‘Meridian’ by Matthew Turner

Full disclosure: Dodo Ink have published the ebook edition of Other Rooms. But I’m not here to attempt to sell books (though I won’t be offended if you do buy it…) Hesterglock were the first to publish Turner’s triptych of stories and I am envious of them because he is a special talent. Ballard’s influence is evident, though M John Harrison has praised them as “perhaps ‘Ballardian’, perhaps something altogether more human, softened, quotidian.” ‘Meridian’ begins with a funeral, the grief-stunned narrator attempting to right himself by walking all day in a straight line along 0 degrees longitude – “not to delineate a route or line in the landscape, but to register an un-movement; one that wouldn’t highlight the route’s presence in the world of experience, rather carve out its absence.” Like many of Turner’s stories, it explores how environments can be faint shadows of thoughts and relationships before people are fully conscious of their subliminal worlds.

First published in Other Rooms, Hesterglock, 2018. You can read an extract at Minor Literatures

‘Understanding the Ur-Bororo’ by Will Self

This is Self’s funniest story: an aspiring anthologist called Janner, based at university in Reigate, wins a bursary to study the Ur-Bororo, a mysterious tribe living in the Paquatyl region of the Amazon. When Janner returns from his mission, he has suddenly become adept at making small-talk, for the Ur-Bororo have rubbed off on him. It transpires the tribe are “relentlessly banal”, their language possessing a number of different inflections which describe various states of boredom – boring hunting, boring gathering, boring fishing, boring sex. In a deliciously satirical ending, Janner marries a member of the tribe and they settle in England, where she fits in perfectly with British society.

First published in The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Bloomsbury, 1991

‘On Day 21’ by Ruby Cowling

This Paradise is one of my favourite short story collections of recent years. When I was a judge for the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize, I wanted to champion her book for the long/shortlist – but unfortunately Boiler House Press were disqualified from entering, since UEA were the prize’s sponsor. Like many of Cowling’s stories, it wrongfoots and disorientates the reader. It starts out as a satire on our dependence on gadgets, focusing on a busy mother who has succumbed to technology and is able to switch her children on/off when they become too demanding. On a trip to a supermarket, she finds the switch no longer seems to work, perhaps due to overuse. In her subsequent panic, she wonders if it ever existed at all, so that we’re left uncertain whether we’re reading a sci-fi satire or the account of a mental breakdown.

First published in Wasafari, 2017 and available to read here; collected in This Paradise, Boiler House Press, 2019

‘The Nonce Prize’ by Will Self

Danny, a drug dealer with a gentle disposition, is framed for a paedophilic murder. Incarcerated in Wandsworth prison, Danny discovers literature – ‘reading burst through his mental partitions, partitions that the crack had effectively shored up, imprisoning his sentience, his rational capacity, behind psychotically patterned drapes’. When a literary competition for prisoners called The Nonce Prize is announced, he seeks redemption in writing. There are plenty of Self’s characteristic literary fireworks on display here; as well as being a fine piece of satire, this is also an unexpectedly touching story. While Self’s early work demonstrates a lack of interest in character in his preference for ideas and an energetic style, this story suggests a maturing and new subtlety in his writing, for Danny is unusually well-rounded and sympathetic.

Included in Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, Bloomsbury 1998

‘The Distance of the Moon’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

It’s hard to pick a favourite from Cosmicomics. In this one, the narrator Qfwfq explores the scientific fact that the moon was once close to the earth. It bobbed just above the sea so that men rowing beneath it feared they might bang their heads if they stood up, and regularly visited it to collect the creamy, curdy milk that collected on its surface, which needed to be filtered due to the pollution of “fingernails and cartilage, bolts, sea horses, nuts and peduncles, shards of crockery, fishhooks, at times even a comb.” A mad, vivacious tale that fills me with joy every time I read it.

First published in Italian in 1965. First published in English by Jonathan Cape, 1968. Now available from Penguin Classics, 2010

‘The Professor and The Siren’ by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, translated by Stephen Twilley

The story is set in Turin in 1938, narrated by a young journalist called Paolo Corbera. One evening he strikes up a friendship in a café with an elderly man called Rosario La Ciura, an eminent professor in the field of Hellenic Studies. The pair return to the café on a nightly basis to share stories of the past and debate the present day. La Ciura reminisces on a romance he had in his youth which still haunts him, a tryst with a mermaid named Lighea, daughter of Calliope. Her voice was irresistible to him, “a bit guttural, husky, resounding with countless harmonics; behind the words could be discerned the sluggish undertow of summer seas, the whisper of receding beach foam, the wind passing over lunar tides” – and so she became his first and only love. A meditation on loss, love and time, this is a bittersweet story which possesses the dreamlike, enigmatic feeling of a Fellini film.

First published in Italian by Feltrinelli 1961; first published in English in Two Stories and a Memory, Collins and Harvill, 1962, translated by Archibald Colquhoun. The Stephen Twilley translation is in The Professor and the Siren, The New York Review of Books Classics 2014

Introduction

Some short stories continue to linger in the mind over many years. Others are soon forgotten. What is it that determines what we remember? Not inherent literary merit, I am sure of that. So what then? This was the question I found myself asking as I compiled this list. The conclusion that I came to is that the stories which leave a mark do so because they resonate with events in the reader’s own life.

As a result, the list I have compiled here operates as an informal autobiography. These stories are ones which I might not now admire, but they operate like old photographs or half-forgotten songs, bringing back times, places, emotional states. This is part of the joy of reading. Stories turn up at times when we need them and help us to navigate through our own experiences.

As these stories helped and comforted me, I hope they could perhaps do the same for others. In accordance with my thoughts on the autobiographical nature of reading, I have laid them out roughly in the order in which I read them.

‘The Lumber Room’ by Saki

I went away to boarding school when I was nine years old. I say that without a hint of self-pity. I loved my school. In particular, I loved Mr John Storr who was a brilliant and inspirational English teacher. He read us Saki’s short stories. While preparing this list, I began to revisit those stories and I can see that in many ways they are simplistic, but I can also see why they captured my attention so entirely. ‘The Lumber Room’ was the first Saki story that Mr Storr read to us. At that time, I already had good cause to know that adults often lie to children, but I also knew that I must never speak of this knowledge. Saki was putting into words what could not be said. I was hooked.

First published in the Morning Post. Collected in Beasts and Super-Beasts, John Lane 1914, and Complete Short Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000. Available variously online, including here

‘The Open Window’ by Saki

I also have very clear memoirs of Saki’s story ‘The Open Window’. Like the ‘The Lumber Room’ it is largely a story about lying. It is also about the subversive and disruptive nature of the child. At the time when I read it, I already had a sense of myself as a person who could wreak havoc if I ever opened my mouth. As a result, I spoke little but ‘The Open Window’ allowed me to savour the power I might have if I chose to speak. I lived the events of the story vicariously. I could have my revenge, the story suggested. But I preferred to allow the adults their silly little games. Like Saki’s children, I was not a pleasant child.

First published in The Westminster Gazette, 1911. Collected in Beasts and Super-Beasts, John Lane, 1914, and Complete Short Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000. Available online here

‘A Shocking Accident’ by Graham Greene

This story was read to me at that same boarding school by our Headmaster, Mr Gilbert Wheat. In both my home world and my school world, I had already noticed that appalling tragedy was often greeted with jokes and laughter. These strange emotional distortions made the world difficult to navigate. But in this story Graham Greene seemed to take these contradictions and celebrate them. How could he move so smoothly from laughter to pain? Forty years later, Greene remains one of my favourite writers and I continue to admire his ability to use shifts in tone to devastating effect.

First published in May We Borrow Your Husband?, The Bodley Head, 1967; Collected in Collected Stories, The Bodley Head, 1973 and now Penguin Classics, 2000

‘Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat’ by Roald Dahl

During my teenage years, the BBC produced adaptations of a series of Roald Dahl’s short stories, entitled Tales of the Unexpected. The themes were rather risqué for the apparently respectable world of my childhood. The stories revealed Dahl’s cynicism about human relationships and often suggested the possibility that life takes revenge on those who are immoral. I loved the nasty edge in those stories and the lack of comfortable resolution. Later I read them and this one, in particular, stuck in my mind.

First published in the 1959 issue of Nugget. Then in Kiss, Kiss, Alfred A. Knopf, 1960

‘The Dead’ by James Joyce

I remember it so well. I was a student in Oxford – lonely, bored, disappointed. I had thought of Oxford as the Promised Land but Waugh’s “low door in the wall” leading to that “enchanted garden … not overlooked by any window” had failed to reveal itself to me. One evening I wandered into the cinema on Walton Street. They were showing a film called ‘The Dead.’ I had no idea about the film, I just wanted somewhere warm to sit for an hour, and a few moments of oblivion. But immediately the film started, I was captured. By the end of it I was crying and I didn’t stop crying for hours. I’m not the kind of person who cries in films. Immediately, I found a copy of Dubliners and read the story. I still think it is perhaps the greatest short story ever written.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914. Published in the Melville House Press Art of the Novella series. Available online including here

‘Miss Brill’ by Katherine Mansfield

Overall, I am not a huge fan of Katherine Mansfield. I recognise the quality of her work but it doesn’t quite speak to me. This is doubtless my failing rather than hers. But this is a story I do remember. The lonely woman in the park. Her investment in the lives of others. Her belief that she is important, appreciated, valued. Then the nasty realisation that she is not. It is a bleak little story and I found it shocking. But it spoke to me when I was young as I myself felt endlessly peripheral, awkward, an outsider. A brilliant and painful read.

First published in the Athenaeum on 26 November 1920, and later reprinted in The Garden Party and Other Stories, Constable, 1922, which is currently available as a Penguin Modern Classic; also collected in the Selected Stories, Oxford World Classics, 2007. Available to read online here)

‘The Beast in the Jungle’ by Henry James

I was told of this short story (which I think is actually a novella) by Amanda Holmes Duffy, a writer and friend who now lives in Washington and works for the Politics and Prose Bookshop there. We became friends twenty years ago when we both lived in Brussels. She always recommends wonderful books. When she told me about this story, I was fascinated, and my interest only increased once I had read it. In this story, I think James manages to dramatize a problem which afflicts us all. Always there is that great, threatening, lurking fear. But what if our fear is only the fear of fear itself?

First published in the collection The Better Sort, Methuen & Co., 1903. Currently available in the Everyman Collected Stories Vol 2, 2000. Published as a Penguin Mini Modern Classic in 2011