Introduction

I wasn’t a committed short fiction reader until university. I read long, wrote long and ignored the benefits of brevity in prose until I was given a Hilary Mantel collection in my second year. It was the best introduction to the form I could have had.

I mulled a lot over the selections I should pick. In the end, I’ve tried to stay true to the title of this series. The below selections are stories that in various ways mark out my adult life. They are also the ones where specific lines have lingered with me, from first reading until now.

‘Sorry to Disturb’ by Hilary Mantel

I was reading Wolf Hall when a friend gifted me this collection. This story is the opener and is set in Jeddah in 1983, based closely on Mantel’s own four years in Saudi Arabia. What Mantel manages here is to communicate the claustrophobic life of the white expat in the region. The narrator carries her own biases and is nearly out of her mind with anxiety, the thrum of which runs under this uncomfortable account of an odd friendship between the English narrator and a Pakistani man she reluctantly allows into her home.

“Sometimes in those days when I closed my eyes I felt that I was looking back into my own skull. I could see the hemispheres of my brain. They were convoluted and the colour of putty.”

First published in memoir form – as ‘Someone to Disturb’ in The London Review of Books, 2009, and available to read here. Published as a short story in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘The Mud Below’ by Annie Proulx

If I could recommend every story in Close Range, a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, I would. Proulx is a writer who belongs to the Wyoming prairies and this story of Diamond Felts, a rodeo rider with a desolate past and a proclivity for violent sexual assault, is a bleak, honest look at life on the edges of rural America.

“The shock of the violent motion, the lightning shifts of balance, the feeling of power as though he were the bull and not the rider, even the fright, fulfilled some greedy physical hunger in him he hadn’t known was there.”

First published in The New Yorker, 1998, available here. Collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Scribner, 1999

‘Sucking Stones’ by Hanif Kureishi

This story is an uncomfortable read for aspiring writers. An established author befriends Marcia, a woman desperate to be published. Marcia feels her own life is small and her terrible hope that the friendship will turn to literary success is palpable in the text.

“She didn’t see how to go on. She did sometimes feel like this, although it was more ominous now. She had been writing for ten years and had never given up hope.”

Published in Midnight All Day, Faber & Faber,1999, and then in Collected Stories, Faber, 2011

‘The Dragon Danced at Midnight’ by Ray Bradbury

This is an absurd tale of Willis Hornbeck Jr, the operator of a film projector who, when drunk, mixes reels up to accidentally create acclaimed avant-garde cinema. The prose is also deeply funny and captures some truths about art, creativity and the inexplicable sources of genius.

“And there in the projection-room window above, a shadow loomed with wide-sprung eyes. The projectionist, bottle in numbed hand, gasped down upon our revelry”

First published with the title ‘The Year the Glop Monster Won the Golden Lion at Cannes’ in Cavalier, 1966. Collected in One More for the Road, William Morrow, 2002

‘In the Air’ by A. S. Byatt

Mrs Sugden, a retired teacher, lives on her own with her dog. She is lonely, addicted to television and constantly terrified of being attacked and raped by a stranger. Her fear of men governs her days and in particular a queasy exchange with a young, sarcastic man she meets when walking her dog. Her instincts tell her he is no good, yet she is forced to interact with him to help a fellow pensioner.

“She knew it was irrational, though there was logic in it, to feel better indoors. There were women who had found men waiting for them in the dark when they came home, women who had been followed and then pushed in quickly from behind, women whose windows or barred doors had been contemptuously shattered.”

Published in Sugar and Other Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1987

‘Munro Country’ by Cheryl Strayed

This is the only nonfiction piece on my list, an essay more than a short story. I’m bending the rules because much of it is about a short story, ‘The House with the Horse and the Blue Canoe’, which Strayed wrote when she was 24. She won a prize with it and sent it off to Alice Munro, the great writer, who she’d admired for years. The essay is about what happens next and about how art inspires longing.

“Her mother had died young too, and she haunts the pages of Munro’s stories the way my own mother began to haunt mine. I read Munro through my sorrow, rereading certain stories and scenes over and over again, memorizing particular sentences.”

Published in The Missouri Review, June 2009, available here

‘Family Furnishings’ by Alice Munro

Strayed led me to Munro, whose portrayals of dreamy and isolated, somewhat cold and ambitious women were ideal for my undergraduate years.

This particular story is about a girl coming of age in rural Ontario, dissatisfied with her provincial roots and fascinated by a cousin of her father’s, Alfrida. Alfrida has left for the big city, though that departure has come with the disillusionment that many of Munro’s women suffer. There is a momentum to this story, a sense that there is something to be worked out, that keeps the reader going until the end, where the concluding shock is delivered with grace. But it’s also about the ruthlessness it takes to write about your family.

“If you have something to tell that will stagger someone, and you’ve told it, and it has done so, there has to be a balmy moment of power.”

Published in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, McClelland & Stewart, 2001, and collected in New Selected Stories, 2011, and Family Furnishings, Knopf, 2014

‘Mrs Sen’s’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

How can I compose a list of short stories and not have Lahiri on it? If you exist in a particular ethnic and class niche – that is to say someone raised in the West, of bookish bent, whose family left India long ago – reading Lahiri is inevitable. And this story is something of a classic, from her debut prizewinning collection. Lahiri shows us Mrs Sen, an academic’s wife who babysits a young American boy, Eliot. Mrs Sen is seen through Eliot’s eyes when he goes to her house after school. The child is the only witness to Mrs Sen’s repressed desperation, her homesickness and her frustration with the lack of Indian home comforts in her new life.

“‘They think I live the life of a queen, Eliot.’ She looked around the blank walls of the room. ‘They think I press buttons and the house is clean. They think I live in a palace.’”

Published in Interpreter of Maladies, Flamingo, 2000

‘Miss Lora’ by Junot Diaz

In 1985 Yunior becomes hopelessly infatuated with Miss Lora, an older woman who lives near him and teaches at a nearby school. He is sixteen. They begin a sexual relationship and later she becomes a teacher at his school. Yunior is bogged down in the grief of his brother’s death and unable to see the relationship for what it is.

“Miss Lora touched you, and you suddenly looked up and noticed how large her eyes were in her thin face, how long her lashes were, how one iris had more bronze in it than the other.”

First published in The New Yorker, 2012. Available here. Collected in This Is How You Lose Her, Penguin, 2012

‘Paradise’ by Edna O’Brien

A young woman goes abroad to a sunny, beautiful location with her much older, much more sophisticated lover. He is wealthy, urbane and keen that she should learn to swim. Her days revolve around the pool and trying to negotiate this relationship – the older man seems sometimes affectionate but sometimes withholds the love she feels she needs. There is pressure and sex and above all else, the pool.

“They would know her predecessors. They would compare her minutely, her appearance, her accent the way he behaved with her. They would know better than she how important she was to him, if it were serious or just a passing notion.”

Published in The Love Object, Jonathan Cape, 1968

‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ray visits his university friends Emily and Charlie and is given an unusual and demeaning task. Charlie pleads with him to hang about with Emily while he’s away for a few days, convinced that the marriage depends on Emily comparing the hapless Ray unfavourably to her partner.

“It wasn’t a particularly fierce action: I didn’t even tear the page. I’d simply closed my fist on it in a single motion, and the next second I was in control again but of course by then, it was too late.”

Published in Nocturnes, Faber & Faber, 2009

‘A Christmas Memory’ by Truman Capote

I read this story most Christmases, it’s the one constant festive tradition I have. The story of the young boy Buddy and his child-like but elderly relative Sook is drawn from Capote’s own itinerant childhood. Sook and Buddy are impoverished and under the thumb of other, strict family members but manage to keep some wonder in their lives. It is a gem of the form.

“Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.”

First published in Mademoiselle in 1956. Available here. Collected in A Christmas Memory, Penguin Classics, 2020