Introduction

If there’s a quality my choices share, it’s excitement. These are all stories I found tremendously energising as a writer and/or reader when I first came across them. In a variety of ways, they all evoke something of a “wow… you can do that?!”

‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ by Herman Melville

This is an oft-anthologised story I know, but I still find the boldness and bravery of this mysterious scrivener as thrilling as when I first watched them play out—through the shocked eyes of our narrator, his disbelieving employer, who is of course fully tangled in the web of obligations and indignities that Bartleby so provocatively rejects. How fragile these systems really are, we might think. The motivations behind Bartleby’s refusals can be interpreted many ways, a mystery that’s part of the story’s pull, but we could do worse than keep him in mind through an era that continues to inspire dissent. All together now… we would prefer not to.

First published in Putnam’s Magazine, November-December 1853, and collected in The Piazza Tales, Dix & Edwards, 1856. Now widely available, including in Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories, Penguin Classics. Available online at Project Gutenberg

‘The New Owner’ by Donald Barthelme

A darkly witty and characteristically sharp depiction of the precarious life and forced passivity of being somebody’s tenant—with one of my absolute favourite last lines (but read the whole thing to get to it).

First published in Overnight to Many Distant Cities, Putnam, 1983, and collected in Forty Stories, Penguin, 1987

‘The Trojan War Museum’ by Ayse Papatya Bucak

An extraordinary story. The cover copy of Bucak’s collection (of which this is the title story) has this summary: “the Greek god Apollo confronts his personal history and bewails his Homeric reputation as he tries to memorialise, and make sense of, generations of war.” A fragmented structure seems a good way of working with mythic material, and this story keeps those ancient gods suitably mighty and strange, while offering a unique empathetic perspective and crucial thread of humanity through a world of ongoing violence. A difficult read at the time of writing.

First published in Guernica, July 2019, and available to read here; collected in The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories, W. W. Norton, 2019

‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by Angela Carter

What’s going on at the edges of the words in a Shakespeare play—or any great canonical text, for that matter? This story is like a guided tour of the strange truth behind the painted backdrop, the real characters underneath the pretend-poetry version, the waterlogged English wood sitting soggily beneath the theatrical pretence, the heart of darknesses (of patriarchy; of imperialism) at the play’s core. And yet it’s also a story of visions, that are poetic, and magic, and hilarious, and unknowable, in their own right.

First published in Black Venus, Chatto & Windus, 1985, and collected in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1995; Vintage, 2006

‘Words’ by A.L. Kennedy

I could have included any number of Kennedy’s short stories on this list but instead I am choosing to bend the remit a bit and mention Words: A One-Person Show, her solo comedy performance about language and love that I was lucky enough to see as a student. Kennedy is great onstage—as warm and witty and wise as the show itself—and it was an experience that helped me stay determined to keep working across the dual worlds of (fiction) writing and live performance. Give words the respect they are due and They. Will. Make. You. Shine.

First performed in 2009 and touring to various places across the UK and elsewhere with its final performance in Humboldt University, Berlin. The full text is reprinted in On Writing, Jonathan Cape, 2013

‘All At One Point’ by Italo Calvino

Most of this story takes place in the impossibly tiny cramped point that is pre-Big Bang existence, then suddenly bursts the desire to make pasta for everyone; and so, everything else must follow: the physics for the act of making must come into being; the chemicals and atoms of pasta have to pop into existence; there must be sunlight to ripen the wheat, so stars duly explode; even the concept of everyone has to become comprehensible, so matter must rush outwards to fill time and space. This life-affirming world-shaping desire to host and cook and gather is more gendered than I would prefer nowadays (it could easily be “friends, let’s have pasta!” rather than “boys, I’ll make you some pasta!”) but the humane philosophy at the core of this mind-expanding story is wonderful anyway and to read it is to be made happy.

First published in Italian in 1965 in Le cosmicomiche and in English in 1968 in Cosmicomics; reprinted in The Complete Cosmicomics, Penguin 2009

‘The Barnum Museum’ by Steven Millhauser

I love the impossibility of the place and the way its mysteries are narrated by a whole town. I don’t think you can read the story without wanting to visit the museum but its appeal goes deeper than that, I think. It’s a story about reading—it’s about going in, getting lost, exploring looking searching, letting yourself in for experiences, finding your way maybe, or perhaps never really knowing what the hell is going on but accepting the chance to wander through a hall of curios anyway, and with any luck accepting that maybe that’s the point. The story appears in Millhauser’s collection also called The Barnum Museum and it’s tempting to read it as a metaphor for the book as a whole, as a guide (or anti-guide) for any selection of wonders.

First published in Grand Street , Summer, 1987 and available to read via JSTOR here; collected in The Barnum Museum, Poseidon Press, 1990

‘The Advisability of Not Being Brought up in a Handbag: A Trivial Tragedy for Wonderful People (Fragment found between the St. James’s and Haymarket Theatres)’ by Ada Leverson

Who’s allowed to parody Oscar Wilde? Wilde wrote (in a letter to writer Walter Hamilton) that good parody needs “a light touch, and a fanciful treatment and, oddly enough, a love of the poet whom it caricatures” and he famously stated: “one’s disciples can parody one—nobody else.” Leverson had Wilde’s blessing and (imho) she remains the best. I’ve picked the Ernest parody for this list because it has some of my favourite lines but there’s not much in it—I also want to recommend ‘An Afternoon Party’ (available to read here) in which characters from a number of his works gather and chat.

(This is also my way of sneaking Wilde onto this list).

First published in Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 108, 2 March 1895. Available to read here

‘Humour, Genre & the One True Quest for a Missing Pillar’ by Shiv Ramdas

A tricksy fantasy labyrinth up to some very smart mischief. Part guidebook part purposeful obfuscation part playful agitation part scholarly article part absurdist adventure through a world of and about words, it’s a must-read for anyone interested in story structures, meta-textual pyrotechnics, interactive literary criticism, speculative architecture, genre thinking, jokes, doors, footnotes.

First published in Uncanny Magazine, 2021 and available to read online here

‘Librarians in the Branch Library of Babel’ by Shaenon K. Garrity

Borges’ concept of an infinite library remains inspirational to many and this story applies a rigorous-yet-playful SF-logic to ask “how might it work?” that gets great results. Garrity’s story is entertaining and smart and ultimately very moving, and the good news is, now this angle has been explored, there remains an infinite set of possibilities for anyone else to have a go.

(This is also my way of sneaking Borges onto this list).

First published in Strange Horizons Magazine, 2011, and available to read online here

‘The Queer Feet’ by G.K. Chesterton

I wanted to include a detective story in my line-up and in the end went for Father Brown because he’s always a delight. I almost picked the one where he solves a case while half-asleep and seasick on a boat (since we all have to operate on less than 100% from time to time), or the one where he solves a decades-old mystery while sitting in a beer garden (as that’s where I personally get my best ideas), but in the end I’ve gone for ‘The Queer Feet’, where the case turns on overhearing different kinds of footsteps. You could give this story to drama students to prove that walking silently across a room is the ultimate show of character.

First published in The Story-Teller, The Saturday Evening Post, Oct 1 1910, and collected in The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911; now available in The Complete Father Brown Stories (Penguin Classics 2012, ed. Michael D. Hurley, and elsewhere

‘Samhaim’ by Uschi Gatward

There something pure autumn about this one, I just love the atmosphere—the menacing creeping witchiness, the merest hint of a hint of a hint that something is off among all the pumpkins and toffee apples and golden sun and bonfire smoke.

Gatward very sadly died in 2021 and this is a collection to be thankful for.

First published in English Magic by Galley Beggar Press, 2021. You can read it online here