Introduction

Those familiar with the water colour Dickens’ Dream by Robert William Buss should be able to picture the scene. The author is depicted sitting in a bentwood chair he has pushed back from his desk. He is either in a state of deep concentration or—more likely given the title—he has dozed off. In the air around him swirls a mist of his creations—scenes and characters from his novels, some so hazy as to be almost imperceptible, others resolving themselves in stronger lines and clearer colours.

I took a similar approach when invited to compile this anthology. After a quick tour of my shelves I sat in my own office chair and let candidates swirl around me till a dozen emerged from the fog, although where Dickens is impeccably dressed in a black frock coat and breeches, and his white-socked, leather-slippered feet sit on a velvet rest, I was probably wearing sweat pants. Let’s, if only for the sake of decency, assume as much. I don’t have a unifying principle to justify the selection except that I do believe it would make a very nice book for the reader keen to revel in the form.

‘101’ by May-Lan Tan

Really, this one line would justify its inclusion: “They got married at the end of the summer, before God and five hundred Korean people in a Gothic church on Wilshire Boulevard.”

It’s a story about the things we have to carry alone, the things we choose to. About the imaginary lines we trace between what we think are our transgressions and the prices we pay for them. About how sometimes there is a need to forgive someone who hasn’t wronged us. About how nothing is ever done. The prose is exquisitely spare—it makes the kind of poignancy possible that is lost the moment an author lays it on with a trowel or indicates what a reader should think. Tan can do with a word, an observation, what Satie could do with a note. The story is laced with many more memorable lines but I won’t quote them. It’s a short story—you won’t expend much energy in finding them and you will be disproportionately rewarded. I don’t recommend you read it in the garden—May-Lan Tan is dry enough to kill your lawn.

First published in The Reader, and collected in Things to Make or Break, CB Editions, 2014, and in a new edition, Sceptre 2018

‘Flower Crazy’ by Mohamed Choukri, translated by Jonas Elbousty

This is an outlier on the list. No matter how much I might tell myself my tastes are wide-ranging and catholic, I am drawn to stylists—and Mohamed Choukri is not that. Sometimes his sentences, at least as they’re rendered in English, read like bullet points, as though style were the enemy. ‘Flower Crazy’ deploys multiple perspectives to contrast Tangier’s public persona with Choukri’s home territory—the city’s impoverished underbelly.

To this day it is possible for a foreigner to go for a short walk in Tangier and encounter people for whom she has no reliable points of reference—individuals whose weatherings and eccentricities have been sculpted in circumstances beyond her ken. Choukri’s fictions are monuments to these people. He depicted them without a trace of judgement or superiority—because he was one of them. Unusually for a writer, he learned to read at the age of twenty, while in prison, following a childhood and youth I suspect most of us would rather not think about, let alone experience. I could have chosen any story by him—his value (and appeal) as a writer transcends the individual works.

First published in Arabic in 1979. Choukri’s complete short stories are now collected in Tales of Tangier, Yale University Press, 2023

‘Home, Sisters’ by Emma Devlin

This is going to be difficult to describe. Devlin does something here which I consider to be both masterful and rare, but which doesn’t sound right when I try to put it into words—she leaves us floundering, but in precisely the right way. We are dropped mid-current into a time and place that will never fully reveal themselves to us, introduced to characters that will remain (just, exquisitely) beyond our understanding, and delivered an ending that isn’t an ending. She does everything wrong, in other words, at least according to the tenets of convention. But this is how, in the hands of a skilled writer, a short story can be an enormity, exceeding the limits of a reader’s vision. The lack of resolution is the resolution—the clarifying in our view of a world, depicted in miniature, that is anything but miniature. You will not need the reassurance of obvious meaning if you read ‘Home, Sisters’. You will not need to formulate a quick response—the story will move into you, to stay.

Winner of the 2019 Benedict Kiely Short Story competition, as yet uncollected but available online on the Irish Times website

‘The Distance of the Moon’ by Italo Calvino, tr. William Weaver

If asked to write about Calvino in another context, I’d probably start with Invisible Cities, but since this is an anthology of short stories, it has to be ‘The Distance of the Moon’, a story from Cosmicomics that exemplifies Calvino’s ability to return a reader to an earlier state, in which our wonder at an unfolding tale is childlike. No coincidence that among his accomplishments is a definitive collection of Italian folktales.

I love lists, and ‘The Distance of the Moon’ is the story that, in its description of moon milk, gave us not only ‘vegetal juices, tadpoles, bitumen, lentils, honey, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, moulds, pollens, gelatinous matter, worms, resins, pepper, mineral salts, combustion residue’ but also ‘fingernails and cartilage, bolts, sea horses, nuts and peduncles, shards of crockery, fish-hooks, at times even a comb’.

Luminous is an overused word but it might have been coined for this story. From a luminous, irreal palette, Calvino paints a portrait of the kind of longing any of us will have known who have played our part in a love triangle (quadrangle, pentangle . . . )

First published in Cosmicomics, Giulio Einaudi (Italy) and Harcourt Brace (US), 1965. Currently available from Penguin Modern Classics, 2010

‘Stirrings Still’ by Samuel Beckett

I’ve carried a false memory with me for many years now, that on the occasion of Beckett’s death the Independent newspaper (re)published ‘Stirrings Still’—that I cut it out and pasted it into a notebook I had at the time and which I still have (and in which are also venerated: Rainer Maria Rilke, Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie and Mark E. Smith). It’s the notebook of a boy, but when I leaf through it now, it’s all there—it seems I’ve grown older but not up.

But I can find no evidence that The Independent ever did this. It turns out that the Guardian had run ‘Stirrings Still’ nine months earlier—I must have got it there. Beckett’s was the first death of a public figure at which I felt visceral, gutting emotion (the second was Mark E. Smith, thirty years later).

We’re just one letter short of being able to anagram ‘distill’ from the story’s title, and that is what it really is. The theatrical works are what went out into the world but for me it’s all about his short fictions and above all ‘Stirrings Still’—it’s my if-you-only-ever-read-one-thing-by-him perennial.

First published in a limited edition illustrated by Louis le Brocquy, John Calder, 1988. Now available in Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still, Faber, 2009

‘The Rule of Names’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

It was a delight to discover this story in the collection, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, not so long ago. Le Guin has plenty of admirers, of course, and for a multiplicity of reasons—much has been made of her feminism, her activism, her advocacy for writing itself. For me, it was really about the dragons, and the possibility that a boy might become a wizard. But then I was a boy when I read A Wizard of Earthsea in the course of a summer night, by clandestine torchlight under my duvet. ‘The Rule of Names’ is one of two stories in the collection that were early ventures into the world of Earthsea and its magic. There are two rules: you never ask anyone their name, and you never tell anyone yours. This is because “the name is the thing”—too powerful to reveal. The magic in Earthsea is premised entirely on language—on names, on words—and it seems as though that may have begun here in this story of (mistaken) identity. I have wondered to what extent Alan Moore is influenced by Le Guin, in his assertion that fiction is essentially—and not metaphorically—magic, and vice versa. I feel the same way. I want it to be true because it would mean the boy did become a wizard after all.

Originally appeared in Fantasticmagazine in 1964, now collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Harper Perennial

‘Henri Bergson Writes About Time’ by C.D. Rose

It may be self-serving of me to pick this story out from a uniformly brilliant collection—my reading habits as a lazy student were both adventitious and incomplete, and being these days in close service to my own efforts, have not improved—so it isn’t often I can truthfully say “Yes, I’m somewhat familiar with this philosopher’s work”.

Bergson sits at his desk and considers time. And time, and time again. And again. Rose laces the story with Bergson’s concept of duration and the fluid, immeasurable nature of what language obliges us to call the moment as we pass through.

And yet, and yet—it is also a story about cold coffee and tired women, about the 20^thcentury, about age and arthritis.

It isn’t the first Rose story to strike me as something of a Gymnopedie—a series of variations, a circling, a fugue of not-quite-repetitions. I’m misusing the musical terms, but you will know what I mean. Like walking around a sculpture and never getting bored.

Collected in Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, Melville House, 2024

‘The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace’ by Donald Barthelme

Perhaps the most astonishing thing that as a reader I’d ever seen—I first came across it in the collection Forty Stories. I’ve learned since that, as well as being the son of a reputable architect, Barthelme was an accomplished jazz drummer. Both show in his work. If Beckett had pared short fiction to its bare bones, Barthelme disassembled the skeleton, reassembling it into any number of anatomical collages and using the leftover bones to play a difficult—but delightful—jazz.

A series of antique engravings—illustrations, diagrams, architectural draughts—prompt the language of the piece, an account of the putting on of a theatrical spectacle which, of course, is the story itself.

I suppose the strategy had a sort of antecedent in Max Ernst and works such as Une Semaine de Bonté, but I didn’t know about Ernst’s collages then so it seemed entirely new to me. And because it seemed entirely new it was entirely new. Completely unprecedented. I’m glad I didn’t know about Une Semaine de Bonté—these little nuggets of ignorance, which I still treasure, can afford a reader a sort of revelation they would not otherwise have known. A personal literature is mapped out in them. And who wants an impersonal literature?

First published in The New Yorker, then collected in Sadness, 1972, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Now available in Forty Stories, Penguin Modern Classics

‘Wants’ by Grace Paley

I was late to the Paley party and went there with precisely the wrong attitude—determined to like her work because all the right people seemed to. In spite of this impulse or perhaps because of it, I struggled at first. I think she is a slippery customer. She has been dubbed a “writer of voice” and I think that’s right. At first I heard only the voice—I couldn’t make out anything it was saying.

‘Wants’ is the story that made Paley click, for me. A woman bumps into her ex-husband on the steps of a library, on her way to return two Edith Wharton books which are 18 years overdue. He follows her to the Returns Desk to talk about the end of their marriage, the reasons for it. His tone is somewhat accusatory, and his diagnosis is tethered to specifics. The narrator’s responses are not so easy to pin down. When he laments (if that’s the right word) that she has never wanted anything (he has always wanted a motorboat, for example) it cuts her to the quick, and when he has gone she reflects on what she does want—a list not of objects but of better ways to live.

There’s a pregnancy to everything in the story—each detail and aspect might be symbolic of some other detail or aspect, but never in a simplistic way. For example, I’ve seen analyses of it that have the husband a symbol of phallocentrism, but I can’t believe it of Paley, whose work I have since been able to greatly enjoy, that she would have set out with so trite a goal. These reductive analyses disregard the kindness, the regard, shown him by the narrator—and this kindness imbues all of Paley’s work: a tolerance for people’s shortcomings and mistakes and for the shortfalls of reality versus expectations.

Her stories do not reach simple conclusions. There is no rush to judgement. The most powerful voices, for me, have been either those with a similar perspective to mine that nevertheless help me see other perspectives, or those with a different perspective to mine that nevertheless help me feel seen. Paley is the latter.

First collected in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974. Now available in The Collected Stories, Virago Modern Classics

‘You (Plural)’ by Jennifer Egan

Can you hear that, folks? That’s the sound of a shoehorn. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is usually considered a novel but there has been just enough discussion around whether these are in fact linked stories to license my inclusion of one here. Very few writers produce prose that has the impact-per-word, for me, that Egan’s does.

‘You (Plural)’ is a tale of lost time from a place not at all relatable to me—the LA of poolside parties, music business moguls and their girls (the Plural of the story’s title?). But Egan gives this short piece—eight pages—a Proustian sweep, and in her invocation of clueless youth giving way to clueless something else, of the guttering flame of diminished possibilities, of the past as another country that we can neither return to nor ever really leave, creates something very relatable indeed. To me, at least.

From A Visit from the Goon Squad, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010

‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka, tr. Willa and Edwin Muir

It was almost certainly ‘The Metamorphosis’ that I read first, when it comes to Kafka. I’m not sure I was ready—it was more perplexing to me than anything else. Despite the striking premise, I couldn’t make out what the story was about, and it seems that was important to me at the time because I set it aside—not unimpressed, exactly, but unengaged. In the years since I’ve gone back to it many times, a different and evolved reader on each occasion with a deeper understanding of both life and literature and . . . just kidding—I still don’t know what it’s about and still very much perplexed. It’s just that, now, those are good things.

So much is glimpsed in this story—but only glimpsed. Glimpses of Gregor’s new body, glimpses of him under the sofa in the gloom at floor level where the light from the streetlamps doesn’t reach, glimpses beneath the sheet he uses to conceal himself, glimpses of his family when they leave the door open. Glimpses of a troubled self-loathing, of longstanding resentment. From the other side of a door, familial dynamics will flash in the glint of an overheard interaction. Anything more than a glimpse spells trouble: for Gregor to be in the full presence of his family, and they in his, is for something bad to happen—some escalating, uncomprehending confrontation to send him scurrying and injured.

A happy ending is delivered that costs us the protagonist. Real life, happy life, good life is only possible sans Gregor Samsa.

First published in German, as ‘Die Verwandlung’, in Die Weißen Blätter, 1915. This translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, is from Metamorphosis & Other Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 1987

‘Awkward’ by Raymond Queneau, tr. Barbara Wright

It seems a caprice to pick out a single entry in Queneau’s iconic Exercises in Style. However, for the sake of sticking to format, I choose ‘Awkward’, which begins “I’m not used to writing. I dunno. I’d quite like to write a tragedy or a sonnet or an ode, but there’s the rules. They put me off. They weren’t made for amateurs. All this is already pretty badly written.”

Exercises in Style introduced me (indirectly) to Oulipo and the idea of Oulipian writing. Much like Barthelme’s The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace, it astounded me. It wasn’t just a new (to me) way of writing, it was writing for an entirely new set of reasons.

New York poet Mike Silverton puts it this way: “If the superficial dazzles, depth need not apply.”

As Barthelme was to do, Queneau directs the reader’s attention away from a linear notion of narrative and towards other possibilities for play. It is quite true that no reading of Exercises in Style could ever alight on character development or (odious phrase) emotional depth. But not to discern a beauty in it would be a form of blindness, I think.

There’s an analogy to be drawn between the intellectual attractions of music in the Western tradition—its themes and developments, motifs, its suspensions and resolutions—and the trance-inducing effect of those other musics which rely most heavily on repetition or drone.

The premise and structure of Exercises in Style allow for the possibility of dipping in, reading it piecemeal. I’d urge the reader to read it as they would a novel, cover to cover. Altered state.

First published by Gallimard Editions in 1947. First translated for Gaberbocchus Press in 1958. Now available as a New Directions paperback

‘Sand Castles’ by Richard Brautigan

I’ve chosen ‘Sand Castles’ from Brautigan’s only short story collection, a brief account of a visit to Point Reyes Peninsula, which is “fastened like a haunted fingerprint to the California coast” and where “Hawks circle in the sky like the lost springs of old railroad watches”. The author parks his car and hikes down through a canyon “which of course unfolded like layers of abstraction and intimacy” to a beach “like a photograph if they’d had cameras in the time when Christ lived.”

But it’s a sham. What I really want, if Brautigan is new to you, is to get you to read his novels—Sombrero Fallout, in which a black cat is described as a suburb of a Japanese lover’s hair, The Abortion, a kinder and more uplifting work than its title would suggest, or maybe Trout Fishing in America. Any of them, really.

Another from ‘Sand Castles’: “I stared at the watercress in the creek. It looked wealthy.”

First collected in Revenge of the Lawn, Simon & Schuster, 1971, now available from Canongate Press, 2014