‘The Cut-Glass Bowl’ by F Scott Fitzgerald

This story gets me every time. It’s one of those F Scott Fitzgerald tales about how shiny-looking things are really hard and nasty, and always turn to poison in the end. The action centres on a three-foot wide punch bowl, a malicious, beautiful gift. Written with his characteristic pace and style, it’s a vivid tale of social climbing, alcohol drinking, failing fortunes, and fading charm.

First published in Flappers and Philosophers, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920. Collected in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Six Other Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2008

‘Harvest’ by Julian Gough

I interviewed Julian Gough about his debut novel Juno and Juliet when it came out in 2001. I only knew of him then as the lead singer in a band called Toasted Heretic. Two decades on, to a certain cohort of gamers he’s known as the author of one of the most culturally significant pieces of interdisciplinary cross-genre writing: the heartrending end poem that concludes the game of Minecraft. You can read more about that authorship saga, and it is one, here. Gough has said ‘Harvest’ was written by his subconscious one morning. Pre-publication, he used it as part of a digital fundraiser at a time when that was still a relatively novel thing to do, coining a brilliant new word, “Litcoin”, which don’t think ever took off. It’s a very beautiful, apocalyptic love story about a man and a woman, a bookshelf, and the end of the world, coming at dawn.

Collected in Davy Byrnes Stories 2014, The six prize-winning stories from the 2014 Davy Byrnes Short Story Award, The Stinging Fly Press, 2014

‘A Dill Pickle’ by Katherine Mansfield

This is a deliciously stop-start story that veers wildly between passion and indifference. I can smell the zest of the orange peel, clearly see the waft of the Russian cigarette smoke, and taste the titular dill pickle. Like a lot of my favourite short stories, it’s a portrait of disconnection, misconnection, and the potential for something more (whether really desirable or not) cut off or cut short. I applaud it for its an exquisitely enticing opening line: “And then, after six years, she saw him again.”

First published in The New Age on 4 October 1917; collected in Bliss & Other Stories, Wordsworth Classics, 1998, and available to read online here

‘The Red Coral Bracelet’ by Judith Hermann translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo

I reviewed this debut collection by German writer Judith Hermann when it was published in translation in 2002. It had been hailed as a triumph by Die Zeit, Le Monde, The Sunday Times, TLS and more, and it astonished me with its brevity, clarity, brilliance, and intense moodiness. This is the opening story and it’s about a woman, her lover, Germany, Russia, and the woman’s great great grandmother’s red coral bracelet. It’s also about how the multigenerational stories we tell, and the artifacts that survive with them, can hold and define us. I ended up owning two copies and giving one away gladly, because this is the kind of book you want everyone to read. I think The Summer House, Later was the compilation that brought me back to loving and believing in the intense, transformative power of a great short story collection.

Collected in The Summer House, Later – A book about the moment before happiness, Flamingo, 2002. An extract consisting of the first 1000 words is available to read online here

Introduction

Initially I planned an anthology made exclusively of final stories from collections. A book of endings. But I quickly realised that many stories that work beautifully as the finale of a book don’t do so well in other contexts. A final story tends to take risks an opening story never would. Perhaps writers put their more challenging material at the end on the principle that – if the reader has got that far – then they’re probably enjoying themselves and ready to experiment. This is certainly true of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, the final story in Wells Tower’s debut collection. The eight stories that precede it earn the goodwill that allows him to finish with a tale of slacker-vikings pulling each other’s lungs out. I’ve put that story at the end of my list. My plan is to work up to it.

‘Merry Christmas from Hegel’ by Anne Carson

I discovered this in The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, which suggests it’s a prose poem, though when Anne Carson talks about it she calls it an essay – and yet it could just as easily be a short story. Whatever it is, it’s four hundred and five words of perfection, with Carson managing to handbrake turn from desolate to comic to profound and back again, sometimes within the same sentence. (This may also be the only story that successfully uses its title as a final line.) It’s not published online but I recommend listening to her read it (from 3.15 onwards.) When I hear the bookshop audience’s silence I wonder if I’m alone in finding the story, and her deadpan delivery, very funny.

First published in Float, Jonathan Cape, 2016. Anthologised in The Penguin Book of The Prose Poem, 2018. Listen to it here

‘Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby’ by Donald Barthelme

I remember buying Barthelme’s Sixty Stories and thinking it was a bit much. On their own, the stories might well have been wonders of surprise and invention but I couldn’t feel surprised for 480 pages. Novelty fatigue set in. The book was not helped by its joy-sapping introductory essay which placed Barthelme in the context of his time and instantly turned him into homework. Years later, I bought one of those miniature, slightly-gimmicky Penguin editions they sell by the tills in bookshops – and only then it clicked. Now I like to read him in short bursts as a palate cleanser, a little explosion of possibility. Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby is the title story in the tiny book and it’s the one I come back to most often, marvelling at its balance of funny and serious, heartfelt and heartless.

First published in The New Yorker, May, 1973, and available for subscribers to read here, then collected in Amateurs, 1976. Recently collected in a Penguin Mini Modern Classic, 2011

‘A Stick of Green Candy’ by Jane Bowles

Mary plays alone in a clay pit, preparing her regiment of imaginary soldiers for war. She is at that tipping point where her inner life is fracturing under pressure from an adult world she both despises and desires. This beautifully internal and restrained story was the final one in Bowles’ collection, Plain Pleasures. It was also final in another sense. She wrote this in 1949 – and carried on writing for another two decades – but never completed another piece of fiction.

First published in Vogue, 1957, then collected in Plain Pleasures, Peter Owen, 1966. Available to read here

‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka

I know, I know. I did try and choose a less famous Kafka story. I thought long and hard about including The Giant Mole, with its magnificent first line: “Those, and I am one of them, who find even an ordinary sized mole disgusting, would probably have died of disgust if they had seen the great mole that a few years back was observed in the neighbourhood of one of our villages, which achieved a certain transitory celebrity on account of the incident.” But in the end I realised that a large part of what I loved about the mole was that it reminded me of Gregor Samsa, the giant insect or beetle or cockroach (depending on translation), his legs spinning in his single bed.

First published in German, as ‘Die Verwandlung’, in Die Weißen Blätter, 1915. Widely translated

‘Emergency’ by Denis Johnson

Many writers, myself included, have gone through a Denis Johnson phase. It never ends well. His poetic but brutal images are dangerously alluring – how the rich of Beverly Hills wander around with ‘their heads shot off by money’ or how the narrator strips copper wiring from a house, the walls collapsing ‘with a noise like old men coughing’. It’s hard enough to imitate his language but impossible to replicate Johnson’s complex affection for his characters. I feel relieved to have finally abandoned hope of ever writing like him.

First published in The New Yorker, September 8, 1991 and available to read or listen to. Collected in Jesus’ Son, Picador, 1992, and widely anthologized

‘The Man on the Stairs’ by Miranda July

I love this story for how it captures the attraction of fear, the perverse freedom that comes with believing you are about to die. Awake in the middle of the night, the narrator listens to what may be a man on the stairs outside her bedroom and thinks: ‘He was putting more care in to hunting me than I had ever put into anything in my life.’ A perfect balance of inner and outer terrors.

First published in Fence magazine. Collected in No One Belongs Here More Than You, Canongate, 2007. Available to read here

‘The Colonel’ by Carolyn Forché

This story (or, again, prose poem) contains the simile that made me fall in love with similes. It felt like a magic trick that a tale about a genocidal dictator and his victims could contain, at its darkest moment, peach halves. I’ve been chasing the strangeness and surprise of that image ever since.

Originally appeared in Women’s International Resource Exchange. Collected in The Country Between Us, HarperCollins, 1981. Widely anthologised and available to read and listen to here

‘Prophets’ by Brandon Taylor

I’m sure I would still love this story – set on a creative writing course in Iowa – even if I hadn’t studied and taught creative writing. In his expertly controlled prose, Taylor exploits the tensions and performances of the staff, the students and the famous writer who has come to give a reading. Very funny and very ruthless.

Published in Joyland, March 2021. Online here

‘Helbling’s Story’ by Robert Walser

It’s one of the great challenges of fiction: how to be interesting about boredom? This story walks that line perfectly, capturing the texture of nothingness without succumbing to it. I also love Helbling’s insistence on his own mediocrity, an averageness that is so profound it becomes unique.

First collected in German in Werkausgabe, Verlag Helmut Kossodo, Geneva and Hamburg 1966. Published in English in Selected Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982