‘Assumption’ by Samuel Beckett

Beckett’s first short story was published in issue 16-17 of Eugene Jolas’s magazine transition in June 1929. He was in good company — the same issue featured a section of James Joyce’s ‘Work in progress’ (later to be published as Finnegans Wake in 1939). The title of Beckett’s story refers to The Feast of the Assumption (15th August) which celebrates the entry of the Virgin Mary into heaven.

Usually described or dismissed as an apprentice work, or juvenilia (the author was 22), it may be (as some critics have claimed) that this short fiction is a parody of the Künstlerroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, something intended to amuse Beckett’s literary mentor. Another reading is that Beckett is debunking the myth of the artist as incarnated in Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, which he does by degrading the aesthetic priorities of his protagonist, who experiences romantic agony but in a form that may be no more than post-coital depression. It’s a fascinating debut, with many Beckettian tropes already in place.

First published in transition, June 1929 and collected in Samuel Beckett: the Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, Grove Press, 1995

‘A Bit of a Smash in Madras’ by Julian Maclaren-Ross

When Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon magazine first read this story in 1940 he was struck by the opening sentence: “Absolute fact, I knew fuck all about it.” This would appear in print as the milder profanity ‘damn all.’ (Issue 6, June 1940) Connolly, impressed by the authentic tone and detail of the story assumed that that the author had spent time in India and was astonished to discover on meeting him that this wasn’t the case. Maclaren-Ross was a threadbare bohemian, barely keeping afloat in a world of booze, bailiffs and benzedrine… He was also among the very best writers of the 1940s, much admired by better-known contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. When the latter praised him as ‘a writer’s writer’ Maclaren-Ross gloomily responded: “No. I’m a writer’s writer’s writer.”

In this debut story Adams, an army officer back in Britain after serving in colonial India, describes his involvement in a hit-and-run accident and the ensuing red tape, bribery, obfuscation and trial. His first-person narrative — gruff, entitled, rather stupid but supremely confident — is utterly convincing, and an impressive act of mimesis. Adams is wholly oblivious to the consequences of his actions and entirely callous in his complete lack of remorse. His breezy account offers an unwittingly ferocious critique of colonial rule and a powerful indictment of injustice.

First published in Horizon, June 1940, and collected in Better Than a Kick in the Pants; Short Stories by J. Maclaren Ross, Lawson & Dunn, 1945, and in Memoirs of the Forties, Cardinal, 1991, which is warmly recommended

‘The Geranium’ by Flannery O’Connor

O’Connor wrote two fine novels: Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). Her 31 short stories were collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965). Her first story to appear in print was published in Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature. ‘The Geranium’ (1946) is one of six stories gathered in her 1947 master’s thesis The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories, and it later appeared in the posthumous anthology The Complete Stories (1971).

In ‘The Geranium’ an elderly white Southerner moves to New York City, where he is surprised to find that the local blacks treat him as their social equal, a loss (form his perspective) of social status that prompts and increasing sense of his own inferiority and powerlessness. O’Connor reworked the story several times over the years and in 1993 four versions of the story were published together in Flannery O’Connor: The Growing Craft. These were ‘The Geranium’, ‘An Exile in the East’ (1954), ‘Getting Home’ (1964), and ‘Judgement Day,’ which was the last thing she ever wrote and the only one she approved for publication in her lifetime.

First published in Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature, 1946, and available to read online here; collected in The Complete Stories, 1971

‘Marina’ by M. John Harrison

“With the discovery of God on the far side of the Moon, and the subsequent gigantic and hazardous towing operation that brought Him back to start His reign anew, there began on Earth, as one might assume, a period of far-reaching change.”

That’s the opening sentence of the first short story in the anthology Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020 (published by Comma Press in 2020), and it shares its title with the collection. Published in 1970 it’s not the earliest of Harrison’s fictions, and in many ways untypical, but is a favourite of mine partly on account of its majestic premise: in the wake of God’s new reign on Earth a civil servant named Oxlade travels from London to investigate the sudden appearance of a twenty-lane freeway that emerges from the Thames estuary in Southend-on-Sea (the town where I grew up) and runs inland to the Midlands, its purpose uncertain. Deserted by day, there is intense movement after dark, with enormous driverless trucks transporting elements of colossal statuary to serve some unknowable Divine purpose. The story becomes ‘a complicated business, with a solution perhaps more metaphysical than actual.’

But Harrison’s first published story was not ‘Settling the World.’ That distinction goes to ‘Marina,’ which had appeared four years earlier in the magazine Science Fantasy(issue 81, February 1966). This was published under the pen name ‘John Harrison’ and has, alas, proved elusive. It doesn’t appear to have been anthologised. Can anyone share a copy? [Ed.: Former Personal Anthologist Ray Davies shared this link to read Harrison’s ‘Marina’ online.]

Harrison’s first novel, The Committed Men, would appear in 1971. Many novels and short story collections have followed and his latest novel, The End of Everything, was published recently to huge acclaim and is currently shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is (I think) as good as anything he has written in a long career.

First published in Science Fantasy issue 81, February 1966

‘The Sylvan Life’ by Jonathan Meades

Meades has featured only once in A Personal Anthology, and it’s for this story, chosen by his long-time publisher John Mitchinson.

Meades has parallel careers as a journalist, essayist, critic, broadcaster and novelist, which may explain why his short stories, once widely acclaimed, are now overlooked and undervalued. ‘The Sylvan Life’ first appeared in the genteel pages of Harpers & Queen in November 1982 and later in his debut collection Filthy English (Jonathan Cape, 1984), published when Meades was employed as Features Editor at Tatler. As well as four hefty collections of his non-fiction writings, two novels would follow: Pompey(1993) and The Fowler Family Business (2002), both (to my mind) overwrought and overlong. As a fiction writer he’s at his best in small doses.

Filthy English made quite a stir at the time. Seven short stories, all as dark and transgressive and as disturbing as anything by Ian McEwan. ‘The Sylvan Life’ was set in the 1950s and is an account of impoverished rural life and incest in the New Forest. It opens thus:

“A chicken that is killed by being swung round and round by the neck will evacuate itself and so leave a thin cloacal trail all across the walls and the ceiling (the colour of a diseased lung) and across the bursting sofa and the happy family gewgaws and the nicotine brown photo of the Saints and the pin-up photo of the girl in the peanut adverts (dead now – tuinoll and gin) and the poker-work antimacassar stapled to the door and across the matted slab of carpet and the ragged hairy moist rug pile where the cats slept and the meat- encrusted plates they ate off and the mallets and the axes and the right across the mirror whose lost silvering already gave it the look of a slide constellated with gonococci.”

The matchless squalor, precisely and almost lovingly catalogued, culminates in the show-off flourish of “constellated with gonococci,” the young Meades flexing his literary muscles. Things get really nasty after that because the author, like Dickens’s Fat Boy, ‘wants to make your flesh creep.’ This he does, gleefully and repeatedly.

First published in Harpers & Queen, November 1982, and collected in Filthy English, Jonathan Cape, 1984

‘The Auctioneer’ by David Hayden

First published in The Yellow Nib: The Literary Journal of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, (Volume 5, November 2009). The same story, slightly altered, appears in Hayden’s outstanding debut collection Darker with the Lights On (Little Island Press, 2017). Few books have carried heftier recommendations, with cover endorsements by Eimear McBride, Kevin Barry, Sinéad Gleeson and, er… myself. ‘The Auctioneer’ is narrated with measured formality by a man at a turning-point in his life. It has (like many of Hayden’s short fictions) a haunting, universal quality. Kafka, of course, comes to mind:

“When my wife departed I moved to this bungalow, which is very comfortable in a modest way. I prefer modesty now that humility has been forced upon me. The auctioneer arranged for a cash advance on the balance of those belongings that Ellen did not take with her and with which I no longer wanted to live. He believed that he would achieve a better price for the paintings and furniture at the twice-yearly metropolitan auction; and so it turned out.”

First published in The Yellow Nib: The Literary Journal of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Volume 5, November 2009 and collected in Darker with the Lights On, Little Island Press, 2017

‘Still Turning Slowly’ by Sara Baume

Now an established Irish writer of both fiction and non-fiction, Baume is also an artist. Her breakthrough as an author came with the short story ‘Solesearcher1’ which was awarded the Davy Byrne Prize in 2014. But before that she had published a handful of short stories in The Stinging Fly, the first of which appeared in the winter 2010/2011 issue. ‘Still Turning Slowly’ opens thus:

“Once it was a butchers shop with bloody aprons on the coat hooks and a queue of smartened housewives out the doors and down the main street, queuing for their turkeys at Christmastime. But the old signboard is long gone now, along with the slicers and cleavers and ratchets, the smell of slopped guts and marinated chops. And Tabitha Byrne can never be sure, when she puts the key in the switch and jerks it to twelve o’clock, whether the shutter will open or not. It is rusted raw and paintless – frayed in the middle like an overwalked step. The objects displayed inside the shop front judder to its rhythm and it groans like a thing possessed as it climbs. The fact that it has never once faltered in two- and-more decades does nothing to reassure Tabitha. She knows only that, one day, it will.”

What follows is a precisely observed, gently-paced description of failure and a miserable marriage. The rains fall constantly, torrentially, and there is a threat of flooding (a subject Baume would later revisit). In a nearby funfair an empty ferris wheel rotates slowly above the rooftops, while in the failing pet shop she manages for her awful husband, hamsters scamper feverishly towards Syria, turning their own little wheels, getting nowhere. Tabitha, the wife, keeps a small wad of emergency banknotes in an urn containing her mother’s ashes. A sense of inertia, of lives stalled, recalls the social paralysis of Joyce’s Dubliners.

First published in The Stinging Fly, Issue 11, Vol 2, 2010, and available for subscribers to read here

‘Czech Mate’ by Drew Gummerson

In 1999, returning to Britain from a. Trip to Australia, Drew bought the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook which confirmed that Women’s Weekly paid for stories. He wrote ‘Czech Mate’ and posted it on spec to the magazine. They accepted it and promptly sent a cheque for £100. A hundred quid in 1999 went a long way – it’s equivalent to around £230 today, which doesn’t go nearly as far. Drew doesn’t have a copy of the magazine of the story. But it’s sobering to think that it used to be this easy for a first-time author to get into print. As I write this I learn that the popular and hugely profitable UK magazine Take a Break is about to generate all its published fiction by using AI.

Drew tells me his very first short story in print was in his school magazine in around 1986. He wrote a series of crime stories called ‘Tod Towski Investigates’ which carried on into sixth form college. He resurrected Towski earlier this year, 40 years after his first appearance, in a flash fiction piece for Pistol Jim Press called ‘Zoran’s Flea Circus.’ You can read it here.

First published in Women’s Weekly, 1999

‘To All Their Dues’ by Wendy Erskine

This, Wendy’s first short story, appeared in the May 2016 issue of The Stinging Fly and would later feature in her debut collection Sweet Home (2018). Her second collection Dance Moves (2022) supports a claim that she has done for contemporary Belfast what Joyce did for Dublin a century earlier. I thought long and hard about sharing a representative paragraph from one of the stories but couldn’t bring myself to dismember (as it were) such perfectly-crafted prose. If you know Wendy’s work you’ll understand; if you don’t you have a revelation in store.

Her debut novel The Benefactors (2025), among the very best novels of the year, met with popular and critical acclaim. Will there be more short stories? Let’s all hope so.

First published in The Stinging Fly, Issue 34, Vol 2, 2016, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Sweet Home, Stinging Fly/Picador, 2018

‘Theme of the Traitor and Hero’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley

A story about reputation, the relations between truth and spectacle and the prison space of the ideal reader, story and telling are both so daring you gasp with delight. Borges is convinced that a short story can be absolutely anything he wants it to be – and why not. The tale concerns the dramatic assassination of a much-loved national independence hero, or rather the unravelling of what ‘really’ happened by the hero’s great grandson who is compiling his biography. The idea that stories should be, if not exactly original, then at least different from other stories, is demolished:

“The action transpires in some oppressed and stubborn country: Poland, Ireland, the Republic of Venice, some state in South America or the Balkans … Has transpired, we should say, for although the narrator is contemporary, the narrative related by him occurred towards the middle or beginning of the nineteenth century. Let us say, for purposes of narration, that it was in Ireland, in 1824. The narrator is named Ryan …’

This is not only a story that could happen in many times and places and has. It also bears uncanny resemblances to famous historical events and literary texts, as Ryan discovers. These likenesses both ground the story as the tale of a ‘true’ hero, and suggest complex, near-unbelievable duplicity.

First published in Spanish in Sur in February 1944. First published in English in Fictions, Jupiter Books, 1965, translated by Anthony Kerrigan. Also available, translated by Andrew Hurley, in Collected Fictions, Penguin, 1999

‘Her Table Spread’ by Elizabeth Bowen

I have never been sure about what happens at the end of this story and I won’t speculate here, except to say that all the possibilities are disturbing.

The action takes place over a single evening. An Englishman, Alban, whose point of view prevails for much of the story, has been invited to a dinner party at a grand house, or ‘Castle’, owned by an Anglo-Irish heiress, Valeria Cuff. The exactness of the moment, after the Anglo-Irish Treaty but presumably before the Civil War, gives specific charge to the Gothic elements of the tale.

House and inhabitants are the ghosts and relics of the dying Protestant Ascendancy. Valeria’s avid sexual exuberance and disproportionate ambitions promise transgression. An English destroyer, moored in the estuary, intimates violence. And yet. The story’s tone and form are comic. The vain dinner guest quickly discovers that the lady of the house is more excited about the arrival of other visitors. Attempts at elegance founder, Alban sets down to play a damp piano. “He played badly, but they were unmusical.” In the strange, expectant atmosphere which Bowen creates with such delicate discipline, comic misunderstanding thrives but so do Gothic delusions and hallucinations. By the end of the story, the boundaries and differences between the two have become difficult for the reader to fathom.

First published as ‘A Conversation Piece’ in The Broadsheet Press, May 1930. Collected in Collected Stories, Vintage Classics, 1999

‘Catastrophe’ by Dino Buzzati, translated by Judith Landry

The Tartar Steppe (1940) was my introduction to Buzzati. It occupies one of my favourite types of literary space: a highly specific, plausible world whose logic and ontology remains just out of view. Many of the stories in this collection exist in similar territory, including ‘Catastrophe’. The story has a very simple shape. The narrator is on a non-stop, fast train to Northern Italy when an idle glance out of the window reveals the unexpected. A woman leaning on the fence, who he is smugly sure is watching his train speed by, is distracted from “a wonderful daily spectacle”, by a man who rushes up to her shouting. Similar episodes follow and start to create a disturbing pattern. The strange behaviour of people outside the train is captured in a few, spare images: a man with cupped hands calling across a field, fields of corn and lucerne trampled by anxious, running feet. As the train hurtles through a station, “[a] small boy with a bundle of newspapers tried to chase after us, waving one with great black headline on the front page…” Like many of Buzzati’s stories, ‘Catastrophe’ is about anxiety. The story starts to bounce between the images of flight and panic beyond the train and the passengers’ attempt to ignore what is obvious or break the silence, even when everyone stares at the emergency cord at the same moment. But no one does anything and they carry on hurtling towards the very place from which everyone else is fleeing, and the reader must travel with them.

First published in English in Catastrophe and Other Stories, Alma Classics, 2018

‘The Lady of the House of Love’ by Angela Carter

Rewritings of fairy tales and myths from alternative perspectives are now so ubiquitous that it’s worth returning to Carter’s collection to grasp just what a challenge her writing represents. ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ is a vampire story, and I love vampires, but the vampire heroine, with her enormous dark eyes and monstrously luscious mouth longs to escape her Nosferatu ancestry and sanguinary appetite. Her next likely victim, a young, blond, British soldier may just offer her salvation. “He has chosen the most rational mode of transport in the world for his trip around the Carpathians. To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion.”

The young soldier thinks the lady of the house is wearing an old wedding dress – shades of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. But she also seems not human, a ventriloquist’s doll or automaton – a favourite figure in Carter – which also evokes Estella, Miss Havisham’s puppet. Like the other stories in The Bloody Chamber, ‘The Lady … ’ foregrounds fairy tale law: the mute crone who offers supper and a bed for the night to the lonely traveller, stark visual polarities, the concealed, vivid presence of the supernatural, and all manner of vampire lore. Above all, it is the patriarchal and determinist logic of fairy tales that Carter dissolves with her characteristic meshing of the critical and the erotic, not to speak of history hidden in plain sight.

Frst published in The Iowa Review, 1975. Collected in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Gollancz 1979 and in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Vintage 1996.

‘The Reservoir’ by Janet Frame

The children are told not to go to the reservoir by their parents, but no one explains why. Is it too far? Is it dangerous? Inevitably it exerts a fascination, over a long, hot, boring summer.

“It was said to be four or five miles along the gully, past orchards and farms, paddocks filled with cattle, sheep, wheat, gorse, and the squatters of the land who were the rabbits eating like modern sculpture into the hills, though how could we know anything of modern sculpture, we knew nothing but the Warrior in the main street with his wreaths of poppies on Anzac Day, the gnomes weeping in the Gardens because the seagulls perched on their green caps and showed no respect, and how important it was for birds, animals and people, especially children, to show respect!”

Frame’s linguistic brilliance glitters from the very first, long sentence of the story which starts with naturalistic description and standard metaphor – the squatters are rabbits – and then turns strange, the rabbits are eating like “modern sculpture” – changing the shape of the landscape. But the phrase is jarring as the narrator immediately admits, introducing a subsequent self who sees differently.

Frame is one of my favourite writers, fusing psychological complexity with a quicksilver imaginary. Her take on the growing-up story explores childhood knowledge as an ever-shifting threshold. The children wander around Woolworths looking at condoms that might be finger stalls, no one is sure. The same goes for the iron lung that afflicts some of the children. Is it a site of glamour, something akin to the iron mask of the Count of Monte Cristo, or is it something to be terrified of?

First published in The New Yorker in January 1963. Collected in The Daylight and the Dust: Selected Short Stories, Virago, 2015. Read online at the Internet Archive here