‘The Woman Dies’ by Aoko Matsuda, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton

In this beautiful translation, which captures the rhythm of the source text so artfully, the woeful fates of female characters in fiction and the way our real life experiences are shaped by them are explored with humour and pathos.

The woman dies so the man can be sad about it. The woman dies so the man can suffer. She dies to give him a destiny. Dies so he can fall to the dark side. Dies so he can lament her death. As he stands there, brimming with grief, brimming with life, the woman lies there in silence. The woman dies for him. We watch it happen. We read about it happening. We come to know it well.

First published in English translation in November 2018 on Granta online and available here. It was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award in 2019. From the collection Wairudo furawa no mienai ichinen (The Year of No Wild Flowers), Kawadeshoboshinsha, 2016

‘The Amnesty’ by Jen Calleja

From the beginning, this story made me uncomfortable (in a good way). It seemed to be demanding a great deal of introspection and analysis of gender and power from the reader. After this initial discomfort wore off, I was drawn in by its comic melancholy, brutal bluntness, and searingly absurd images, which still linger in my mind at odd moments.They practically ruined my day because I couldn’t stop thinking about how utterly inadequate they both were to me. I went over to them, hung my bag off the shoulder of the young one and put my wide-brimmed hat on his head, and lay my briefcase on the lap of the old limp thing, popped it open, took out my newspaper and started reading it, silently defying either of them to look at me.

First published in Calleja’s short story collection I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For (Prototype, 2020). Reproduced in The London Magazine, April 2020, and available at The London Magazine

‘Payment to the Universe’ by Annabel Banks

This story is a potent mixture of the mundane with music and the unseen and horrific. The childish internal bargains we make, the twisted ways in which we navigate moral ambiguities are mercilessly explored, and the accusatory second-person “you” is employed to great effect.

Up some stairs, down some stairs. Blue, blue, in your ears, and you’re not allowed inside this room at all, but that’s why you come here. An accident of opportunity gave you pass, and you’re not about to give it up with any fake attempt at decency, of notions of “the right thing” so carefully primed in your childhood.

First published in matchbook, 2015. Collected in Banks’ short story collection Exercises in Control, Influx Press, 2020. Available on matchbook

‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ by Raymond Carver

The simplicity of language and action in this story encourages the reader to co-create the “more to it” that cannot be “talked out.” I imagined entire lives on this artfully blank canvas, in a frame sketched out with minimal words:

His side, her side.

First published in Quarterly West, 1978. This version first published in the Paris Review, 1981. Collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981, and Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic, 1988

‘The Olive Grove’ by Charlotte Grimshaw

The perspective of a five-year-old child—a child with agency, who has been thrown into the foreign world of Menton, France—is captured so amazingly well in this story, which is a nod to Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Doves’ Nest’. The casual way Grimshaw slips into the heads of other characters at various moments is dazzlingly well executed. The unfamiliar world glows with colour, the family buzzes with life.

First published in Second Violins: New Stories Inspired By Katherine Mansfield, Vintage New Zealand, 2008, and available on its own as a Kindle edition

‘Fitting Room’ by Yukiko Motoya, translated by Asa Yoneda

This was one of the surreal, magical stories that kept me going in the early days of global pandemic. I especially love the cute drawing by the author. In a Guardian review of Picnic in the Storm, Chris Power describes some of these collected stories as “like soap bubbles, several of these stories catch your eye, but the instant they are gone you forget about them.” Sometimes, soap bubbles that catch the eye—that float with airy swirls of rainbow and pop softly—are exactly what one is looking for.

First published in English translation online by Granta, as ‘Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing’, available here. Collected in Picnic in the Storm, Corsair, 2019

‘Elk Talk’ by Elizabeth Gilbert

A powerful depiction of precarity and human entitlement, with a great deal of modern resonance.

They both watched as the camera slowly pushed out the cloudy, damp photograph.
“Hold this by the edges carefully,” Jean instructed, handing it to Benny, “and see what turns up.”
There was a knock at the door.

First published in Story. Collected in Pilgrims, Houghton Mifflin, 1997

‘Bliss’ by Katherine Mansfield

This story begs the question: is ignorance sometimes best?

A grey cat, dragging its belly, crept across the lawn, and a black one, its shadow, trailed after. The sight of them, so intent and so quick, gave Bertha a curious shiver.

First published in the English Review, 1918. Reprinted in Bliss and Other Stories, 1920. Widely collected, including in the Selected Stories, OUP, 2008. Available online thanks to the Katherine Mansfield Society

Introduction

How to formulate a list like this?

Lists are silly. Lists are stupid. Lists change with the weather and time of day.

Lists are fun.

This isn’t a list of the twelve best stories of all time. (Or is it?)

This is a list of twelve stories which have stuck with me for one reason or another for a lot of years. Stories which chewed their way into my brain and squatted there. They still poo out little jolts of delight or terror or sorrow or satori when I least expect it

I have made no effort to balance this list in any way, though I could have come up with more than twelve tales to talk about. In the end, they are simply twelve stories I really like – some of them I also find useful for teaching.

Lists are fun? You tell me.

‘“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman’ by Harlan Ellison

Ellison represents one of the two writers most important to my tragically not-misspent youth. (Kurt Vonnegut, who appears next, is the other.) There is no louder a ‘voice’ writer out there than Ellison, and I think the fact that I prize voice so highly is down to his influence. Ellison was also that now rarest of creatures: a self-declared short story writer. (He wrote a couple of unmemorable novels, and was a successful screenwriter for a while.) He was also as much a character as he was a writer of characters, and while he was probably loathed and loved in equal measure for his… exuberant personality, he wrote wonderful short stories. (Hearing him read his stories aloud was mesmerizing.) And in his often brilliant non-fiction – along with essays, he always wrote intros to the stories in his collections that were as interesting as the stories themselves – he presented his readers with a path to lots of other great writers in and out of genre.

As with others on this list, I could have chosen several of his stories – ‘The Deathbird’, ‘Jefty is Five’, ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’, etc – but ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ is the one that means the most to me. It won all kinds of awards, has been reprinted a zillion times (that’s a true statistic), and is a glorious excursion into Ellison’s world of wit, wordplay and wonderment. It offers typically Ellisonian excess, is probably just a tad juvenile – and is very funny.

First published in Galaxy Science Fiction, Dec 1965. Collected in Ellison’s Paingod and Other Delusions, Pyramid, 1965 and widely recollected and anthologised

‘Harrison Bergeron’ by Kurt Vonnegut

I think Vonnegut shaped my sensibility as a teenage reader more than anyone – yay, Kilgore Trout! – and while I don’t believe he wrote a lot of short fiction later in his career, ‘Harrison Bergeron’ is an early masterpiece that has only grown more timely with time. If you took Vonnegut’s name off it and said it was written last week, no one would doubt it – at least thematically. His vision of a world where everyone must be equal would no doubt delight critics of so-called PC culture, though I can’t imagine the author himself had a lot of time for the politics of that particular crowd. I think the measure of the story’s value is how often images from it dance – clad in solid lead ballet slippers – through my brain, as the world that we live proves ever more Bergeron-ish.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct 1961, and collected in Welcome to the Monkey House, Delacourt, 1968 and the Collected Stories, Seven Stories Press, 2017

‘One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts’ by Shirley Jackson

Now there’s even a biopic about her (haven’t seen it), and I think Shirley Jackson is pretty widely recognised as a brilliant, major writer. But for a long time, it seemed like she was ‘The Lottery’ and that was about it. Of course, ‘The Lottery’ is a great, great story and deserves all the huzzahs it gets. I could have included that one here, too, and been stoned to death a happy man. But just to be interesting (“Too late!” you moan) may I offer for your consideration ‘One Ordinary Day…’.

It’s short, it’s sweet, it’s clever, it’s funny, it’s profound and just a little bit disturbing… all the things that Jackson was so good at stirring together. It’s only about the origin of good and evil in the world – kind of. Read ‘The Lottery’ if you’ve never done so, by all means (and drop a copy of The Haunting of Hill House into your shopping basket while you’re at it.) But sit back and enjoy the Jacksonian whimsy of ‘One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts’.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1955, and collected in Jackson’s (posthumous) Just an Ordinary Day, Bantam, 1996

‘Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?’ by Howard Waldrop

Let me briefly slip into something clichéd and comfortable for you. Oooh: soft, silky, trope-y…that’s better.

Howard Waldop is a National Treasure^TM.

You agree, right? I mean, who doesn’t love them some Howard?

Howard who? you ask.

(Four of you are slapping your arthritic knees with laughter right now. ‘Cause Waldrop’s first, spectacular story collection was called Howard Who? and… never mind.)

Waldrop is no secret in genre circles, though (tragically) I’d bet cash money that his entire output hasn’t sold as many copies as George RR Martin’s lavishly illustrated, pop-up recipe book of dragon piss cocktails. That’s no reflection on Waldrop (or Martin, whose ‘Sandkings’ might have made this list on a different day), but rather on all of you who don’t own any of his books. Shame on you, you bastards.

Waldrop is probably best known for ‘The Ugly Chickens’ – I see you rolling your eyes at each other, so stop it now – a spectacular tale about the not-quite-extinct dodo that could have been named here. There’s his short novel, A Dozen Tough Jobs, which is awfully like the Coens’ O Brother Where Art Thou, but written about ten years earlier (no plagiarism is remotely suggested, my learned friends…). Waldrop specialises in kind-of-obscure alternate history tales underpinned by years – no kidding – of research. He has a voice and a sense of humour and a playfulness which is singular and delightful.

‘Do Ya, Do Ya’ isn’t alternate history, but it is very much about ghosts of the past. About things lost and found again, and it is just magical. Maybe it doesn’t feature sentient, robot Disney characters in a post-apocalyptic future (see Waldop’s ‘Heirs of the Perisphere’ for that) but it is awfully human and awfully wonderful.

Buy one of his fucking books, for the love of Mickey!

First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Aug 1988, and collected in Waldrop’s Night of the Cooters, Ursus Imprints and Mark V Ziesing, 1990

‘“Yore Skin’s Jes’s Soft ‘N Purty…” He Said’ by Chet Williamson

This one won’t be for everyone.

Williamson is a solid genre guy.

I can totally identify (with all respect to Chet, whom I don’t know personally).

He’s the kind of reliable, decent – and that’s no insult – mid-list writer on whom the industry was once built but has dispensed with because, c’mon, who wants a writer who regularly turns out good words but doesn’t light up Instagram? Why publish someone who still actually – get him! – employs quotation marks to set out their dialogue? (God, what a miserable old fart I am.)

‘Yore Skin’ was published in an entertaining small press anthology co-edited by Joe R Lansdale (see below) called Razored Saddles. The story is fucking brilliant. It belongs, I suppose, to that most eccentric of subgenres, the Weird Western; it is certainly horror, though it has no supernatural element.

(By the meaningless by, I’ve been working on my own weird western novella for about fifteen years now. It guest stars Dashiell Hammett and Nathanael West. You’re excited, aren’t you? Maybe another fifteen years…)

The Williamson story follows a man, an illustrator of frontier adventure tales, who goes in search of the romance of a true west about which he has only read.

And ohlordymama does he find it.

Williamson pulls not so much as a fluid ounce of punch in this sucker. It is raw, brutal and leaves you feeling like you’ve been hit in the back of the head with an axe handle. Over and over.

I love it.

First published in Razored Saddles, edited by Joe R Lansdale & Pat LoBrutto, Dark Harvest, 1989