‘An Inhabitant of Carcosa’ by Ambrose Bierce

A great movie could be made of Bierce’s life – born in a log cabin, fought bravely for the Union Army in the American Civil War where he was badly wounded, became a notorious journalist who battled corruption and gained a reputation as a ruthless satirist (‘Bitter Bierce’ was his nickname), suffered family tragedy and ended his days with the words “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination” before disappearing over the border and into the chaos of the Mexican Revolution, never to be heard from again. Along the way, he managed to create one of the most innovative bodies of work. Yet he remains a curiously overlooked figure. Part of the problem is that the plot twists and turns that he pioneered, the end of ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ for example or the multiplicity of views in ‘The Moonlit Road’ (which inspired Akutagawa’s ‘In a Bamboo Grove’), are now so ubiquitous in books, films and games, that they seem like they’ve always been with us.

Over the past few years, I’ve been taking long walks around different neglected parts of London. Often I’ll take photographs, write notes and record the sounds of the places but other times, I’ll find myself trudging through endless suburban streets to get to somewhere remote. So I started listening, along the way to pass the time, to podcasts about books, particularly Sherds Podcast and the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, and I found myself being further and further drawn into what I guess is called Weird Fiction and a childhood fascination with creepy Victorian stories became reanimated in me. For a year or two, I immersed myself in M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, H.P. Lovecraft, The King in Yellow, The Turn of the Screw, The Yellow Wallpaper and so on. It’s a deep dark rabbit hole you can easily lose yourself in. There’s been a real revival of interest in these circles and their origins but even now Bierce is overlooked as a crucial forefather and a link between ancient myths, the dark side of the Romantics, orientalism and medievalism, and modernity. I suspect because of the things he saw growing up and especially while fighting in the Civil War, Bierce could not adequately settle in a world of sanitised lies and so he acts like a kind of psychopomp in his short fiction, taking us to places beyond the comforts of Reason.

First published in the San Francisco Newsletter, 1886, and collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, ELG Steele, 1891

‘Every Cripple has His Own Way of Walking’ by Ann Quin

If you haven’t read Berg, you should try it. Quin is often touted as an experimental writer, which speaks for the conservatism of much of publishing. Certainly, there is a startling quality to her work but it’s experimental in the way that life, and especially childhood, is experimental. I love the way she builds this story, assembles it piece by piece, like we are there, touching the things she describes. It’s such a physical experience. In a lot of writing, you can forget that the characters have bodies. Maybe we even do that with ourselves, as if we are avatars or just floating perspectives. At the same time, anxiety and uncertainty perpetuate the tale, so that all those solid things we have touched are not solid at all but are capable of shifting. I’m not sure how successful I was in Inventory, which is a book based on objects, but I wanted to examine that tension between the tangible and intangible that Quin does so well, and particularly the idea of entering a world already populated by others and trying/failing to make sense of it. I feel drawn to Quin, maybe because of overlaps in background (Catholic, working class etc), but she is always off in the distance.

First published in Nova, 1966. Collected in The Unmapped Country, And Other Stories, 2018. Available to read at Music and Literature, here

‘Red Leaves’ by Can Xue, Translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping

I kept finding myself falling into ruts with music and starting to become nostalgic so this year I’ve tried every morning to find something brand new to listen to. I’ve collected these in a long playlist for those who are interested. The process has restored not just my curiosity but a passion for music that was probably waning since I was a teenager. It’s quite a welcome surprise to still be able to be surprised.

Reading Can Xue, I have a similar feeling. Initially, I was drawn to her because of her background; her parents were persecuted by the Communist party in China during the Cultural Revolution (a lot of my favourite writers come from societies that have suffered through conflict, division and tyranny, Han Kang for instance, and I’m interested in how those experiences resonate with and differ from the experiences of people I grew up with). It was only this year that I fully realised the extent of her brilliance (and the brilliance of other sharp imaginative writers like Lesley Nneka Arimah and Camilla Grudova). My father died of Covid-19 after a brutal six month battle with the illness on a ventilator in ICU. Spending the last few nights of his life with him, I found there was no rational way of recording what was happening given how surreal yet hyperreal it was. All logical attempts were completely inadequate. It was hallucinatory, and trying to frame it in any kind of structure, with any trite kind of lesson, would betray the depths of what he, and we, went through. Can Xue knows that there are realities below our reality, the world of health and sanity and safety, and reminds us that the ice might be thinner than we think.

First published in translation in Vertical Motion, Open Letter Books, 2011. Available to read at Belletristra, here

‘Small Causes’ by Primo Levi, translated by Ruth Feldman

It is wise not to have heroes but there are certain writers, for all their human flaws, whose integrity seems heroic – Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Nawal El Saadawi, Osip Mandelstam, Albert Camus, Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee, Roberto Saviano, Nurmuhemmet Yasin, and so many of the current imprisoned dissident writers highlighted by PEN International who need our advocacy. Though he would have rejected piety, Primo Levi has such an immense moral presence, even the way he wrote had an ethical basis in clarity and honesty. I could pick any number of his short stories – ‘Rappoport’s Testament’ for its reflexivity, ‘Lorenzo’s Return’ for its melancholy, ‘Carbon’ for being such a perfect encapsulation of scientific wonder but ‘Small Causes’ is an incredibly powerful example of how the littlest things can eventually have the most monumental consequences.

First published in Vanity Fair, January 1986, and available to read here. Collected in Moments of Reprieve, 1986

‘The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls’ by J.D. Salinger

From the noble to the ignoble. I’ve chosen this not for its intriguing title or for its moving ending (even for a Salinger agnostic like myself) but because in order to access this story, you have to travel to Princeton University Library where you can only read it supervised after checking in behind closed doors. There’s something that interests me in things we cannot easily have and the attraction of the forbidden or just being tantalised but also how it’s essentially an illusory feeling. Anyways, for those of you who still like vaguely illicit things, someone posted a link to it here that I couldn’t possibly recommend clicking on.

Unpublished

Any island from Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will by Judith Schalansky

I’m cheating somewhat with this choice as it’s primarily nonfiction but it does contain a great deal of folklore and each island is written about in the form of an essayistic short story. I’ve returned to this collection over and over during these years of lockdowns, travel restrictions and uncannily empty streets in order to have some kind of astral projection out of London. They are intimate and expansive, reminiscent to a degree of Herman Melville’s short sketches ‘The Encantadas or the Enchanted Islands’, which are rarely mentioned now but also worth a visit.

First published by Mare Verlag, 2009

‘It is Getting So Dark’ from The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon

The Pillow Book is a fine example of literature as a form of time travel and clairvoyance. There is over one thousand years between its writing and now, and yet the way that it is written is as intimate and immediate as a whisper. It was created by a lady of the court and was never intended to be published. It contains elegiac passages on fireflies, cherry blossoms, blue horses and the passage of boats along rivers. What fascinates are the personal touches that render Sei Shōnagon so lifelike and her world so three dimensional – there are lists of things that depress her, things that make her heart beat faster or arouse thoughts of the past. She writes of dogs and cats in the palace, the clothes people wear, people who are a laughing stock, and others who have amazing memories. She speaks of shame, envy and awkwardness, storms and moonlit nights. She writes “I am the sort of person who approves of what others abhor and detests the things they like.” She writes in this particular fragment that she regrets the book was ever found and that “It is getting so dark that I can scarcely go on writing; and my brush is all worn out” as if she were finishing just now and not a millennia ago.

First published in the year 1002

‘A Study In Scarlet’ by Arthur Conan-Doyle

It is very rare that you encounter a story that is both anchor and lighthouse but I find both in Holmes. I adore the Sherlock Holmes stories even though I am from a different world. As long as the enigmatic and the idiosyncratic exist, Holmes will be alive and relevant. It is a radical and very uncontemporary position to be uncertain but thank god writers venture into these places. Conan Doyle has a lot to teach us.

First published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, 1887

‘Worsted’ by Garielle Lutz

A friend and I once joked about the eponymous adjectives that would describe our work once we had become famous writers. As the inheritor of a terminal vowel, I would find my options somewhat limited, but hers were wide open. Would she take the -ic suffix, as in Miltonic, the -ian as in Woolfian, or reliable old -esque? Years on from such nonsense, I am here to tell you that Garielle Lutz deserves not just an adjective but an adverb too. Her stories can pick up even the most exhausted discard of language—an adverb, say—and somehow, miraculously, Lutzily, startle me with it. Worsted is the latest collection in a body of work that includes the excellent (and excellently titled) Stories in the Worst Way and Partial List of People to Bleach. The title story might be read as a series of abortive attempts to explain a life. As with all Lutz’s writing, it hits me at the level of word-choice, the level of sound and rhythm, the level of what Lutz herself calls ‘intra-sentence intimacy’. Take the line: ‘The closest city had a sorrily statued traffic circle just barely in the glare. At a lunch counter we each ate a frankfurter served in a sheet of folded bread instead of a roll.’ It’s so rich with alliteration, rhyme and subtle half-rhyme (‘lunch counter’ and ‘frankfurter’, for crying out loud! The quiet little ‘shh’ at the end of ‘each’ being shunted forward to create ‘sheet’!) that it demands to be reread straight away, chewed over, considered. I think that push towards rereading is why Lutz’s language doesn’t come across, to me, as mere literary conjuring. The sentences contain their own drama, but they always remain in the service of the stories’ key qualities: deep humour and deep sadness.

First published in the South Carolina Review and available to read there online. Collected in Worsted, Short Flight/Long Drive Books, 2021

‘Where You Live, When You Need Me?’ by Christine Schutt

In the above-linked essay, Garielle Lutz praises Christine Schutt for her sentence-level antics, and perhaps that’s what drew me to her also. Writers often talk about another writer having given them permission to do this or that in their own work, and at the risk of repeating that lazy phrase, yes, after reading this story I thought: Oh, okay, I’m allowed to do this sort of thing. I’m allowed to end stories in this way that’s part precipice, part digression, part musical coda.

Collected in Pure Hollywood, And Other Stories, 2018

‘The Postmaster’ by Rabindranath Tagore, translated from Bengali by Utsa Bose

As an emigrant and an immigrant (not necessarily in that order), I find that stories about people leaving a place tend to do odd things to me. This one also makes me feel closer to my father’s culture, though we’re not Bengali. The plot is simple: a self-obsessed postmaster decides to teach his young servant how to read. But he soon loses interest, both in the servant and the village he’s been posted to. Partly, the story asks us to question our motivations for what we like to imagine are acts of disinterested kindness. It might also be read as a subtle critique of a colonialism that professed magnanimity while committing violence, or of the echoing voluntourism that continues to this day in India and many other countries. But the exquisitely sad ending of ‘The Postmaster’ takes the story beyond such concerns and into something more fundamental. You might compare it to Joycean epiphany (and incidentally, it came a couple of decades before Dubliners was published), but whereas I feel Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ focuses more on Gabriel Conroy as an individual and an ego, Tagore’s story is more general, a portrait of the nexus between two people, or all people.

First published in 1891. Collected in Stories From Tagore, Macmillan, 1918, and available to read online at Asymptote. You can also hear it read on the BBC iPlayer here

‘Three Miles Up’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard

A preoccupation I consistently notice in my own fiction is the male friendship, and specifically how sexuality influences such relationships. This story is a masterclass on the subject, and it’s worthy of René Girard’s theory of triangular desire (essentially the urge to desire what someone else desires). Two men, friends, take an argumentative trip on a canal boat. After a third person unexpectedly joins them, unsettling things begin happening, both within the men’s friendship and along their journey’s route. The story builds quietly, as many of the best ones do, into the kind of ending that may well have you gaping astern and asking, How on Earth did we get here?

First published in We are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories (a collaboration with Robert Aickman), Jonathan Cape, 1951. Collected in Mr. Wrong, Jonathan Cape, 1975 – more latterly Picador, 2015 – and in Three Miles Up and Other Strange Stories, Tartarus Press, 2003

‘Break It Down’ by Lydia Davis

Some years ago, somebody broke my heart. Perhaps this has happened to you. Perhaps you can still bring to mind the wasted, hollow feeling and the paralysing urge both to run and to burrow. Heartbreak is hard because it is acutely paradoxical; your greatest joy is causing you inexpressible pain, and you cannot even bring yourself to wish the pain away. At such times we cleverly turn to art, which, like god, we invented to help us cope with paradox. ‘Break It Down’ is a break-up story. In my case, it is also a story I discovered and enjoyed together with the person who ended up breaking my heart. It is dear to both of us, which made it all the more comforting/excruciating to reread in those hollow and wasted days. Much could be inserted here about Davis’s technical genius, about the effect of shifting from third into first and then second person, or the many exquisite images, or the particular line that may be the only time a short story has ever single-handedly brought tears to my eyes. But there’s no time to go into that, because I have to tell you what happened next. What happened next was that some time went by, and I met my girlfriend, Madeleine. And in the weeks after we met, I discovered during one of our long conversations that ‘Break It Down’ was extremely dear to her, too. So the story became part of the stories we told each other as we gradually unlayered ourselves in that way you do when you get to know someone special. I guess what I’m saying is that if one can be hoisted on one’s own petard, the opposite must also be true.

First published in the Paris Review 88, Summer 1983, and available to subscribers to read there. Collected in Break It Down, FSG, 1986. You can also hear James Salter read the story on the Guardian podcast, here

‘When the Mice Failed to Arrive’ by Gerald Murnane

I once heard Ben Lerner say that an interesting thing about parenthood was a sort of mise en abyme aspect to observing your child. You were observing them, but you were also observing your own parents looking down at you at that age, and observing yourself at that age looking up at your parents, this time with an adult’s consciousness. Many of the best short stories allow us similarly multiple glimpses: because stories are often wilier than longer prose when it comes to evading the drudgery of chronology, they can put us in several places at once. Here, a father watches a storm break as he waits for his asthmatic son to arrive home from school. But the loving father is also a young boy himself, years earlier, terrified both of lightning and his mother’s death. He is also the obsessive young teacher, concealing things from his pupils, and the teenage boy discovering his capacity for cruelty. These leaps through life, together with echoing phrases and images, accumulate into an at times dark exploration of sexuality and an era-spanning sense of melancholy.

Collected in Collected Short Fiction, And Other Stories, 2020, and available to read online at And Other Stories