‘Pelt’ by Angela Readman

Although ‘Pelt’ is, technically, a reimagining of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, Readman instead shines a spotlight on Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, giving us a sense of what she experienced when inside the body of the wolf. A beautifully written tale of transformation, it confirms to me that Readman is one of the best writers of magical realism in the UK today.

First published in The Forgotten and the Fantastical 5, Mother’s Milk Books, 2019. Collected in The Girls Are Pretty Crocodiles & Other Fairy Tales, Valley Press, 2022

‘Grey Area’ by Will Self

The protagonist in ‘Grey Area’ is a young woman who works in the Department, at the Company. Charged with carrying out various administrative tasks for her boss, who is the Head of Department, she becomes sure that she is stuck in some kind of stasis – there seems to be no shift in the seasons, the sky remains the same grey colour, and her period, though due, stubbornly refuses to start. There isn’t a great deal that happens in this story, yet it’s shot through with Self’s darkly comic observations on office life; the tragedy of finding oneself in an uncanny limbo.

First published in Grey Area, Penguin Books, 1994

‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens

A near-perfect example of one of the seven basic plots (rebirth), I have no doubt that this archetypal story will continue to find fans as the years go by since it offers the reader a blueprint for the process of individuation, asking us that most discomforting of questions: do you have the strength to undergo personal transformation; to become the best person you can be? Or will you stumble at the hurdles on the hard journey before you? Thankfully, Dickens showed us how even the worst kind of person has the capacity for great change within him, and in doing so, inspired generations of readers.

First published by Chapman & Hall, 1843 and widely available in print and online

‘Story of Your Life’ by Ted Chiang

Technically a novella, ‘Story of Your Life’ may be better known as the film, Arrival,which was directed by Denis Villeneuve. Nominated for a number of Academy Awards, I’m not surprised by the success of its translation to the screen because first contact films always have a certain allure to them. We cannot help but be curious as to what aliens might look like if and when we ever get to meet them. But the novella is so much more than just a story about first contact. It is about motherhood and language and time, and the curiously static, though transformational, quality of free will.

First published in Starlight 2, 1998. Collected in Stories of Your Life and Others, Tor Books 2002

‘The New Utopia’ by Jerome K. Jerome

This short and witty story by the wonderfully-named Jerome K. Jerome, first published in 1891, confirms two things: people have always complained about the state of society and they’ve always been very sure as to exactly how to fix their society (if only they were in charge). So Jerome takes his protagonist into the future to show him exactly what a strictly equal society would look like. (It’s not good.)

Having an interest in the roots of dystopian fiction, I’d add that it’s not difficult to see how Jerome’s story may have influenced Yevgeny Zamyatin, the author of the novel, We – We being the direct inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984. So if We is considered the grandfather of all dystopian fiction, what does that make the even older, ‘The New Utopia’? I’d like to think that Jerome would approve of his story being a ‘great grandfather’ to this thought-provoking genre.

First published in Diary of a Pilgrimage and Six Essays, J. W. Arrowsmith, 1891. Now out of copyright and freely available online)

‘The Three Gold Hairs’ by Clarissa Pinkola Estés (though she writes that the little core of the story was given to her by her ‘Tante’ Kata)

This wonderfully told tale starts with an old, exhausted man wandering through the woods at night and carrying a lantern in which the candle is about to go out. Unexpectedly, he finds himself at the door of a warm, light-filled cottage, and it is there that he is looked after by an old woman and nursed back to vigour. Ostensibly a straightforward fairy tale, Estés explains that the story is really about creativity, and its ebb and flow. A deeply satisfying tale of transformation, it’s one that I’ve told to my children many times, and over many years. I don’t think they know why they like it so much, but being an archetypal story of rebirth, it will never fail to cast its spell on the reader who is still open to the power of magic.

First published in Women Who Run With The Wolves, Ballantine Books, 1992

Introduction

These are not the best short stories ever, nor are they representative of anything apart from themselves. I’ve read hundreds of others that clamoured to be listed, so in the end this is, as much as anything else, a list of Great Omissions. There are no stories in translation—nothing by Borges, Maupassant, Chekhov, Babel, Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Clarice Lispector, Julio Cortázar, or Eileen Chang. And nothing by Henry James, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, Henry Green, Virginia Woolf, Edward Upward, Dorothy Richardson, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle…oh, I’ve hardly got started on who’s not on this list. Let alone all the many brilliant living writers, old and young, who deserve a look in, and who (with one exception) I’ve excluded. The few stories that remain, the ones that are on the list, are just twelve of the stories that have obstinately stuck in my head, for one reason or another, at various points in the last fifty years or more. I’ve listed them alphabetically, for fairness.

‘The Iconoclasts’ by A.L. Barker

Towards the end of the second world war, a five-year-old boy, Marcus, with a small and fearful growing awareness of the world around him, spends the afternoon with Neil, five years older, full of his knowledge, scathing of Marcus’s childishness, and possessed of a kind of fanaticism, “an ardour so extreme, so pitiless that it chilled and almost repelled”. Neil lives by the airfield, wants the war to go on long enough for him to be a pilot; he sees a decayed windmill over the fields and sets off, accompanied by Marcus, to explore it, and decides to test his nerve by swinging down on one of the sails and jumping off at the botttom, making a “four-point landing”. Unfortunately, the sails won’t turn, and eventually Neil falls to his death. The story, focalised through Marcus’s consciousness draws its force from the limits of his vision, almost like an allegory of short story form itself.

First published in Innocents, Hogarth Press, 1947 and collected in Submerged: Selected Stories, Virago, 2020

‘Look at All Those Roses’ by Elizabeth Bowen

Like most of Bowen’s stories, this is one that reveals more and more about itself every time I read it. I love first of all the description with which it opens, two bored and mutually disappointed young people driving back to London through a curiously inert Suffolk landscape, empty and still and hot. Their car breaks down half a mile after they’ve past a house, the front covered in the eponymous roses. What happens after that unfolds in Bowen’s best manner, slowly revealing things that remain unspoken and inconclusive, raising all sorts of questions and reflecting the relationship of the central protagonists.

First published in Look at All Those Roses, Cape, 1941, and variously reprinted, including in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, Penguin, 1983

‘Broccoli’ by Maeve Brennan

This is a rather short short story, not much more than a page, and by some counts not really a story, being a personal anecdote. None of which matters, as the seemingly inconsequential account about the smallest of private failures takes on, fills with, rings with echoes of one’s own moments of lesser or greater failure.

First published in The New Yorker, 3 November 1963, and available to subscribers to read here; reprinted in The Long-Winded Lady Notes from The New Yorker, Boston: Mariner Books, 1998, Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016 and Peninsula Press, 2024, with an introduction by Sinéad Gleeson

‘Speed the Plough’ by Mary Butts

An early story by Mary Butts, about a shell-shocked conscript in the first world war, a mismatch both with the army and the normative assumptions of doctors and authorities, sent to recuperate by working on a dairy farm. The crude physicality of milking begins to sicken him—”There was a difference in nature between that winking, pearling flow and the pale decency of a Lyons’ tea jug”—and in the end he contrives to return to his job as a London couturier. Aesthetics, popular culture, gender, culture, nature and artifice, all interrogated and dramatised brilliantly.

First published in The Dial, 71 as ‘Speed the Plow’; reprinted in Speed the Plough and other stories, Chapman and Hall, 1923; in Natalie Blondel (ed.) With and Without Buttons and other stories, Carcanet Press, 1991; and in The Complete Stories, McPherson, 2014

‘Handel’ by Lydia Davis

I’m fond of this story (another very short one, less than a page) partly because I’m extremely keen on Handel’s music and, like the annoying husband in the story, I listen to it a lot of the time. The undecorated narration and the matter-of-fact but surreal conclusion is productively disturbing. Like a number of Lydia’s stories, this one is very short, very formal, and very much larger than it looks.

First published in Little Star, reprinted in Can’t and Won’t, Hamish Hamilton, 2014

‘The Singing Man’ by Fielding Dawson

This is possibly my favourite short story ever, perfect narrative control beside (and necessary to contain) an almost voluptuous love of the sheer exuberant presence of a delivery man in the street the narrator comes to enjoy the existence of, as he pushes a hand truck through the crowds, occasionally lifting his voice in a song. Not that he can sing well—he forgets the words, can’t hit the high notes, and embarrasses the passers-by—but an absolute social grace is what Dawson’s writing creates in this unembarrassed, inclusive, brilliant vision of city life.

From The Man Who Changed Overnight and other stories & dreams 1970-1974, Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1976

‘The Vanishing Princess or The Origins of Cubism’ by Jenny Diski

An apparently simple story, like a fairy story, but with complex, recursive thinking about ontology and desire. It’s shot through with ironic distance, and the distinctive Diski note of apparent objectivity masking implied feeling. (I have to add here that I was married to Jenny Diski, so have a special fondness for her writing, but that’s not the only reason for including this story.)

First published in the New Statesman, reprinted in The Vanishing Princess, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995