Category: Camilla Grudova

Camilla Grudova is the author of The Doll’s Alphabet, Children of Paradise and The Coiled Serpent. In 2023 she was named as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.

‘Egg Meat’ by Ivor Cutler

My beloved adopted country of Scotland tends to grow bad poets and ‘storytellers’ like a particularly noxious fungus. When I feel disheartened, I turn to the best Scottish storyteller of all, Ivor Cutler. This strange little story about the mysterious “egg meat” you buy from the ironmonger is heightened by Cutler’s wonderful intonations and Glaswegian accent. Ivor Cutler is a much lesser-known figure than he ought to be.

From the album An Elpee and Two Epees for Free, Decca, 2005

‘God in the Billiard Room’ by Barbara Comyns

This is an excerpt from Barbara Comyns’ Sisters by a River, a novel whose chapters were serialised in Lilliput magazine under the title “the novel nobody will publish”. It’s gloriously plotless, highly descriptive, and with the surrealism every child experiences. In this one God appears as a sort of floating brown paper bag. It is done in a deadpan, factual way and such a wonderful little chapter and it’s taught me to be more fearless and more surreal in my fiction.

First published in Lilliput Magazine, and then included in Sisters by a River, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1947, republished by Virago Press in 2013

‘Who Will Greet you at Home’ by Lesley Nneka Arimah

This beautiful story reminds me of the strange dreams I have while ovulating, the sense of something coming into being or falling apart. In the story, women must choose what material to make their children out of with whatever materials are within their means. When the protagonist Ogechi brings various babies of cotton and paper to her mother, her mother destroys them, saying they are not durable. When I first read it in my twenties, it was so exciting in its originality, and while it still is to me now, recent readings are tinged with sadness as I think of how my own desire to have children has been thwarted by my economic situation and my means.

First published in The New Yorker, October 2015, and available to read here; collected in What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, Riverhead/Tinder, 2017

‘Garden Magic’ by Diane Williams

I am very fortunate that a couple weeks after a horrendous breakup, a friend read this story aloud to me, a reminder of how ridiculous romantic relationships often are. The object of affection is a man named Horace whose “place was tidy and a bit surprising. He showed me his sword cane and his living room features an owl that’s made of poultry feathers.”

First published in The Paris Review 230, Fall 2019, and available for subscribers to read here; collected in How High? – That High, Soho Press, 2022

‘The Springs of Affection’ by Maeve Brennan

The title story of a recent rerelease of Brennan’s work is a beautiful and sad description of one family, and the children who make fun of their illiterate, sentimental father who becomes attached to the pigs he raises for butcher. Maeve Brennan died impoverished in New York in 1993, despite having worked for the New Yorker for many years.

First published in The New Yorker, March 1972, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Christmas Eve, Scribner, 1974; also in The Springs of Affection, Houghton Mifflin, 1997, republished by Peninsula Press, 2023

‘Journey of a Cage’ by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull

Like the dancer Nijinsky, Krzhizhanovsky was a Russified Pole, and like Nijinsky, beautiful strange and vivid. Living as he did in the Soviet Union, Krzhizhanovksky’s work wasn’t published until 1989, long after his death in 1950. ‘Journey of a Cage’ has something in common with the sad French film Balthazar, in that it tracks the tragic passing of an animal through many human hands, in this story, a grey parrot in a cage.

Written in Russian in the 1920s; First published in English in Unwitting Street, NYRB classics, 2020

‘Star’ by Yukio Mishima, translated by Sam Bett

Authors who committed suicide have a reputation for being gloomy and serious, but in fact it is the opposite, their writing is often the most humorously dark. This story is written from the perspective of a Japanese male celebrity actor having an affair with his older, “dowdy” assistant. It has much to say about our grotesque obsession with fame.

First published in Japanese in Gunzo, November 1960. First published in translation as Star, New Directions/Penguin, 2019

‘The Thing in the Forest’ by A. S. Byatt

A. S. Byatt is one of those rare writers equally powerful as a short story writer and a novelist, both filled with her rich knowledge of culture and history. Her work isn’t very fashionable at the moment, and I think its because we live in an especially anti-art and anti- intellectual moment. Like Angela Carter, she is one I still wish was around to reflect on things. This is a retelling of the Lambton Worm legend set during the blitz of World War Two, when city children were evacuated to the countryside.

Published in The Little Black Book of Stories, Vintage, 2004; also available as a Vintage Digital single, 2011

‘The Red Shoes’ by Hans Christian Andersen

I love Hans Christian Andersen. His stories are part of the cultural subconscious, but he isn’t often read directly. This story, which inspired a Powell and Pressburger film and a Kate Bush album, is particularly dark and terrifying – I don’t think a lot of writers read him or take him seriously because he is from a lower class background.

First published as ‘De røde sko’ in Nye Eventyr. Første Bind. Tredie Samling, Reitzel, 1845. Variously translated, including by Tiina Nunnally in Fairy Tales, Penguin Classics, 2005

‘First Love’ by Samuel Beckett

The British Penguin publication of this calls it a novella, because of the English aversion to short fiction, but this is one of the most perfect short stories. I feel like I am in some sort of strange green belly when reading it. “My sandwich, my banana, taste sweeter when I’m sitting on a tomb,” says the narrator. Whenever I feel like I have forgotten how to write a short story I go back to this one.

First published in French in 1970, and in its English translation by the author by Calder and Boyes, 1973. Now available in First Love and Other Novellas, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000, and The Expelled / The Calmative / The End / First Love, Faber, 2009

‘Sweeney Agonistes’ by T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot has taught me how to write, and more recently, also, how to be a Christian. This unfinished verse play I turn to a lot. Lines like “She’s got her feet in mustard and water,” and “I don’t like eggs; I’ve never liked eggs; and I don’t like life on your crocodile isle.”

First published in the New Criterion, October 1926 and January 1927 and collected as Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama, Faber, 1932. Now available in The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I, Faber, 2015)