Author: Jonathan Gibbs

‘Sunstroke’ by Tessa Hadley

The sunstroke that gives Tessa Hadley’s wonderful story of the promise and perils of a summer day its title is both literal—a little girl comes down with a fever after playing outside all day—and metaphoric. It could refer to the light beating its way through the leaves of a tree in the shade of which the two main characters, old friends Rachel and Janie, now in their early thirties with fading careers and three kids each, set up camp on a stolen day at the seaside. Or to the pulsations of sensuality that course through each of the women, aware as they are of inhabiting that “piquant moment of change when the outward accidents of flesh are beginning to be sharpened from inside by character and experience.” Or the interruption into orderly lives by the arrival of an unmarried friend.

But while the child recovers quickly, the adults are more easily knocked off their equilibrium. Rachel’s husband, Sam, is a writer, but Janie’s partner has never been able to read past the second chapter: at every moment, the man thinks, the book diverts into thickets of cultural allusions; there isn’t any room for anything to happen. Hadley is no Sam; even though her canvas is small, plenty happens in her story. The events aren’t dramatic—the women exchange confidences; the men overcome awkwardness by smoking up; a couple kiss in the dark. But they promise to be consequential. Yet the consequences aren’t the ones the characters expect. Everyone in the story is on the verge of getting something they think they want, but then they pull back, unsure, finding themselves staring at the possibility of another life, in equal parts excitement and distaste. (Everyone except the children; they take full advantage of the largesse of the glorious Somerset day.)

Hadley does her novelist character one better: she laces these events with oblique references to canonical literature—Virginia Woolf, Henry James—but so gracefully you can admire them or not as you like. In the end, the deepest pleasures of this wise story are its images of summer’s ease: the peace of the afternoon made deeper by the sight of the children’s toys strewn across the lawn; the light from a television silhouetting the heads of the children watching a movie; the sound of a bat stirring the velvety, sumptuous night air. These brushstrokes are Hadley’s masterstroke. Take a minute from your summer to revel in them.

Collected in Sunstroke, Jonathan Cape, 2007) Chosen by Dorian Stuber

‘The July Ghost’ by A.S. Byatt

The story I’ve selected for the summer personal anthology series is not cheerful or with a holiday aspect, so apologies in advance. But it is set in London, during a very hot summer, and here I am, in London, and it is turning out to be a very hot summer.  The story is about a terrible loss, and the emotional paralysis that comes with it: all the more painful because it is set against a ravishing backdrop – a large, almost paradisiacal garden:

It was a lovely place: a huge, hidden, walled South London garden, with old fruit trees at the end, a wildly waving disorderly buddleia, curving beds full of old roses, and a lawn of overgrown rye-grass.

A man, an academic trying to write a paper on Hardy’s poems, “on their curiously archaic vocabulary” rents some attic rooms from a woman he has no connection with; her husband is mostly away. The initial set-up leads one to expect a foregone conclusion, but what follows is profoundly unexpected. The man has recently been left by his lover: he is bereft. Sitting in the garden each day his mind begins to recompose itself: and soon he has a companion – a silent boy of about ten with brilliant blue eyes and an extraordinarily trusting smile, swinging from the apple tree, or lying in the grass beside him.

When he asks the woman who the boy might be, and describes him, right down to his Chelsea football shirt, he taps into a wild grief. The woman’s only child, he discovers, had been killed two years before, knocked down by a car on a hot July afternoon (Byatt’s own son died this way: there is a personal heaviness to the writing). The woman cannot see the boy: she longs to. Neither the man nor the woman believes in ghosts: they agree that they appear to have crossed over into each other’s emotional currents: whether they can find mutual comfort through this is debatable.

The story seems to me to be very Jamesian (both Henry and M.R.) especially as it is a retelling with omissions – the man recounts it to a young American woman he meets later at a party. It is less contrived and curlicued than much of Byatt’s writing: there is a sense of urgent reflection about it. In our family, too, there is a lost child, and although she died in her early 20s, it is – sentimentally or perhaps so as not to dwell on the suffering which took her from us – that as a child I choose most often to remember her, an eternal child in an everlasting summer garden.

From Sugar and Other Stories, 1987, and also collected in The Penguin Book of Modern Women’s Short Stories, ed. Susan Hill, 1990) Chosen by Catherine Taylor. Read Catherine’s Personal Anthology here

‘Paper Losses’ by Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore’s ‘Paper Losses’ definitely isn’t an upbeat beach read, but it neatly illustrates the idea that wherever you go, there you are. Kit and Rafe met in the peace movement, but twenty years on they’re about to divorce and have “become, also, a little pro-nuke”. Moore’s depiction of their disintegrating marriage and an ill-advised final family holiday is full of clever observations and dark humour. There are Kit’s thoughts on being with Rafe: “It was like being snowbound with someone’s demented uncle: should marriage be like that?” Then there’s her take on life: “A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: choosing the best unhappiness.” The holiday itself sounds fairly appalling even if it weren’t taking place during the death throes of a marriage. Kit’s suitcase is lost; the “colonial” resort is surrounded by barbed wire, through which the local boys peer; their children are painfully aloof; and the finale of the holiday – watching turtles hatch – doesn’t go to plan. At all. However, as Kit moves on, her life seems pretty optimistic and, as she says, “Hope is never false. Or it is always false. Whatever. It’s just hope… nothing wrong with that.”

I first came across this story on the New Yorker podcast and revisit it now and then as a touchstone of how to write funny/sad stories with a central character who is trying to figure out what it is to be a human. Enjoy!

First published in The New Yorker, and collected in Collected Stories, Faber. Chosen by Zoe Venditozzi

Introduction

I’m not sure what a short story is. I’m not at all sure about the ‘story’ bit. I suppose I’m more sure about the ‘short’ bit, though this can vary: shorter than a ‘novel’, I guess, and shorter than a ’novella’ (and I’m not so sure about these either), sometimes as short as a sentence. I would have liked to have included Gertrude Stein if Identity: a Poem were a short story; I would have liked to have included Anakana Schofield if Martin John were a collection of short stories; I would have liked to have included Anne Boyer if A Handbook of Disappointed Fate were a collection of short stories, but I’ll stick to things that have called themselves short stories, or have been published that way. I’m hesitant to make a list of ‘greats’, there are just stories that have been important to me at one time or another. This list is in no way either a lesson or a warning.

‘Helen and Vi, A Study in Vitality’ by Lydia Davis

Davis was one of the first writers I read who showed me writing can play with ‘non-literary’ forms and this story takes the form of a sociological report. A reviewer in Paste Magazine wrote: “Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality” details the lives of two healthy, elderly, working-class women (and a shadowy third whose wealth and narcissism negatively affect her health,” which seems to me a slightly odd interpretation, as the two women named in the title successfully inhabit feminised social strictures which mean they are endlessly at the beck and call of others. I read the story at a time in my life where there was a strong possibility that if I continued as I had been, I might end up like Helen or Vi. Instead I decided I would rather be like the third woman, who is called “Hope”. Helen and Vi is unusually long for a Davis story. In an interview with the LARB she wrote: “Usually I don’t put a story in a collection if I think it’s not quite finished or if it didn’t quite work but I was very fond of this story. I decided to put it in anyway; I thought, ‘This one will be for me, even if other people don’t like it or are puzzled by it.’”

From Varieties of Disturbance, FSG, 2007. Also in the Collected Stories, FSG/Penguin

‘The Poet and the Novelist as Roommates’ by Sheila Heti

A man I met in a bar, who was in fact a novelist, asked me if I liked Lydia Davis’s stories. I said yes. This was not enough: he asked me if I preferred her early or her later collections. I said ‘early’. He made it clear that this was the correct answer. And so he was able to continue his conversation with me. I have more usually gone for ‘poets’: they are worse.

From The Middle Stories, McSweeney’s, 2012. Available to read online here

‘Words Escape Me’ by Claire-Louise Bennett

It’s difficult to choose only one piece from this book, which was published as a collection of short stories, so I’ll pick this section I published at 3:AM around the time of the book’s initial publication in Ireland by The Stinging Fly. Like Lydia Davis’s ‘puzzling’ stories, it doesn’t so much tell as offer a set of things to thing about, and think about again. And Claire-Louise is very interested in things: “bon à penser” Lévi-Strauss wrote: goods are good to think with…

First published at 3:AM Press. Collected in Pond, The Stinging Fly/Fitzcarraldo, 2015

‘Go When You See the Green Man Walking’ by Christine Brooke-Rose

Better known for her longer fiction and criticism, Brooke-Rose wasn’t very interested in having her stories collected. This is from a recent reissue by Verbivoracious Press, for which I wrote an introduction. I have not read anything more like being a woman walking alone through a strange city: “One could walk miles and miles obeying the code.”

From Go When You See the Green Man Walking, Michael Joseph, 1970. Reissued by Verbivoracious Press, 2014

‘Alight at the Next’ by Eley Williams

I published this at 3:AM Magazine and am in no way surprised by the subsequent wild success of her first collection. Eley combines a meticulous eye for language with the rare ability to write convincingly about happy love. She had me at “I am the first to admit that my spirit animal is probably a buttered roll.”

First published at 3:AM Magazine. Collected in Attrib. and Other Stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘Fantomas Takes Sutton’ by Isabel Waidner

I also published this at 3:AM. Out of a batch of about 200 submissions it was the only one to which I wanted to say immediately – unequivocally – yes! Isabel’s writing queers the form into the realms of pure language: her characters are words, her settings, the exhilarating freefall of an entirely linguistic universe.

first published at 3:AM Magazine

‘Homage to Switzerland’ by Ernest Hemingway

This is unexpected Hemingway perhaps: deadpan, strange, structurally experimental and in no way pursuing ‘realism’. I called one of my stories after it: ‘Homage to Homage to Switzerland’, which I wrote for Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith’s Winter Papers anthology.

Collected in Winner Take Nothing, Scribner, 1933, and in Collected Stories: Part One, Everyman, 1995. Listen to Julian Barnes read, and write about it here

‘Being Unhappy’ by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann

I like stories that seem to have something missing, in which something of the meaning is located outside the story. ‘Being Unhappy’ is both restless and pointless, and slightly disturbing, as well as slightly distasteful. I don’t even know if I like this story any more. I just know it did something for me and for my work at some point. If I went with one of Kafka’s longer, better known stories, it wouldn’t be ‘Metamorphosis’, but ‘Josephine the Mouse Singer’; it wouldn’t be ‘The Hunger Artist’, but ‘Investigations of a Dog’.

First published in German in Bretrachtung, 1913. Widely translated, including in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Penguin, 2007. Read it online, in a different translation, here

‘The Hen’ by Clarice Lispector, translated by Elizabeth Bishop

While you’re there you might as well read ‘The Smallest Woman in the World’ too. In both stories, Lispector writes female figures who become the instrument of a turn against narrative – as though to be female were to overturn the rules of form.

First published in The Kenyon Review, 1964. Collected in The Complete Stories, New Directions/Penguin Modern Classics, 2015. Read it online here