‘Rune Mountain’ by Ludwig Tieck, translated by Peter Wortsman

For Anglophone readers, Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) is surely among the least familiar German Romantic authors. Yet his story ‘Rune Mountain’ – somewhere between short story, fairy tale, supernatural horror, and allegory – is one of the most beguiling works of early Romantic fiction.

Tieck had been a key figure in the Romantic circle that emerged in the late 1790s in the university town of Jena, near Weimar. The Jena Romantics included some of the most famous figures of early nineteenth-century German philosophy and literature, such as the brothers August Wilhelm and Karl Friedrich Schlegel, F. W. J. Schelling, and Friedrich von Hardenberg (better known by his pen name Novalis). Tieck (along with his daughter Dorothea, the diplomat-cum-translator Wolf Graf Baudissin, and A. W. Schlegel) would later produce a German edition of Shakespeare that remains both popular and well-regarded as a literary classic in its own right. In 1802, just as Romanticism was becoming a significant force in German letters, he wrote ‘Rune Mountain,’ which appeared in print two years later.

We tend to associate Romanticism with autumnal storms and bleak winter nights. It is surprising, then, that ‘Rune Mountain’ begins in the bright heat of summer. The narrative opens somewhere in the summer months with a young hunter named Christian filled with melancholy and resting in an isolated valley. He contemplates the world around him and his estrangement from his home village. And yet when Christian is approached by a stranger, his first impulse is to flee. Instead, however, they end up walking together through the night and he tells the stranger of his early life, his frustrations with the mundane world of his childhood, and his departure for a new, more exciting life in the woods.

As they reach the stranger’s home, Christian is directed towards the enigmatic mountain of the title, a source of both dread and fascination. Christian sets out alone. The rest of the story is difficult to describe without giving too much away, but it is a delight of strange and unsettling fiction. Inexplicable apparitions, mysterious woods, ominous arrivals, and incurable obsessions abound. That the most important action takes place in summer – albeit several different summers – only adds to the story’s dreamlike terror.

Doubt and anxiety drive a story that is psychologically rich and deeply disconcerting. Exquisite descriptions of uncertainty and longing take on a peculiar salience in 2021. It is also remarkably moving. ‘Rune Mountain’ is, in my view, one of the finest examples of European short fiction. Perfectly suited for those long, melancholy summer days when the sun seems just a little too bright, and the trees just a little too alluring.

Picked by Morgan Golf-French. Morgan is a lecturer in eighteenth-century European history at the University of Oxford. He enjoys creepy stories and occasionally tweets from @zeno_thankyou.

First published in German as ‘Der Runenberg’, 1804. First published in English translated by Thomas Carlyle, in German Romance,1827. Also translated by Thomas R. Browning in German Literary Fairytales, 1997. Wortsman’s translation is in Tales of the German Imagination, Penguin Classics, 2012)

‘A Bash in the Tunnel’ by Flann O’Brien

John Ryan (1925-1992) was a leading figure in mid-century literary Dublin as an artist, broadcaster, publisher, critic, editor, writer and – not least – publican. He was organiser of the first Bloomsday celebration, in 1954.

Two books by Ryan, both strongly recommended, are Remembering How We Stood (1975) and A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce and the Irish (1970). The former is a brilliant gossipy memoir of Bohemian Dublin in the 1950s, a time when Ryan seemed to know everyone, and everyone else as well.

A Bash in the Tunnel, edited by Ryan, is an anthology of Irish writers which includes eight pieces that had originally appeared in The Envoy, the literary magazine Ryan edited, to mark the tenth anniversary of Joyce’s death. Illustrious contributors included Samuel Beckett, Stanislaus Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, Edna O’Brien, Aidan Higgins, Benedict Kiely and Brian O’Nolan (aka Brian Ó Nualláin aka Myles na gCopaleen and aka, most famously, Flann O’Brien), whose brilliant shaggy dog story gives the collection its title.

It’s about a Dublin man of O’Brien’s acquaintance who comes by a key to one of the Irish State Railway’s Pullman cars, and its well-stocked bar, and who occasionally takes advantage of the arrangement when it’s shunted onto a suburban siding at the weekend. If I choose this as a summer story it’s because I read it first in Dublin one August years ago and the light and heat of the day have stayed with me.

You can pick up a copy of A Bash in the Tunnel for less than the price of post and packing.

Chosen by David Collard. David is a writer and researcher based in London. His latest book is About a Girl (CB editions) and he is currently working on a group biography of writers associated with Ian Hamilton’s New Review in the 1970s. Since March 2020 he has been running Carthorse Orchestra, a weekly online cultural gathering. You can read David’s previous selections for A Personal Anthology here.

First published in The Envoy, 1951. Collected in A Bash in the Tunnel, Clifton Books, 1970

‘Story of a Panic’ by EM Forster

What is summer but a landscape? Turquoise pool accompanied by white lifeguard stand; busted concrete lot littered with spent Slurpees; rows of Girl Scout tents in maritime hammock; and add to them the sunny strangeness of E.M. Forster’s Italy, where May hovers on spring’s fading cusp. ‘The Story of a Panic’ captures a dreamlike fragment that for modern readers may call to mind Picnic at Hanging Rock, In the Tall Grass, or other weird tales composed of a handful of moments in a striking landscape.

A party of picnicking English tourists find themselves overtaken by abject horror, without obvious source and derived from a deceptively picturesque locale. One of their number, a boy called Eustace whom the narrator loathes for his seeming indolence and unmasculine tendencies, is left behind in the party’s scramble to flee.

Once retrieved, he relates a troubling story: that he happened upon the hoofprints of a goat and proceeded to roll around on them like a dog, and knew no more after that. One of the adults concludes that the Devil had been abroad that afternoon.

“Pan!” cried Mr. Sandbach, his mellow voice filling the valley as if it had been a great green church, “Pan is dead. That is why the woods do not shelter him.” And he began to tell the striking story of the mariners who were sailing near the coast at the time of the birth of Christ, and three times heard a loud voice saying: “The great God Pan is dead.”
“Yes. The great God Pan is dead,” said Leyland. And he abandoned himself to that mock misery in which artistic people are so fond of indulging. His cigar went out, and he had to ask me for a match.
“How very interesting,” said Rose. “I do wish I knew some ancient history.”
“It is not worth your notice,” said Mr. Sandbach. “Eh, Eustace?”

The archetypal summer is, for adults, often a collection of private childhood rituals. In contrast to the narrator’s confusion and disgust, the reader may find Eustace’s blossoming into “a real boy” charming, hopeful, the promise of freedom from society’s strictures and a return to primal ways of believing and being. After his experience in the Ravello chestnut grove, Eustace cannot be contained. He falls in with unsuitable local companions, recites spontaneous poetry to the stars and trees, and claims that if kept indoors, he’ll die.

The narrator’s cagey description of the adult Eustace’s “career” intimates an artist or performer, a medium of some type in the metaphoric and perhaps literal senses. The development of Eustace’s friendship with an older Italian fisher-boy is difficult to read outside the context of Forster’s own sexuality, not to mention the enduring cultural relationship of sex/uality to pagan religion and outsider art.

As seen in recent light-drenched horror films like Midsommar, the summer sun strips away artifice and reveals hidden truth. It’s unusual to encounter Forster as a horror writer in English classes, but ‘The Story of a Panic’ locates him among classic fantasists and cements his landscape obsession as a powerful tool of the queer speculative.

Picked by Diana Hurlburt. Diana is a librarian, writer, and Floridian in upstate New York. Her short work has most recently appeared in Sword & Kettle Press’s mini-chapbook series; Amethyst Review; and the Rhonda Parrish-edited anthologies Clockwork, Curses & Coal and Arcana. She’s often on Twitter @menshevixen talking horses, heavy metal, and cold brew.

First published in The Celestial Omnibus, Sedgwick & Jackson, 1911. Collected in The Collected Tales of E.M. Forster, 1947; it may be read online here

‘Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness’ by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Edith Grossman

Forget ‘magical realism’, a term he neither invented nor embraced, Gabby does gothic best (or if you insist, ‘magical realism noir’). Granted, the evidence here is a single story, but it’s a killer, literally. If you’ve read any Márquez, you recognize that the title is highly ironic. Any happiness in the story, as the narrator says “became hellish for us,” two brothers, nine and seven, and eventually worse for the titular and Teutonic nanny hired to instill virtues of old fashioned European order and civilization in their heretofore paradisiacal summer of unfettered freedom on a tiny island off the coast of Sicily while their parents are off on a five-week tour of the Aegean Sea.

Miss Forbes arrives looking like a cross-dressing Wehrmacht veteran, and immediately imposes a strict regimen of timed activities consisting primarily of lessons in etiquette, piety, and obedience. Obedience above all, against which the boys, resentful but totally cowed at first, eventually plan to rebel. So there’s your conflict: a child’s need for autonomy and play vs. autocratic adult authority. A common theme, but Marquez elevates the stakes when the boys, infuriated by their discovery that Miss Forbes holds herself to a far lower standard of decorum and rectitude at night, plan to kill her by spiking her brandy with poison.

The plan goes awry until one afternoon when the boys return home from a swim to discover a crowd of police, ambulance medics and curious neighbors. Inside, Miss Forbes lay on the floor of her room, her naked body riddled with 27 fatal knife wounds, inflicted with “the fury of a love that found no peace, and that Miss Forbes had received with the same passion … the inexorable price of her summer of happiness.”

Who did it? The local fisherman whose beauty Miss Forbes found beyond imagining? No clues or possible suspects mentioned. It’s not that kind of story. A moral, at least? Not that I can tell. The most we can say is that any notion of a summer sentimental education for the boys has been permanently corrupted by witnessing this bloody image of adult loneliness and love. Not exactly beach-reading material, unless your taste runs to the mystifying and disturbing. Listening to that 60s pop ode to summer love, ‘See You in September’ by The Happenings, might cheer you up. I doubt it.

Picked by Tom McGohey. Tom taught Composition and directed The Writing Center at Wake Forest University for 20 years. He has published essays in Fourth Genre, Sport Literate, and Thread. Two of his essays have been cited as “Notable Essays” in Best American Essays.

First published in Playboy, January 1986, under title of ‘The Happy Summer of Miss Forbes’. Collected in Strange Pilgrims, Knopf, 1993

‘Man From the South’ by Roald Dahl

I hesitated in picking ‘Man from the South’ which I have enjoyed reading to classes over the years. First published in the American magazine, Collier’s in 1948, the story displays certain early twentieth century values which might stick in the throat of the modern reader. The man of the title is exoticized – almost animalised – with his “very small uneven teeth” and the fact that the only black character in the story is the “colored maid” portrays a time in literature quite different from our own. Roald Dahl himself was known to hold controversial opinions and it is perhaps for this last fact that I went ahead with my choice. Is it possible to read – and still enjoy – the work of those with whom we strongly disagree?

‘Man from the South’ is a snapshot of a hot Summer afternoon in Jamaica where a deal between strangers gains momentum, building to a single horrifying moment. Dahl turns the trope of ‘a stranger comes to town’ on its head by setting the scene in a place where none of the characters are ‘home.’ And the ‘stranger’ is perhaps all the more peculiar, to balance out the temporariness of place.

What I love about this author’s writing is his ability to entertain. There’s something so satisfying in the set-up of the scene. Is it the straightforward language? The almost invisible, Gatsby-esque narrator who – like the reader – sees everything yet never interferes? It can’t be the other characters who, I think, appear somewhat cartoonish and flat.

My money’s on the plot mechanics which – like the best thrillers – capture and twist, leading the reader, inevitably, towards a visceral ending. ‘Man from the South’ reminds me of listening to a great storyteller spin a yarn with a surprising punchline – it achieves catharsis. A physicality in our response.

Picked by Josephine Rose. Josephine is a teacher and writer whose published work includes poetry and travel journalism. You can read more at www.muscattales.com and find her online @jrosephine

First published in Collier’s Magazine, 1948. Collected in Someone Like You, Knopf, 1953, and Complete Stories Vol 1, Penguin, 2013

‘Traitors’ by Doris Lessing

Most of Doris Lessing’s writings are autobiographical in nature. Her short stories are infused with the heat, sun and arid beauty of rural Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where she and her brother grew up. As a young child Lessing had dreamed of having a sister instead of a brother.

‘Traitors’ is the story of two intrepid young girls who go exploring in their neighbourhood. Written in the first person, Lessing’s writing style is lyrical, almost poetic, as she describes the animals they encounter — cattle, wild guinea fowl, pigeons and lonely looking dogs. Lessing sets the scene when the girls first set out on their adventure:

One morning, at sunrise, when the trees were pink and gold and the grass-stems were running bright with drops of dew, we walked, heads down, eyes half-closed against the sun, past thorn and gulley and thick clumps of cactus where wild animals might lurk.

We are never told the names of the two girls. They breakfast on wild plums and pawpaw gained by throwing stones at the tree. One day, believing themselves lost, they suddenly find themselves near the boundary with the neighbouring farm. They have not met the Thompson family and are chased away by the black servant. A few days later the girls hear that Mr. and Mrs. Thompson are coming to visit their parents and feel guilty for having strayed near their farm when their parents would probably have told them not to, and to be wary of people they didn’t know.

Lessing portrays Mrs. Thompson as “a large, blonde, brilliantly-coloured lady with a voice like that of a go-away bird.” The girls’ father clearly takes a dislike to her. The Thompsons had heard that the house they now live in had been rebuilt after a fire, caused by a fallen oil lamp, had burned it down. Mrs. Thompson wants to know if this is true or merely a local legend. The girls’ father takes the Thompsons to the spot where it happened. He shows them the ashes and scarred grass which is still visible. The girls confess that they used to come here to play. Later, sitting on the veranda in the gloaming of the summer evening their mother tells the girls never to go there again.

My two little girls out there in the bush by themselves is unthinkable. Danger is everywhere,” she says.

Picked by Carola Huttmann. Passionate about art, literature and writing, Carola draws much of her creative inspiration from the richness of landscape, stories, history and traditions of the Orkney Islands which have been her home since 1995. Find her at Twitter: @CarolaHuttmann / https://carolahuttmann.blogspot.com

First published in African Stories, Michael Joseph, 1964, later Flamingo Modern Classics, 2003

‘Signs and Symbols’ by Vladimir Nabokov

I’m fascinated by the notion of the “story behind the story” in fiction – the great and terrible truth being revealed piece by piece as the surface narrative unfolds. ‘Signs and Symbols’ feels like a near-perfect example of this. The surface narrative concerns an aged couple who attempt to visit their mentally ill son, but cannot, because he has tried to kill himself (again). They are Jews who have lived through the first half of the Twentieth Century; and it is this terrible story that we as readers are directed through, again and again – the true signified of all the signs. My favourite interpretation is that the son is not truly mad. In the context of the persecution to which the family has been exposed, the “referential mania” that plagues him is not a pathology but in fact a logical reaction to the world in which they live. In the context of genocide, it is reasonable to corelate the “invisible giants” persecuting the son and the same monstrous forces that have thrown the family across Europe and around the world.

First published – as ‘Symbols and Signs’ – in The New Yorker, May 15, 1948, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, Doubleday, 1958 and Collected Short Stories, Knopf, 1995. Also in the Penguin 70 Cloud Castle Lake, 2005

‘Girl with Curious Hair’ by David Foster Wallace

Our narrator, Sick Puppy – a sociopathic Young Republican with a penchant for sadistic burning –attends a jazz concert with a group of nihilistic punks with names like Grope, Tit and Gimlet. Terrible events ensue. Thanks to Foster Wallace’s virtuoso distortion of the English language, the narration resembles a writing exercise by an unhinged child in an ESL class. It is hilarious. It is also deeply unsettling: you get the feeling that anything (the most awful things) could happen; and beneath the layers of chaos and hilarity, there is a kind of stark moral terror. Sick Puppy is somebody with only shards of a personality – and beneath those shards, a roaring, violent nothingness. Good stuff.

Collected in Girl with Curious Hair, W.W. Norton & Co, 1989

‘The Walk’ by Robert Walser, translated by Christopher Middleton et al

I have to report that one fine morning, I do not know any more for sure what time it was, as the desire to take a walk came over me, I put my hat on my head, left my writing room, or room of phantoms, and ran down the stairs to hurry out into the street.

So begins Walser’s long short story ‘The Walk’. There is so much to love about this piece of autofiction: Walser narrates a day’s worth of physical and psychic travel through the city and its environs. We encounter his ambitions, his pleasures, his frustrations; the things that draw him and repel him. It is a discursive, playful, sometimes Rabelaisian ramble. It seems to be written for the joy of consciousness itself. There is also something delicious about the way Walser addresses his readers, vacillating between formality and intimacy, sometimes as spectators, sometimes participants in a private discourse. Nothing is fixed. The story starts where he starts it and ends where he decides it must end. Reading it is like entering a fugue – wonderful.

First published in German as ‘Das Spaziergang’, Huber, 1917. First published in English in The Walk and Other Stories, Calder, 1955. Now available in various editions, including Selected Stories, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982. Also available from Serpent’s Tail, 1992 and 2013

‘Lucky’ by Julianne Pachico

Stephanie Lansky is a privileged child in a dangerous country. Her parents, whom she has overheard dismissing rumours of guerrillas and civil war, leave to visit rich, powerful friends in the countryside. They never return. The domestic staff disappear. The telephones stop working. The power stops. By the time a man dressed in rags appears at the door and invites Stephanie to leave with him, we understand that everything is about to be taken away from her. ‘Lucky’ is part of Pachico’s interlinked short story collection The Lucky Ones, set in Colombia between 2003 and 2013. Context is slowly drip-fed into these stories – including ‘Lucky’ – and you come to understand the Colombian conflict through diverse, distorted perspectives. The stories don’t pretend to present a cohesive picture of Colombia’s civil conflict, but the implicit arguments concerning power and privilege that underly it are consistent and powerful. Reading ‘Lucky’, the complexity of my feelings about Stephanie – she is spoiled, sympathetic, infuriatingly helpless, half-innocent – speaks to the depth of Pachico’s understanding of the world she is describing.

First published in The Lucky Ones, Faber & Faber, 2017, and available to read on the Faber website here

‘My Best Soldier’ by Ha Jin

This story, like all the others in the collection Ocean of Words, is set on a Chinese army base by the Russian border during the Cultural Revolution. In ‘My Best Soldier’, an army officer must deal with a soldier whose libidinous impulses run contrary to official doctrine. The story first attracted me as a window into a previously unimaginable world. The clarity of the vision – the ability to tell a story so other and yet so familiar – belies the skill of its creation: what seems simple is in fact understated, wry, and tightly controlled. And despite the shocking events that occur, every character can be understood sympathetically as people subject to forces beyond their ken or control.

First published in English in AGNI 33, 1991. Collected in Ocean of Words, Zoland, 1996

‘The Boulder’ by Henrietta Rose-Innes

Henrietta Rose-Innes’s novels often centre on the irruption into sanitary, constructed, (sub)urban human space of chaotic, untamed, unsanitary nature. ‘The Boulder’ operates in the same territory. The protagonist is a young man in the tentative openings of a relationship that seems doomed by gulfs of class and privilege. Sleeping in his new girlfriend’s family home, a luxurious but soulless beach house, he awakes one morning to discover a gigantic boulder has crashed into the garden. It appears as if plucked out of a dream. It could be seen to represent his hopes and his fears, both made manifest at once; but more than anything, it simply represents itself: colossal, indifferent, enduring nature.

Collected in Animalia Paradoxa, Boiler House Press, 2019

‘The Repairer of Reputations’ by Robert W Chambers

This is part of a collection of linked short stories that spawned the ‘King in Yellow’ lore that has been an inspiration for fantasy and horror writers for more than a hundred years. There is something very innovative about the collection’s form, and this particular story is weirdly prescient. It is speculative science fiction, set in a fascist vision of America in the 1920s (as imagined in 1895!). It’s hard to know where the story’s politics lie – the narrator describes approvingly the (genocidal) steps taken to consolidate the new American Empire, yet he is explicitly represented as a miniature Napoleon and lunatic. At the centre of the new, neoclassical New York, built over what once were multicultural neighbourhoods, stands the temple-like Lethal Chamber, into which the lowest members of society are encouraged to enter and end their miserable lives. The narrator schemes to marshal an army of people enlisted by means of blackmail (ie, corrupted by their secrets) to restore his place on the American imperial throne. His scheme is directed by the mysterious King in Yellow, an evil demigod who manifests as a consequence of the consumption of evil literature. This concept has stuck with me.

First published in The King in Yellow, F Tennyson Neely, 1895. Available to read online in various places, including Project Gutenberg

‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ by Kazuo Ishiguro

The plot of ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ is like the engine driving a sitcom – a foolish man is caught between a slightly unpleasant husband and wife whose marriage is falling apart. The only way he can help them is if he demonstrates that his life – his choices, his qualities – are worse than theirs; this is ultimately achieved through slapstick. None of the characters come out of this particularly well. The protagonist Ray is the comic counterpart to the profoundly flawed protagonists of the tragic Never Let Me Go and Remains of the Day: a bore at heart, Ray is inadequate in the face of the world, yet his trivial pleasures are real. And as a reader, you genuinely feel his extremely minor victories, and gain a sense of happiness as something fleeting, personal, farcical, and likely contemptable to the wider world.

Collected in Nocturnes, Faber & Faber, 2009