Introduction

I’ve been the filter reader for the Willesden Herald short story competition and its New Short Stories book series for getting on for 20 years. In selecting stories here, I decided not to include any by those contributors or by the judges or any of my friends, as I love them all and couldn’t choose.

Beyond childhood reading, Phibsboro Library in Dublin introduced me to The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud and collections by William Saroyan, James Thurber, Turgenev and Pushkin. I went on to absorb short fiction by Beckett, Joyce and J. P. Donleavy. I remember loving the stories of Neil Jordan, Fred Johnston and others from the weekly New Irish Writing pages edited by David Marcus every Saturday in The Irish Press.

A confession: I don’t remember much about most stories a few weeks after reading them. In most cases, all I recall is how enjoyable they were, the mood, the setting and an ever-vaguer outline of the plot. I keep a general impression of the characters though, including the narrator, as if I had met them in person.

The short stories I selected for this anthology are ones that come readily to mind and that I remember better than the rest, ones that left me with that glowing sense of wonder, almost a physical effect like a rush of some pleasure hormone, to which I am addicted.

‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ by Ambrose Bierce

We had this story on the high school curriculum in Ireland and it is the one I always cite as my favourite ever since. The experience of first reading the ending can never be quite as intense but the narrative is so wonderful that it bears rereading. We begin with the slow ticking of a fob watch. In the American civil war, a man is about to be hanged on Owl Creek Bridge. This is an adventure story of escape and pursuit leading to a beautiful and emotional vision, perhaps symbolising what was lost in Civil War. It has something in common with ‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff, another story often selected as a favourite, in that the action in both takes place in an instant.

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

‘Steady Hands at Seattle General’ by Denis Johnson

There are not many stories from which one can remember an actual line. Something that has made such an impression, no pun intended (you’ll see), that it keeps a permanent place in your mind. In this case it’s “Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I’m fine.” The guy has the scar of a bullet hole on the side of his face. It’s a retort by a world-weary inmate to someone trying to cheer him up while giving him a haircut.

First published in Jesus’ Son, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992

‘Clay’ by James Joyce

This story is built around a song and is a classic in the use of symbolism, something that would die in the hands of anyone other than Mr Joyce. We are with poor old Maria as she buys treats and makes her way to visit some of her relations. She is an ordinary well-meaning person but has never found a life partner. (Now I feel a bit gloomy and wish I’d chosen ‘Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen’ by P. G. Wodehouse, the go-to writer if you need a laugh.) When Maria is buying a cake, the shop girls tease her about a wedding cake. On her visit, she sings “I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls / With vassals and serfs at my side / And of all who assembled within those halls / That I was the hope and the pride.” There is a game the family’s children play of guessing what something is by touch when blindfolded. Maria can’t guess what the hilarious substance is that they have given her to dabble her fingers in. It’s clay. By the way, there’s an excellent article about the story in Wikipedia, which has just reminded me how thin my own memory of it is.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914. Available to read online at Project Gutenberg

‘The Bath’ by Raymond Carver

In this story a mother orders a birthday cake for her son but the same day her son, Scotty, is in a road traffic accident and ends up in a coma. The anxiety of the boy’s parents throughout the day is interspersed with calls from the baker, who wants the cake paid for and collected. It’s interesting because there are two versions of this story: the originally published one, which was brutally cut by editor Gordon Lish, and the restored full version about four times the length, subsequently released and titled ‘A Small, Good Thing’, which became one of Carver’s most lauded and best loved stories. Towards the end of this version, the mother has taken a break from watching over the child who is in a coma in hospital and gone home intending to take a bath. When she reaches home, someone phones and asks for her by name. She asks, “Is it about Scotty?” The man says, “It has to do with Scotty, yes.” That is the last line, the abrupt ending of the Lish version. It leaves us with the bitter sense of cruelty and selfishness of the baker and his unconcern for the plight of the distraught parents.

First published in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981

‘The River Potudan’ by Andrey Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler

I love a journey story. ‘The Return’ by the same author is also a great journey story but I prefer this one, which I read first in Granta. Often in Russian short stories someone sets out for a destination. It’s common in Chekhov and it affords a great opportunity not just to describe scenery but to bring a place to life in the mind of the protagonist. You feel like you’re there on the journey with them. And there is literally no bigger country than Russia for providing the drug of evocation with snow and steppes, hovels and in the old stories, peasants, wood stoves, sleighs, troikas and so on. In this story we’re following the course of the eponymous river in the aftermath of the Russian civil war. A soldier’s journey forms the first part of the story but most of it is about life in the village when he gets there, as I see now that I’m re-reading it. When he returns he finds dire poverty and although he marries his sweetheart from before the war, their lives in the village are pitifully cold and poor.

First published in English translation in The Return and Other Stories, Harvill, 1999. Available to Granta subscribers to read online here

‘Oysters’ by Anton Chekhov, variously translated

I first read this online at Bibliomania, a terrific resource, which also has dozens more of Chekhov’s great short stories, though no translator is credited. They are most likely all Constance Garnett’s translations. Here we are in a freezing street in St Petersburg with a father and his small son. The father is ashamed and has been reduced to asking passers-by for some money to buy food. They are standing outside a restaurant that serves oysters. The boy doesn’t know what oysters are and imagines the strange creatures and what it would be like to eat them. He thinks they are like frogs. The desperate poverty in this story hits home with the force of an arrow through the heart. The restaurant owner takes pity on them and invites them in and they get oysters. Then the turn, the owner is amazed, “The child is eating the shell.” The boy wakes up in a hospital bed. His father is pacing back and forth in the room. The concision in this story would leave not one comma even for a Gordon Lish to remove. It is perfect in every way. It might be called flash fiction these days. Apart from the most famous stories, Chekhov wrote hundreds of short pieces like this, often in a humorous vein

First published in Russian in Budilnik #486, 1884. First published in English in The Kiss and Other Stories, Duckworth, 1908. Available to read online here

‘Misery’ by Anton Chekhov

The thoughts and conversations of a cab driver as he works with his horse-drawn sleigh on a dreadfully cold evening. It happens that his son died just the week before. Amid the small talk he has with surly passengers, he tries to tell them about his sad news. But each time they cut him off, they don’t want to know, they will talk about their journey and destination. So by the end of his working day, he has not managed to tell anyone. But in one of the greatest endings ever, while he is unharnessing and putting things away in the stable, he tells his news to the horse. It makes me tearful just to think about it now.

First published in Russian in Peterburgskaya Gazeta, 1886, Variously collected, including in The Essential Tales of Chekhov, transl. Constance Garnett, ed, Richard Ford, Granta Books, 1999. Available to read online here

‘Guests of the Nation’ by Frank O’Connor

This is another story we had on our high school curriculum in Ireland, if I remember correctly. I re-read it recently and it hit home with much more force. I had in mind that it was a great story about hostages being held during the revolutionary era in Ireland but I had forgotten the ending. Each of the two British captives, their rebel guards, the woman whose farmhouse they occupy and the occasionally visiting rebel commandant are vividly brought to life. The people in the safe house form somewhat friendly relationships over their long stay. The visiting commandant takes a cold view of all this and doesn’t say much. The men play cards and smoke tobacco by the fireside and the hostages hope to be released in due course. But the commandant turns up one night and orders the captors to take the prisoners down a lane on the farm to some bogland. The guard whose point of view we share objects to this turn of events, but the British had just executed several Irish prisoners, “six of our lads”. The taciturn one of the captives is resigned and asks only for his wristwatch and a note to be forwarded to his family. The other, an extrovert working class lad says he supports the rebel cause and offers to switch sides and fight for them. But nothing can save them. The ending is terrible in the true sense of the word.

First published in The Atlantic, 1931. Collected in Guests of the Nation, Macmillan, 1931, also in Modern Irish Short Stories, Oxford University Press, 1957 and My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2005

‘Lying Under the Apple Tree’ by Alice Munro

The social layers of a small town are revealed to us through the eyes of an adolescent girl whose parents consider themselves a cut above some others in the town, though they are not very much so, really. She is kind of a loner, doesn’t like people to classify her or say anything about her. To get a feeling of freedom her pastime is to go cycling out through the countryside. She admires the blossoming trees in an orchard and has an irresistible urge to lie down under one of the magnificent apple trees and look up towards the sky. The owner appears, a woman who has stables alongside for keeping and training horses, and chases her away. Our girl admires a lad who plays in a Salvation Army band in the town with other members of his family. She stands and listens to them and later the boy gets talking to her. They start going cycling together out in the country. The same lad works with horses for the owner of the stables and the orchard. This is a story in which so much happens, a dramatic encounter, and the subsequent lives of the characters are summarised. And that’s fine. Short stories do not have to be confined to one time or very few events. Some of Alice Monro’s stories if they appeared today might be marketed like novels, as Claire Keegan’s are, for example.

First published in The New Yorker, 2002, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The View from Castle Rock, 2006 and New Selected Stories, Chatto & Windus, 2011

‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan

Here we see a family considered the poor relations with many children, and their better off relatives who are childless. In the depths of poverty, our poor young girl who has a hard life at home, ill-used by her elder sisters. She is sent away to be fostered for a time by the better off relatives. We gather that the father is a louche individual as he drives her there thinking about another woman and being generally unpleasant in the way he talks to his daughter. The girl’s mother and family are Irish-speaking but the father ignores that and speaks English with them. The uncle and aunt are wonderful in the way they greet and look after the girl when she arrives. They get her washed and dressed and when something about her home life comes up, the girl says it’s a secret. Well, the mother tells her gently there are no secrets in this house. The uncle seems quite harsh with the girl when they’re out in the farmyard, shouting at her not to go near a certain place. It’s only when we learn that they lost their only child who fell into the slurry pit and drowned that we understand the father’s concern. The girl loves her new caring uncle and aunt and her life with them. When eventually the father returns to collect his daughter, we are presented with the most enigmatic and heart-rending ending ever. It’s a long story of about 10,000 words and is being marketed like a novel, as is another great long story by the same author, ‘Small Things Like These’, which I could as easily have chosen, also concerning the treatment of children. ‘Foster was made into an Oscar-nominated film, An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) and ‘Small Things Like These’ is also in production in a film starring 2024 Oscar winner Cillian Murphy.

First published in The New Yorker, 2010, and available to subscribers to read here. Also published in book form by Faber, 2010

‘Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes’ by J. D. Salinger

If ever a spoiler alert was needed, it is now. Because I am going to tell you about this absolutely supreme dialogue story and the unbeatable premise and twist. So avert your eyes now if you don’t want to know. The whole story is about a phone call. On one end, when the phone rings our guy leans across a woman in bed to pick it up. On the other end, it’s his good friend looking for his wife, whom he was expecting home from an event she went to earlier. It’s the same woman who is in the bed. The friends talk and talk and the other guy reminisces about how it was when he courted his wife and recites a short poem he gave her, written in her voice, containing the immortal line, “Pretty mouth and green my eyes”. Anyway, he’s a bit emotional but by the end so he wraps the call up and says something like “You know what, she just walked in.” [From memory.] I don’t think even Chekhov could beat that ending.

First published in The New Yorker, 1951. Collected in Nine Stories, Little, Brown & Co, 1953

‘Shovel Kings’ by Edna O’Brien

Well-known for her novels, Edna O’Brien has also written many wonderful short stories, several of which can be found online in the New Yorker magazine archives, and any would be an excellent choice here. In this story we’re in Kilburn, one of the districts of London where a lot of Irish immigrants settled. Shovel Kings is the story of Rafferty, an exile to whom neither Ireland nor England is home anymore, a not uncommon theme. The story is told by a visitor who is killing time prior to an appointment and goes into the pub the old building labourer frequents. We are immersed in the life and characters of the pub. She gets into conversation with Rafferty when he says something while picking up a newspaper lying nearby. They talk and a life story unfolds, in its fascinating and moving details. Over a series of visits by the narrator to the same pub prior to recurrent appointments, we learn all about Rafferty. Then we learn that he’s gone, returned to his old town in Ireland. But by the end he comes back to Kilburn. It wasn’t the same home he remembered from all those decades ago. The story gives us an insight into the pub culture of Irish labourers on building sites and the loneliness of an exile in old age.

Collected in Saints and Sinners, Faber, 2011. Available on the New York Times website for subscribers to read, here