Introduction

The more I read short fiction the more I’m intrigued by what draws me back to a story. What quality makes me return to a fictional world? What is it about the prose that hypnotises me again?

The pieces I’ve chosen for my Personal Anthology all have that je ne sais quoi. These are stories I’ve re-read for pleasure and entertainment, to be moved once more by the writing, to be reminded that my personal pain – grief, heartache, shame… – is a shared thing, a human thing, and we are not alone.

From Anton Chekhov to Brian Moore, from Mieko Kawakami to Elizabeth Taylor, my selections travel across centuries, all over the world. I’ve chosen ten stories and two novellas. To me, all of these works feel fluid and alive. Again and again, I’m drawn to them, and grateful to their authors. The joy of re-reading gives these stories new life.

‘Big World’ by Tim Winton

“Some mornings out in the misty ranges the world looks like it means something, some simple thing just out of my reach, but there anyway.”

The Turning was the first short story collection I ever bought, aged nineteen, browsing the shelves of my local bookshop. I don’t know what compelled me to pick up this book, with a blood-spattered fish and bait hook on the cover. I hadn’t heard of Tim Winton and didn’t realise he was – or would become – Australia’s greatest living writer. Something about the blurb or the prose must’ve lured me in – like the fish on the cover, I took the bait and got hooked.

Set in Angelus, a Western Australian fishing town, The Turning features surfing, cray-fishing, shark attacks and road-trips. It’s a stunning linked collection, where the stories intersect and characters reappear, viewed from new angles at different stages of their lives.

At nineteen, I’d read enough fiction to recognise something special in Winton’s prose. Here was a writer with a gift for describing characters and landscape. In the opening story, ‘Big World’, a teenage boy called Biggie has “a face only a mother could love … He’s kind of pear-shaped, but you’d be a brave bugger calling him a barge-arse.”

Narrated by Biggie’s best friend, ‘Big World’ explores the end of youth and the journey into adulthood. Leaving high school, the boys are “feverish with anticipation” yet somehow their “crappy Saturday job” in the local meatworks becomes full-time, their days spent “hosing blood off the floor” and packing cow hide, their arms “slick with gore”.

Desperate to escape the meatworks and “the January of our new lives”, the boys take a roadtrip across Australia, the landscape “shimmering with heat” and “the sky as blue as mouthwash.” Throughout ‘Big World’, Winton describes the environment with such vibrancy. The boys’ excitement is palpable as they “buzz north” towards Perth: “The longer we drive the more the sky and the bush open up.”

Rich with vivid descriptions, ‘Big World’ is infinitely re-readable. Like much of Winton’s work – stories, novels, memoir – the prose feels so transportative. Winton’s writing makes me feel like I’m there with the characters – he takes me to landscapes that I want to return to.

First published in The Turning, Picador, 2004

‘Fjord of Killary’ by Kevin Barry

“So I bought an old hotel on the fjord of Killary. It was set hard by the harbour wall, with Mweelrea mountain across the water, and disgracefully grey skies above. It rained two hundred and eighty-seven days of the year and the locals were given to magnificent mood swings.”

My most joyful reading experiences have sprung from the pages of Kevin Barry, to my mind the greatest short story writer at work today. If ever I need to reignite my love for reading and writing, I return to his second collection, Dark Lies the Island, and in particular to ‘Fjord of Killary’, a raucous story set at the Water’s Edge hotel bar.

“The people of this part of north Galway are oversexed,” says the narrator. “I had found a level of ribaldry that bordered on the paganistic.” The narrator is the owner of the hotel and a poet with creative block. His nine Belarusian bar staff are in varying degrees of sexual contact, his sleepless nights filled with “the sound of their rotating passions”.

Serving the locals Bushmills whiskey and Guinness stout, the hotel owner admonishes John Murphy, an “alcoholic funeral director” for leering at the “rear quarters of Nadia” the barmaid. “You’d do jail time for that,” says John while Mick Harty, “distributor of bull semen for the vicinity” grinds against his “enormously fat wife, Vivien”.

‘Fjord of Killary’ is set on a Bank Holiday Monday, “among the wettest bank holidays ever witnessed”. Outside the bar, the waters of Ireland’s only natural fjord rise up the harbour walls while dogs howl and a pair of minks head for the fields. Unlike the animals, the locals stay put, drinking at a quickened pace while the rain intensifies.

Barry’s love of language glitters in every sentence of this tragicomic masterpiece. Funny and poignant, ‘Fjord of Killary’ is rich with themes of ageing, creativity and pleasure.

First published in The New Yorker, 2010. Collected in Dark Lies the Island, Vintage, 2013. Read it online here

‘The Black Monk’ by Anton Chekhov

“Andrey Vasilich Kovrin, MA, was exhausted, his nerves were shattered. He did not take any medical treatment but mentioned his condition in passing to a doctor friend over a bottle of wine, and was advised to spend the spring and summer in the country.”

Is wellness the death of intellect? Is a degree of mental exhaustion necessary for happiness? Anton Chekhov’s thought-provoking story ‘The Black Monk’ centres on Kovrin, a passionate scholar of psychology and philosophy.

When we meet Kovrin, he’s headed towards the house of his former guardian and mentor, Pesotsky, a horticulturist famous throughout Russia. Kovrin is suffering from burnout, insomnia and megalomania. He’s overworked his mind in pursuit of posterity.

Pesotsky’s house includes a landscaped garden and a bountiful orchard of about eighty acres. Kovrin enjoys the garden’s splendours yet doesn’t cut back on his work. “In the country he continued to lead the same nervous, restless life as in town. He read and wrote a great deal, studied Italian, and on his strolls took pleasure in the thought that he would soon be back at work again.”

Everyone was amazed how little Kovrin slept, and how he emerged from a night of insomnia “vigorous and cheerful, as if nothing was wrong.” Even though Kovrin is happy, he begins having hallucinations of a black monk. The apparition doesn’t frighten him – on the contrary it helps to cement his intellectual destiny. “You’re one of the few who are rightly called God’s Chosen,” says the black monk. “Your ideas, intentions, your amazing erudition, your whole life – all bear the divine, heavenly stamp”.

I won’t say any more about how the story progresses, instead urging you to read this classic for yourself. Chekhov’s story asks questions about genius and madness. It’s a dizzying read – a whirlwind in the mind.

Re-reading ‘The Black Monk’ in our current age – where health has become wellness and work is often vilified – I was struck by the timelessness of Chekov’s story. Should we work less and rest more? Or does work give life meaning? For those, like Kovrin, who enjoy pursuits of the mind, does too much rest threaten to unravel us?

First published in Russian in The Artist, January 1894. First published in English in The Black Monk and Other Tales, 1903. Widely translated and collected, including in A Nervous Breakdown, Penguin Classics, 2016, and as a Penguin 60, 1984

‘Aberkariad’ by Thomas Morris

“When Father fell pregnant with us, Mother visited each day, checking up and making extensive enquiries about his well-being. Was he eating enough? Was he comfortable? Did he want her to scratch his back with her snout?”

This sensational story about a family of seahorses is the showstopper from Thomas Morris’s second collection Open Up. Narrated by a young male seahorse with five brothers, the story pivots on his mother’s decision to abandon her fry, leaving their father to raise the family alone.

Seahorses are one of the only creatures (along with pipefish and sea dragons) where the males give birth. Through the lives of seahorses, Morris has found the perfect portal to explore the effects of parental abandonment, how it shapes people’s lives and capacity for love. “I think: if love is an inheritance that I’ve been given something faulty,” says the narrator. And yet this story swells with an ocean’s worth of love.

The title of the story, ‘Aberkariad’, is an invented word for the mating place for foals and fillies. The boys’ father thinks they’re too young for Aberkeriad, yet Uncle Nol urges the boys to outgrow their father.

‘Aberkariad’ is as playful as a Pixar movie and as profound as the finest literary fiction. Much of the reading pleasure comes from Morris’s descriptions of seahorses, how they join their tails together, click their mouths and twirl in celebration.

The profundity of ‘Aberkariad’ rises up in waves, catching the reader off guard with moments of exquisite pain. While the father waits for his wife to return, he paints her portrait using a reed dipped in octopus ink. “Many such portraits lined the whalebone shelves of our home,” says the narrator, “and in each picture Mother looked so warm and so friendly I felt as if I knew her.”

Collected in Open Up, Faber, 2023

‘Ms Ice Sandwich’ by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Louise Heal Kawai

“Ms Ice Sandwich’s eyelids are always painted with a thick layer of a kind of electric blue, exactly the same colour as those hard ice lollies that have been sitting in our freezer since last summer.”

This 92-page novella is a masterpiece of voice, narrated by a young boy infatuated with a girl who works on the sandwich counter in his local supermarket. In this charming story, Kawakami conjures the vocabulary and grammar of a child, a skill that’s rare in much contemporary fiction.

Queuing to buy his egg sandwich, the boy is extremely nervous. “Then when she finally takes my money and gives me the change and her eyelids turn upwards and I can see those great big eyes again, without any warning that squishy, yellowy, orangey stuff inside my head becomes extra bright, then that hollow place right under my chin, above my collarbone, feels like it’s being squeezed really tightly. It’s like that feeling you get when you swallow rice without chewing it properly first.”

The simplicity of the language, with all its endearing innocence, makes the book a deceptively easy read. Beneath the child-like sentences are all of life’s joys and hardships, from first love to parental grief to the confusions of friendship.

Kawakami’s coming-of-age novella is a love story but it’s also a child’s-eye-view of grief. What amazed me about this story was how the author made me feel different emotions at the same time. From the strange joys of shared grief to the agonies of love, it’s all there in the simple tale of one boy’s life.

First published in Japanese in Shincho, 2013, and in the novel Akogare, 2014. Published in English by Pushkin Press, 2017

‘After Rain’ by William Trevor

“In the dining-room of the Pensione Cesarina solitary diners are fitted in around the walls, where space does not permit a table large enough for two.”

Told in the present tense, ‘After Rain’ by William Trevor is a tender story about solitude. Harriet is on holiday in Italy, following the end of a love affair, and we meet her as she dines alone in a hotel restaurant.

Observing the other diners, Harriet wears an “unadorned” blue dress and “earrings that hardly show”. We’re told that a holiday to Skyros with her lover has recently been cancelled, giving her an “empty fortnight” to fill.

She chose the Cesarina because she’d stayed there in childhood, before her parents separated. Tinged with sadness and nostalgia, ‘After Rain’ explores how our upbringing shapes our own romantic encounters. But more than that, the story is a meditation on being alone.

In understated prose, Trevor shows us the quiet virtues of solitude, how it makes us more attentive to our surroundings and our inner lives. As Harriet wanders the Italian streets, she’s attuned to architecture, nature and changes in the weather. She visits the Santa Fabiola, a church with a version of The Annunciation by an unknown artist. Looking at the painting, she zones in on details – the Virgin’s feet, the angel’s wings, the sky and hills in the distance.

For Harriet, observing the world is a form of healing. She’s heartbroken yet she gives herself the space she needs. As the title suggests, ‘After Rain’ is a story about change. Harriet’s “private journey” isn’t grand or dramatic, it’s subtle and humane, and so beautifully told.

First published in The New Yorker, 1995. Collected in William Trevor: Selected Stories, Penguin Books, 2009. Read it online here

‘Losers Weepers’ by Donal Ryan

This six-page story from Donal Ryan’s collection A Slanting of the Sun centres on the search for a lost wedding ring. ‘Losers Weepers’ is a monologue, like much of Ryan’s work, a tidal stream-of-consciousness, dipping into someone’s soul.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator tells us how his neighbour lost her wedding ring while walking with her child. “Its worth seven grand. I know because she told me in a desperate whisper as I helped her search for it earlier.”

The search for the ring creates a common purpose for the local community. “We sifted through patches of gravel and pebbles with our fingers. We braced the sting of kerbside thistles. We were forensic about it.” Threaded through the story of the lost wedding ring are insights into the narrator’s life and family. The different strands whirl together, back and forth in time – it’s a rambling story, a kind of scavenger hunt.

What I love most about Ryan’s work is the sensibility of the prose, the way that it ebbs and flows, swelling up with secrets. Several years ago, I went to one of Ryan’s readings, where he discussed his first book, The Spinning Heart, a polyphonic novel made up of monologues. He described The Spinning Heart as “a book of silences”, the pages filled with things the characters couldn’t say. There’s something of this quality to ‘Losers Weepers’ – it’s unclear who the narrator is speaking to, if anyone. And yet there is an urgency to his monologue, a need to tell the truth, if only to himself.

Collected in A Slanting of the Sun, Transworld, 2015

‘Inextinguishable’ by Lucy Caldwell

“Three days before my daughter died she comes running into the kitchen, Mummy, Mummy, you have to listen to this piece of music.”

It’s hard to find words for this story because it explores the limits of language, its inability to convey the inexpressible. Narrated by a bereaved mother, ‘Inextinguishable’ orbits around a piece of classical music loved by her daughter. Through the music, her child lives on and the mother searches for the words to tell us how that feels.

“We weren’t a classical-music sort of family,” she says. “Her daddy’s tone-deaf, and as for me, I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket with a lid on it.” Despite this, the classical piece breeds a sense of communion.

The tone of ‘Inextinguishable’ is perfectly pitched, the mother’s voice colloquial and movingly authentic. Caldwell’s story rings true because it tries and fails to put words to grief. This is the true magic of art, in all its various forms, to give expression to things that are unspeakable.

In an interview, Caldwell said: “A short story has almost nothing to do with a novel: don’t be deceived by the fact that they’re both prose forms. A short story has much more in common with a poem or a play. For me, even more than either of those things, it is a spell: a series of rhythms, of images, to conjure a feeling, an emotion, an atmosphere…” Like many of Caldwell’s stories, ‘Inextinguishable’ has that spell-like quality, a story that envelops you with all of its power.

First commissioned and broadcast by BBC Radio 3, February 2013. Collected in Multitudes, Faber, 2016

‘The Astral Plane’ by Mary Costello

“She had never met this other man, or heard his voice, and she had tried not to love him.”

This exquisite story by Irish author Mary Costello explores the loss of faith in marriage and the temptation to stray. On holiday in Co. Clare, a woman spends time with her husband while plagued by thoughts of another man.

Known only as E, the man lives in New York yet recently visited Dublin. While attending an author reading, he found a novel with the woman’s email address inside the back cover. A prolonged correspondence begins between E and A: “He sent her quotations, lines from songs; he sent her poems. Did he not know the effect such words, such lines, such poems might have on a woman?”

Described as “an affair of the mind”, their correspondence feels somehow more shameful than a sexual liaison, testing the woman’s religion as well as her marriage. I fell in love with this story from the first reading and always enjoy returning to it. Costello plumbs the depths of romantic relationships, the virtues of commitment and the meaning of happiness. The story is also very funny, its humour delivered with an elegant touch.

Recalling Elizabeth Taylor’s tragicomic classic ‘The Letter Writers’ (which I recommended in A Personal Anthology’s collaborative summer special), ‘The Astral Plane’ weaves together embodied scenes with epistolary fragments. Both stories dramatise the space between life and writing, highlighting the joys and the limits of literature.

First published in The China Factory by Stinging Fly Press, 2012. Collected in The China Factory, Canongate, 2015

‘The Blush’ by Elizabeth Taylor

“Something had not come true; the essential part of her life. She had always imagined her children in fleeting scenes and intimations; that was how they had come to her, like snatches of a film.”

The first page of ‘The Blush’ is one of the most affecting openings I’ve ever read. Mrs Allen mourns the children she wanted but wasn’t able to have. Meanwhile, her housekeeper, Mrs Lacey, grumbles about her own children, drowning her sorrows after work in The Horse & Jockey.

One Monday morning, Mrs Lacey is late for work due to morning sickness. Bitter with animosity, Mrs Allen goes for a walk, “trying to disengage her thoughts from Mrs Lacey and her troubles; but unable to.” The dynamic between the two women – the mutual envy – is darkly comic and always compassionate.

In her lifetime, Taylor wrote four collections of stories and twelve novels. Kingsley Amis described her as “one of the best English novelists” and she’s widely regarded as a master of the short story.

Deploying an omniscient point of view, Taylor’s prose roves between characters with such lightness and fluency. How ‘The Blush’ develops is a stroke of genius – this is a story that expands in the reader’s mind.

First published in The New Yorker and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Blush, Peter Davies, 1958

‘Forever Overhead’ by David Foster Wallace

“Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognise that important things are happening to you.”

Written in the second person, David Foster Wallace’s breathtaking story ‘Forever Overhead’ puts us in the body of a young boy at a swimming pool. “Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right.”

The boy is at the pool with his family for his thirteenth birthday, his sister playing with her friends, his parents sunbathing in deckchairs. As the boy strays from his family, walking towards the diving board, we go deeper into his skin, feeling his heartbeat rise, seeing his footprints disappear on the hot concrete.

Queuing to climb the ladder, he pretends to look bored while looking at the older girls’ bodies. “The bottoms are in soft thin cloth, tight nylon stretch … The girls’ legs make you think of deer. Look bored.”

Capturing the acute self-awareness of puberty, ‘Forever Overhead’ is an incredibly visceral story. As the boy slowly climbs the ladder up to the diving board, his feet hurt on the thin metal rungs. Foster Wallace gives us such fine detail, from “the wind that makes a thin whistle in your ears” to the “constellations of blue-clean chlorine beads” on the boy’s skin. The use of the second person perspective brings us so close, adding a sense of intimacy, an aching tenderness. Each time I read this story I experience it anew.

First published in Fiction International, 1991, and collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown, 1999

‘Lion of the Afternoon’ by Brian Moore

“Jack Tait was an achondroplastic dwarf, twenty-four years old, with a handsome head and a normal torso, but tiny arms and legs. His partner, Davis, was a melancholy young man, six feet six inches tall. They were billed as The Long And The Short Of It, and were to be paid twenty-five dollars for this afternoon’s work.”

This unforgettable story by one of Belfast’s all-time greats gives us a day in the life of an acrobat named Tait. Dressed in baggy checked trousers and a “tiny tailcoat”, Tait paints a clown grin and star-shaped dimples on his face, readying himself for the afternoon’s performance.

The audience comprises eight-hundred children with a range of physical disabilities. (The terms used to describe the children are hugely outdated and offensive, the story first published in 1957). In addition to Tait and his acrobatic partner Davis, the day’s line-up includes: Tommy Manners, an overweight accordionist whose “great rump bumped against Tait’s forehead”; Len the balloonist, wearing “a magenta suit with silver lapels”; Arnoldi, the alcoholic magician, and his partner Doris, who distracts the men with her “black-meshed legs and comely hips”.

Top marks to Moore for the character line-up, each perfectly poised on the tragicomic tightrope. As Tait prepares to go on stage, he’s verbally abused by his fellow performers. Davis and Doris call him “Shorty” while Arnoldi calls him “runt”. Moore’s unflinching prose is clean as a bone. The discrimination is awful – and far too believable.

What’s wonderful about this story is the awe with which the disabled children observe Tait on-stage. They watch him with wonder, smiling at “the pratfalls, the somersaults, the running and the catching.” Tait was the children’s favourite – “the lion of the afternoon” – and this story by Moore brings him to life.

Moore was a multi-award-winning novelist, shortlisted three times for the Booker prize; as a short story writer he’s renowned as one of the masters of the form. ‘Lion of the Afternoon’ is a shocking story about a complex character. With empathy and courage, Moore somersaults onto terrain most writers wouldn’t dare to tiptoe.

First published in The Atlantic, November 1957, and available to read here. Collected in The Dear Departed, Turnpike, 2020