Introduction

What’s the relationship between fiction and truth? Any piece of writing is both a fabrication and “based on a true story” (the story behind its author’s decision to write it, for example). Nowhere is this more manifest than in the short story genre, whose very definition can be bent in various ways. It shows that truth is rarely absolute and, moreover, that no two readers understand the same word in the same way. These stories were chosen for the spectrum of interpretations they offer: one that spans the entire space of meaning, from false to true.

‘April Truth’ by Ilya Zverev, translated by Anna Aslanyan

Set in a country where the central press organ was called The Truth, this story by an underappreciated Soviet author, who made his name as a journalist in the 1960s, puts the very notion of veracity in perspective. The premise is simple: a group of schoolchildren, tired of April Fool’s pranks, swear “to speak the truth and nothing but the truth…and not to deceive, nor pull anyone’s leg, nor make anything up, nor make any false statement, nor lie, be it with word or voice or gaze”. The results, naturally, are catastrophic.

There is no “truth” in the original title, which translates as “The second of April”, but I had my reasons (too complex to give here) to change it. In a footnote Ilya Zverev thanks several children for providing him with material, suggesting that the story is based on real events. It is not known if he ever swore the same oath.

Originally published in Russian as ‘Vtoroe aprelya’, 1963. Published in translation in gorse 3, 2014, with an extract available to read here

‘Blow-Up’ by Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn

“I know that the most difficult thing is going to be finding a way to tell it,” the narrator (if that’s what he is) of Julio Cortázar’s masterpiece tells us early on. “It’s going to be difficult because nobody really knows who it is telling it, if I am I or what actually occurred or what I’m seeing…or if, simply, I’m telling a truth which is only my truth, and then is the truth only for my stomach, for this impulse to go running out and to finish up in some manner with, this, whatever it is.”

The “I” in this story is as hard to define as its plot. An amateur photographer captures a scene he does not quite know how to interpret – and that’s the beauty of it. Later, looking at the developed film, he sees details that make him regret he is “only the lens of my camera, something fixed, rigid, incapable of intervention”. The story inspired Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1967), which in turn gave it the new title.

No matter how many times you reread the piece, you can never be sure of what the “real” story is; nor do you care. Its essence is that of all fiction: “It might go like that, it might very well go like that”.

Originally published in Spanish as ‘Las babas del diablo’, 1959. Collected in Blow-Up and Other Stories, Pantheon Books, 1985

‘An Alien Flower’ by Mavis Gallant

The narrator of this story doesn’t try to hide her unreliability from the reader. She is indignant at her daughter’s accusations that she is responsible for the tragic fate of a refugee who came to live with the family. She says coolly that she doesn’t mind her husband’s infidelities. She protests too much.

The narrator knows that her husband “lied sometimes, but so do all divinities. Divinities invented convenient fables and they appeared in strange disguises, but they were never mistaken”. The family’s private dramas are played out against the background of postwar Germany, where the past often gets distorted in interpretation.

When Mavis Gallant moved to Europe from Canada in 1950, it was to understand what really happened in the preceding decade. This short story convincingly demonstrates both the futility of such attempts and their absolute necessity.

Originally published in The New Yorker, 1972. Collected in The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Bloomsbury, 2004

‘The Street of Crocodiles’ by Bruno Schulz, translated by Celina Wieniewska

The street where we walk with Bruno Schulz appears peculiar: grey and shoddy, definitely dodgy yet with plenty to offer, including is a shop selling books, drawings and photographs of the most licentious nature. The “girls” that work here even enact the poses in the images for the client’s pleasure.

It’s all a sham, we soon realise. “Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.” Worse still, this “improvised masquerade is already disintegrating” – so we need to hurry up to grab a piece. Whose fault is this: the shopkeeper’s, the author’s, the reader’s? Here’s a clue: “Our language has no definitions which would weigh…the grade of reality”. If this is our only tool used to describe, or perceive, what’s around us, we shouldn’t be surprised when the whole picture dissolves right before our eyes.

Originally published in Polish as “Sklepy cynamonowe”, 1933. Collected in The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2008

‘Alphabet for Stämpfli’ by Georges Perec, translated by Ian Monk

The title of the anthology where this piece appears is a reminder that experimental prose, like its traditional counterpart, follows the never-confuse-fact-with-fiction rule. Georges Perec, who never took reality for granted, offered this beau present to Peter Stämpfli on the occasion of the Swiss artist’s exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1980. You could call it a poem or a short story; the author would not have minded either way. The opening part uses only the letters in the recipient’s name; then other letters appear and disappear in succession. The translation by a fellow Oulipian, Ian Monk, loses none of the original constraints. “As a still, I trap real life’s stiff seams,” the piece begins. “Realities gestate images; as images, realities,” we read in the fifth stanza (the letter “g” having just been introduced). The author plays with us for a while, before returning to “real life” to tell us, “I affirm its verities.”

Originally published in French as ‘Alphabet pour Stämpfli’, 1981. Included in All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo, 1963—2018, McSweeney’s, 2018

‘The Long Crossing’ by Leonardo Sciascia, translated by Avril Bardoni

As far as deceptions go, the one described in this story is perhaps among the most trivial. It’s a classic tale: people desperate to escape poverty entrust their lives to a smuggler. Having paid him for a passage from Sicily to America, after eleven torturous days on a boat, they are put ashore. “Are you sure it isn’t some other place?” one of them asks – not because the landscape looks wrong, but simply because the long crossing was so incomprehensible: “neither roads nor even tracks across the sea…it was left to the Almighty to steer the ship without error between sky and water to its destination”.

Did the travellers ever arrive? In a sense, they did.

Originally published in Italian as ‘Il lungo viaggio’, 1973. Collected in The Wine-Dark Sea, Granta, 2014

‘Three People by William Trevor

The three people of William Trevor’s title are an old man, his unmarried daughter and a younger man who comes to their house. Each of the trio has their own version of why these visits have been happening for years, but only two of them know what’s behind it all. “The darkness of their secrets lit, the love that came for both of them through their pitying of each other” is gradually revealed by the old master of the genre. Even before we learn the true story, or what passes for it, we want to turn away from it, so devastating it promises to be. Towards the end, we come to envy the old man, who will die unburdened by it. “The truth restored, but no one else knowing it.”

Collected in The Hill Bachelors, Viking, 2000

‘Cricket’ by Zinovy Zinik, translated by Bernard Meares

To an émigré in London, a figure often appearing in Zinovy Zinik’s fiction, the world he finds himself in is not what it appears to be. Unfaithful lovers and anti-Semitic bullies, European accents and summer drinks – nothing can be trusted, everything has a twist.

There is no clarity in his own head either. “I seemed to be thinking in English while continuing to speak Russian. But isn’t this an illusion, this separation of thought and word?” These ambiguities make the real state of things as difficult to decode as a cricket match. Yet it is this game that teaches the protagonist a lesson that applies far beyond the pitch. Guided by it, he can make as many runs as he wants without missing the ball.

Originally published in Russian as ‘Kriket’, 1990. Collected in One-Way Ticket, New Directions, 1995

‘Merge’ by Deborah Eisenberg

Deborah Eisenberg’s works are often studies in perception of the world. So it is with this story. Told from different perspectives and introduced by epigraphs from Noam Chomsky and Donald Trump, it is also a reflection on language as a phenomenon inextricably linked to contemporary ills: “a way for us to deceive ourselves into believing that we understand things, so then we can just go ahead and do stuff that’s more ruthless than what any other animal does”.

Our relationship with words is overrated, “Merge” suggests. Some of us make “mental objects out of them”, to quote Chomsky; others simply declare, after Trump, “I have the best words”; in any case, speech alone is not enough to give us human status. Language is nothing but “an extremely plastic faculty, amenable to many uses, but it developed to serve the pressing demands of malice, vengefulness, and greed – humanity’s most consistent attributes”. And then, as you keep reading, the very language of the story proves that wrong.

First published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2018, and available to read to subscribers here, and via JStor here. Collected in Your Duck Is My Duck, Europa Editions, 2019

‘Ceci N’Est Pas un Mémoire’ by Fernando Sdrigotti

The narrator of this story moves from his native Argentina to Europe, having picked his destination at random. What awaits him? Is he an economic migrant, an adventurer, a moody young man with no prospects? All he knows is this: “And this is where I am now, I will think and repeat uncountable times since then, the this and the now jumping back and forth. Ungraspable thises and nows.”

He has just arrived here; he has found a job. Is he to spend the rest of his life washing dishes? No, he will keep moving, without knowing where to. “Because it will take some more immigration officers until I shake off the illusion that I belong this side of the ocean.” And now, writing the story, he muses: “I may be trying to figure out what is actually real, and what made-up…I might be rejoicing in the fabrication.” Who needs a better reason to pick up the pen?

Collected in Jolts, Influx Press, 2020

‘Tortoiseshell’ by Domenico Starnone, translated by Oonagh Stransky

“I have never been honest with myself,” Starnone’s narrator begins. “I can’t accept even the most basic truths.” This is a situation every fiction writer, as well as many people who have never written a single line, will find relatable: telling lies (stories) is compulsive; it starts as a replacement for real life and then it becomes your life. The defining moment in the narrator’s relationship with truth is a short story by Hemingway. The version of “Cat in the Rain” he read as a child had a majolica cat in it, but then things turned out to be different. He was left convinced that what you invent is more truthful than what you stumble across in so-called reality. “[W]hat are facts, if not an endless series of majolica cats?”

Originally published in Italian in L’umanità è un tirocinio, Einaudi, 2023. Published in translation in The New Yorker, April 2025, and available to subscribers to read here

‘Proof of the Pudding’ by O. Henry

O. Henry knew a thing or two about dissembling: before being crowned the humour king of American letters, he did time for embezzlement. Many of his characters end up on the wrong side of the law. “Proof of the Pudding”, however, relates a fully legit transaction between its two protagonists: a magazine editor and a fiction writer who cannot agree on the question of style. “No human being ever uttered banal colloquialisms when confronted by sudden tragedy,” the editor claims. The writer counters that in such situations, “[t]hey talk naturally, and a little worse”.

To find out who is right, a cunning plan is concocted. Before it can be implemented, however, fate intervenes, as it often does in O. Henry’s stories. “My God, why hast Thou given me this cup to drink?” one of the characters exclaims in the finale. The other goes, “Ain’t it hell, now, Shack – ain’t it?” The truth of the matter is thus revealed, and no mistake.

Collected in 100 Selected Stories, Wordsworth Classics, 1995