These are not the best short stories ever, nor are they representative of anything apart from themselves. I’ve read hundreds of others that clamoured to be listed, so in the end this is, as much as anything else, a list of Great Omissions. There are no stories in translation—nothing by Borges, Maupassant, Chekhov, Babel, Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Clarice Lispector, Julio Cortázar, or Eileen Chang. And nothing by Henry James, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, Henry Green, Virginia Woolf, Edward Upward, Dorothy Richardson, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle…oh, I’ve hardly got started on who’s not on this list. Let alone all the many brilliant living writers, old and young, who deserve a look in, and who (with one exception) I’ve excluded. The few stories that remain, the ones that are on the list, are just twelve of the stories that have obstinately stuck in my head, for one reason or another, at various points in the last fifty years or more. I’ve listed them alphabetically, for fairness.
Category: Ian Patterson
Before his retirement, Ian Patterson taught English at Queens’ College, Cambridge. His translations include Fourier’s Theory of the Four Movements (C.U.P., 1996) and Proust’s Finding Time Again (Penguin, 2003). In 2007 he published Guernica and Total War (Profile & Harvard), a cultural history of the fear of attack from the air. His most recent book of poems is Shell Vestige Disputed (Broken Sleep, 2023), and his Collected Poems is forthcoming from the same publisher in 2024. He is also the current editor of the long-running (since 1892) annual literary quiz Nemo’s Almanac. He lives in Suffolk.
‘The Iconoclasts’ by A.L. Barker
Towards the end of the second world war, a five-year-old boy, Marcus, with a small and fearful growing awareness of the world around him, spends the afternoon with Neil, five years older, full of his knowledge, scathing of Marcus’s childishness, and possessed of a kind of fanaticism, “an ardour so extreme, so pitiless that it chilled and almost repelled”. Neil lives by the airfield, wants the war to go on long enough for him to be a pilot; he sees a decayed windmill over the fields and sets off, accompanied by Marcus, to explore it, and decides to test his nerve by swinging down on one of the sails and jumping off at the botttom, making a “four-point landing”. Unfortunately, the sails won’t turn, and eventually Neil falls to his death. The story, focalised through Marcus’s consciousness draws its force from the limits of his vision, almost like an allegory of short story form itself.
First published in Innocents, Hogarth Press, 1947 and collected in Submerged: Selected Stories, Virago, 2020
‘Look at All Those Roses’ by Elizabeth Bowen
Like most of Bowen’s stories, this is one that reveals more and more about itself every time I read it. I love first of all the description with which it opens, two bored and mutually disappointed young people driving back to London through a curiously inert Suffolk landscape, empty and still and hot. Their car breaks down half a mile after they’ve past a house, the front covered in the eponymous roses. What happens after that unfolds in Bowen’s best manner, slowly revealing things that remain unspoken and inconclusive, raising all sorts of questions and reflecting the relationship of the central protagonists.
First published in Look at All Those Roses, Cape, 1941, and variously reprinted, including in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, Penguin, 1983
‘Broccoli’ by Maeve Brennan
This is a rather short short story, not much more than a page, and by some counts not really a story, being a personal anecdote. None of which matters, as the seemingly inconsequential account about the smallest of private failures takes on, fills with, rings with echoes of one’s own moments of lesser or greater failure.
First published in The New Yorker, 3 November 1963, and available to subscribers to read here; reprinted in The Long-Winded Lady Notes from The New Yorker, Boston: Mariner Books, 1998, Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016 and Peninsula Press, 2024, with an introduction by Sinéad Gleeson
‘Speed the Plough’ by Mary Butts
An early story by Mary Butts, about a shell-shocked conscript in the first world war, a mismatch both with the army and the normative assumptions of doctors and authorities, sent to recuperate by working on a dairy farm. The crude physicality of milking begins to sicken him—”There was a difference in nature between that winking, pearling flow and the pale decency of a Lyons’ tea jug”—and in the end he contrives to return to his job as a London couturier. Aesthetics, popular culture, gender, culture, nature and artifice, all interrogated and dramatised brilliantly.
First published in The Dial, 71 as ‘Speed the Plow’; reprinted in Speed the Plough and other stories, Chapman and Hall, 1923; in Natalie Blondel (ed.) With and Without Buttons and other stories, Carcanet Press, 1991; and in The Complete Stories, McPherson, 2014
‘Handel’ by Lydia Davis
I’m fond of this story (another very short one, less than a page) partly because I’m extremely keen on Handel’s music and, like the annoying husband in the story, I listen to it a lot of the time. The undecorated narration and the matter-of-fact but surreal conclusion is productively disturbing. Like a number of Lydia’s stories, this one is very short, very formal, and very much larger than it looks.
First published in Little Star, reprinted in Can’t and Won’t, Hamish Hamilton, 2014
‘The Singing Man’ by Fielding Dawson
This is possibly my favourite short story ever, perfect narrative control beside (and necessary to contain) an almost voluptuous love of the sheer exuberant presence of a delivery man in the street the narrator comes to enjoy the existence of, as he pushes a hand truck through the crowds, occasionally lifting his voice in a song. Not that he can sing well—he forgets the words, can’t hit the high notes, and embarrasses the passers-by—but an absolute social grace is what Dawson’s writing creates in this unembarrassed, inclusive, brilliant vision of city life.
From The Man Who Changed Overnight and other stories & dreams 1970-1974, Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1976
‘The Vanishing Princess or The Origins of Cubism’ by Jenny Diski
An apparently simple story, like a fairy story, but with complex, recursive thinking about ontology and desire. It’s shot through with ironic distance, and the distinctive Diski note of apparent objectivity masking implied feeling. (I have to add here that I was married to Jenny Diski, so have a special fondness for her writing, but that’s not the only reason for including this story.)
First published in the New Statesman, reprinted in The Vanishing Princess, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995
‘The Gannets’ by Anna Kavan
Nobody equals Anna Kavan in evoking states of powerlessness, puzzlement, lostness, uncertainty, and paranoia, and in seeing through the eyes of people in those states of mind. I might have chosen any of the stories from this volume, the title story itself, or ‘The Blackout’ or ‘All Kinds of Grief Shall Arrive’, or ‘Now I Know Where My Place Is’ but I chose this one, because of an apparent inconsequentiality which sits uncomfortably with the unexplained scene of cruelty the narrator witnesses. Kavan’s stories are often thinking about cruelty, both casual and deliberate, and it’s extraordinary how much she manages to imply in this two-page story. It suggests interesting comparison with Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’, with Lord of the Fliesand with A.L. Barker’s observations of childhood.
First published in I am Lazarus, Jonathan Cape, 1945, and reprinted in Machines in the Head: Selected Short Writing, ed. by Victoria Walker, Peter Owen, 2019
‘The Tournament’ by William Sansom
This isn’t entirely successful, not as outstanding as other stories of his like ‘The Wall’, but it is an interesting attempt to write a political allegory using a future setting and a familiar trope, with a description of spectacle being used for political purposes, loudspeaker commentary subtly (at first) sowing propaganda, and a finale in which sport (of a sort) tips over into war, rules abandoned. It owes something perhaps to the novels of Rex Warner, and is one of the reasons people sometimes evoked Kafka as a comparison for Sansom’s writing. A period piece, in a way, but an interesting one, and I’ve never been quite able to get it out of my mind.
First published in English Story, Third Series, 1942; reprinted in Reginald Moore and Woodrow Wyatt eds., Stories of the Forties, Vol. I, Nicholson & Watson, 1945
‘”Dear Ailie”’ by Malachi Whitaker
Another brilliant writer from the nineteen thirties. Almost any of her short stories would have done, but this one is particularly and resonantly poignant, full of misunderstandings, fears, circumstantial misconnections, in fact all the ingredients of comedy except a happy ending.
First published in Five for Silverm Jonathan Cape, 1932
‘The Door in the Wall’ by H.G. Wells
A paradigmatic story about a lost Eden, a magical realm the central narrator stumbles on at the age of five when he goes through a mysterious door in a wall a few streets from his London home. Later opportunities to revisit it are passed over for more mundane urgencies, but latterly he becomes obsessed with finding it again, with tragic consequences. The story is hedged about with Wellsian scepticism in the frame narrative, but doubt never quite leads to complete disbelief. For all the familiar Edwardian male clubland setting, the story has a haunting quality that draws on unconscious memory and unconscious desire.
First published in the Daily Chronicle, 1906, collected and reprinted frequently since. Available to read online here
‘The Ground Hostess’ by Francis Wyndham
There is a long tradition of playing with the gap between fiction and reality, and the short story form has proved very adept at summoning ghosts and creating weird narratives. In this more light-hearted story, Francis Wyndham takes an existing strand and provides an original and satisfying twist on it. What makes it remarkable though, beyond the narrative, is the perfectly judged, perfectly characterised style.
First published in the London Review of Books, 1 April 1983; reprinted in Mrs Henderson and other stories, Jonathan Cape 1985
A Personal Anthology 