Author: Jonathan Gibbs

‘Forever Overhead’ by David Foster Wallace

Most of David Foster Wallace’s work was ‘closed’ to me for a long time. I found his style overbearing, heady with detail, footnotes and stylistic play. Reading this story was a turning point for me. It’s in the second person (a rare example of when the use of the second person actually works), and I’ve seldom felt closer to a character than in this story. It minutely describes the moments of a boy ascending the diving board and preparing to jump into the pool.

From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown/Abacus, 1999

‘Y Condemniedig’ by Kate Roberts

This makes me cry every time. Kate Roberts is one of the most famous Welsh-language writers, particularly known for her short stories. Her work is often based in the North Wales community where she grew up and this story is no exception. It follows a quarry worker who can no longer work because of a debilitating illness. While he convalesces at home, he ‘discovers’ the life that Laura (his wife) has led while he was at work: he observes her baking bread, cleaning the house, doing the laundry. This new appreciation of the domestic life leads him to fall in love with his wife all over again, making the ending all the more heart-breaking.

First published 1931. Collected in Goreuon Storiau Kate Roberts, Gwasg Gee, 1997. Available in English translation by Joseph P. Clancy as ‘The Condemned’ in The World of Kate Roberts: Selected Stories 1925-1981, Temple University Press, 1991

‘A Temporary Matter’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

This is another story about husbands and wives and how they succeed and fail to communicate with each other. I read this at a period in my life when I’d begun to think all relationships between men and women were doomed (this tends to happen when you’re about 25). Like Roberts, Lahiri explores the slowly disintegrating marriage between a South-Indian couple in the USA through the use of ordinary, domestic detail. She shifts subtly between the two perspectives, employing a light-touch on a heavy subject. It’s a beautiful portrait of a couple in crisis that quietly suggests that there are some things that no marriage can overcome.

First published in The New Yorker, April 20, 1998. Collected in The Interpreter of Maladies, Houghton Mifflin/Flamingo, 1999

‘The Beggar Maid’ by Alice Munro

This is my favourite short story. I’ve re-read it several times. It ‘opened up’ to me because it seemed that it was written for me. Or, perhaps, it speaks to most women in their early twenties, I don’t know. I’ll have to ask. In a sense, it’s a story about uncertainty, about navigating important choices while not knowing whether they are the right ones. Munro carefully describes the smallest event and allows its effects to ripple through the story. In this case, the event is someone touching the protagonist’s bare leg in the library. This leads to absolutely everything else, until the final, small yet momentous event – an expression – completes the piece.

First published in The New Yorker, June 27 1977. Collected in Who Do You Think You Are? Macmillan, 1978 – later reissued as The Beggar Maid – and also collected in Selected Stories, Vintage, 2010

‘He-y, Come on ou-t!’ by Shinichi Hoshi, translated by Stanleigh Jones

A very strange story that I can’t describe. You just have to read it. Years after I’d come across it in an anthology in some local library, I kept thinking about it, even though I hadn’t noted down the author or the title. I went looking for it again. It took me a while, but here it is.

From The Columbian Anthology of Japanese Literature, CUP, 2005. Also available online here

‘The Cavalry’ by Christopher Meredith

Christopher Meredith is famous for his novels, Shifts, Griffri, but this is his first collection of short stories. ‘The Calavary’ is set in post-war South Wales and follows a family visiting an old man on Christmas. Meredith weaves the past with the present: memories of each character come and go, their speech deeply rooted in the Valleys. It’s a contemplation of mortality, really, articulated in a moving, beautifully-crafted way.

From Brief Lives, Seren, 2018

‘Cecilia Awakened’ by Tessa Hadley

I’m a great admirer of Tessa Hadley’s work, and I was grateful that I didn’t have to choose between her short stories! I could simply pick her latest work. The story immediately took me back to being twelve again. She captures exactly those feelings of excruciating embarrassment and painful awkwardness that every teenager has. Everything is wrong: your body, your clothes, your surroundings, other people and, worst of all, your parents. This is Cecilia’s awakening, and it happens overnight. But there are many different kinds of ‘awakening’ in life: some of those ‘awakenings’ happen after reading a great short story at exactly the right time, when the story unfolds and makes the world seem a little clearer, a little more bearable.

In The New Yorker, September 17, 2018

Introduction

Nobody has ever asked me for advice about how to teach and I don’t think they ever will. But if they do, I’ll say this: If you’ve got a good text to share and some good questions to ask, everything might be fine.

As well as being good and well-written and worthy in their own right I think that these stories are all broadly appropriate for study with 11-18 year olds.  In my experience they ‘work’, either as something fun to read aloud, or as something thought-provoking to discuss.

If you are a teacher and you would like PDFs of the stories, do get in touch.

‘A Table is A Table’ by Peter Bichsel, translated by Michael Hamburger

‘I want to tell the story of an old man, of a man who has given up talking, who has a tired face, too tired for smiling and too tired for frowning’

An old man decides that something has to change, and invents his own language. As he pursues this idea, keeping track in blue exercise books, what was at first odd becomes funny, then suddenly sad.

With very little prompting (“is this just a weird story about an old man, or does it have a deeper meaning?”) even tough-guy teenage boys will discuss loneliness, dementia, immigration, and the importance of friendship.

First published in German 1973. Available on The White Review website, newly translated by Lydia Davis, here

‘The Linesman’ by Janet Frame

 I looked from my window and saw him already working, twisting, arranging wires, screwing, unscrewing, leaning back from the pole, dependent upon his safety belt, trusting in it, seeming in a position of comfort and security.

Not even a whole page! There are lots of things by Janet Frame that I Iike, but I’ve never worked out how to teach any of them. This nicely worked little story perfectly captures the feeling of being young in summer, and is so neat it near enough teaches itself. Nothing happens, everything seems achingly slow, and the last line is a killer.

A nice thing to do is to ask the kids “what happens next” and have them write their own continuations.

Published in The Reservoir, George Brazillier, 1993

‘Hermit Wanted’ by Mick Jackson

‘[Giles and Ginny] created a deer park and commissioned a couple of follies and a croquet lawn with peacocks strutting around it, and employed plenty of staff to do all the cooking and cleaning and to treat [them] with the kids of respect they felt their considerable wealth deserved.’

It’s hard to choose just one story from Mick Jackson’s ‘Ten Sorry Tales’, which was left in my pigeon hole by a much better, kinder teacher a few years ago. The whole collection is worth a look, and it is the book most often stolen from my classroom – high praise indeed.

This story is about a well-heeled couple who decide that the one thing their estate lacks is a hermit. Despite attracting few applicants they eventually fill the position, providing food and shelter with the simple request that their hermit must remain ‘as quiet as the grave’. All goes well until Giles and Ginny find ‘a new distraction’ in the form of ‘an heir to the throne’.

in ‘Ten Sorry Tales’, Faber, 2005

‘Job’ by Roger Robinson

What the hell happened to your eyes, Frank? Don’t tell me you’ve started wearing tinted contact lenses.

When a friend dragged me to some trendy literary event in East London, Roger Robinson towered above the other contributors. I picked up a copy of ‘Adventures in 3D’ for the princely sum of five pounds, and read ‘Job’ to my Year 11 class the next day. Two black men, friends from University, stay in touch as they enter the world of adulthood. With the pressures of work one of the men, Frank, starts to change.

Some of the most interesting conversations I have had have started as a result of this story. Is the author black? Would it make you feel differently if the author were white? How might different readers understand this story differently? How might white readers interpret this story differently from readers of colour?

From the collection ‘Adventures in 3D’, Lubin & Kleyner, 2002

The Vertical Ladder by William Sansom

This is one of the many stories I would never have come across without A Personal Anthology. It was Roland Bates‘ first pick and he introduced it with this:
in 1981 my English teacher read to the class a story about a boy pressed into climbing the ladder on the side of a gasometer. He climbs, his friends kick away the first bit of the ladder, he climbs, they wander off, and he climbs… towards a truly oppressive ending. You could have heard a pin drop.
 What teacher wouldn’t be tempted to give it a go on a rainy Friday afternoon? I can’t say my pupils were quite as rapt as Bates’ mates in 1981, but they did listen, and they occasionally mention the story even months later. Why does Flegg agree to climb? Why does he keep climbing? Is this just a story about a gasholder, or might it have a deeper message?
1944; now in The Stories of William Sansom, Faber. Online here