‘The Insect World’ by Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys writes so beautifully about the sadness and loneliness beneath the façades of cities. In my early 20s, I spent a year living in Paris, working as a nanny and an English tutor. I had very little money, and I rented a tiny attic room on the outskirts of the city, which didn’t have a shower or hot water. At that time, a romantic view of the world was a mode of survival; I read Jean Rhys and imagined her moving from café to café in her fur coat, looking for something or someone to lift her out of herself, not knowing where her next meal would come from.

Yet, I also learned that romanticism is a fallacy, which is evident in Rhys’ work. A cramped attic in Paris sounds romantic on paper, but when you’re cold, hungry and dirty, it is simply disempowering. The women in Rhys’ books are angry, hurt and disillusioned; they want frivolous things like nice dresses and glasses of wine, yet Rhys shows us that these things aren’t really flippant; they are symbols of desire caught in a complex intersection of gender, capitalism and need.

In, ‘The Insect World’, Rhys writes, “almost any book was better than life, Audrey thought. Or at least, life as she was living it”, which encapsulates how it feels to be caught in a difficult reality and attempting to dream your way out of it. She writes about the desire for transcendence or elation, to be lifted out of oneself for a moment, before crashing back into the cold, hard reality of your own circumstances and a life trapped within your own skin.

First published in The Sunday Times Magazine, 19 August 1973, and collected in Sleep it Off, Lady, André Deutsch, 1976. Also available in the Collected Stories, WW Norton, 1987 and then Penguin Modern Classics, 2017, and in the Penguin 60 Let Them Call it Jazz, 1995

‘The longform patriarchs and their accomplices’ by Bernadine Evaristo

Bernadine Evaristo’s 2020 Goldsmiths prize lecture is a manifesto for the future of literature. She deconstructs the literary canon through a revised history of the novel, from oral storytelling in Africa to the gatekeepers of the contemporary publishing world. She writes about the necessity of decolonising the curriculum and expanding our idea of ‘literature’ which has traditionally been published by the elite. She writes that, “the novel is thriving because of the fresh perspectives and narratives infusing it with new ideas, stories, cultures, life” and examines what it would mean for our bookshelves to be truly inclusive. This is a searing, timely essay which deserves a place on every university reading list.

New Statesman/Goldsmiths Prize lecture, October 2020. Available online here

‘My Jockey’ by Lucia Berlin

I moved to Donegal on the north-west coast of Ireland to write my first novel. I had been living in a London houseshare, juggling multiple jobs, so when my grandad died, leaving an empty cottage in Donegal, I decided to go there to find time and space to write. The house is in a remote fishing village and I cannot drive. I tutored a local student and cycled to the library every day. The experience was transformative; the landscape is wild and storm-wracked and I finally had a room of my own. I had very little money and no internet connection but I read and read, studying the shapes of novels and working out what kind of writer I might be.

My first novel, Saltwater, is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story, told through the lens of a mother-daughter relationship. It is partly about northern, working-class identity, which I hadn’t often seen represented in literary novels. A Manual for Cleaning Women is a collection of short stories about women working all kinds of menial jobs, trying to find their way through the world. The title references the cleaning women that Berlin writes about, but it also centres working-class women as the readers of the anthology; these stories are about us and also for us, which felt radical to me as a working-class woman trying to write my own story, prompting me to consider whom we assume writing is for.

‘My Jockey’ is a short, piercing story which demonstrates Berlin’s power. It is told from the perspective of a woman working in the emergency department of a hospital, looking after a jockey who arrives with broken bones. The piece explores power, gender roles, loneliness, motherhood and the fragility of the human body in Berlin’s stark, direct prose.

First published in Home Sick: New and Selected Stories, Black Sparrow, 1991; also in A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin, Picador, 2016

‘Smote (Or When I Cannot Kiss You in Front of a Print by Bridget Riley)’ by Eley Williams

I read this story on Durdle Door beach, my back pressed against warm limestone and my bare feet pushed into the pebbles. I had recently fallen in love and everything in my life was shifting. There was nothing to hold onto and it felt destabilising, yet thrilling, to be moving somewhere new. This story captures something of that feeling, while also exploring language, images, art-making and the politics of queer desire. Williams deconstructs narrative using innovative, exciting forms and her writing makes the world of ideas feel expansive.

“and you stark me
and I am strobe-hearted.”

First published in The White Review online, 2015 and collected in Attrib. and Other Stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘Life on Mars’ by David Bowie

Of course, this is a song, but it is also a story, and a room that allowed me to glimpse a different kind of world to the one I grew up in. I first encountered Bowie at 13, when I heard ‘Life on Mars’ on a television advert for home insurance. I had never encountered anything like his voice, or his lyrics, or those unsettling minor chord changes. When I saw a picture of Ziggy Stardust in his skin-tight spangled jumpsuit I downloaded his entire back catalogue and listened to it on the bus to school, watching the terraced houses and kebab shops blur into grey through the window, dreaming of a glamorous, dazzling life. My father wasn’t around much when I was growing up, but my mother told me that he also loved Bowie and I felt that the music connected us, pulling us closer together.

The day Bowie died, I went to Brixton. Hundreds of people thronged the streets, wielding guitars and cans of beer. The Ritzy cinema wrote, ‘David Bowie: Our Brixton Boy’ across their letterboard and people painted murals on the streets. Bowie had always felt like my secret, despite his fame, and it was humbling to see the effect he had on so many others. A man climbed on top of a van with a guitar, lit by an orange streetlight. He played ‘Life on Mars’ and the whole crowd sang along with him. The song was my story, but it was also the story of so many other people too, which is one of the best things that literature can do.

Released on Hunky Dory, RCA Records, 1971. You can listen to it here

‘Cleanness’ by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell is one of the best writers of sex, desire and emotion working today. He imbues each moment of intimacy between his characters with contrasting feelings of admiration, disgust, control and oblivion, which feel true to life. ‘Cleanness’ examines what it means to be clean, pure, debauched or dirty, what it means to want another person and the insubstantiality of both relationships and our own lives. His use of language is sharp and charged with feeling: “I thought, however slowly, nothing was solid, nothing would stay put, and I held on more tightly to R…I wanted to root into him, even as the wind said all rootedness was a sham, there were only passing arrangements, makeshift shelters and pearl harbours.” It is a masterful piece of short fiction that reminds me of the feeling of possibility that good writing creates.

Published in Cleanness, Picador, 2020

Introduction

When I started to compile a personal anthology, I tried to find a theme to wrap my choices around. But as I worked up a few possibilities, nothing came together convincingly and I ended up including things that I thought ought to be there rather than those I really liked.

So I decided just to bring some stories together, many of them recently published, which I’ve enjoyed the most and have shown me something new and interesting. In the process, coherence of a sort emerged – first geographical, then thematic. The writers who stood out for me come from Ireland and the Balkan countries, and many of these stories deal with exile, displacement and loss of home and family. It wasn’t a theme I had looked for, but the history of those places makes it unsurprising and I doubt there is a more pertinent and affecting subject for story-telling today.

‘A Love’ by Neil Jordan

Night in Tunisia was the first book of short stories I bought, forty years ago. I had seen Neil Jordan’s film Angel twice in a week when it was released, and the book had been in the news when it won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. After years of studying Shakespeare and fat Victorian novels, it was exciting to discover that stories which were so powerful and memorable could be told in short form. ‘A Love’ is the final story in the collection and the one that has stayed with me the longest. A young man and older woman meet again in Dublin after his long absence in London, on the day of de Valera’s funeral, then drive across country as they rake through the last embers of a relationship which started when he was a teenager and she a holiday landlady. It’s an elegiac and ruminative Oedipal story, which lingers in images like the “peculiar yearning” he felt when he found her father’s civil-war pistol and she took it from him and hid it between her breasts under her blouse: “you called it love, I remember. And it must have been”.

Collected in Night in Tunisia, The Irish Writers Co-operative, 1976, and Chatto and Windus, 1983

‘Cell’ by Wendy Erskine

I suspect all Wendy Erskine’s stories will eventually be included in these personal anthologies, and some, like ‘Cell’, more than once. It’s hard to choose a favourite from her collections, but this one includes all her strengths as a writer: depth of characterisation, subtle layering of place and time, humanity, empathy, and – even in a story as dark as this one – humour. It shows us Caro – Caroline – an isolated and vulnerable Irish student adrift in London who is “adopted” into a small and inept political group, and is then effectively held captive for almost twenty-five years. It doesn’t feel like a political story, rather one of sad personal tragedy, but it contains real insight into how people in cults behave. There is a terrible incident early on, when Caroline meets Bridget, the leader, for the first time and she effectively has her name stripped from her by the other woman who insists on calling her Caro. And Caro she remains from that point onwards, belittled and diminished. As a glimpse of how a ruthlessly cruel person can undermine the identity of a potential victim by renaming and misnaming her, it’s profound and subtle and so fleeting you’d almost miss it.

Collected in Dance Move, Stinging Fly, 2022

‘The Coast of Leitrim’ by Kevin Barry

I don’t know if the word “delightful” is a good enough word to describe something you love, but when I first read this story I grinned like a fool from beginning to end. I’ve just read it again and I’m still smiling. Seamus isn’t the exile in this story, but Katherine is – a young woman from Poland working in a cafe in Carrick. They are both lonely and a bit lost, but they work through their awkwardness to accommodate each other’s failings – his weak chin and her lumpy knees – and find a way to make reality live with their ideals. Much of the humour of the story is in the language and the telling, and that’s enough to make it irresistible. But it also plays some very clever games with the conventions of romance, undercutting them at every stage with the rituals of everyday life – shopping in Lidl, stalking an Instagram account. They lose each other of course, and after a modern version of a romantic quest, by google maps and a cheap flight to Wroclaw, Seamus finds her again. When he walks into the last internet cafe in Europe where Katherine is the only customer, she sees him and says, “Oh, thanks be to fuck”, and you know they’ll be alright.

First published in The New Yorker, October 2018, and available to read and listen to here. Collected in That Old Country Music, Canongate, 2020

‘Dead Dog’ by Philip Ó Ceallaigh

‘Dead Dog’ is one of the most uncomfortable stories here because of its intense physicality but also because the margins of hope are so narrow. The protagonist is a failing Irish writer living in Bucharest with no money, in a run-down apartment block, trying to look after his young daughter after her mother has left them. He has written a “dead-end book” which has been refused by his publisher and his editor has abandoned him. But he is a man who can’t help taking on responsibilities he can barely meet, like arranging to remove the corpse of an old neighbour’s dog from the basement because people are complaining about the smell. Literally scratching around, collecting bits of scrap metal to raise money to pay the disposal company, every move he makes is draining and painful in the sweltering Romanian summer. The reader feels it too – the heat, the smells, the sheer effort of doing anything at times, are relentless. But there is some hope in the end, in the writer’s attempts to do the right things in the hardest circumstances, and particularly in his relationship with his daughter:

“When the child was born and he first held her, he felt he was good enough to protect her and do only what was right. That was love, and nothing else held the foolish precarious world together.”
Collected in Trouble, Stinging Fly Press, 2021

‘Extra Few Feet in My Bed’ by Marie McQuade

I’m not sure that Marie McQuade qualifies as an Irish writer, but this is very much an Irish story – lyrical, funny and sad. The narrator is a single English woman with a young son who grieves for the loss of her Irish father and feels a “mad longing” for another Irish man to take his place. She finds one only too quickly:

“I did not know there were men who attended wakes for the free egg sandwiches, excess of daytime drinking and the lust that death evoked in women.”

He charms her, they marry, and then he flits, leaving his own old father for her to care for. There’s a quiet desperation in some of the things that follow, but she shows resilience and humour too. She ends up bonding with the old man over hash cakes and Cowboy Junkies songs and the story ends in laughter. It’s a slight tale, only six pages long, but it’s one that will leave you smiling. It’s also a lovely example of the good work coming from local writing groups and small publishers like thi wurd and all the more precious for it.

Collected in Alternating Current: an anthology of fiction, poetry and experimental writing, thi wurd, 2022

‘We Too Have Wind-blown Plazas’ by Adrian Duncan

I knew I had to buy Midfield Dynamo when I saw the contents page was laid out in the formation of a football team, with each story occupying its own position on the field. ‘We Too Have Wind-Blown Plazas’ is the No 9, one of two strikers, the target man. Foster is an engineer working in Abu Dhabi, who has left Ireland as much to escape the scorn of his father as the country to which he promised himself he would never return. He wants to “perish in the desert”, isolating himself in his work, but he comes under the influence of his employer, another father figure, who introduces him to class A drugs and seems determined to lead him into complete dissolution. His sense of reality becomes increasingly disordered and when he witnesses the grotesque death of a migrant worker it’s never clear if it’s an actual event, a drug-induced hallucination, or purely a metaphor. This is a short and shocking story of alienation and loss of self, flatly and precisely told. It starts with Foster’s rage at his father and ends in his deportation back to Ireland and its “people and their rage, or something that sounds like rage, but rage that has been continuously doused and beaten and broken, until it is barely rage at all.” There’s not much in the way of hope here, even less than in Ó Ceallaigh’s ‘Dead Dog’, but it’s a fascinating and compelling piece of writing.

Collected in Midfield Dynamo, The Lilliput Press, 2021

‘The Conductor’ by Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon was the first writer from Bosnia I came across a few years ago, and he helped me find my way to other excellent writers from the Balkans. Everything he has published is worth reading but I think his short stories are where his quality really shines. They have a style, poise and elegance that are a pure pleasure to read. ‘The Conductor’ is in some ways a characteristic Hemon story in that it contains autobiographical elements (the young Bosnian writer who is stuck in the USA throughout the siege of his home city of Sarajevo), but also fantastical characters and events, and a large space between where you just don’t know where the real and the fictional collide. Along with the narrator, the other main character is Muhamed D., a older poet also known as Dedo:

“My story is boring: I was not in Sarajevo when the war began; I felt helplessness and guilt as I watched the destruction of my hometown on tv; I lived in America. Dedo, of course, stayed for the siege – if you are the greatest living Bosnian poet, if you wrote a poem called “Sarajevo”, then it is your duty to stay.”

The narrator dislikes Dedo from the time they first meet in Sarajevo before the war. He resents the obvious disdain the older man has for him. He resents his poetry and his fame, and the way he uses them to attract young women. Then, when he pretends that Dedo’s poetry is his own in order to seduce an American woman at an MLA conference, he resents him even more. His feelings about the old man become inseparable from his own self-loathing. Eventually they meet again when Dedo moves to the USA and the younger man becomes reconciled to him during a night of horribly comic mishaps as they get drunk together and suffer a series of degradations and humiliations. In the end he learns to love the old man and to embrace him in his decrepitude, and perhaps he learns to accept the lost and guilty part of himself as well.

First published in The New Yorker, Feb 28, 2005, and available to read here. Collected in Love and Obstacles, Picador, 2009. Also included in The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, Penguin, 2021