Introduction

At first I thought of choosing the shortest stories I could, and some of those remain in the list below, but in the end I broadened my thinking as some stories kept pushing their way in. I did briefly wonder, after completing the list, why I don’t have any classic short story writers here – no Chekhov, Borges, Mansfield etc – and I think it’s because although I do love their stories, they don’t feel like they’re mine. The ones I’ve chosen do.

‘Bruce Calls from Mulholland’ by Bret Easton Ellis

I bought Ellis’s book The Informers in hardback when I was on holiday, and nowhere did the blurb say it was a collection of stories, so I read it as a novel. This was both difficult – it’s not a novel – and easy – Ellis’s characters are interchangeable, so it just felt even more dissociated than his other books, but not different in substance. And when I found it was actually a collection of stories, I was disappointed. All that work I put in! ‘Bruce Calls from Mulholland’ is the opening chapter – sorry, first story – and it’s just bog-standard Ellis: stoned and sunburned, written with the blank deadness that I didn’t realise, until I read Joan Didion’s fiction, was a straight lift from Joan Didion’s fiction. It is probably not a great story in its own right – but that’s not how I read it anyway.

First published in The Informers, Picador, 1994

‘Boil Some Water – Lots of It’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 1939, Fitzgerald’s success as a novelist was in the rear view mirror and he was working in Hollywood, groping for scraps as a freelance writer. At the weekends, he dashed off stories about Pat Hobby, a freelance writer groping for scraps in Hollywood. They were written purely for the money (“Will you wire me if you like it”) but they show how Fitzgerald’s facility meant he could never really turn out a dud, even with the left hand. In this story, Pat is doing rewrites on a script and can only think of one line to add – the title of the story – so decides to do a little research over lunch to help inspire him. Chaos and reversals ensue. It’s a tight little gem of comedy, written in the final year of Fitzgerald’s short life.

First published in Esquire, March 1940, where it can be read online, and subsequently in The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vol.3 : The Pat Hobby Stories, Penguin Classics, 1986, and The Collected Short Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000

‘Stock’ by Cynan Jones

“I write twelve pages to get one page, and I cut all the time,” Beryl Bainbridge once said. Cynan Jones is of similar mind: his most famous novel The Dig went from 90,000 words to 30,000 in one cut. His novels have been getting shorter and shorter, and now he has, well, cut out the middleman and just published a collection of stories. Stock is one of the best, a masterpiece of spring-wound tension that’s so pared-back it reads as simultaneously clear and abstract. It’s about a rural community on the edge of change, and the lengths people will go to to stop that change. To say more would spoil a story driven by the gaps left for the reader, but Stock has stuck with me more than any other new story I read this year. To return to Bainbridge: “Unless a writer is superb, I don’t think it’s enough just to go wuffling on.” Jones is superb, but he still doesn’t wuffle.

First published as a standalone story by Nightjar Press in 2023, and subsequently in the collection Pulse, Granta, 2025

‘Reunion’ by John Cheever

Probably the shortest great story I’ve read, at three pages top to tail. It’s about – as the opening and closing lines tell us – the last time a boy saw his father. The father is appalling in a comic way, and the story is rich in horrible dialogue that might even have been as much fun to write as it is to read. (I read it aloud to my son recently, though I think I enjoyed the experience more than he did. Another bad father.) But also the story and the central character of the father exemplify Cheever’s own dual nature – his need for respectability and his desire to subvert – which gives the story an undertow of deep poignancy, below the undoubted entertainment and horror value.

First published in the New Yorker, 20 Oct 1962, where it can be read online, and subsequently in the collection The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, Gollancz, 1965, and The Stories of John Cheever, Cape, 1979

‘The English Understand Wool’ by Helen DeWitt

DeWitt, depending who you ask, is somewhere between an underrated genius and a universal taste, but she doesn’t publish new work very often. This – OK, a novella more than a story; who’s counting? – is an exquisite self-contained world, led by our narrator Marguerite. Wealthy but fallen on hard times, she is required to write her life story, which we are reading. Her poise and orientation toward the world are visible when she is asked to write more about her feelings: “Perhaps there were people who would like to hear about feelings, but I did not think that they were people I would want to know.” The purity and intensity of DeWitt’s prose is a wonder, and the story will have you referring to certain things as “mauvais ton” for weeks afterwards.

First published as a standalone story in the New Directions Storybook ND series, 2022

‘Marching Songs’ by Keith Ridgway

In 2012 I became a pest on social media by talking about Keith Ridgway’s novel Hawthorn & Child too much. As one Irish writer – whom I blocked – observed, you’d think I had written the thing myself. Hawthorn & Child is a novel made of loosely connected stories – “a shattered novel in a bag”, Ridgway called it – and Marching Songsis one of the stories. It’s narrated by a man who is clearly not right in the head, who disappears down YouTube rabbit holes toward radical thinking in a way that seems even more familiar now than it did then. But what I love about the story is the poetry of the narrator’s cracked and freewheeling voice, which manages to be idiosyncratic without striking false notes. There are lines in it that hang around in my own head a dozen years later, which is as good a measure of its success as any.

First published in Granta 120, June 2012, where it can be read online, and as part of the novel Hawthorn & Child, Granta, 2012

‘The Choc-Ice Woman’ by Mary Costello

Costello’s stories are generally rigorous, austere, unconsoling – stylistically, the sort of thing I gravitate toward very easily. Her latest collection Barcelona is mostly stories of pain distilled into precise prose. But this, the longest and perhaps best story in the book, is a bit different. It’s more expansive in both story and style, about a woman whose husband has a sex addiction. She “loathes people with big appetites”, which is probably connected to those qualities in Costello’s stories I mentioned earlier. But it also has unexpected comedy, and the feel of a writer stretching herself in different ways – so it feels both more traditional than Costello’s other work, but also excitingly new because it’s unlike that work. It’s a complete thing.

First published in the New Yorker, 9 Oct 2023 where it can be read online, and as part of the collection Barcelona, Canongate, 2024

‘The First Seven Years’ by Bernard Malamud

The collection that this story comes from – The Magic Barrel – seems to me as coherent and artful a portrait of Jewish-American life in the last century as Dubliners was for its own era and place. In the story, Feld is a shoemaker (many of Malamud’s characters are small businessmen, often heading for penury) whose “old and ugly” assistant Sobel wants to marry Feld’s daughter Miriam, much to our man’s horror. “Then he realised that what he called ugly was not Sobel but Miriam’s life if she married him. He felt for his daughter a strange and gripping sorrow, as if she were already Sobel’s bride, the wife, after all, of a shoemaker, and had in her life no more than her mother had had.” Malamud’s stories are not out-and-out funny, but there’s an energy in the language that is akin to the energy of comedy, so I always read them with a big smile on my face, even when terrible things are happening.

First published in the Partisan Review, Sep-Oct 1950, and subsequently in the collection The Magic Barrel, 1958. Can be read online here

‘Foundry House’ by Brian Friel

Here in Northern Ireland, where he was born, Brian Friel has a huge and justified reputation as a playwright, but I didn’t even know he started out writing short stories until Penguin issued a selection of them earlier this year. It’s not so surprising, really – the efficiency of setting up narrative in a story and in a play must be connected skills. This is the best story in the new selection; it’s a bit less twinkly-eyed and Frank O’Connor-esque than some of the others, and it concerns the daughter of an Irish household who has moved to Rhodesia (as it then was), and how that affects everyone. It’s set largely in one room – the playwright flexing – and the characters, the details, the gestures, are all perfectly pitched; it’s sad and funny; it made me wish Friel hadn’t given up prose.

First published in the New Yorker, 11 Nov 1961, where it can be read online, and collected in The Saucer of Larks, Victor Gollancz, 1962, and in Stories of Ireland, Penguin, 2025

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff

I’m sorry to be the seventh person to choose this Wolff story – he has written other great stories – but it really is a corker. It’s the story of a book critic, Anders, who can’t keep his trap shut during an armed robbery and gets shot in the head as a result. And I loved it when I first read it 30 years ago, but I love it even more now that I too am a book critic and can take Anders’s story in part as a warning on the corrosive qualities of cynicism. Most of all though, it really is the exquisite, surprising, last scene and closing lines that tip this story into the pantheon of greats. How does he do it? And more to the point – since Wolff hasn’t published an all-new collection of stories since the one this one appeared in 30 years ago – why doesn’t he do it a bit more?

First published in the New Yorker, 18 Sep 1995, where it can be read online, and collected in The Night in Question, Bloomsbury, 1995) and subsequently in Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, Bloomsbury, 2008

‘The Drowned Man’ by Maeve Brennan

Brennan’s The Springs of Affection – both the collection and the title story – are rightly celebrated by connoisseurs of the spiky and sharp: as William Maxwell put it, “as a study of one kind of unhappy marriage, these stories are surely definitive”. The unhappy marriage is that of Hubert and Rose Derdon, who spend their lives expertly crushing their own prospects of happiness. Rose is the focus for most of the time, but the story I have chosen is after the marriage has ended, when Rose has died, and Hubert is left alone. He finds he cannot express his (non-existent) grief to anyone, even his own sister when she comes to stay. “He could not speak to tell her that it was all only a masquerade and that he was only a sham of a man, and after a long time, when he finally got command of himself, it no longer seemed worthwhile to tell her, and the way it worked out he never told her, and never told anybody.”

First published in the New Yorker, 20 Jul 1963, where it can be read online, and collected in In and Out of Never-Never Land, Scribner, 1969, and The Springs of Affection, Flamingo, 1999; Peninsula Press, 2023

‘Arrival’ by Gurnaik Johal

I first encountered this story as a judge of the Galley Beggar Short Story Award. We read fifty stories and this one instantly stood out for me – happily, the other judges agreed and it won the prize. It’s astonishingly brief – 6 pages; 1,500 words – but packs so much in, I kept looking for hidden trapdoors. It’s about a husband and wife who live near Heathrow Airport and let people use their driveway as a parking space. But one traveller fails to return for her car and they start using it themselves – and that’s just the set-up. It’s one of those rare stories where every sentence – bang, bang, bang – does something. It gives us the trajectory of a whole relationship in shorthand. And Johal was some disgusting age like 22 when he wrote it.

First published as a shortlisted story on the Galley Beggar Short Story Award website in 2021, where it can be read online, and as part of the collection We Move, Serpent’s Tail, 2022