Introduction

I’ve chosen twelve stories that I frequently find myself coming back to and thinking about, whether I first read them years ago or discovered them relatively recently. They all haunt me and, in their different ways, say or reveal something true. Looking at my selection now, it strikes me that one reason they’ve stayed with me is because they are all slightly audacious. By ‘audacious’ I don’t mean showy or experimental, but they’re stories where I can imagine how the same idea might easily have fallen flat (how it could have been taken too far, or not far enough), yet the writer makes it work perfectly, and it’s as if you’ve witnessed someone pull off an astonishing acrobatic feat.

‘The Long-Distance Runner’ by Grace Paley

One morning, Faith – “a woman inside the steamy energy of middle age” – goes for a run and finds herself in the Brooklyn neighbourhood where she grew up. In an odd turn of events, she arrives at her childhood home and meets the family who now live in her old apartment. Then, without a second thought, she moves in with them for three weeks. When Faith finally returns home, her partner and grown-up sons are as non-plussed by her explanation of her absence as you might expect.

The story has many things to say – it’s a bit about running (like Alan Sillitoe’s similarly-titled story), and quite a lot about race in 1960s and ‘70s America (in ways that would take a long time to unpack). But what floors me every time is the off-kilter truths it offers about middle age. It reveals something profound about what it means to arrive at midlife, that vantage point from where you can see your own childhood and everything you used to know rapidly receding into the distance, while at the same time you’re looking out ahead and wondering, as Faith puts it, “what in the world is coming next.”

It’s fantastic. And the final paragraph is as sublime and mysterious as a prayer.

First published in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1974, and in The Collected Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994

‘In Another Country’ by David Constantine

This was the first work by David Constantine I ever read, and it remains one of my favourites. In this story, Mr and Mrs Mercer’s marriage is turned upside down when they receive a disconcerting piece of news: 60 years ago, before the couple married, Mr Mercer’s then-girlfriend, Katya, was killed in a hiking accident, but now her preserved body has been found in the ice of a melting Alpine glacier.

The prose is both mundane and otherworldly – the small murmurings of Mr and Mrs Mercer’s daily conversations merge into poetry, and lines like this have lodged themselves in my mind:

“whatever is in there behind the eyes or around the heart or wherever else it is, whatever it is that is not the husk of us will cease when the husk does but in the meantime never ages, does it?”

I always enjoy Constantine’s hypnotic stream-of-consciousness style, but ‘In Another Country’ is as much about the startling story itself as the telling of it. Years after I read this story, it dawned on me that it’s a reworking of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. And then I read ‘Unexpected Reunion’ by Johann Peter Hebel (apparently Franz Kafka’s favourite story), and I realised it’s a retelling of that, too. All of which is to say I am still turning this story over in mind and still seeing it in new ways, and it feels a bit like a living thing.

First published in The Reader, 2005, and collected in Under the Dam and other stories, Comma Press, 2005. Available to listen to, as read by the author, here

‘The Rotifer’ by Mary Ladd Gavell

‘The Rotifer’ is a beautiful, melancholic reflection about the passing of time, and about the ways that other lives can touch our own and how we sometimes become intensely invested in those other lives. I’ve never read anything else quite like it.

It’s essentially three linked stories. We meet the narrator first as a student, anxiously watching a minute organism (the eponymous rotifer) as it wriggles in distress under the lens of her microscope. The rotifer is ensnared in a piece of algae, but the narrator’s attempts to help it only result in chaos – her huge, clumsy body exists on a different scale to its tiny world. The story then pans out to events in other times and places that obliquely echo this first incident and culminates in a casually devastating last line.

Mary Ladd Gavell’s fiction was only discovered after she died at the age of 47, and it was not until 2002 (35 years after her death) that her first and only story collection was published and gained significant acclaim. You read her work differently, I think, when you know this. I imagine her in the neatly coiffured world of mid-century America, busily writing while her children slept and stashing her stories away, unaware of what the future held. Which, of course, is itself a haunting story about the passage of time and the quiet tragedy of other lives.

First published in Best American Short Stories of 1968, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968, and included in Best American Short Stories of the Century, Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Collected in I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly and other stories, Random House, 2002

‘Arrangements Have Been Made’ by Alice Jolly

I’ve chosen several pieces about the return of the dead (I could probably have selected a personal anthology on that theme alone). In Alice Jolly’s story, the narrator’s beloved friend has died and it’s the day of the funeral. However, the deceased friend is not ready to make her final departure; she darts and flits just out of sight. The narrator scours the house for her friend – searching under beds, looking behind curtains – as if engaged in a dreadful round of hide and seek, although it’s clear that “[t]his is not a silly children’s game. The rituals we will enact today are for grown-ups, definitely for grown-ups.” As the story races to its harrowing climax, the narrator pleads, cajoles, and ultimately must force her friend to leave. After all, there’s nothing to be done about it – “this is the time appointed. It cannot be changed.”

The story is unreal, but I find it one the most realistic depictions of death and loss I’ve read. It’s about how grief often hews close to madness, how living might feel like an act of betrayal, and how the dead can linger long after they should have left.

First published in The London Magazine, and available to read online here

‘Factory’ by Emily Thomas Mani

In ‘Factory’, a young girl, somewhere in landlocked North America, accompanies her father on his night-shifts as a factory cleaner – a job he performs once all the machines are turned off and the buildings are emptied of workers.

At eleven, the girl is on the threshold of learning what it means to be an adult, and, specifically, what it means to be a woman. The deserted factories provide a perfect metaphor for the unknowable expanse of the adult world, as does the girl’s fascination with the sea (which she has never visited). She dreams particularly of what it might be like to visit the ocean at night, “because that is when an ocean can be itself”, and because the ocean at night “is peculiar and it is dangerous”.

So many things are left unsaid (by the author and by the characters themselves), and the whole story rings with vastness and emptiness. The images and the meaning meld seamlessly, and it becomes much more than the sum of its parts.

First published in Forge, 2021, and available to read online here

‘The Life of Ma Parker’ by Katherine Mansfield

Ma Parker cleans the house of a “literary gentleman”, and we meet them both on the day after she has buried her grandson, Lennie. Ma Parker has had a life of almost unimaginable suffering – her knees ache from years of relentless work, and her spirit is bruised by infinite small injustices and the loss of her husband and seven of her thirteen children – but it’s the death of Lennie that brings her, finally, to breaking point. The moment has come, she realises, to let out the years of misery – “but to have a proper cry over all these things would take a long time”.

I suspect (and fear) that some people find this story mawkish or unsubtle. Admittedly, the characters sometimes teeter on the edge of caricature, but to me, the wonder of it is that it although the story could slide into sentimentality, it doesn’t. There are terrible, unexpected shards of observation, such as the way that Ma Parker’s childhood memories have been reduced to a just a couple of fleeting images and stock phrases, as if she’s been deprived even of the right to tell her own history.

The story doesn’t resolve or offer any sort of redemption, and the ending is brutal. It seems simply to bear witness to the fact that, much as we wish it weren’t the case, life can be like this. Sometimes there’s a strange, small comfort in that.

First published in The Garden Party and other stories, Alfred A. Knopf 1922, and widely collected. Available to read online at the Katherine Mansfield Society here

‘Sea Oak’ by George Saunders

‘Sea Oak’ unfolds in a dystopian, funhouse-mirror version of America – an over-sugared, blaring idiocracy. The narrator lives in a “dangerous craphole” with his sister and cousin, their babies, and long-suffering Aunt Bernie who works thanklessly for minimum wage to support the family (a modern-day Ma Parker). Tragically, Aunt Bernie dies of fright when an intruder breaks into their apartment, only to return soon afterwards from the dead, strangely transformed and emboldened.

What I find irresistible is George Saunders’ quasi-anthropological commitment to the particularities of his fictional world, from the depraved reality shows on TV to the details of the narrator’s workplace (an aviation-themed strip club called Joysticks). There’s also a delightful string of walk-on characters, including the priest who declares that upon discovering Aunt Bernie’s newly-vacated grave, he “literally sat down in astonishment.” And so the story thunders along in its full-throated madness and surreal glory, until – like a magician who has artfully misdirected the audience – Saunders throws out a dazzling ending you didn’t see coming at all. I’ve read it so many times, and each time I literally sit down in astonishment.

First published in The New Yorker, December 1998, and collected in Pastoralia, Bloomsbury, 2000. Available to read online in The Barcelona Review here

‘Mrs Tsubaki’ by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi

What sets this glorious story in motion is the moment elementary school teacher Mrs Tsubaki inadvertently lets out a loud fart in front of her class of 7-year-olds:

“The friction there, the muscles not fully choking the aperture, the fart became a bit musical. The pitch soared. The class went silent. It was like a bugle had been sounded at a funeral. Young brains were on fire. (…) A thing like that happens and everyone knows the day will not go back to being regular.”

Before I came across ‘Mrs Tsubaki’ last year, I wouldn’t have imagined that a story centred around farts could be so seriously good. It’s a series of unexpected delights, from philosophical musings on flatulence to a delicious cameo appearance by Prue Leith of The Great British Bake Off. And while it’s ostensibly about farting, in fact it’s really about everything – self-acceptance, the many kinds of love between people, life and death, the passing of years. It’s hilarious and moving, and every time I read it, it makes me both well up and laugh out loud, which seems as good a way as any to measure a great short story.

First published in Split Lip, 2024, and available to read online here

‘Mrs Silly’ by William Trevor

William Trevor must have written at least a hundred short stories; every one I’ve read is excellent, and I can’t quite fathom how he managed it again and again. ‘Mrs Silly’ is one of my enduring favourites (apparently it’s also Elizabeth Strout’s favourite Trevor story, so I’m in good company). It’s about a boy, Michael, caught between his very different divorced parents. Michael’s mother is not well-off but she is sweet and kindly, cries easily, and is prone to chattering and oversharing when she’s nervous. His wealthy father sends him to boarding school, but this is a stiff, affluent world in which his mother can never be at ease. Eventually, of course, these two worlds do collide, and the collision is almost unbearable to witness: Michael’s dread that his mother will show herself up, his hot shame when she does, and the crushing guilt he then feels for having been ashamed of her.

Reading it is an intense experience, not only because the drama is so visceral, but because I identify equally, and painfully, with Michael and his mother (though I suppose I’m not alone in having both cringed at a loved one and having caused a loved one to cringe). In any case, I can’t think of a better story that sums up the messy sadness of love.

First published in Angels at the Ritz and other stories, Viking 1975, and in The Collected Stories, Penguin, 1992

‘Big Milk’ by Jackie Kay

I first read ‘Big Milk’ when I was deep in the early years of first-time motherhood – a weird time that nothing had quite prepared me for. I loved (and still love) how this story captures some of that weirdness and how it’s effortlessly breezy and, at the same time, as tightly-woven and meaty as a fairy tale.

As the story opens, we meet a mother, her breastfed two-year-old daughter, and the mother’s breasts, which the daughter has named ‘Big Milk’ and ‘Tiny Milk’ and with whom the daughter has charming conversations. However, the story’s protagonist is none of these characters, but the mother’s lover, who is quietly nursing her resentment at being excluded from this cosy, milky world. This jealousy sparks the protagonist to set off on a slightly manic quest to address her other unresolved issues about mothering. The reader is swept along on this compulsive journey towards an ending which seems a perfect example of Flannery O’Connor’s maxim that an ideal story should be at once surprising and inevitable, or as she put it, “both totally right and totally unexpected”.

First published in Why Don’t You Stop Talking?, Picador, 2002

‘The Tulip Plate’ by Georgina Hammick

I came across this story in an anthology of women’s short fiction, edited by Susan Hill. Amongst the stories by familiar and famous names (such as Fay Weldon, AS Byatt and Margaret Drabble) was this understated marvel by Georgina Hammick, and I wondered why on earth I’d never heard of her before. She published two collections of stories (in 1987 and 1992), which are all wise, observant and devastating, and sometimes, as in ‘The Tulip Plate, make you feel as if you’ve just been told a strange secret.

In ‘The Tulip Plate’, Margaret has come to visit Nell, an old school friend she hasn’t seen in years. It’s soon clear that the two women have little in common anymore, and a weekend of awkward conversation looms ahead. Georgina Hammick excels in picking out the irony in moments where people’s perceptions are entirely at odds (Margaret is quietly appalled by Nell’s dour home and unappetising food but forces herself to eat the grim cottage pie provided for dinner, while Nell is quietly appalled by Margaret’s gluttony and had hoped they might save some of the pie for a second meal). And then, while they are walking Nell’s dog by a muddy lake, the story comes suddenly to its ineffable conclusion. The transcendent climax has the feel of a Flannery O’Connor story (and I’m sure she’d have approved of it, since it’s also “totally right” and “totally unexpected”).

First published in People for Lunch, Methuen, 1987, and included in The Penguin Book of Modern Women’s Short Stories, Penguin, 1991

‘The Lampshade Vendor’ by Allen Woodman

‘The Lampshade Vendor’ is just two pages long, so I’ll take its lead and keep this brief. I’ll simply say that this was one of the first pieces of flash fiction I read that really captured my imagination and opened my eyes to the possibilities of the tiny story. It’s eccentric and tender, and it involves a flea circus.

Included in Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories, W.W. Norton, 1992, and collected in Saved by Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald and other stories, Livingston Press, 1997