My anthology brings together stories that explore the endless shades of childhood: its joys and mischiefs, its innocence and fears, its small triumphs and quiet tragedies. Each story is a window into a past life that many of us can still remember – when the world felt vast and unknowable, yet strangely immediate and at hand. The authors I’ve selected look at childhood from different perspectives and ask different questions. What’s it like to be a child? How does the presence of a child shape the world around them? How do adults interact with children? Why do memories of childhood linger in the late and long days of adulthood? And of course, when do you stop being a child? These are questions for each of us to reflect on, guided by stories that may provide insights, or open up paths toward our own answers.
Category: Diana Grosser
Diana Grosser is a lifelong book and literature enthusiast, hopelessly in love with 20th-century fiction and women’s writing. She also enjoys exploring the classics and, occasionally, contemporary literature. On her blog, leseriana.blog, she writes about the books and stories that resonate with her, tracing themes across different works and uncovering hidden literary gems. She believes in literature’s ability to reveal new perspectives, connect readers across time and place, and surprise even the most experienced readers.
‘Bago’ by Alberto Savinio, translated by Michael F. Moore
The magical realism of the story is nicely tucked in the space between being a child and society saying when you stop being a child. Ismene is in the habit of saying ‘Good morning’ and “Goodnight’ to creatures around her. “To Daddy and Mummy. And then only to Mummy after Daddy died. Then only to Bug after Mummy died too. Then only to Bago, after the death of Bug”. But Ismene says neither ‘Good morning’ nor ‘Goodnight’ to Uncle Rutiliano, who took Ismene for wife after her Mummy and Daddy died. Who, or what, Bago is we learn only at the end of the story, but knowing the answer doesn’t really resolve the ambiguity in the story. Bago, a silent and rather unremarkable companion retains the warmth of Ismene’s childhood, even as she transitions into adulthood and into a marriage that was imposed on her. Bago is a placeholder for Ismene’s emotional attachment to an inexistent past, but also a question mark as to where the boundary between the real and the fantastic lies.
First published in English in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, ed. Jhumpa Lahiri, Penguin, 2020
Loving Sabotage by Amélie Nothomb, translated by Andrew Wilson
Starting in 1992 and up to 2024, Nothomb has published a book every autumn, and I’m using here the term “book” deliberately loose. Depending on your definition, her books could be a novel, a novella or a longer short story. In Loving Sabotage, the seven-year-old unnamed narrator tells her story with innocence, flair, and a complete lack of modesty. “I had everything. I was an epic unto myself. I felt kinship only with the Great Wall, the single human construction visible from the moon. At least it respected my scale” When the story begins, the girl had moved with her parents to the San Li Tun ghetto in Beijing at age five and had been there for three years. The ghetto was reserved exclusively for foreigners, and friendship was far from what the children of the expats wanted from each other. The “terrible, epic war of the ghetto of San Li Tun” begins around the time the girl arrives in China and rages on for years. The story does not offer an idealized or sanitized depiction of childhood. The foreign children in the ghetto, including our narrator, are cruel, intelligent, and unforgiving. Imprisonment, judgment, sabotage, and torture are as much a part of the narrator’s supreme childhood as they are of the global war that, in the San Li Tun ghetto, never truly ends.
First published in English by New Directions, 2000
‘Kishmish’ by Nadezhda Teffi, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
Teffi’s short stories are often backgrounded by elements of religion and/or superstition. Sometimes she takes religion and superstition seriously, but sometimes she adds that little touch of satire which turns the whole thing around and reminds us that life is best lived when sprinkled with a bit of humour. ‘Kishmish’ is the nickname of an eight-year old girl who is at the stage in life when she’s wondering what she could be when she grows up. A strongman. A brigand. An executioner. All seem to her to be marvellous ideas, but Kishmish makes her final decision after a visit to the church. She wants to become a saint. “But how could she become a saint? She would have to work miracles – and Kishmish had not the slightest idea how to go about this. Still, miracles were not where you started. First, you had to lead a saintly life”. Kishmish’s idea of leading a saintly life made me laugh out loud, and this almost never happens to me. It’s best if you discover by yourself if she does become a saint or not, but let me just say this: her efforts, sincere and funnily misguided poke fun at the absurdities of adult expectations and shine a light on the grit of everyday reality.
First published in English in Slav Sisters, ed. Natasha Perova, Dedalus Books, 2019
‘Grisha’ by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett
‘Grisha’ is a story told from the point of view of a little boy who is less than three years old. The nurse takes Grisha, the boy of the title, out into the world for the first time. So far, his world had been limited to the safe four corners of the nursery, and the sudden encounter with the outdoors is for Grisha an explosion of light and new emotions. The boy is afraid at first, but also curious. His understanding of what happens around him is limited, but he quickly learns to observe and imitate. Grisha’s observations are vivid but fragmented, focused on immediate impressions rather than cohesive narratives. The nurse’s conversations with other people, the bustling streets, and the overwhelming sensations are all described as Grisha perceives them, without adult interpretation or analysis. When arriving home, Grisha tries to express what he had seen and felt. “He talks not so much with his tongue, as with his face and his hands. He shows how the sun shines, how the horses run, how the terrible stove looks, and how the cook drinks”. But the words which could reach the deadened ears of grown-ups elude him, and the wonders of what he now knows fall flat in his inability to speak them, and in the inability of grown-ups to hear them.
First published in Russian in 1886. Available in English in Ward no. 6 and Other Stories, ed. David Plante, Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003
‘The Voyage’ by Katherine Mansfield
Fenella is a young girl who travels across the sea with her grandmother, who is taking her to live with her and Fenella’s grandfather. And that’s pretty much it in way of “what happens”. The story starts as Fenella’s father accompanies them to the ship and ends when they reach the house of Fenella’s grandparents. To be honest, it’s not very exciting to read. The strength of the story lies in what is not being told, and in the undercurrents of Fenella’s perception of the unknown environment and of the great unknown which lies ahead. “On the land a white mist rose and fell. Now they could see quite plainly dark bush. Even the shapes of the umbrella ferns showed, and those strange silvery withered trees that are like skeletons…” The story subtly reflects Fenella’s childlike consciousness and emphasizes details that are otherwise quickly overlooked—a woman’s hat, the creak of the ship, the strangeness of the landscape. These sensory observations highlight Fenella’s insecurity, but also awareness, as she navigates a world that feels vast and incomprehensible.
First published in The Sphere, December 24th, 1921. Collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories, Constable, 1922
‘Afternoon in Linen’ by Shirley Jackson
If some authors write short stories which could be considered more like novels, Shirley Jackson writes short stories which can be considered more like flash fiction. They are sleek, slim and minimalistic. Yet somehow the characters manage to shift from the first impression the give off, that of stick figures, to full-bodied people into the lives of whom we get just a thin glimpse. ‘Afternoon in Linen’ captures the tension between children and adults, focusing on a girl and her grandmother during a social visit. Mrs. Lennon and Harriet are visited by Mrs. Kator and her little boy, Howard. As a reader, the story puzzles me. Mrs. Lennon pushes Harriet to show off her skills: play piano or read a poem written assumingly by herself. But Harriet recoils from each one of her grandma’s gentle pushes. “‘I didn’t write it’, she said. ‘I found it in a book and copied it and gave it to my old grandmother and said I wrote it’”. Of course, Harriet not only needs to perform for and in front of her grandmother. Howard, her schoolmate, also assesses Harriet’s performance. And the question remains, who does Harriet want to impress more and to what lengths she’s willing to go for that.
First published in The New Yorker, 27 August 1943, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, Farrar, Straus and Company, 1949. Can be listened to here, with an introduction by Kristen Roupenian
‘The Children’s Grandmother’ by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Townsend Warner, alongside Katherine Mansfield and Chekhov, of course, writes what I define as perfect short stories. Her stories are little jewels that encapsulate single occurrences, but that reflect images of entire lives lived, and contain other stories within. ‘The Children’s Grandmother’ is a bit different, though. An unnamed narrator thinks back on her role as a mother, wife and, more importantly, daughter-in-law. Her story unpacks the dynamics between herself and “the children’s grandmother”, as she mostly refers to her mother-in-law. It quickly becomes clear that the presence of the narrator’s children shapes their relationship, mostly underscoring differences in values and expectations. The grandmother is a formidable, somewhat domineering presence in the household. She exerts her influence with a mix of criticism and care, yet her love for the children is undeniable. She involves herself in their upbringing, and the narrator, shows herself to be a quiet and submissive woman, whose presence in the household counts but for little. As the story progresses, the narrator reflects on how the grandmother’s personality weighs on her mind as the children grow up. Yet as the grandmother ages and finally dies, the narrator gains a clearer understanding of the woman who felt her entire life the pain of being a mother.
First published in The New Yorker, 17 November 1950. Available in Winter in the Air, Faber, 2022. Can be listened to here, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín
‘Rem’ by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Julian Semilian
Mircea Cărtărescu’s first work of prose, Nostalgia, was for some reason published in English as a novel. But it is as much a novel as Joyce’s Dubliners is. Cărtărescu’s collection is similar to Joyce’s in that they both tell stories of people from young to old age, but that’s where the similarities stop. The Romanian writer concocts stories which are a stage of war between character, author and narrator and ‘Rem’ is the most intricate of all five stories in the volume. In this story we have three very different narrators, each with an apparently different goal in the act of storytelling. Nana tells her lover Vali about a summer from her childhood when she kissed someone for the first time. But the story surpasses this simple promise and encompasses the bizarre past of a family searching for “The Entrance,” Nana’s literal future on paper, and above all, the chance of a wasted life. The most charming section is Nana’s recollection of when she and her six friends play in that fated summer of childhood. To pass the time, the girls play a game called “The Queens”, where each girl gets to be Queen for a day. The Queen of the day has an object using which she’s supposed to invent a game and all other girls must play it. In the end, it turns out that it is be the game which plays the girls and the game is nothing short of a life lived. ‘Rem’ is a wonderful story of childhood, and the long shadow childhood throws upon our adult lives.
First published in English in Nostalgia, New Directions, 2005
‘Araby’ by James Joyce
I remember that the first time I read ‘Araby’ all I was left with was that there was a house where a priest died. Those youthful days are long gone, but when rereading the story that first impression hits me straight from the first paragraphs. An unnamed boy is head over heels with “Mangan’s sister”, and when she mentions she can’t visit Araby, the local fair, the boy vows to go and bring her something. “The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me”. The house of the priest is the static element which stays unchanged on each reread, but it’s only this time that I noticed the narrator’s tone. The memory of Araby is painted in the blueish nuances of memory, and the story reads as a weave of bittersweet nostalgia and grandiose, yet gentle, irony. The boy’s feelings for the girl transform the mundane into the extraordinary, but the end of the story reveals the magical bazaar the boy imagined to be for what it really is – a dim, lacklustre place. In the end, it’s not really clear to me who is more disillusioned – the boy for not finding that perfect something to bring back or the adult narrator who knows what lies outside the illusion of perfection.
First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards Ltd., 1914
‘A Fall of Snow’ by James Turner
What I liked about ‘A Fall of Snow’ was how authentic and natural it read. Nicholas, the narrator, tells of a marking event which happened to him on Christmas when he was fifteen, visiting his uncle in the snowy countryside. The snow plays the central role in the story, but it has a dark edge to it, because it shows an unknown landscape and hides familiarity. “Where before I knew my way about, now everything, the fields, the trees, the church, even the cottages of my uncle’s estate, was strange and terrifying”. When Nicholas and his cousin ride the sledge across snow-covered fields, a terrible accident happens, which shapes his memories of that winter. The occurrence marks the young Nicholas and leaves him in fear of snow, though he barely admits that to himself. What makes the story so resonant is the way it captures the presence of childhood memories in adult life. The memory of that terrible winter clings to the narrator as a fixed image, bright and unwavering with time, as a photograph which can’t be edited nor burnt away.
First published in Staircase to the Sea, Kimber, 1974
‘Voices Lost in Snow’ by Mavis Gallant
It’s impossible to binge Mavis Gallant’s stories. For me, it’s actually even impossible to binge a single one of Mavis Gallant’s stories. Each line is so loaded with impressions and feelings and there are sentences which I need to read several times in a row to even get the gist of. But it’s probably most advisable to just read the story through, then come back to it over the next days (months? years?) and let it take shape in your head. ‘Voices Lost in Snow’ is the perfect example. “Dark riddles filled the corners of life because no enlightenment was thought required”, Gallant writes. Each word, perfectly placed to give childhood its atmosphere. Adult Linnet tells the story of a Saturday afternoon when she went with her father to visit her godmother, Georgie. But the story is so much more than that. It is about the distance between childhood perception and adult understanding, about the way memories shift and take on new meanings as we grow older. As a child, Linnet moves through the world with a sense of unquestioning acceptance, absorbing but not fully grasping the grown-up conversations around her. She sees but cannot yet interpret. The past, as adult Linnet remembers it, is fragmented, shaped by a child’s logic, where certain things are felt rather than known. It is the adult Linnet who recognizes what was hidden in the past moments—the absences, the evasions, the things left unsaid. In Gallant’s story childhood is a time of mystery, filled with codes and signals that only later come into their full bloom.
First published in The New Yorker, April 5, 1976, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Varieties of Exile, The New York Review of Books, 2003, and The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Bloomsbury, 2004; also The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Everyman’s Library, 2016
‘A Sketch of the Past’ by Virginia Woolf
I imagine sitting down with Virginia Woolf and asking her “Virginia, what do you think your best short story is?”. I see her looking at me with pity. “Short story, darling? What might you mean?” Virginia Woolf didn’t believe in the conventional genres of writing. Novel, essay, short story, memoir, biography? These were for her muddles in the large sphere of literature. Before her suicide, she was working on what she called a novel-essay, and what I see as her masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, might very well be called novel-memoir. But of course we, in the world out here, don’t indulge in this kind of dreaming. We deal in “The Short Stories of Virginia Woolf” and “The Complete Novels of Virginia Woolf” and such.
Whether ‘A Sketch of the Past’ published in its current form is a short story is up to the reader’s interpretation. What it is, though, is a series of diary entries from 1939, which Woolf intended to form the base for an upcoming autobiography. Her death in 1941 put an end to that project. In her diary entries, Woolf is writing of her mother, whose memory never stopped haunting her, her father and her siblings. She recalls the vacation house at St. Ives, which shaped her earliest memories, and describes not just events, but the sensory impressions that surrounded them. “Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of these first impressions. When I think of the early morning in bed I also hear the caw of rooks falling from a great height. The sound seems to fall through an elastic, gummy air”. These fragments of memory do not follow a linear structure; they ebb and flow like the very act of recollection itself, creating an impressionistic tapestry of her childhood.
What makes ‘A Sketch of the Past’ read so close to fiction is the fluid quality of the writing and the sense of certainty that there is a narrative thread which will in the end lead somewhere. There is the feel of a narrative voice which is not simply documenting events, but shapes them and draws attention to the shortcomings of memory. Following the Modernist belief, the text rejects a rigid plot structure in favour of mood, perception and interiority. And, after all, isn’t a good short story at its core simply a powerful act of storytelling, which goes beyond the simple narrative?
First published in Moments of Being, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976
A Personal Anthology 