Lucy Weldon’s fiction is inspired by her many years living and working in different countries across Europe and Asia as well as Australia. From migration to climate change to political unrest and the intricacies of human relationships, she writes about some of the 21st century’s defining topics in her debut short story collection, Ultramarine. Born in Hong Kong, Lucy went on to obtain a BA Hons degree in Spanish and a Masters in Responsible Business Practice and Sustainability. She is a published nonfiction author and has worked as an international freelance journalist. A number of Lucy’s short stories have been short- and long listed in writing competitions including the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, the Bridport Short Story Prize, the Aurora Prize for Short Fiction and the Cinnamon Press Literature Award. Ultramarine is Lucy’s debut short story collection.
Surprisingly, it didn’t take me long to find the criteria to select my twelve short stories.
The stories I’ve chosen strike a balance between the experience of being a reader and that of a writer. In other words, I’ve loved the narrative and marvelled at the craft, all at the same time. When I pause to notice the craft, I’m soon swept along by the story.
Written in 1948, read in 2015 by myself, ‘The Lottery’ rocked my world as a reader and writer. It is brutal. The narrative voice is chillingly calm, as if talking about doing the washing up, and then Jackson upends the reader’s world, by centering on the everyday potential of human cruelty. The story is set in a small, seemingly idyllic village where the residents gather for an annual lottery. The so-called winner is stoned to death by the other villagers as a ritualistic sacrifice.
‘The Lottery’ was an influence on the writing of the short story ‘Ultramarine’, in my story collection of that name.
First published in The New Yorker in June 1948 and available online to subscribers here. Widely collected, including in The Lottery and Other Stories, Penguin 2009
Elizabeth Taylor has been a wonderful discovery for me – firstly as a novelist and then as a short story writer. I had read Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) and A View of the Harbour (1947) which if taken in isolation suggests a certain direction of interest for Taylor’s writing. Wrong! ‘The Fly-paper’ illustrates how diverse and talented Taylor is, a writer who has been underrated for too long, a writer who gets under the skin of the darkness in human behaviour.
‘The Fly-paper’ is a suspenseful and chilling exploration of trust, innocence, and danger. It’s a haunting and unsettling read. Sylvia, an eleven-year-old girl, takes a bus to her music lesson. When a man starts harassing her, she is reassured by a middle-aged lady who comes to the rescue and takes her home to her own house. The shocking denouement features a table laid for three and the flypaper of the title. It ends with the apparent banality of having tea with an older couple. But all is not well, not well at all. She’s shown us all the clues. We can’t ignore them.
First published in The Cornhill Magazine, Spring 1969. Collected in The Devastating Boys, 1972, and Complete Short Stories, 2012, both Virago Modern Classics
Considered by George Saunders as possibly the best short story ever, it’s another expertly rendered tale that upends the reader. ‘The Stone Boy’ is about two brothers, on their way to pick peas, when the lives of the family change in a second. From the get-go, Berriault lays narrative clues and red herrings which keep the reader on edge as to what is really happening.
What’s so heartrending is the emotional temperature of the story, how it must be one of the worst things to happen when a child dies but in this case is killed by another child. Made worse as siblings? What would you do? How would you react as a child or as a parent? I keep thinking about that. The dreadful pull between love and loss. The story is not so much about the death itself but about the reactions afterwards.
First published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1957 and collected in The Mistress and Other Short Stories, Dutton & Co., and later in Women in Their Beds, Counterpoint, 1996
Wow. Politically charged, provocative, an imagining of a fictional assassination of a real-life figure. So daring. Such a clear narrative voice. So much to admire here with the use of setting as well as an opening address to the reader which draws us immediately in, with the drip drip of foreshadowing, even though the title does the job. “Picture first the street where she breathed her last.” Yet, we all know this never happened, but what if it had?
We’re in middle-class Windsor, amongst normal people, going about their lives – such banal detail around the age of the housing, the cars, parking problems, music that floats from open windows – Vivaldi, Mozart, Bach. The specificity is to be admired but it’s all part of the literary plan to plant hints that come thick and fast around what might happen. Mantel’s phrases and vocabulary are fantastic – “royalist lickspittles”, closet republicans, dissidents (in Windsor!) and an assassin who poses as a plumber, then as a photographer until he unpacks his bags.
It’s bold, punchy, unequivocal, funny, unsettling. It also caused an uproar, probably amongst Tories.
First published in The Guardian, September 2014, and available to read online here. Collected in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Fourth Estate, 2014
Munro, who recently died, is rightly singled out as an expert in telling short stories that capture the passing of time in all its guises – present, past and future. In ‘Postcard’, she uses present tense, flashback and foreshadowing. The specificity around time is set from the opening so we know where we are, the character voice of Helen and the first mention of Clare.
“Yesterday afternoon, yesterday, I was going along the street to the Post Office, thinking how sick I was of snow, sore throats, the whole dragged-out tail end of winter, and I wished I could pack off to Florida, like Clare.”
Munro introduces us further to Clare using a delightful conversation between Clare and Helen’s mother – so much efficient character building through dialogue. ‘Postcard’ is not just about a romantic break up and the way Clare breaks up with Helen. There’s also the relationship between Helen and her mother and the damage of cruel social judgement particularly towards women by women: “But once a man loses his respect for a girl, he is apt to get tired of her.”
Here’s a sharp description of Clare: “He was a fat, comfortable, sleepy-faced man.” We know what we should think of Clare.
Such a beautiful and harsh delving into loss and heartbreak where there is little comfort extended, except by Alma who doesn’t want Helen to eat lunch on her own.
First published in Dance of the Happy Shades, Ryerson Press, 1968, and collected in Selected Stories, McClelland and Stewart, 1996/ Vintage, 1997
‘Sandpiper’ is a lyrical beauty, written in the first person, that draws you in immediately, with detail of the sea, the beach the narrator is sitting on and her thoughts on the love for her husband that has been fading each summer, a beautiful marker of time.
This collection of short stories was one of the first I read as an expatriate of twenty years, but never in Egypt, alas. I can identify closely with the settings and the stories. I met and befriended so many people of different cultural identities. There are important questions raised in the collection – of who are you, where do you belong, where is home, questions that are often asked and not always answered. And the answers can change over time.
I basked in the sense of place, cultural evocation and multiple layers of each story.
First published in I Think of You, Bloomsbury 2007
I got the measure of Pearlman as a writer in the opening of this story.
“Thorns and palm oil and two full back matriarchs, each with the heels of her hands on the young girl’s shoulders as if kneading recalcitrant dough. Someone forces the knees apart.”
She’s describing female circumcision, genital mutilation. Pearlman has the eye of a journalist, looking for the angle. Go straight in. Get to the point. Yet, she can change gears in the story. We get to know Gabrielle, the ‘”concierge extraordinary” and a little of her backstory. Short, sharp sentences that give us Gabrielle in morsels but I feel I know her.
Pearlman reminds me of Elizabeth Taylor with her skilful dance between POVs, freighted sentences that convey the humanity and lack of humanity in each character.
“The hysterectomy was without complications. And now, flat as a book below her waist, dry as linen between her legs, she felt pity for the Africans’ dripping wounds…well curiosity, at any rate.”
Small, deft phrasing that expands our knowledge and experience of the story.
First published in Ecotone, Fall 2012, and collected in Honeydew, John Murray, 2015
Mavis Gallant, another Canadian writer, is the first writer I encountered where her short stories teemed with characters and different settings around the world. On courses, you’re told as a short story writer that it is better to have fewer characters. Space is tight. I say, just enjoy these stories as a reader and a trip around post war Europe.
Despite the generational difference, I identified strongly with the lives of expatriates in the stories. They made me think of my parents, expatriates too, living away from ‘home’ and getting to grips with a new culture, a new way of living with people who are thrown together by circumstance.
The collection was inspiring to me as a writer. I enjoyed travelling the world from Montreal to Manhattan, but Paris seems to anchor the collection. In Ultramarine, my short story collection, I have done the same – eleven stories, eleven different countries, anchored in the world. I think it can work.
First published in The New Yorker, February 1962, and collected in The Cost of Living: Early and Collected Stories, Bloomsbury, 2009
Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in a refugee camp, to Laotian parents, and raised in Toronto. ‘Picking Worms’ is from her debut short story collection, which is infused with stories about loneliness, alienation, the hierarchies that beset an immigrant family trying to find their place in a new society. It brings a contemporary lens to the immigrant story as well as authenticity. I admire the political edge, the social commentary and the humour.
At times, ‘Picking Worms’ was an excruciating read. It must have been the worms, which I generally like. The story typifies the grunt work that immigrants often have to undertake.
First published in How to Pronounce Knife, Bloomsbury 2020
This was one of the first short stories I read, as part of a short story writing course. It is a fascinating story in a number of ways, particularly for its narrative structure. I even tried to map it out on paper – how it ebbs between the past, the imagination of the protagonist Peyton Farquhar, a Southern plantation owner who is about to be hanged by Union soldiers for attempting to sabotage a railroad bridge, and the present.
As a reader, we are catapulted into the immediate moment where Farquhar stands on the edge of Owl Creek Bridge with a noose around his neck. What a beginning. This is when time slows down and we become part of his inner world, as he imagines himself escaping from his captors and returning to his family. I wanted him to escape.
At the end, having been lulled into thinking he had escaped, he hasn’t. He’s already dead. The rug is pulled from under our feet. It’s a brilliant showcase of how Bierce plays so plausibly and confidently with the perception of time and reality. I read it as an anti-war story as well.
First published in The San Francisco Examiner, 1890. Collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, ELG Steele, 1891. Available to read online at Project Gutenberg
What an opening to a short story: “Later, when I knew her better, Manda told me how she’d beaten two girls at once outside the Crane-makers Arms in Carlisle.” There’s more, much more. Manda Slessor comes from a family where violence is a way of life. Violence underpins each sentence, language taken from the animal world to describe the human world.
I was worried and smiling, all at the same time, as a reader. There’s no messing with Manda, I thought. The writing is overpowering, unique, but similar to Mantel with its original turn of phrase and local dialect. Hall takes you into the guts of the character.
‘Butcher’s Perfume’ is gripping, filled with tension (great use of short sentences) and unsettling. It’s brilliant to be in the world of ‘Butcher’s Perfume’, but I was glad to leave it too.
First published in The Beautiful Indifference, Faber and Faber, 2011
I’m new to Jo Ann Beard and so glad to have discovered the American essayist. She’s a compassionate, empathic, clear sighted writer of ‘Cheri’, a novella, that tells the story of the final few weeks of a woman dying of cancer. It’s beautiful. When I finished reading it, I read it again. It is clinical, stark. The imagery of being under ice that links the beginning and the end is haunting.
“She breathes slowly in the narrow pocket of air, and the children in their bright skates congregate above her head. She lingers there for a moment, her cheek pressed against the underside of the ice, a hand reaches down and pushes her under.”
I recommend ‘Cheri’, always with the caveat that you might cry. It feels all too real. It is.
First published in the US as ‘Undertaker, Please Drive Slow’ in Am I Blue? in Tin House, issue no. 12, summer 2002, and as ‘Cheri’ in Festival Days, Little, Brown, 2021. Published as a standalone novella in the UK by Serpent’s Tail, 2023
A Personal Anthology 