Author: Jonathan Gibbs

‘El Aleph’ / ‘The Aleph’, by Jorge Luis Borges

My Spanish has never been up to reading this in the original, although I continue to cherish the edition of the collection that I bought in Mexico City in the late ‘90s. The humour and profundity in this story – in which the protagonist encounters, in a friend’s cellar, a point in space containing all other points; a point from which he can see everything in the universe, including you, the reader – continues to dazzle. A trip to Buenos Aire five years ago became a Borges pilgrimage, although I regret not visiting Garay Street where this story is set.

First published in the Argentine journal Sur in 1945. First published in English in The Aleph and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1971. Currently available in The Aleph, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000 and Collected Fictions, Viking, 1998

‘Light is Like Water’ by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Edith Grossman

I no longer have my copy of Strange Pilgrims, from which I first read this pure tale of how Toto and Joel navigate a rowing boat, complete with sextant and compass, on light rather than water, having smashed light bulbs in their crowded fifth-floor apartment. I almost always regret giving books away, and have been known to return to second hand book shops the day after to buy back my own copies. This is one certainly I must somehow retrieve. 

First published as ‘La Luz es como el Agua’, in Doce Cuentos Peregrinos, Editorial Oveja Negra, 1992; and in English in Strange Pilgrims, Cape, 1993, available at the Independent)

‘Lavatory’ by Diane Williams

A friend recently put me onto Diane Williams’ work, for which I am so grateful. She is one of those writers who, from the first page, I knew I must read everything. This is the pick, for me, so far of her strange insightful tales, with these lines, in particular (which close the story), standing out as somehow representative of the whole:The host called, ‘Kids! Mike! Dad and Mom!’ He called these copulators to come in to dinner. In fact, this group represented a predictable array of vocations – including hard workers, worriers, travelers, and liars – defecators, or course, urinators and music makers.

From Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, CB Editions, 2016, available at PANK

‘Nancy Brown will be in Town’ by Lydia Davis

I first came across Lydia Davis in a piece on experimental fiction, although I had an uncanny feeling of having encountered her before. She resists the label ‘experimental’ (in ‘From Raw Material to Finished Work: Forms and Influences II’, from her recently published Essays), since it ‘implies that the writer had a plan to test some preconceived writing strategy and see if it would work’. She doesn’t consider her stories to be ‘in any way experimental’, then, since she prefers to start them without much of a plan or process. I take her point, but doubt there is a better term, currently, for work that subverts the form, as hers so often does.

Another essay (Forms and Influences III, on ‘Sources, Revision, Order, and Endings’) includes a fascinating analysis of the genesis (a group email) and evolution of ‘Nancy Brown will be in Town’. Here is the finished product:

Nancy Brown Will Be in Town
Nancy Brown will be in town. She will be in town to sell her things. Nancy Brown is moving far away. She would like to sell her queen mattress.
Do we want her queen mattress? Do we want her ottoman? Do we want her bath items?
It is time to say good-bye to Nancy Brown.
We have enjoyed her friendship. We have enjoyed her tennis lessons.

First published as ‘Susie Brown will be in Town’ in Five Dials; collected in Can’t and Won’t, Hamish Hamilton, 2014

‘When it Breaks’ by Linda Mannheim

I first met Linda through another extraordinary writer – Gerson Nason, with whom I had attended the great John Petherbridge’s City Lit writing group. I have read many of Linda’s stories since, and never a weak one. Linda brings searing precision and empathetic passion, and always takes us somewhere new. This comes from her collection for Influx about Washington Heights, a part of NYC few tourists would visit but which Linda knows intimately.

From Above Sugar Hill, Influx Press, 2014; available online at The Learned Pig

‘Reversible’ by Courttia Newland

There was a time before black British fiction, and that time was not that long ago. I am exaggerating for effect, but not by much. Courttia Newland was one of few shining early lights in that wilderness, with his wonderful novel from ’97, The Scholar. This story is like a scene from Top Boy yet all the more poignant for its temporal reversal.

First published in Sex & Death, Faber & Faber, edited by Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs; collected in Best British Short Stories 2017, Salt Publishing

‘The Aquatic Uncle’ by Italo Calvino

This is my favourite of the Cosmicomic stories, each of which begins with the expression of a scientific hypothesis – true, subsequently disproved or apocryphal – which is then inhabited fictionally, with absurd consequences. This particular story hinges on the fact of our evolution from the oceans, with the recalcitrant uncle of the title refusing to make the transition to dry land.

Originally published in Italian between 1964 and 1965 in the periodicals Il Caffè and Il Giorno; first published in English translation in Cosmicomics, Harcourt Brace, 1968; translated by William Weaver, collected in The Complete Cosmicomics, Penguin Modern Classics, 2010

‘Precision’ by Raymond Queneau

I categorise Exercises in Style as a short story collection, though it defies classification. It is the retelling, ninety-nine times, each in a different style, of a seemingly unremarkable observation the narrator makes of a man seen first on a crowded bus and then, later, in front of Gare St-Lazare. I have long been fascinated by attempts at exhausting place through an ultimately unattainable total description, and this is a key textbook of that project.

First published in French as Exercises de Style in 1947 by Editions Gallimard; widely translated

‘A Small Good Thing’ by Raymond Carver

‘A Small Good Thing’ was the first short story that showed me the transcendent possibilities of the form. I didn’t understand how Carver could create his effects with such precision and concision; I still don’t. The story of a parents’ loss of a child and their consolatory interaction with a baker, ‘A Small Good Thing’ is a devastating tale of forgiveness and kindness that continues to reverberate deep within me.

First published in the USA in Cathedral, Alfred A. Knopf, 1983, and in Britain by Collins Harvill, 1984; collected in Where I’m Calling From – The Selected Stories, Harvill, 1993

‘All Strange Away’ by Samuel Beckett

Late Beckett is the pinnacle, for me. The materials at his disposal diminish with age, through choice or disposition, as told here: 
from

‘Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no, not that again’.

to 

‘Five foot square, six high, no way in, none out, try for him there’. 

What he discloses of the human predicament, ‘talking to himself in the last person’, extends in inverse proportion to the narrative constraints he places upon himself. Extraordinary consolation.

First published in English in 1964; collected in The Complete Short Prose 1929 – 1989, Grove Press, 1995

Introduction

I grew up in the sixties in Pontypridd, South Wales, relieving the crushing boredom of secondary school byspending my pocket money at the local newsagent’s every Friday on volumes of short stories, seduced by the lurid covers of the Pan Books of Horror Stories, Fontana Ghost Stories and the Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts of Dennis Wheatley. Later, much later, I’d sink into the warm Black Water of Alberto Manguel’s collections (which Amazon now calls “a kaleidoscope from the Magi of the imagination”), consuming countless other paperback anthologies along the way.   
 
Through these, my love of the genre was undoubtedly unlocked (or unblocked? for it felt like a liberation) by such visionary writers as Poe, whose ‘Tell-Tale Heart’, with its unforgettable opening POV – (much imitated but never surpassed, even by Robert Bloch’s ‘Enoch’) – and M.R. James, with his rising bed sheets, unwanted wetnesses, and deeds best kept buried. 
 
As time went by, the likes of Angela Carter with her carnivalesque symbolism, Robert Aickman with his “kitchen sink gothic”, J G Ballard with his stark unrealities, and many writers outside the field (Tobias Wolff, Bernard MacLaverty, Richard Ford, James Lee Burke) became as important to me as the old masters I revered (and still do) like Conan Doyle, Machen, and Stevenson. 
 
I hate any kind of top ten list, or top twelve, but here is a selection of newer discoveries and old favourites I’d like to share. Ones that instruct me how that magical frisson of the uncanny and weird can be achieved. Sparingly. Subtly. Intelligently. Memorably. And remind me that the cause I’m obsessed with as a writer to this day – the creation of nightmares – is a noble and ongoing one. 

‘Even The Cops Didn’t Make Jokes’ by Ralph Robert Moore

‘You have a noticeable bulge in your stomach.’
The old woman looked down at her seated body. At the prominent bulge in her abdomen. Milky eyes, filled with joy. ‘I’m pregnant.’
Claire made a note. ‘Really. Well, congratulations. Looking at your file, I see you’re ninety years old. Is that correct?’
Croaking voice. Smile. Yellow teeth. ‘It is.’

Ralph Robert Moore, who regularly has stories in my alma mater, Black Static magazine, as well as a regular non-fiction column in the same publication, is an unsung hero as far as I’m concerned. His writing has the easy, naturalistic, observational charm of Carver, edging the reader ever so gently into a sense of the downright bizarre without ever succumbing to the crass weapons of the more mainstream proponents of horror. He’ll bring you right up to the dotted line, let you take a peek over, then prod you hard in the back, and you plummet. His unforgettable story ‘Men Wearing Make-Up’ is bone-chilling in a way that the creepy clown of Stephen King’s ‘IT’ can elicit only a disinterested shrug by comparison. ‘Even the Cops…’ begins as a tale about a hapless soul, Claire, a social worker, whose life goes from bad to worse. We don’t know where it’s heading, then – wow, a curve ball. I love stories where the inexplicable borders on the religious, or spiritual (or what we think we understand of the religious or spiritual): in a few spare pages Moore does this, without pushing it a word too far. As often with his tales, you are left wondering if you have been privy to internal madness or whether madness has taken grip of external reality itself. 

First published as ‘Learning not to Smile’ in Nightscript 1 2015; collected in Behind You: 18 Stories and Novelettes, Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017