Author: Jonathan Gibbs

‘England, My England’ by D. H. Lawrence

I know The Rainbow and Women in Love inside out, but I’ve only got to know the stories recently. The collection, England, My England, is just astonishing. Lawrence shows such great sensitivity to all living creatures, human or animal; woman, man or child — and to the shifting relationships between them. The title story is as great a piece of war literature as any poem by Owen or Sassoon. The protagonist Egbert “…] had not the faintest desire to overcome any foreigners or to help in their death. He had no conception of Imperial England, and Rule Britannia was just a joke to him”. And yet, perversely, he enlists. The description of Egbert’s death under fire, written through the dying man’s consciousness, is unforgettable, a real tour-de-force.

Collected in England, My England, Thomas Seltzer, 1922. Read it here

‘The Forest Path to the Spring’ by Malcolm Lowry

Another cantankerous Englishman, another one of a kind. If you’ve heard of Malcolm Lowry you’ll know him for his novel, Under the Volcano, which in fact is only one element in what he regarded as an ongoing cycle of work, the ‘Voyage That Never Ends’. His constantly reworked, and sometimes lost, manuscripts, travelled with him on his travels from Merseyside to New York and Mexico and Canada, and back to England where he died in 1957. This free-wheeling account of his time living in a fisherman’s shack on the shores of Burrard Inlet, north of Vancouver, is truly life-affirming.

Collected in Hear Us O Lord in Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, published posthumously, Lippincott, 1961

‘By-the-Wind Sailors’ by Lucy Wood

We’re staying on the shoreline, this time in Cornwall — the Cornwall behind the tourist facade. A homeless family is marooned in a rickety caravan at the very edge of the site, a mile away from the facilities, exposed to the fierce winter winds. When the tourist season comes they’re forced to find other solutions, including a cabin in some one’s garden, a couple of crummy hotels and a house flimsily divided into flats. At last, it seems as though a winter-let holiday cottage might become permanent — only for them to end up back where they started, at the caravan site. You feel desperately sorry for the characters, and yet they’re never victims. They’re survivors.

Collected in The Sing of the Shore, 4th Estate, 2019

‘Mess’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Ingvild Burkey

Winter is a sequence of stand-alone pieces, written to greet the arrival of a new baby. You might call them flash fictions, although that term has a gimmicky ring that doesn’t do justice to the intricacy of Knausgaard’s style. What he’s trying to do is to draw his daughter’s attention to the weirdness and the beauty of the world, The close-up descriptions of snow, rain and the sound of forest are perfectly precise; he also ponders philosophical questions such as the relationship between the local and the universal, and, at the other end of the spectrum, the banalities of the everyday. My house is messy, your house is messy, so why ‘this shame, which flaps around in me’ when your friends call by?

Published in Winter, first published in Norwegian 2015; in English, Vintage, 2017

‘Cluster’ by Naomi Booth

A story about the intensity of the maternal bond, as well as the torture of being awake in the night with a young baby. Wood plays that trick with second-person narration of simultaneously distancing the narrator from her own experience and bringing those experiences close to the reader. The interaction between mother and the baby is punctuated by passages describing what she can see, and hear, from her window. She has become a kind of voyeur – overhearing quarrels, watching drug dealers and listening out for owls. There’s a strong sense of danger in this story, especially when something happens that makes the protagonist want to intervene in what’s happening out onto the street. But then, in a coda that comes as a surprise, the final sentence brings home the primacy of the maternal bond.

First published online in the shortlist for the 2017/18 Galley Beggar Prize; collected in Animals at Night, Dead Ink, 2022 and also included in The Best British Short Stories 2019, edited by Nicholas Royle, Salt, 2019

‘Digital’ by Patience Agbabi

Some time in the future, baby “K-23, 23rd citizen, Generation K” is born from a biological mother, in the traditional manner. The reactions of her mother, I-Cara, are much the same as those of any mother straight after childbirth — physically drained, relishing her tea and toast, and above all amazed and slightly panicked by her baby. The difference is that, firstly, the birth is supported by robot midwives, and every aspect of the new-born monitored technologically. And secondly, unknown to the authorities, I-Cara has “crossed the divide”. The baby’s father is a ‘bot’, and bots aren’t supposed to make babies….

Collected in Glimpse: An Anthology of Black British Speculative Fiction, edited by Leone Ross, Peepal Tree, 2022

‘The Quick Child’ by Jane Rogers

Another story that celebrates a new life and the atavistic hold that children have on the imagination. A variety of characters, each realistically depicted in their everyday setting, are haunted by a mysterious figure. The figure is gradually revealed as a kind of premonition, not a ghost from the past, but the promise of the future. At the story’s end we discover what brings these characters together, despite the differences between them. I enjoyed all the stories in Jane Rogers’ collection, whether set in the contemporary world or a dystopian future, but what I love especially about this one is the importance it gives to the unique experience of becoming a grandparent.

First published in The Independent on Sunday, 23 December 2012; collected in Fire-Ready, Comma Press 2024

‘There are New Birthdays Now’ by Tom Vowler

Tessa Hadley once said that when you’re writing a short story you should feel “slightly anxious and almost ashamed”. I don’t know how Tom Vowler felt about writing this one, but reading it takes you inside experiences that don’t bear thinking about.. The best short fiction alway forces the reader to participate; with great subtlety, Vowler leaves those gaps for you to fill — gaps that in some ways stand for memories the protagonist is trying to suppress. Gradually you realise that he and his ex are using conflicting strategies to cope with the long aftermath of their child’s unexplained disappearance. All the usual awkwardness between an ex-wife and the husband’s new family are magnified by a situation in which ultimately there is no consolation. If that makes the story sound like heavy going, I promise you it isn’t.

Collected in The Method, Salt 2010; reprinted in Head Land: Ten Years of the Edge Hill Prize edited by Rodge Glass, Freight/Edge Hill University Press, 2016

‘Kerfol’ by Edith Wharton

With so much room for ambiguity, mystery and the purely subjective, ghost stories are perfect for short fiction. This one begins with the standard trope, with a house so cheap there’s bound to be a supernatural catch. This house is an ancient French chateau, haunted by a pack of dogs that don’t attack the narrator, when she comes to view the property, but simply stand their ground in silence. The legend unfolds, of an aristocrat who strangles his wife’s dogs one by one, until suddenly, and mysteriously, the dogs wreak their revenge. We never find out if the narrator makes an offer on that house, and there’s much else about the framing story that’s unresolved or hinted at, an affinity perhaps between the visitor, the chateau and the ‘deep, dark memory’ attached to the dogs. Wharton captures that strange mixture of unknowability and empathy behind the dogs’ eyes. And, dead or not, those are real dogs, carefully observed.

First published in Scribner’s,1916. Read it here

‘The Long and Painful Death’ by Claire Keegan

I don’t believe that writing just takes place when you’re sitting at your desk. Trying to write a story can also mean hours spent wandering off, messing about, seemingly wasting your time. The protagonist in this story has been awarded a residency at the Heinrich Böll House on the beautiful Achill Island, off the west coast of Ireland. She’s looking forward to concentrating on her work. But what does she do? She goes for a swim, she bakes a cake, she takes a bath, she thinks about a Chekhov story. One cause of her distraction is the intrusion of a German professor who wishes to see the Böll house — a person from Porlock, you might think. When he arrives he is shocked at her inactivity. But I suspect that supposed laziness was necessary for her to start writing, in order for her pen to move across the pages of her notebook.

Collected in Walk the Blue Fields, Faber 2007

‘Reckless Eyeballing’ by N. K. Jemisin

Such a clever story — and it zips along swiftly, written in the kind of style that seems effortless. Carl, a macho, not very likeable, cop, has started to see eyes where car headlights ought to be. At first he thinks they must be some kind of decorative fad, but no, those are real eyeballs, and he’s got used to them as a sign of suspect vehicles. Jemisin takes her time revealing, subtly, that Carl is Black, undermining any easy assumptions about her story as an allegory on race. By telling it from Carl’s own point of view she also puts the reader in an uncomfortable position, half-identifying with a character whose actions and attitudes are for the most part repellent.

Collected in Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adam, Picador 2023

‘The River’, by Bruce Springsteen

One way to think about a classic, lyric short story is to map it like a song, ‘The River’ models that kind of structure perfectly — basically, a linear narrative that keeps doubling back to a real place at a different time, telling a character’s story through that central image. There’s an epiphany in there too. People always stress cutting back and paring down, but rhythm, pace and repetition are just as important. You can hear that in the music; in a story on the page, you control those elements through words alone. The version of ‘The River’ on the Live 1975-85 album is prefaced by a spoken monologue that’s another masterclass in storytelling, delivering an ironic twist in the final sentence.

First included in The River, Columbia Records 1980. Listen to it here

Father Christmas by Raymond Briggs

I’m classifying this picture book featuring a bare minimum of words as a graphic short story. It’s one of the first books I remember coming into my childhood home (I was 4 when it was published) and probably also the one I’ve read the most times as I reread it every Christmas. Beautiful artwork – I especially love the depiction of Father Christmas having a snack between snowy roofs – and with so much detail in the background that each panel merits as close an inspection as a Pont cartoon.

Hamish Hamilton, 1973