence of letters that also happened to be a place I could visit. I ended up travelling to Bonn, but Walsh’s narrator is forever waiting for someone to arrive.

First published as a chapbook, ‘Hauptbahnhof’, 3:AM Press, 2013 and collected in Fractals, 3:AM Press, and Worlds from the Word’s End, And Other Stories, 2017

‘Barn Burning’ by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel

I sometimes get a bit bored of all the men lying around on sofas, drinking beer, thinking about baseball and listening to Jazz, and I don’t like to mix mediums (I did it again, sorry) but Wong Kar-wai just does a better job of showing boredom and crisis mixing into one. Murakami’s stories, however, are unique in how they flit around between seemingly random events, like dogs getting distracted by squirrels, and manage to draw them together into gold.

There is a successful and married writer who meets a flighty younger woman at a wedding party. Despite having nothing to talk about they have something of an emotional affair, then the girl goes away to North Africa. When she returns to Japan three months later the writer meets her at the airport, she’s transformed and has her new lover in toe. He learns that the lover is rich and cares for nothing, and his favourite pastime is burning barns—a glimmer of recognition flares between the two.

The writer takes to running and looking for the charred remains yet, being independently wealthy himself—similar to the lover—can’t see them. There is something of exploitation in the images of barns burning in the night, some needless destruction against a lower class, and both men seem to forget about the woman who’s future they have also set to flame. Murakami’s men come across as quirky fools, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be creeps.

First published in The New Yorker, 1983, and available for subscribers to read here. Collected – in a different translation – in The Elephant Vanishes, Harvill Press, 2001

‘The Unspoken’ by David Hayden

David Hayden’s stories are like silences set in a velvet background, like jewels in a display case. This one is chilling, yet there is a strange pull between relaxation and aggression as someone sees what might be their violent actions as being the work of someone else, or something else. It’s like a compressed slasher road novel, but truly it doesn’t quite fit any genre, and that’s partly why I like it.

I was once told that to write a good short story you must first create an atmosphere that leads the narrative, and this, for me, is a prime example. It feels a bit like how I experience ASMR, pleasant by way of discomfort.

First published online in Granta, October 2018, and available to read here

‘The Enormous Space’ by J.G. Ballard

I first read this story while I was studying architecture at university and it made the whole thing feel redundant. It showed me that rather than design buildings you can just see the ones that already exist in a different way—Perec came next, intensifying the realisation. It’s still building and the best way to do it is by writing.

My copy of this story, in War Fever, is littered with so many notes that it runs the risk of sprouting a novel. It came later in Ballard’s writing career when the stories got better by dispensing with narrative in a more traditional sense, and the premise is simple: one morning a man decides not to leave his suburban home. The fallout is anything but, domestic space is a desert island traversed by a lone explorer, the house dilating with psychological proximity and distance, between agoraphobia and claustrophobia. The result is mesmerising, a mix between Caspar David Friedrich and potholing.

Nobody else has demonstrated so powerfully how the imagination can remake the world, while also showing that utopias can only really exist in our own heads, and it’s in there where they can quickly turn on us. Dali invented The Paranoid Critical Method but Ballard did it better.

First published in Interzone, 1989, and collected in War Fever, Collins 1990, and the Complete Short Stories Vol 2, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘In Autotelia’ by M. John Harrison

For some reason, when I’m reading the work of M. John Harrison I have the German experimental rock band CAN playing along in my head. Recently, on his radio 6 show, Iggy Poppy described CAN as psychedelic picturesque and I think the same phrase can be easily applied to Mike works. It has the band’s expansive panoramas that are sometimes empty, sometimes full of some ether that can talk but nobody fully understands. Crumbling train lines shooting into the distance stand in for CAN’s repetitive beats and damp nettles for the profusion of white noise. And Damo Suzuki’s discordant mumbling and moaning? That will be everyone’s perpetual inner scream while they attempt to continue as normal while everything fades around them. ‘In Autotelia’ is a large landscape painting with the story and characters growing through the crack like lichen.

First published in Arc. the New Scientist Magazine, 1983, and collected in You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts, Comma Press 2017

Introduction

A few years ago, I undertook a challenge of reading a short story every day for an entire year (it’s a New Year’s resolution I’d highly recommend, and one I really should embark on once more in 2022). I actively sought voices I’d not connected with before, or classics that had escaped my attention, or works by debut writers that might have slipped under my radar. This is my anthology of a selection of short stories I read that year and want to share with others.

‘The Personal Knife’ by Chart Korbjitti, translated from the Thai by Marcel Barang

The first short story I read on 1 January, as part of my “year of reading short stories”, was one by Chart Korbjitti, called ‘The Personal Knife’. Kortbjitti is a Thai author, and I found a collection of his, An Ordinary Story (and Others Less So) translated by Marcel Barang, in a second-hand bookshop in Bangkok (the collection is a retrospective of Korbjitti’s short fiction from 1981 to 2006). ‘The Personal Knife’ is a dark and unsettling, overtly political story about a father taking his son to a dinner party for extremely rich and privileged guests, each of whom have their own personal knife for the very special meal ahead. But the father is concerned at his son’s underwhelmed reaction to his environment and the luxuries on offer: “My son sat listening listlessly. I was reflecting that he should have shown more enthusiasm and was rather worried he’d turn out to be an inferior being. His eyes didn’t have that famished look ours have.” But the reader soon discovers that what gets served up is beyond palatable: “A trolley was being pushed in on which lay the body of a young man, naked but for steel straps around his arms, waist and legs […] Nobody could see his face, nobody knew who he was.” The son has to be coerced into using his knife, and getting a taste of what’s on offer: “Go on, taste it. Don’t bother yourself too much with morals. Morals is for inferior folk.” The Personal Knife’ is a visceral, gut-turning story, offering a glimpse of our most selfish sides. Modern readers might not find this tale of cannibalism screamingly original, but it was written in 1983, and at the time, was a creative and controlled attack on Thailand’s privileged classes.

First published in English in An Ordinary Story and Others Less So, Howling Books, 2010

‘Fungus’ by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from Spanish by JT Lichtenstein

During the short-story-a-day challenge, I also found myself drawn for the first time to an incredible Mexican writer, Guadalupe Nettel. I was seduced by the five short stories in her collection, Natural Histories (translated by JT Lichtenstein). One of the stories that stands out in my memory is ‘Fungus’. Perhaps because it deals with a particularly unsettling topic for a short story. It begins: “When I was a little girl, my mother had a fungus on one of her toenails…” We go on to discover that the protagonist has an incurable fungus of her own, caught from a lover, which she cultivates compulsively, as a way to maintain a connection with a failed love affair. “Parasites – I understand this now – we are unsatisfied beings by nature. Neither the nourishment nor the attention we receive will ever be enough. The secrecy that ensures our survival often frustrates us.” I’ve since read Nettel’s work in Granta, and she has a new novel (her fourth) out in August 2022, called Still Born (translated by Rosalind Harvey), which deals with themes of maternal ambivalence.

First published in Natural Histories, Seven Stories Press, 2013

‘The IOU’ by F Scott Fitzgerald

This humorous short story is about the blurred line between fact and fiction, and explores what happens when greed hijacks truth: “I am a publisher. I publish any sort of book. I am looking for a book that will sell five hundred thousand copies.” ‘The IOU’ was written in 1920, five years before the publication of Fitzgerald’s acclaimed novel, The Great Gatsby, at a time when the author was just twenty-three years old. It remained unpublished until 2017, when it appeared for the first time in The New Yorker. At its heart, ‘The IOU’ is a story about fake news, and continues to be relevant more than a century after it was written. The protagonist is the publisher of a superbly successful book, who takes a train journey to meet his best-selling author, when, by chance, he meets the person who is the subject of the book, whose very existence discredits the story. The unscrupulous publisher grapples with the ethics at play: “I considered quickly whether I could change all the names and shift the book from my nonfiction to my fiction. But it was too late even for this. Three hundred thousand copies were in the hands of the American public.” The story is an entertaining romp of conflicted interests. And of course, the author and publisher get their comeuppance – thanks to the existence of a forgotten, but measly, IOU.

First published in The New Yorker, March 2017, and available for subscribers to read there

‘The White-Bear King Valemon’ by Linda Boström Knausgård translated by Martin Aitken

This story comes from a collection of Nordic short stories, The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat, edited by the Icelandic writer Sjón and Ted Hodgkinson. ‘The White-Bear King Valemon’ is written by the Swedish writer Linda Boström Knausgård (who was once married to Karl Ove Knausgård). Her story, which brings to mind the language and landscapes of Angela Carter, is a rewriting of a classic and well-known Nordic fairy tale of the same name – and is a tragic version of the myth of Eros and Psyche. Boström Knausgård’s version begins with a child living at the edge of a forest, which seems to call to her. “My name is Ellinor and I have a wish. The crown of gold I see in my dreams at night. I want it. It’s the only thing I want.” Ellinor leaves her unsettled home, drawn to the mythic and the wild. The child grows up, and falls in love with a majestic bear. Of course, an emotional and physical battle ensues. “My anger at this now being my life, the anger that rose up in me when all else was erased, was what made me go on, though my strength was long gone, had seeped away, shed onto the senseless rock.” ‘The White-Bear King Valemon’ is ultimately a coming-of-age story – one of transformation, and of the pleasure and perils of discovering who you are.

First published in Swedish in 2011, and in English in The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat, edited by Sjón and Ted Hodgkinson, Pushkin Press, 2017

‘The Metal Bowl’ by Miranda July

The American writer Miranda July was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award in 2018, and I remember reading her knowing, deviant story, ‘The Metal Bowl’, over lunch at work, and laughing out loud as this eccentric story progressed. In it, I connected with so many great sentences (the kind of thoughts that you think are unique, as you haven’t seen articulated before, but the writer puts them clearly on the page): “If I went to the mall immediately and got a new sheet, then the chore wouldn’t have time to gather weight. Once a task goes on the to-do list it settles in, grows roots – the trick is to pre-empt that.” ‘The Metal Bowl’ is about a woman who is grappling with ageing, with domesticity and the tedium of marriage – and who is haunted by an adult video she filmed in her youth. “The video shoot became the central sexual experience of my life; to this day, I can’t orgasm unless I imagine that I’m the pale man, the dad, or the young lesbian watching it, sometimes all of them together, crowded around one computer screen.” The protagonist wants to feel alive – and wanted – again, and finds a moment of clarity and sexual tension with her neighbour during an earthquake. But it is short-lived. “Joel had taken the exquisite energy of our experience and ploughed it back into his marriage. How wise. This option had never occurred to me.” The narrator ultimately reconnects with her husband in a gloriously outlandish (and remarkably touching) scene, involving the title’s metal bowl.

First published in The New Yorker, 4 September 2017. You can read it online here or listen to it read aloud by novelist Emma Cline here. The story was shortlisted for the Sunday Times / Audible Short Story Award in 2018, there’s an interview with Miranda July here.

‘The Mullerian Eminence’ by Leone Ross

The wonderful British writer Leone Ross attended one of the Word Factory literary soirees, at which I work, alongside the organisation’s founder Cathy Galvin, and gave a reading of this deeply strange and supernatural story, ‘The Mullerian Eminence’ from her collection Come, Let Us Sing Anyway (and I immediately went away to devour the other twenty-two stories in that exceptional book). Everyone in the room, as Ross read it out loud, was spellbound as we heard this magic-realist story about disembodied hymens, which slide with ease out of their host bodies, carelessly discarded; only to end up gathering dust behind a cupboard or to be stumbled over on the streets of the city. Each one, like a fingerprint, is unique and has a tale to tell: “A golden cobweb”, “thin silk”, “glimmering wrought iron”. The medical phrase found in the title, “Mullerian eminence”, refers to the hymen which, apparently, has no useful part to play in the anatomy of a body. Before long, a man discovers these superfluous cast-offs, and is able to tune into their chorus, as they recount their experience of sexual violence. ‘The Mullerian Eminence’ was such a surreal, strange and deeply powerful story – listening to it was something like a hallucination – that nobody could speak for a few minutes afterwards… until the applause began.

First published in Closure: Black British Contemporary Writing, edited by Jacob Ross, Peepal Tree Press, 2015. Collected in Come, Let Us Sing Anyway, Peepal Tree Press, 2017

‘Fishskin, Hareskin’ by Zoe Gilbert

Zoe Gilbert and I co-founded the Word Factory short story club in 2014, and she went on to publish Folk in 2018 – which was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. It’s billed as a novel, but I read it as a luminous collection of fifteen interlinked, spell-like allegorical stories, set on the remote island village of Neverness. Folk is full of poetry, conjuring up the scent of gorse, the island’s craggy coastline and beguiling characters, such as Verlyn, a boy born with a wing for an arm. The story I particularly connected with is the melancholic ‘Fishskin, Hareskin’, which won the Costa Short Story Award in 2014. It’s about a fishwife named Ervet, who is newly married, but she cannot let go of the desire for her old life. Ervet’s mother-in-law scolds her: “‘What,’ she asks Ervet, ‘have you been finding to do all the long day that’s more pressing than making spick and span for your husband?’” Ervet’s husband is a fisherman, who often leaves for long voyages on the sea, so Ervet dangerously makes references to hares – an animal with which she has a deep connection – as a way to keep him close. “It was one of the first lessons in Turpin’s house: no speaking of hares, no thinking of them, even, if Ervet wished her new husband to return safe in his fishing boat. A hare is the worst bad luck for a fisherman.” Ervet becomes a reluctant mother and goes on to reject her baby (continually referred to as a fish) – and the crisis point of the story is reached when Ervet takes the baby away, to be wrapped in the skins of her beloved hares. Zoe’s writing draws deeply on Angela Carter and the Brothers Grimm to conjure a magical and murky world.

First published on Word Factory, 2014 and available to read here. Collected in Folk, Bloomsbury, 2018

‘Sylvia Wears Pink in the Underworld’ by Alison MacLeod

This story by Alison MacLeod is the one we read as part of the Word Factory short story club that provoked the strongest response from members. ‘Sylvia Wears Pink in the Underworld’ is from the Canadian-born writer’s 2017 collection, All the Beloved Ghosts, which was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. The narrator takes the reader to Sylvia Plath’s grave in Heptonstall, Yorkshire, and conjures up a supernatural conversation by holding a wine glass to the poet’s headstone. She goes on to re-imagine a happy ending for the late poet, who committed suicide in 1963. And in doing so, Sylvia is seen with her husband, Ted Hughes, travelling the River Styx. The title refers to Sylvia’s pink dress, which she wore on her wedding day. The language at times is reminiscent of Plath’s poetry: “In suburban-esque gardens, clumps of forget-me-nots insist as delicately, and as forgettably, as they do every year. (They are pale things compared with the wild alkanet that has colonised your grave.)” A real-life and much-loved subject can be a challenge for a writer, but can connect powerfully with readers if done with sympathy and finesse, which MacLeod achieves.

First published in All the Beloved Ghosts, Bloomsbury, 2017. Also available to read on LitHub