I was thrilled to be included in Test Signal, an anthology of contemporary writing from the North of England, but my excitement was tempered by classic imposter syndrome when I read some of the other stories. Pick of the bunch was this, by Naomi Booth, a claustrophobic tale that played with characteristic coolness on ideas of motherhood, femininity and cleanliness, as well as having some wonderfully nasty business with a rat.
From Test Signal, Bloomsbury, 2021
Alasdair Gray is the most wonderful, anarchic, infuriating talent. His writing (and the art that goes with it) soars at times to magnificence, while sometimes his playfulness and general atmosphere of seedy chaos results in odd and uncomfortable misfires. His stories have an unchecked abundance to them – not bound by any sense of decorum or genre. This one – and the delightful illustrations that go with it – is a blunt takedown of the industrial revolution, a kind of Morris-esque Marxist allegory of the problems of modernity. And a very funny story.
First published in Unlikely Stories, Mostly, Canongate, 1983, then collected in Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray, Canongate, 2012. You can hear it read by the author here)
Tolstoy has his flaws, but I challenge anyone to find better, more precise, more careful delineations of human psychology and behaviour. His novels are masterworks, but he applies the same rigour and compassion to his stories. This might be halfway between the two, but in its focus and intensity, I’m claiming it for a story. I have never read anything by him and come away less than amazed – but reading this gave me a sense of profound and life-changing understanding that very few works of art or literature can manage.
First published in Russian, 1886. Widely available in translation, including as a Penguin Classic, 2006, and online, including here
And I love this one in a very different way. It makes me laugh out loud. Before I read it, I carried exactly this story in the back of my mind – something that riffs on the fact that jokes are essentially stories. It works brilliantly – at least for someone with a mind as puerile as mine – by balancing the shift between two modes. You have an out and out gag-based structure, with a series of punchlines, that are then undercut by deadpan seriousness about their implications.
First published in The New Yorker, 2013, and available to subscribers to read online here. Collected in Spoiled Brats, Serpent’s Tail, 2014
You can’t really do a list of short stories without Alice Munro. You could say that about other people I’ve missed out here, of course – Joyce, or Raymond Carver. But Munro seems to me the person who has engaged the most, and most persistently, with the form itself. Over decades, she’s honed what a story can do – and this is a great early example. It’s all about the gaps – the things missing from the character’s lives, the things missing from the narrator’s understanding, the information missing from what Munro reveals. Short stories can play with this in the way longer writing can’t – they can let the gaps within the story extend out beyond its confines and sketch out the larger emptiness beyond.
From Dance of the Happy Shades, Ryerson Press, 1968, and collected in Selected Stories, McClelland Stewart, 1996
I do also have to have Borges in here. His stories are undoubtedly some of the most important pieces of literature of the twentieth century. I could have chosen any of them – I’m not sure there is any other writer of whom I can say that I have read as much as I can find, and never yet encountered a dud. They are jewels, little reflective, magical worlds that shatter as you read them. I could choose any, so I’ve gone for the one that is emblematic of the whole project – the labyrinthine Library of Babel. It is a game, a philosophical exploration, and a surprisingly straight bit of science fiction fantasy.
First published in Spanish as ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ in El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan, Sur, 1941. First published in English in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962, and Fictions, Grove Press, 1962
I know I’ve already pushed the boundaries by including a poem, but I have to finish with this. Frost’s poem feels like a story, reads like a story. This one is undoubtedly not just a poem but a song. Part of the storytelling is Johnny Cash’s voice – gravelly and old, weighed down with guilt, backed by the metronomic swell of the music as the title is repeated again and again. But it is also nothing if not a narrative – and one that proceeds with astonishing, sparse vigour. The images are crystal clear, the story vivid and precise even as the central mystery – why does the speaker shoot? – is never touched. The moment of realisation is a proper epiphany – “I orphaned his children; I widowed his wife” – that is devastatingly blunt and totally heartbreaking.
Original version by Sting from Mercury Falling, 1996; Johnny Cash version from American IV: The Man Comes Around
A few years ago, I realised that short fiction was the form I loved most. I love the immersive state of attention required when reading (or writing) a short story – how it lets you get away from yourself for a bit. That realisation coincided with me taking a job where I wouldn’t realistically have time to write novels anymore. So, I’m making it my mission to learn how to write short stories. My main method is reading loads of them – at least one a day. And so this is not necessarily a list of all-time favourites, but more about some recent discoveries. The great thing is, the list will probably be different next week.
This story is a bit of a miracle. It takes place during one afternoon, near Wood Green station in London, and is about Mrs Neecy Brown, a woman in her 60s who is married to a serial cheat. Mrs Brown meets a bloke from St Elizabeth on the tube, who is visiting his grown-up daughter. I have categories for the stories I read, and this is a classic ‘encounter’ story. But Leone Ross manages to give us Mrs Brown’s entire life: her coming to England, the births of her daughters, her middle-age, and also a moment of revelation and beauty. The technical control of the third person voice – the way it slips from the storyteller into Mrs Brown’s Patois – is amazing. I love Mrs Brown so much, and every time I read the story I cry.
First published in Wasafiri 64, December 2010, and collected in Come Let Us Sing Anyway, Peepal Tree Press, 2017)
When I first read the linked collection Hawthorn and Child I was so excited. I was like, ‘But, but…I didn’t know you were allowed to do this!’ In each story, there’s a depth of detail, an access to the contemporary world which is rare and almost spooky – as if the events of the story might be happening just round the corner. But there’s also a strong narrative compulsion – often involving dread. This story is about a North London thief out of his depth, and has a lot of brilliant dialogue in cars. The way he uses the connections between the stories in his linked collections – both Hawthorn and Child and A Shock – feels less contrived than the big narratives in many regular novels. He never over-exploits a single idea.
First published in The New Yorker, April 2011, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Hawthorn and Child, Granta, 2013
I often give Kevin Barry’s books to pals who don’t read much. They love him, and so do I. This story, from his first collection, is absolutely mad. The central character, John Martin, a farmer and remorseful swinger whose chicken operation is under inspection, spends the day driving around town in a state of existential desperation. It’s hysterical, and features many such lines as “He didn’t know how he finished that sausage sandwich but by Jesus he finished it.” But the brilliant thing about Barry is the way he sneaks in the devastating lines, too: “You imagine the whole wife-swapping business would take four decisions but really it only takes three.” Oh God.
First published in There are Little Kingdoms, Stinging Fly, 2007
This story is from a linked collection called Revenge. It took me some time to get used to Ogawa’s sensibility, but then I got properly sucked in. This might be the gentlest story in the collection, and it’s basically about a man who runs a torture museum. It feels to me like Ogawa is one of those writers who has unfettered access to the depths of their imagination, which I envy. Some of her images feel plucked out of dreams (tomatoes tumbling onto a road, a tiger dying in a backyard), and the narratives seem to go where they want. I like this particular story because of the relationship between a young guy and his socially noxious uncle. I also like the central idea: that breaking stuff isn’t always bad; it depends what you break.
First published in English in University of Hawai’i Press, Volume 13, Number 1, 2001, and collected in Revenge, Harvill Secker, 2013 – now available as a Vintage Classic, 2020
I wouldn’t try to imitate Bolaño, and he’s difficult to teach because he does lot of things you’re not supposed to. But I love his short work, and the way the stories all bleed into each other. Shadowed as it is by exile, his short fiction contains a loneliness and a cinematic spareness, as in this story set in the Mexican desert, where people watch each other from hotel rooms or lay-bys. He’s often funny, too, and never fails to provide a strange, stark image. In another story in this collection, Last Evenings on Earth, a father and grown-up son eat Iguana and chilli sauce at a roadside cafe. I think about that scene all the time.
First published in Spanish in Putas asesinas, Anagrama, 2001. First published in translation in The New Yorker, July 2005 and available to subscribers to read here, and collected in Last Evenings on Earth, New Directions, 2006
My good pal David Swann wins or is placed in one or another category of the Bridport Prize pretty much every year. His stories are beautiful and funny and moving, but I can’t put him in this list because we’re both a bit Northern, and therefore object to nepotism. We both love the work of Mary Robison, especially her book of tiny fragments Why Did I Ever. I think Dave recommended this 500-word story to me, which might be the best story of this length I’ve ever read. It features an evening in the life of Alison and Clark, as they carve some Hallowe’en pumpkins on the porch.
When you first read it, you might wonder how Robison managed to do what she did. But then you read it again, and you see that she just used the right word, every time.
First published in The New Yorker, October 1982, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in An Amateur’s Guide to the Night, FSG, 1983. Now available from Counterpoint, 2019
A Personal Anthology 