‘La Penseuse’ by Dorothy Edwards

“It was the first time since Mary’s girlhood that she had been in a library which was the possession of and the expression of the tastes of a single person.” Public libraries are all very well, but, alas, I reserve especial interest and (often) admiration for other people’s personal libraries. Dorothy Edwards has the female protagonist of this story enter such a library, and it is as quietly astonishing a scene as one could wish for. I like this Dorothy Edwards. ‘La Penseuse’ is a story of three intelligent, interesting people who grow close because they live in the same Welsh village; then, who would have thought it, things change. It is both sad and happy. I am not sure I will ever get over it, nor Edwards’s way with telling the story in the first place.

from Rhapsody, Parthian, 1927

‘The Creature’ by Edna O’Brien

“She was always referred to as The Creature by the townspeople, the dressmaker for whom she did buttonholing, the sacristan, who used to search for her in the pews on the dark winter evenings before locking up, and even the little girl Sally, for whom she wrote out the words of a famine song.” Look, I’m sorry about this. But I hope that the quality of the stories I’m talking about here, should you actually wish to read them for yourself, will justify my selection, and really, well, really that’s the only criterion, isn’t it? (Isn’t it . . . ?) This story by Edna O’Brien concerns the narrator herself (I think it’s herself) and her putting things right. Thank the Lord for people trying to put things right.

from A Scandalous Woman, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990

‘The Skylight’ by Penelope Mortimer

“The heat, as the taxi spiralled the narrow hill bends, became more evident.” Apart from anything else, I like my copy of this story collection by Penelope Mortimer, from 1966 (the collection first being published six years earlier). It features, on the front cover, a fine monochrome portrait of the author laconically burning her way through a cigarette, leaning back and observing all human folly in her wicker chair, The story itself, by the way, tells of a mother arriving at a holiday destination with her five-year-old son, and the anxieties that accrue, accumulate, accrete grotesquely, around the idea. The tension it generates is, to my mind, extraordinary. But don’t think about that now. Just relax. Pour a drink. Read on.

From Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, Arrow, 1966

‘At Sea, at Night’ by Ivan Bunin, translated by Sophie Lund

Now I suppose, approaching the halfway point of this highly personal anthology, it is a not unreasonable time to confess that I am myself, oh yes, a dabbler in the fine art of fiction. Oh yes! I have myself written more than one short story. Although I should always be getting on with something else (commissioning a review, reading some long-deferred classic etc), and therefore seldom begin, let alone threaten to complete, something on a grander scale than a short story. I love a short story. My boss expressed not so long ago, in podcast form, his mystification at the idea of short fiction being fulfilling but, alas, we feel differently on this point. Long books daunt me but also, obscurely, move me to annoyance. What is the point of them? Why use many words when few will do? Alas – here we are. And, sure enough, here is Ivan Bunin. A master of the form. This particular instance, about a dialogue between two men meeting on the deck of ship ‘on its way from Odessa to the Crimea’, is economic yet quite open to vistas of . . . life. They are a ‘pair of celebrities’; yet here they are alone, struggling to come to terms with one another. Personally, I find it quietly, desperately riveting.

First published 1923. Collected in The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, Penguin, 1992

‘The Crisis’ by M John Harrison

“You sit over a one-bar fire in a rented room.” Humblebrag time! I’ve met that M. John Harrison. I heard him quietly read this story during a wondrous evening of art, organized by somebody artistic in East London. It struck me as uncanny at the time, with its straightforward, serious-minded depiction of the homeless being deployed in a countermeasure against the incursion of alien invaders in the City of London. But like those invaders, Harrison’s story itself exists on more than one plane; and once you’ve glimpsed that, life is never the same again. I feel that this is a story that really has altered me. I was so proud, ludicrously proud, to have even a shred of involvement in seeing it published in the TLS last November.

from You Should Come with Me Now, Comma Press, 2017. Available to read here

‘The House Made of Sugar’ by Silvina Ocampo, translated by Daniel Balderston

“Suspicion kept Cristina from living.” Involvement is a word with a somewhat different meaning in relation to this bleak beauty, in which a man (I think) recalls the story of his true love’s curious attitude to life, the house they buy together, the little lie he tells in order to avoid upsetting her, the consequences of that lie . . . . Luck plays a part in this story. As it does in:

From Thus Were Their Faces, New York Review Books

‘Faithful Lovers’ (formerly ‘The Reunion’) by Margaret Drabble

“There must have been a moment at which she decided to go down the street and around the corner and into the café.” This is the story of a chance encounter, between a man and a woman. For some reason, I think it happened around the corner from a place where, years later, I encountered someone I had loved, and still loved, momentarily. More to the point, it is a London story, and such things do happen. I have met my brother twice by chance, under different circumstances, wandering through different parts of town. Margaret Drabble magnificently sets off old disagreements against enduring memory, passion and the rest. Oh for a scintilla, whatever that is, of her skill.

First published in Winter’s Tales 14, ed. Kevin Crossley-Holland, from Macmillan, 1968. Collected in A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman, Penguin, 2011). Available to read here

‘Blow’ by Susan Minot

“He called in the middle of the day to ask if he could come over.” The end, alas, is drawing near. Do I have many more tales of regret and loss and melancholy, and all the rest, to hand? Ah, well, for a slight (insultingly slight; forgive me) change of pace, here’s a (AHEM) sexy little number by Susan Minot (and from a hardback that, oh I admit, calamitous though it is, that I bought for the title and the sexy author photo! Well, what can I say? I was young(er) and foolish(er) then; and as for now . . .). In ‘Blow’, Bill drops by. The narrator notes what a mess he is: “He was like a hunted man”. He jitters around. It’s a fairly short short story. The gift, the sting, the killer blow is in the last line. Susan Minot: not just a pretty face, you dubious, desperate, positively stupid, semi-literate boy. I’m troubled by the place this story has in the world.

from Lust and other stories, William Heinemann

‘Scropton, Sudbury, Marchington, Uttoxeter’ by Jessie Greengrass

“My parents were grocers.” Ten down, two to go. So many wonderful writers, so many wonderful stories, I now realize, that are not going to make the cut. Such as it is. But consider this, and while we’re on the subject of regret: Jessie Greengrass’s last story in her first collection, about a woman (I think) recalling her parents, and paying their old haunt (singular) a visit. Am I going to cling to Jessie’s coattails, too, as well as M. John’s? Yes, I think I am. Ms Greengrass was once a member of a small outfit called the Brautigan Book Club, as was I. It was fun, you might say, hearing people enthuse about Richard Brautigan. But here we are, and Jesse is a superb short writer and I’m . . . OK. Never mind.

From An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, JM Originals, 2015

‘The Dead’ by James Joyce

Let this personal anthology be taken as proof that there are far too many heart-horrifyingly good short story writers out there. In a dozen stories, you can, of course, only scrape the surface; dip a foot, as it were, amid a dozen specimens of the species. Lord knows, and now you know, too, that some extraordinary things have slipped by me. I would name all the wonders if I could: William Maxwell, Mavis Gallant, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Anne Enright, Helen Simpson’s ‘Up at a Villa’ and… all that rest. For now, though, the end must be the incontrovertible end to Dubliners by James Joyce. Not only because of the story, but because, a couple of years ago, I heard the actor Aidan Gillen read the story in the Sam Wanamaker Theatre, attached to Shakespeare’s Globe, and it was then that the wonder of thing struck me anew. Some stories are glimpses. ‘The Dead’ is not, of course. Mr Gillen made it mesmerising. The story and the performance combined perfectly. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.

From Dubliners. Available to read here

Introduction

This is the anthology I would give to myself, if I had lost all my memories of reading. These stories are ones that make me gleeful and uproarious, that enchant me and make me squirm. They would remind me what a short story can do, and make me hungry to read all the other great stories in the world. Which I could then make into new personal anthologies, to give to myself should I ever lose all my memories of reading…

All these stories are entertaining – some in a more cane-twizzling, top hat-tipping manner than others. At least one of them I would call ‘fun’, which would not be to belittle that story. They are all serious in their own way, but they are also sometimes funny, sly, or irreverent – sincerity can be tiring. These are not the ten best stories I have ever read, but they are the ones I would want in that anthology, when I open my amnesiac eyes and reach for a book, wondering what could be inside it.

‘Stone Mattress’ by Margaret Atwood

Atwood, it strikes me, is into revenge: it is writ large in her recent Hagseed; it is the fantasy driving The Robber Bride (a favourite of mine). ‘Stone Mattress’ has one of the most delicious opening lines I’ve read, enticing us to follow Verna as she coldly calculates a revenge most satisfying. In many ways this is a simple story. Verna is aboard an arctic cruise ship when she encounters the man who turned her life upside down forty or so years before. Will he recognise her, and apologise, and if not, what should she do? The glory here is in the quiet organisation as she plots her method, disturbing yet immensely cathartic, even more so in the wake of #MeToo. It is also in Atwood’s hilarious characterisation of the other men in Verna’s life, and Verna’s honed flirtation techniques, ‘perching the Magnetic Northward nametag just slightly too low on her left breast’, pronouncing Bob’s name with a ‘small breathy intake, a certified knee-melter.’ Refreshingly, nobody in this story has an epiphany, or goes through some profound change. Revenge is best served at arctic temperatures.

In Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales (Virago, 2015) and in The New Yorker, available to read online here

‘The Stone Book’ by Alan Garner

I got into Garner as an adult, when I was thinking more and more about English vocabulary, and how our decisions to use Latinate or Germanic words in our writing profoundly alters its effect. Garner’s understanding, and control, of language, is astounding, and The Stone Book Quartet is a masterclass in how to draw the reader’s emotions straight from the gut with even a simple tale. Alongside almost pure Germanic (or Anglo-Saxon) vocabulary, Garner also freckles these stories with local dialect, including words now entirely lost to most of us. This does not hinder understanding, but enhances it. At the beginning of ‘The Stone Book’, we watch Mary take her father’s lunch to him at work, which means climbing the scaffolding right to the top of the new church spire. ‘“You’re not frit?”’ he asks her. She is not, and so with one heft he has her up sitting on the golden weathercock at the spire’s pinnacle, which he then spins, round and round, as Mary whoops and gazes out at the green world spread beneath her. If you can read this without gulping, from fear and heart-swell, you are a hard reader indeed.

In The Stone Book Quartet, Flamingo new edition 1999, first published 1979

‘Driver’ by Taiye Selasi

Rhythm is the beating heart of this story, and were the audio version of Selasi reading it herself still available, that is where I would send you. Every line is structured to produce a rhythm that starts to affect your heartbeat and your own speech after a while, but that seductive beat reaches new heights of incantatory beauty whenever the narrator, Webster, talks about ‘Madam’. Webster is the driver for a rich family in Ghana, and Madam is the wife of his employer and the forbidden object of his affections. Selasi’s silken voice and intimacy with her own writing make her delivery a blissful seduction in itself. Try this out loud, huskily: “Madam has the contours of a girl I knew in Dansoman and sculptures sold at Arts Centre and Bitter Lemon bottles. Slender top and round the rest. A perfect holy roundness that is proof of God’s existence and His goodness furthermore.” Gorgeous.

In Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4 (2013), read online with a Granta digital subscription here