‘In the Reign of King Harad IV’ by Steven Millhauser

I first heard this story on the New Yorker Fiction podcast, being read and discussed by Cynthia Ozick. Her love of the story was evident in her careful delivery, and I was quite captivated. In this elegant Borgesian fable, King Harad IV’s court miniaturist creates beautiful, intricate works of art, including a toy replica of the King’s entire palace with 600 rooms. But soon, the artist is not satisfied by these intricacies, and begins to create smaller and smaller objects. It’s not long before he needs a magnifying glass to see what he is working on. His miniatures become almost invisible to the naked eye, then completely invisible… Is this a parable, and if so, what does it mean? That is part of the pleasure in reading this story – we envy the miniaturist his artistic vision and drive as he delves alone into an uncharted creative realm, but we wonder if it is really just madness. So, a story that is a salve for writers who wrestle with this question every day.

In Dangerous Laughter, Vintage, 2009, and in the New Yorker to read online here, or listen on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast here

‘The Erl King’ by Angela Carter

I include this because it’s a story that gave me one of those heart-stopping moments, falling in love, aching with envy, resolving to try and keep trying to write. I also once used it in an exercise on a writing course, where I had to compare the qualities – literal and metaphorical – of a story I admired with one of my own. Depressing, but instructive. The Erl-King is the bad-boy type you’re not supposed to fall for, and are therefore seduced by – after all, he does have goat’s cheese, wild mushrooms and rabbit stew in his one-room woodland hut. He also has cages full of birds, a metaphor too heavy for most writers to handle but one Carter whisks into this plum pudding of a story with ease, probably with a cigarette in the other hand. Reading this is a feast, of a kind that nobody can now reproduce. Carter’s brew transcends fashions in fiction, and thank goodness; this is an antidote to minimalism should you ever need one, but most glorious when read on its own luscious terms.

In Burning Your Boats, Vintage, 1996; first published in The Bloody Chamber, Gollancz, 1979

‘Parson’s Pleasure’ by Roald Dahl

There is much glee indeed to be had reading Dahl’s stories, but this is the one that makes me wince the most, and with painful joy. A cruel and clever plot, an odious swindler of a protagonist, and a pair of wise fools make for a comedy that breezes along towards devastation. I listened to this as part of an audio book as I walked through London, the streets around me transforming into the summery Buckinghamshire countryside that Mr Boggis traverses in his station wagon, scouting for country houses he might relieve of their antiques. When new levels of deviousness are about to deliver him a major prize that will one day – he is sure – be known as The Boggis Commode, “All the buttercups in the field were suddenly turning into golden sovereigns, glistening in the sunlight. The ground was littered with them, and he swung off the track on to the grass so that he could walk among them and tread on them and hear the little metallic tinkle they made as he kicked them around with his toes.” Kicking buttercups comes before a fall, and one that made me giggle as much as Boggis does at his seeming fortune.

In Completely Unexpected Tales, Penguin, 1986; first published in Esquire (1958), available online here

‘Bliss’ by Katherine Mansfield

Rich and strange, heart-breaking and cruelly funny, this is one of my favourite Mansfield stories among many. Mansfield, like Chekhov, can conjure unalloyed joy. Bertha Young’s excitement – albeit about a dinner party – is infectious, yet we see from the start how it renders her vulnerable. She hides it from Harry, her husband – ‘she couldn’t absurdly cry: “Hasn’t it been a divine day!”’ – and instead delights over her beautiful bowl of fruit, and the anticipation of welcoming the enigmatic Pearl Fulton. Bertha ‘fell in love’ with Pearl Fulton the first time she saw her. We wonder later how to take this; is it just a turn of phrase? Central to the story is a beautiful pear tree in Bertha’s garden, in full and perfect blossom, ‘a symbol of her own life.’ The dinner guests – Pearl Fulton excepted – are hilariously dreadful, yet Bertha maintains her unbearable bliss, becoming ‘ardent’ (such a laden word) before inevitably, this being Mansfield, a shadow is cast. Each time I read this story the pleasure only increases, laced as it is with pain. Early on, Bertha ‘seemed to see on her eyelids the lovely pear tree’, and so it is for the reader, left wondering at Bertha’s capacity for joy in her stifling, unsympathetic world.

First published in the English Review (1918), now in Selected Stories, Oxford World’s Classics, 2002, and other Mansfield collections, available online here

‘Tributaries’ by Ramona Ausubel

I was introduced to this story by Helen Oyeyemi on a writing course a few years ago. Ausubel’s whole collection has heart – a kind of affection for and between her characters that is not often in evidence in short stories, or is hard to get away with if it’s there (Lorrie Moore does it well). Her stories are also fantastical, and in this one, we zoom in on teenage girls at a slumber party as Genevieve tells her friends, “My parents both have perfect love-arms.” Even though Genevieve adds that it is “almost sick,” the way they use these arms to write love letters to one another, all the other girls hope for exactly this. For in the world of ‘Tributaries’, people grow extra arms from their chests when they are truly in love. There are variations: one girl’s grandmother has seven love-arms; the school teacher Claribel has hands all over her chest that clean each other’s nails while she marks papers. This sounds ridiculous, almost grotesque, but that heart of Ausubel’s that I mentioned prevails, and this exploration of love-arms – the use of fake arms, the presence of wayward or unusual arms – becomes a beautiful meditation on how we love, and love differently.

In A Guide to Being Born, Riverhead, 2013; available online here

‘A Shocking Accident’ by Graham Greene

This story is brilliant for the concept at its core – that a tragedy (the death of a parent) can have about it an inherent comedy (method of dispatch) such that it haunts the offspring left behind in a uniquely undignified way. I first read it in an anthology of the same name, and sadly it set the bar so high that most of the other stories couldn’t compete. It also has a great opening. Like David Copperfield summoned to the headmaster’s office on his birthday, expecting a hamper and receiving instead news of his mother’s death, Jerome sits opposite his housemaster without fear, for he is an ‘approved, reliable’ boy, destined ‘for Marlborough or Rugby’. Rather, the housemaster appears a little afraid of Jerome. What does he have to tell him? The news is delivered, and a guilty smile spreads across the reader’s face. Perhaps there is also a snort, or a hoot, at the gift of this awful, wonderful image. So many short stories are dark, it is true, and this one in a way is no exception. But it is also exceptionally funny.

In A Shocking Accident: stories with a twist in the tail, ed. Sara Corrin, Walker Books, 2003; available online here

‘Debarking’ by Lorrie Moore

This is another one I highly recommend you hear the author read herself, which you can if you buy the audiobook. Lorrie Moore’s warm, laconic voice brings out the best in the humour here, and there is so much of it. In this long short story, newly divorced and nervous Ira starts a relationship with long-divorced but possibly unhinged Zora. Standing defiantly between them is Zora’s teenage son, Bruno – or Bruny, or Brune, depending on Zora’s fancy. Mother and son play footsie under the table, wrestle each other onto the sofa, and turn all Ira’s attempted dates into a disturbing threesome. Bad enough, but add in Zora’s sculptures of pubescent boys, ‘priapic with piccolos,’ and her planned children’s book about a hedgehog entering a house full of crocodiles… “I’ll spare you the rest,” Zora says, but she does not spare poor Ira. Sad and comical in equal measure, relatable but bizarre, sympathetic but also pathetic, watching forlorn Ira navigate this woman is mesmerising.

In Bark, Faber & Faber, 2014 and in The New Yorker, online here

‘As They Rode Along the Edge’ by Leonora Carrington

Virginia Fur lives in an abandoned village, and rides around, ‘between precipices, across trees,’ on a wheel. She has ‘a mane of hair yards long and enormous hands with dirty nails’, and she smells pretty interesting. Virginia Fur falls for a wild boar called Igname after he declares his love, dressed up for the occasion in a wig of squirrels’ tails and fruit, and with a nightjar perched atop his head. How could she resist? I couldn’t. Sadly, their furious passion is short-lived. Carrington’s stories often tread a line between the fabulous and the wilfully surreal, and ones that tip too far in the latter direction can make for a bewildering read. This one delivers the satisfaction of all Carrington’s strange imaginative flourishes adorning a story that we can recognise: love lost and avenged. I can’t remember where I first found this story, but it has lodged in my imagination ever since. Carrington’s work is a great reminder to let rip when it comes to writing, to embrace ideas and let them ride their wheels into the wild.

in The Seventh Horse and Other Tales, Virago, 1989

‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ by Gabriel García Márquez

Márquez is here because he was such an influence on my young self. As a teenager, I pretty much wanted to be him (I’d have accepted the generous moustache), and my first ‘proper’ short story was a wholesale Márquez rip-off, of which I was quite proud. This story is resplendent with so many of the Márquezian traits I know and love. Days of rain have left Pelayo’s house infested with crabs, and ‘the world had been sad since Tuesday.’ Then he finds a ragged old man face down in the muddy yard. The man has enormous wings. Pelayo ignores his neighbour’s advice to club this apparent angel to death, and instead locks him in the chicken coop. Soon, visitors are flocking from far and wide, and Pelayo is raking it in. Only when a woman who has been turned into a spider arrives with a travelling fair are Pelayo, his family, and his aloof angel left alone. Infestations, transformations, curious crowds, extreme weather, and mystery make this classic Márquez. It strikes me now that all those elements have indeed snuck into my own writing, though I am sadly still short a generous moustache.

In Collected Stories, Penguin, 1996; first published in English in Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories, Harper & Row, 1978; available online here

Introduction

This list is incomplete. It’s a bodge job, a let’s-fuck-off-home-early-eh number, a half-formed thing. I didn’t mean it to be but it is. I have lost my copies of Borges’ Labyrinths and Peter Carey’s Collected Stories. I let a friend borrow Krzhizhanovsky’s 7 Stories and he never gave it back. The anthology that contains Bartleby is at the bottom of a box under a dustsheet in an upstairs room. And so on. So there’s no ‘Life And Death In The South Side Pavilion’ here, nor ‘The Quixote of Pierre Menard’, nor ‘In The Pupil’. I didn’t want to write about them if I didn’t have them to hand.

It’s incomplete for other reasons, too. It’s incomplete because I’m incomplete (regrettably, woefully so). I haven’t read enough. More specifically, I haven’t read enough writers of colour, or non-European writers, or gay writers, or women writers. My list and I are twin inadequates.

And it’s incomplete because I made it that way. It should have more comic stories in it (there’s no Wodehouse, no Runyon, no Thurber) and more detective stories (no ‘The Big Knockover’, no ‘The Purloined Letter’) but I left them out. Curators gonna curate. And I left out some stuff I know you’ll have all read already (of course you’ve all read Eley Williams’ stories, of course you all know ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’). But I wouldn’t want you to think I left out Raymond Carver for that reason. I left him out because I can’t abide him.

‘Nevsky Prospekt’ by Nikolay Gogol, trans. Ronald Wilks

Gogol was in some ways the most 19th-century-Russian-novelist of the 19th-century Russian novelists. He has some of the louche wit and sophistication of Lermontov; some of the brisk amorality of Leskov; a little of Dostoevsky’s intensity (but, thank goodness, far less of his frantic earnestness); in private he shared with Tolstoy a religious agony. He was a visionary with a cocked eyebrow. ‘Nevsky Prospekt’ is a darkly entranced waltz through St Petersburg, city of clerks and civil servants, an improbable dream-city (but one later spun into yet more oblique fantasy by Andrei Bely). Gogol shows us the cracked passion and miserable suicide of the artist Piskarev, and the thwarted philandering of the officer Pirogov – but most of all he shows us the city (no, his city) with wide-panning camerawork that at times recalls Dickens’ cinematic swoops through London in Bleak House. “Everything here breathes deception,” the narrator warns. With ‘The Nose’ and ‘The Overcoat’, ‘Nevsky Prospekt’ completes a metropolitan trilogy that presents St Petersburg in treacherously shifting light: at once a city of the dead and a theatre of the absurd.

First published in 1835. Collected in The Diary Of A Madman, The Government Inspector and Selected Stories, Penguin, 2005

‘The White Death’ by Stanisław Lem, trans. Michael Kandel

Stanislaw Lem wrote robot fairy-tales. These are stories that feel like myths, built on teetering hypotheticals and imparting cryptic robot morals. Robot kings send robot knights on madcap quests; engineer-cosmogonists construct competing universes. In ‘The White Death’, Aragena, ruler of the Enterites, confines his people within their crater-pocked planet, for fear of cosmic invasion. The planetary interior is a vision (“with a system of pipes they pumped light into the heart of the planet… they had their choice of dawn, or noon, or rosy dusk… they even had their own sky, where in webs of molybdenum and vadium flashed spinels and rock crystal”) – but this is a story of hubris and nemesis, modelled, surely, on Poe’s ‘Masque of the Red Death’ (1842), wherein Prince Prospero’s opulent apartments prove no barrier to a terrible plague. Here, the ‘white death’ is a mould that arrives on a spaceship and brings rust to the Enterites’ planet. The king’s engineers destroy the ship (an extraordinary passage tells of how they “smashed it on anvils of platinum… immersed the pieces in heavy radiation, so that it was reduced to a myriad of flying atoms, which keep eternal silence, for atoms have no history”) – but a single spore escapes, and a “brownish leprosy” consumes the Enterites and their works.

First published in 1977. Collected in Mortal Engines, Penguin, 2016

‘The Young Immigrunts’ by Ring Lardner

Mis-spelling has a distinguished literary history. It can have an emotional kick (nowhere more so than in Hardy’s Jude The Obscure: Little Father Time’s note “Done because we are too menny” was rewritten in Michael Winterbottom’s 1996 adaptation Jude as ‘becos we are to many’, presumably with pathos in mind) but more often the effect is comic: Geoffrey Willans’ Molesworth is of course the exemplar here (“Gaze in mirror at yore strange unatural beauty”). Sometimes, though, the comedy is unintentional, as in The Young Visiters, written by nine-year-old Daisy Ashford and a surprise bestseller in 1919; it begins “Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him”, and continues in a similar vein for some time. Ring Lardner’s ‘The Young Immigrunts’, written contemporaneously with the success of Ashford’s book, is a knowing take on the theme. Lardner was a pioneer in the use of the US vernacular, championed by (among others) Virginia Woolf. Less flashily brilliant than, say, Damon Runyon, he wrote comic stories that were dense and characterful, and by 1919 had already created the baseball player Jack Keefe, one of literature’s great mis-spellers. The narrator of ‘The Young Immigrunts’ – supposedly Lardner’s four-year-old son – is a wonderful mix of Keefe and Ashford (“Wilst participateing in the lordly viands my father halled out his map and give it the up and down”). There’s magic in every line, and perhaps the most famous exchange in all Lardner’s work: “Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly. Shut up he explained.”

Collected in Selected Stories, Penguin, 1997

‘A Telephone Call’ by Dorothy Parker

If all you know about Dorothy Parker is that she had a zinging wit and a sad love life then you will pretty much know what to expect from ‘A Telephone Call’. It’s zingingly witty and achingly sad; it squeezes the rueful empathy of Parker’s longer works like ‘Big Blonde’ into a crammed monologue of infatuation, self-doubt and thwarted hope (we’re a long way, here, from the brilliant but frivolous ‘The Waltz’, a monologue that might seem to be from the same mould). “Oh, it’s so easy to be sweet to people before you love them!” the narrator cries, as she waits for her lover to call. Emotionally, it’s an exhausting thing to read, as one switchback slingshots you into the next; as a commentary on sexual politics, it’s uncompromisingly raw: “They don’t like you to tell them they’ve made you cry. They don’t like you to tell them you’re unhappy because of them. If you do, they think you’re possessive and exacting. And then they hate you. They hate you whenever you say anything you really think. You always have to keep playing little games.”

First published 1950