Introduction

With a book of short stories out and a book’s worth of short stories rejected, I’m no closer to knowing what a short story is, what I like about them, or how they work. If I were going to know, I’d know by now. But I do enjoy blundering around reading and trying to figure it out.

‘Grass Laminate’ by Ben Pester

The closest I get to knowing what short fiction is and how it works is when Ben Pester and I talk about them together. I could do this as a Pesternal Anthology. I think I might. For now, though, I’d direct you to ‘Grass Laminate’. Ben writes short stories for the voice: under and within this one, I can hear the click of a glottis, the nervous motion of spittle, the panic-whimper retuned into a proper syntax music. I feel like a lot of them could stand comfortably beside the speaker of Not I, only they wouldn’t be comfortable, because discomfited, upset, and yet doggedly continuing is more the mood Ben operates in, and it makes me feel less alone in my sense of this. When we talk, we end up talking about Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. Few people come as close to touching that book, which is my favourite one, as he does.

To be published in a forthcoming collection

‘Until the Girl Died’ by Anne Enright

Anne Enright’s best stuff for me is that clutch of impressionistic, unresolving pieces she had out in the New Yorker 2015ish or so. But I love the casual savagery of this one. Afterwards I felt like a tree branch cleft off by a storm – unsocketed, left hanging. Nobody does it like her.

First published in Taking Pictures, Jonathan Cape, 2008. Also available in Yesterday’s Weather, Vintage, 2009

‘To All Their Dues’ by Wendy Erskine

As with Anne Enright you could pick any twelve of Wendy’s stories and have a 2019/20 Liverpool of a Personal Anthology. But I love this one because I think of myself as a crime writer and she still wipes the floor with my novels in a couple of thousand words. Boss.

First published in Sweet Home, Picador, 2018. You can hear Wendy read her story on RTE here

‘Candy Glass’ by May-Lan Tan

Wendy writes in the intro to the Brick Lane / Desperate Lits Prize Anthology 22 Fictions that you can get away with formal experiment of a wild kind in short fiction, because word-count constriction means novelty isn’t exhaustible in the same way as in a novel. What that means, though, is that the formal experiment has to be both highwire and agile, in order to be expansive rather than gimmicky. May-Lan fits a whole pair of lives into this screenplay-format story. Three friends and I had a short-story reading group going for a while. This was our favourite one.

First published in Things to Make and Break, CB Editions, 2014. Now also published by Sceptre

‘Prosinecki’ by Adrian Duncan

For more Wendy, listen to her reading and analysing Adrian’s story. I feel like I’ve learned about half of what I know about stories from that (if that’s much at all). My favourite stories are mini-novels, like May-Lan’s, and like this one, where a clanky-limbed gladiator of a midfielder nearing the end of his career looks around a clanky stadium, wondering – but not for too long – what the point of his footballing life has been (hint: it is a moment of unrecorded, unrecordable, unrepeatable beauty). In the synaptic gap between his wondering and his realisation, a whole lifetime is recounted, and a whole philosophy articulated,

First published in The Stinging Fly 38:2, Summer 2018, and collected in Midfield Dynamo, Lilliputt Press, 2021. You can hear Wendy Erskine read it on The Stinging Fly podcast here

‘The Silver Coast’ by Colin Barrett

I once had a dream where I was playing in goal for Liverpool and pinged a long ball over the top of Leicester’s midfield for Colin to bring down and jink past Dewsbury-Hall, to secure an 88th-minute 3-2 winner. My exultant yell woke my family. This has nothing to do with the story. However, his work does bring me a similar, if less weird, form of joy. This story is all shimmer and disquiet, and sad, smoke-touched beauty.

First published in Homesickness, Grove/Jonathan Cape, 2022. You can read an extract from the story at Harper’s, here, and hear Eileen Walsh read it on RTE here

‘17’ by Tom Morris

By now I think Tom and I disagree about everything but what a short-story writer he is. This is my favourite one. The dialogue is so crisp you can taste it. The uneasy atmosphere of Is this banter or is this cruelty? is perfect. Finally, the numbered sections make you see how he doesn’t really write paragaphs so much as prose poems. I wish I had his patience and clarity of mind.

First published in We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, Faber, 2015

‘Company’ by Namwali Serpell

Again, you might be tempted to pick ‘Muzungu’, but this is the one for me. She turns Beckett inside out without surrendering the deadpan for a moment. It’s a masterly wrestle: she recombs the fabric of the Beckett text to find new, deep, rich infinities that are all their own. I suppose it’s as much a critical essay in the mode of a short story (in this case, a parody commissioned by McSweeney’s). She does have a critic’s eye when she leaps on Beckett’s one properly tin-eared moment, for sure, but a writer’s subtle mercy in making it work in a different way.

First published in McSweeney’s 49: Cover Stories, 2017

‘The Venus Effect’ by Violet Allen

The closest thing, I think, that I’ve read, in fictional form, to my favourite film, which is Last Year at Marienbad. There’s such swirl and control to its sentence rhythm. She inches us up as close to the real as May-Lan does in ‘Candy Glass’: here, it’s when “Apollo boogies on the margins” – look at that, packing so much sound and anxiety into the small words. You can’t teach that. You can’t teach “unfunky”, “meat man”, “jiggly bedroom memories”. That’s just the first page. That’s just the language. Wait till you catch the rest. I can’t articulate it: the speed, the tumble, the tuneage of this one leave me a bit too bruised to manage. But Namwali Serpell unpacks this story’s political capabilities in ‘The Banality of Empathy’ – and the clock has really struck out there for that essay.

First published in Lightspeed 185, October 2016, and available to read online here

‘Heads of the Colored People’ by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

As she tells us herself, this story isn’t about race or ‘the shame of being alive’ or any of those things. It’s about kiddos, modernism, boba tea, reporterese, dadhood, art-market networking, Tamaki, casual drivebys on Drake, on Flannery O’Connor, on the next gobshite to say craft with a straight face (and thereby risk getting set adrift in one, by me, and probably the author, too), and the limits of genre (literary and non-) for approaching the contemporary, the horror, the horror that is the contemporary, meta-ness (which is not so eighties). It’s about you – and yes, there’s some self-judgement in my deployment of that you. It’s about how the finical temperatures of critical metalanguage can be turned around into the service of a sorrowing humanity that can’t be separated from race or ‘the shame of being alive’ or any of those things. A tremendous Möbius. When Penny asks Kevan ‘What’s your name?’ you feel the deep shattering of the political all the way through the domestic, a busted lift-shaft.

First published in Story Quarterly 49, 2016. Collected in Heads of the Coloured People, Simon & Schuster / Chatto & Windus, 2018. You can read an extract of the story on the Fawcett Society website, here

‘At the WIELS’ by Peter Wächtler

My friend Ezra sent this to me. It’s so funny and upsetting. ‘This one did that stomach thing when I first read it,’ he said to me. It did to me as well. The dreamy intensity of the Inside section of Robert Glück’s About Edsprings to mind, but it’s more antic, more manic, less tragic in scale. But you should still also read About Ed.

Collected in Come On, Sternberg Press, 2013

‘Emergency’ by Denis Johnson

I have to include this one. Why? You’ll have to read my seminal 2025 memoir, THE BLACK POOL (2025), to find out. Don’t want to? Well, that’s fine: apart from Barry Hannah – who is, I think, what would happen if Kenny Powers had written short fiction: and I mean this in a good way – nobody writes janky, apparently offhand, apparently casual improv sentences that begin, taper up, and interrupt themselves halfway along, the way – yes – the smoke of something bad for you does quite the way Denis Johnson does. I just tried to do that and I couldn’t. I feel like he didn’t really write so much as expose, in linguistic terms, through a frightening, zenlike readiness of mind, some chaotic suprahuman principle of words themselves, which always want to do more than we want them to, and which are trying to wipe us out, and which are relentlessly, tenaciously at once human and not the way the bones making up a skull are at once human and not. However, at least they can get us to make some funny jokes whilst we are being squooshed back into our own pre-birth red pulp, the way the lads in this do, God willing, one day at a time.

First published in The New Yorker, September 8, 1991 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Jesus’ Son, Picador, 1992, and widely anthologised, including in That Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the Finest Short Stories, ed. David Miller, Head of Zeus, 2014