Author: Jonathan Gibbs

‘Drinking Coffee Elsewhere’ by Z.Z. Packer

This is a deeply satisfying story about a deeply frustrating, and frustrated, central character. Dina has arrived at Yale University from a background of some privation and with something of a chip on her shoulder. In an early class, she and her classmates are asked to nominate an inanimate object they relate to and Dina, in the kind of fully conscious, fully self-destructive moment that will characterise her behaviour in this story, chooses a revolver. Dina’s problem is that she is unable to work out what story to tell about herself, and bitterly opposed to the stories anybody else tries to tell about her, particularly a gender questioning student she grows close to yet remains aloof from, for reasons she (characteristically) can’t articulate, though the reader will have their suspicions. It’s sometimes said that good stories are timeless, but this story unmistakably originates in the America of the early 2000s, both in its depiction of an academic world on the brink of a fall, and in the language the students use to talk about themselves and one another (“Her name was Heidi, although she said she wanted people to call her Henrik. ‘That’s a guy’s name,’ I said. ‘What do you want? A sex change?’”). Yet Dina’s situation is familiar and universal: she’s the outsider who yearns to belong but fearing this might mean losing her sense of self, cleaves to – maybe even invents – what sets her apart.

First published in The New Yorker, June 11 2000, and available to read here. Collected in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Riverhead Books, 2003

‘Human Development’ by Anthony Veasna So

Another campus story, this time set in the slightly panicky aimlessness of post-graduation. The narrator of ‘Human Development’, from the only collection published by the late Anthony Veasna So, and also named Anthony, is a Stanford graduate who has grown jaded of being the only Cambodian American in any room, and of the expectation from others that he represent a country, a culture, a whole people. On a hookup app he meets Ben, his equal and opposite, a Cambodian American who’s as extroverted, cheerful and driven as Anthony is gloomy and rudderless. Where he sees his minority background as an impediment, Ben – a developer with an idea for an app based around identity politics that is both silly and chilling – thinks the pair and their associate Vinny can use it as a status symbol, even monetise it. There’s so much here about academia (Anthony teaches a humanities course that gives the story its title and, for all his pessimism, genuinely feels Moby-Dick can be a guide to life for “rich kids with fake Adderall prescriptions”), fitting in and standing out, queer identities, and the way that having all of life available to you – the endless scrolling screen of the hookup app – can be as inhibiting and trapping as being starved of opportunity. I rather enjoy a discursive, character-driven story where plot isn’t a priority, and ‘Human Development’ unfurls easily, casually, conversationally, painfully, in a way that always leaves me wanting more.

Collected in Afterparties, Atlantic, 2021

‘A Little Like Light’ by A. L. Kennedy

For about a year I’ve had a line stuck in my head that I knew must come from an A.L. Kennedy story because it’s so painful and so wry, so unmistakably her; including one of her stories here was a given, and as I was going through various candidates, I stumbled on the source of it. ‘A Little Like Light’ is the story of John Edward, a (this is quintessential Kennedy) sexually frustrated school janitor and self-taught close-up magician navigating what could be, might become, may never turn into an affair with one of the schoolteachers. Kennedy never judges her protagonists – John is self-flagellating enough – but simply relates, an empath wielding a scalpel, every minute shift in the non-couple’s relationship and the progress of John’s own self-loathing. Towards the end, as he realises the affair will never come to anything, almost relishing the understanding, we get his wonderful, gutting revelation: “This is love. This terrible feeling. This knowing I would rather see her than be content.” No wonder it stuck with me. It takes the top off my head, every time.

Collected in Indelible Acts, Jonathan Cape, 2002

‘Evie’ by Sarah Hall

I realise on looking through this list that few of the stories I’ve selected have a plot twist of the kind that, growing up, it was impressed on me a good short story ought to have (it’s probably hard to teach a child about a gradual dawning realisation or a shift in perspective that casts previous details in a new light). “Evie” is an exception: a brilliant and alarming narrative that builds and builds before a devastating revelation transforms it into an entirely different kind of story. It starts small, with the narrator startled when his wife, the titular Evie, scoffs a bar of chocolate despite not having much of a sweet tooth. Gradually, Evie’s appetites intensify and expand, and soon she is exhibiting wilder hungers. Seeming to pick up her husband’s mild, almost genial sense of marital frustration, she begins behaving in ways that eerily reflect, even anticipate, his idle sexual fantasies. What begins as a kind of wish-fulfilment for her husband – the wife as wanton – becomes ever more dangerous. Unnerving, too, is the growing sense that even this “good man”, who’s on the verge of boasting about this change in his circumstances, thinks on some level of Evie as property to be commodified. Desire itself, personified, is overtaking the characters, warping them into new shapes … and then the twist comes. The wonderful tension here is between the storyline’s almost outrageous eroticism – how far is Evie going to go? How implicated is a reader titillated by the frank and graphic descriptions of Evie’s suddenly boundless sexuality? – and Hall’s always meticulous writing, her precise sentences and alertness to detail.

First published in The Sunday Times, July 2013, and available to read here; collected in Madame Zero, Faber, 2017; also in Sex and Death, ed. Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs, Faber, 2017

‘Sixteen Straws’ by The Drones

Not a story, but an epic reworking of an Australian folk song, “Moreton Bay”, reimagined by now defunct Melbourne four-piece The Drones. The originating ballad describes the brutal conditions of a New South Wales penal station overseen by a historical figure, the vicious “commandant” Patrick Logan. The Drones extend and expand this into a saga of the terrible bargain struck by the prisoners on the chain gang as they seek to escape their imprisonment by any means possible. Over acoustic guitar and ghostly mouth organ, Gareth Liddiard’s gaunt, swampy croak – right up close to the microphone, intimate and terrible – adds harrowing novelistic detail, such as an aside about the prison camp’s “chief flogger” who rinses “his lash in a bucket / Then drinks the remains”. When the prisoners form a scheme to cut short their sentences, things go from bad to worse: there comes murder, flames, gunfire, death and catastrophe. Lyrically it’s magnificent, sonically it puts my hair on end. It’s so wide-open yet constrictive, so fierce and desolate yet beautiful – so Australian – and it ends on an unforgettable cliffhanger.

From the album Gala Mill, Shock/ATP Recordings, 2006

‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley

“I met a traveller from an antique land,” starts the narrator. What is being offered to the reader in the course of this short (just fourteen lines) story? Person, setting, incident, mood; a precise choice of whittled-down language and detail; a particular way of considering, isolating, describing something, so that a moment in text resonates out through time and space and over “the lone and level sands.” These seem to me to be pertinent aspects of a short story; that’s what Shelley’s doing, entirely successfully, here. I think this one through in my mind when I wake up in the night, and it calms my heartbeat, sends me off to sleep.

First published in The Examiner, January 1818. Collected in Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; With Other Poems, C. and J. Ollier, 1819, and Selected Poems and Prose, Penguin Classics, 2017. Available online here

‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A man trying to go to a wedding meets another man. It’s the ancient Mariner, who collars the Guest and proceeds to tell him an absolutely cracking story. Then what happened – Death and a thousand thousand crawly things came out playing ghostly dice? Hold off unhand me greybeard loon, too right. The events are memorable, and the language lovely: “The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out: / At one stride comes the dark;” (though I notice with interest that this verse is an improvement, added in to later editions).

I like the way it foreshadows Melville’s 1851 Moby-Dick, too, with a sailor who has encountered a white creature seeing his ship go down with all companions into a whirlpool, while he alone bobs up to tell the tale. And the Mariner’s story demonstrates the power of storytelling: the Guest misses the ceremony; he’s been educated, informed and entertained; he ends up “A sadder and a wiser man.” If the Mariner’s adventure can wreak that on the Wedding-Guest, what might it do to us readers, too? A good story broadcasts or expands, on and on; it has an afterlife, as though radioactive.

Included in Lyrical Ballads, J. and A. Arch, 1798 and The Complete Poems, Penguin Classics, 1997. Available online here

‘Introduction’ by Alan Garner

This is an intro written nearly forty years later for a reissue of Garner’s own 1973 novel Red Shift. It’s also a story, in a personal vein, in which Garner investigates the process of creativity, describing how ideas, memories, and events pile up then tug at your sleeve. He’s explaining how he came to write the book, and it involves a meeting with a neighbour: “A descendant of an old Mow Cop family told me a story she’d heard from her grandmother, who could neither read nor write.” But she had retained the oral tradition that some Spanish slaves, being marched north to build a wall, escaped and established a dark-haired community in Cheshire. Garner is “startled” to realise that this old, local folk tale is a version of the story of the Legion of the 9th, lost to Roman history in 120 AD.

He describes this meeting as an illustration of how he works, gathering scraps of stories, repeating and reworking them. And though he lights on the final line very early on in the process, he then has to “leave it and let the rest of the story write me.” Garner is a very distinctive writer. I wouldn’t say I even like his stories, not most of them, (though his retelling of the Russian ‘Bash Tchelik’ is fabulous) but they are completely haunting; they don’t let you go.

First published in the NYRB reissue of Garner’s own 1973 novel Red Shift, 2011

‘In Uncertain Time’ by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

In a Madrid nightclub the narrator encounters a famous footballer, then, later, his girlfriend. It turns out badly. I like the whole of Marías’s line that weaves in and out between reportage, film reviews, memoir, pondering, making up stories about the past. This one’s about writing about football, which I like. And about the relationship between time and language, football and sex.

Many of his short pieces are factual, about the “real” Marías, it seems. But, as with anything, once it’s written down and given to someone else to read, that becomes its status: a story on the page. Any other attributes: truth, fictionality, genre, person; they’re all only notional now. It’s all stories.

First published in Spanish as ‘En el tiempo indeciso’ in the collection Cuentos de futbol, Alfaguara, 1995. First published in English in When I Was Mortal, Harvill, 1999

‘The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-winkle’ by Beatrix Potter

This one is imaginary, sort of. The main tale is a story about a girl called Lucie who meets the eponymous washerwoman and discusses the increasingly precarious status of the rural working classes. Or, it’s a fairy tale about a hedgehog. All of Potter’s short stories have great illustrations, obviously, but the language – all the phrases, names, cadences – and the characters (Old Mr. Benjamin Bunny smoking his home-grown!), and sense of place, are wonderful even without the pictures.

And as with the Mariner, it’s a story with a framing device, which comes not at the start but as a footnote at the end: although some people think Lucie must have been dreaming, the narrator demurs: “I have seen that door into the back of the hill called Cat Bells–and besides I am very well acquainted with dear Mrs. Tiggy-winkle!”

The narrator’s engagement with the beyond-the-human has altered her doors of perception, contributed to her intertextual world-building. If you like that sort of thing, Potter is way ahead of the curve. If you just like badly-behaved kittens, she’s also great.

Frederick Warne & Co., 1905

‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad

Now I’m tacking to the traditional, with a longish short story, told by an effacing narrator who sits in the boat at Greenwich and listens to Marlow telling a story about “how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap.”

I’ve just put this in because Conrad is brilliant, he’s a water/death writer, and he produces many short stories and long novels about which we can at length debate which is the best. Pass the port.

First serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1899. Collected in Youth, A narrative; and Two Other Stories, William Blackwood and Sons, 1902; Heart of Darkness, Penguin, 1989. Available online at Project Gutenberg here

‘The Old Doll’s House’ by Damon Runyon

Another classic here with Damon Runyon. They’re all about the narrator strolling down Broadway and bumping into one of the guys. Who tells him a story. There are so many good ones – ‘Dancing Dan’s Christmas,’ ‘Dark Dolores’ (I like this one so much that we named our daughter after it) – but I’ll pick this one because it’s slightly Scheherazade-like, about how a good story can ward off the death that’s waiting just outside the door. The plot is that Lance McGowan has perhaps foolishly edged in on Angie the Ox’s splendid trade in merchandise, and is now being pursued by three very crude characters with sawed-offs. He takes refuge in the living-room of “the richest old doll in the world,” and charms this Miss Abigail Ardsley so convincingly that, during Lance’s subsequent trial for the murder of Angie the Ox, she’s happy to appear in Lance’s defence, stating that “It is just twelve o’clock by my clock” when Lance is with her, so it cannot have been him throwing four slugs into Angie at exactly this time, five blocks away.

There’s a twist, as in every Runyon. And as in every story, his language is just so funny. Or, the language of the nameless narrator, who explains that “the reason I know this story is because Lance McGowan tells most of it to me, as Lance knows that I know his real name is Lancelot, and he feels under great obligation to me because I never mention the matter publicly.”

More and more it strikes me, on re-reading Runyon, that there’s a commodity even more important than money or booze (that’s, potatoes or wet goods) to the guys and the dolls, and that’s information. That’s what they’re all hustling for, trying to control the flow of, conceal, withhold, embellish, all the time.

First published probably in Collier’s Weekly during the 1930s. Collected in More Than Somewhat, Constable and Company, 1937 and On Broadway, Penguin, 1990

‘At the Gallery of National Art’ by C. D. Rose

I pick this because C. D.  is my current literary hero, with his expanding galaxy of books about books about photos of writers who write about reading books about typewriters… I like the way that he uses the form of the short story (and the lecture, the compilation, the bibliography,) to build up one large, hilarious oeuvre which basically expands upon the idea of “we love to read.” With Tintin jokes.

In this story, a blankly desolate man meets a visitor: “sometimes I am startled into feeling: this morning, for example, a young girl came to me and asked me a question at which I marvelled.” So says the narrator, who is, as he repeatedly states, a Warder at the Gallery of National Art. We don’t know the question, let alone the answer, as he’s unable to reply to her, then or years later. Time bundles and tangles in the gallery and in the Warder’s mind, as it does right through this collection, and through Rose’s other books. 

The ‘A Brief Note on the Translation’ that precedes this collection of stories includes the useful observation that “I once knew someone (who was an idiot) who claimed they would never read a work in translation, as it was not authentic. But there is no authentic text, no original.”

In The Blind Accordionist, Melville House, 2021