Category: Zoe Gilbert

Zoe Gilbert’s first novel, Folk, was published by Bloomsbury on 8th February 2018. Zoe’s short stories have been published in anthologies and journals worldwide and have won prizes including the Costa Short Story Award. She is completing a Creative Writing PhD focusing on folk tales in new short fiction. She also teaches and mentors creative writers at London Lit Lab and other organisations, including the British Library and Arvon Foundation. Zoe lives in London, and her next book is inspired by her local urban woods.

Introduction

This is the anthology I would give to myself, if I had lost all my memories of reading. These stories are ones that make me gleeful and uproarious, that enchant me and make me squirm. They would remind me what a short story can do, and make me hungry to read all the other great stories in the world. Which I could then make into new personal anthologies, to give to myself should I ever lose all my memories of reading…

All these stories are entertaining – some in a more cane-twizzling, top hat-tipping manner than others. At least one of them I would call ‘fun’, which would not be to belittle that story. They are all serious in their own way, but they are also sometimes funny, sly, or irreverent – sincerity can be tiring. These are not the ten best stories I have ever read, but they are the ones I would want in that anthology, when I open my amnesiac eyes and reach for a book, wondering what could be inside it.

‘Stone Mattress’ by Margaret Atwood

Atwood, it strikes me, is into revenge: it is writ large in her recent Hagseed; it is the fantasy driving The Robber Bride (a favourite of mine). ‘Stone Mattress’ has one of the most delicious opening lines I’ve read, enticing us to follow Verna as she coldly calculates a revenge most satisfying. In many ways this is a simple story. Verna is aboard an arctic cruise ship when she encounters the man who turned her life upside down forty or so years before. Will he recognise her, and apologise, and if not, what should she do? The glory here is in the quiet organisation as she plots her method, disturbing yet immensely cathartic, even more so in the wake of #MeToo. It is also in Atwood’s hilarious characterisation of the other men in Verna’s life, and Verna’s honed flirtation techniques, ‘perching the Magnetic Northward nametag just slightly too low on her left breast’, pronouncing Bob’s name with a ‘small breathy intake, a certified knee-melter.’ Refreshingly, nobody in this story has an epiphany, or goes through some profound change. Revenge is best served at arctic temperatures.

In Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales (Virago, 2015) and in The New Yorker, available to read online here

‘The Stone Book’ by Alan Garner

I got into Garner as an adult, when I was thinking more and more about English vocabulary, and how our decisions to use Latinate or Germanic words in our writing profoundly alters its effect. Garner’s understanding, and control, of language, is astounding, and The Stone Book Quartet is a masterclass in how to draw the reader’s emotions straight from the gut with even a simple tale. Alongside almost pure Germanic (or Anglo-Saxon) vocabulary, Garner also freckles these stories with local dialect, including words now entirely lost to most of us. This does not hinder understanding, but enhances it. At the beginning of ‘The Stone Book’, we watch Mary take her father’s lunch to him at work, which means climbing the scaffolding right to the top of the new church spire. ‘“You’re not frit?”’ he asks her. She is not, and so with one heft he has her up sitting on the golden weathercock at the spire’s pinnacle, which he then spins, round and round, as Mary whoops and gazes out at the green world spread beneath her. If you can read this without gulping, from fear and heart-swell, you are a hard reader indeed.

In The Stone Book Quartet, Flamingo new edition 1999, first published 1979

‘Driver’ by Taiye Selasi

Rhythm is the beating heart of this story, and were the audio version of Selasi reading it herself still available, that is where I would send you. Every line is structured to produce a rhythm that starts to affect your heartbeat and your own speech after a while, but that seductive beat reaches new heights of incantatory beauty whenever the narrator, Webster, talks about ‘Madam’. Webster is the driver for a rich family in Ghana, and Madam is the wife of his employer and the forbidden object of his affections. Selasi’s silken voice and intimacy with her own writing make her delivery a blissful seduction in itself. Try this out loud, huskily: “Madam has the contours of a girl I knew in Dansoman and sculptures sold at Arts Centre and Bitter Lemon bottles. Slender top and round the rest. A perfect holy roundness that is proof of God’s existence and His goodness furthermore.” Gorgeous.

In Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4 (2013), read online with a Granta digital subscription here

‘In the Reign of King Harad IV’ by Steven Millhauser

I first heard this story on the New Yorker Fiction podcast, being read and discussed by Cynthia Ozick. Her love of the story was evident in her careful delivery, and I was quite captivated. In this elegant Borgesian fable, King Harad IV’s court miniaturist creates beautiful, intricate works of art, including a toy replica of the King’s entire palace with 600 rooms. But soon, the artist is not satisfied by these intricacies, and begins to create smaller and smaller objects. It’s not long before he needs a magnifying glass to see what he is working on. His miniatures become almost invisible to the naked eye, then completely invisible… Is this a parable, and if so, what does it mean? That is part of the pleasure in reading this story – we envy the miniaturist his artistic vision and drive as he delves alone into an uncharted creative realm, but we wonder if it is really just madness. So, a story that is a salve for writers who wrestle with this question every day.

In Dangerous Laughter, Vintage, 2009, and in the New Yorker to read online here, or listen on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast here

‘The Erl King’ by Angela Carter

I include this because it’s a story that gave me one of those heart-stopping moments, falling in love, aching with envy, resolving to try and keep trying to write. I also once used it in an exercise on a writing course, where I had to compare the qualities – literal and metaphorical – of a story I admired with one of my own. Depressing, but instructive. The Erl-King is the bad-boy type you’re not supposed to fall for, and are therefore seduced by – after all, he does have goat’s cheese, wild mushrooms and rabbit stew in his one-room woodland hut. He also has cages full of birds, a metaphor too heavy for most writers to handle but one Carter whisks into this plum pudding of a story with ease, probably with a cigarette in the other hand. Reading this is a feast, of a kind that nobody can now reproduce. Carter’s brew transcends fashions in fiction, and thank goodness; this is an antidote to minimalism should you ever need one, but most glorious when read on its own luscious terms.

In Burning Your Boats, Vintage, 1996; first published in The Bloody Chamber, Gollancz, 1979

‘Parson’s Pleasure’ by Roald Dahl

There is much glee indeed to be had reading Dahl’s stories, but this is the one that makes me wince the most, and with painful joy. A cruel and clever plot, an odious swindler of a protagonist, and a pair of wise fools make for a comedy that breezes along towards devastation. I listened to this as part of an audio book as I walked through London, the streets around me transforming into the summery Buckinghamshire countryside that Mr Boggis traverses in his station wagon, scouting for country houses he might relieve of their antiques. When new levels of deviousness are about to deliver him a major prize that will one day – he is sure – be known as The Boggis Commode, “All the buttercups in the field were suddenly turning into golden sovereigns, glistening in the sunlight. The ground was littered with them, and he swung off the track on to the grass so that he could walk among them and tread on them and hear the little metallic tinkle they made as he kicked them around with his toes.” Kicking buttercups comes before a fall, and one that made me giggle as much as Boggis does at his seeming fortune.

In Completely Unexpected Tales, Penguin, 1986; first published in Esquire (1958), available online here

‘Bliss’ by Katherine Mansfield

Rich and strange, heart-breaking and cruelly funny, this is one of my favourite Mansfield stories among many. Mansfield, like Chekhov, can conjure unalloyed joy. Bertha Young’s excitement – albeit about a dinner party – is infectious, yet we see from the start how it renders her vulnerable. She hides it from Harry, her husband – ‘she couldn’t absurdly cry: “Hasn’t it been a divine day!”’ – and instead delights over her beautiful bowl of fruit, and the anticipation of welcoming the enigmatic Pearl Fulton. Bertha ‘fell in love’ with Pearl Fulton the first time she saw her. We wonder later how to take this; is it just a turn of phrase? Central to the story is a beautiful pear tree in Bertha’s garden, in full and perfect blossom, ‘a symbol of her own life.’ The dinner guests – Pearl Fulton excepted – are hilariously dreadful, yet Bertha maintains her unbearable bliss, becoming ‘ardent’ (such a laden word) before inevitably, this being Mansfield, a shadow is cast. Each time I read this story the pleasure only increases, laced as it is with pain. Early on, Bertha ‘seemed to see on her eyelids the lovely pear tree’, and so it is for the reader, left wondering at Bertha’s capacity for joy in her stifling, unsympathetic world.

First published in the English Review (1918), now in Selected Stories, Oxford World’s Classics, 2002, and other Mansfield collections, available online here

‘Tributaries’ by Ramona Ausubel

I was introduced to this story by Helen Oyeyemi on a writing course a few years ago. Ausubel’s whole collection has heart – a kind of affection for and between her characters that is not often in evidence in short stories, or is hard to get away with if it’s there (Lorrie Moore does it well). Her stories are also fantastical, and in this one, we zoom in on teenage girls at a slumber party as Genevieve tells her friends, “My parents both have perfect love-arms.” Even though Genevieve adds that it is “almost sick,” the way they use these arms to write love letters to one another, all the other girls hope for exactly this. For in the world of ‘Tributaries’, people grow extra arms from their chests when they are truly in love. There are variations: one girl’s grandmother has seven love-arms; the school teacher Claribel has hands all over her chest that clean each other’s nails while she marks papers.  This sounds ridiculous, almost grotesque, but that heart of Ausubel’s that I mentioned prevails, and this exploration of love-arms – the use of fake arms, the presence of wayward or unusual arms – becomes a beautiful meditation on how we love, and love differently.

In A Guide to Being Born, Riverhead, 2013; available online here

‘A Shocking Accident’ by Graham Greene

This story is brilliant for the concept at its core – that a tragedy (the death of a parent) can have about it an inherent comedy (method of dispatch) such that it haunts the offspring left behind in a uniquely undignified way. I first read it in an anthology of the same name, and sadly it set the bar so high that most of the other stories couldn’t compete. It also has a great opening. Like David Copperfield summoned to the headmaster’s office on his birthday, expecting a hamper and receiving instead news of his mother’s death, Jerome sits opposite his housemaster without fear, for he is an ‘approved, reliable’ boy, destined ‘for Marlborough or Rugby’. Rather, the housemaster appears a little afraid of Jerome. What does he have to tell him? The news is delivered, and a guilty smile spreads across the reader’s face. Perhaps there is also a snort, or a hoot, at the gift of this awful, wonderful image. So many short stories are dark, it is true, and this one in a way is no exception. But it is also exceptionally funny.

In A Shocking Accident: stories with a twist in the tail, ed. Sara Corrin, Walker Books, 2003; available online here

‘Debarking’ by Lorrie Moore

This is another one I highly recommend you hear the author read herself, which you can if you buy the audiobook.  Lorrie Moore’s warm, laconic voice brings out the best in the humour here, and there is so much of it. In this long short story, newly divorced and nervous Ira starts a relationship with long-divorced but possibly unhinged Zora. Standing defiantly between them is Zora’s teenage son, Bruno – or Bruny, or Brune, depending on Zora’s fancy. Mother and son play footsie under the table, wrestle each other onto the sofa, and turn all Ira’s attempted dates into a disturbing threesome. Bad enough, but add in Zora’s sculptures of pubescent boys, ‘priapic with piccolos,’ and her planned children’s book about a hedgehog entering a house full of crocodiles… “I’ll spare you the rest,” Zora says, but she does not spare poor Ira. Sad and comical in equal measure, relatable but bizarre, sympathetic but also pathetic, watching forlorn Ira navigate this woman is mesmerising.

In Bark, Faber & Faber, 2014 and in The New Yorker, online here

‘As They Rode Along the Edge’ by Leonora Carrington

Virginia Fur lives in an abandoned village, and rides around, ‘between precipices, across trees,’ on a wheel. She has ‘a mane of hair yards long and enormous hands with dirty nails’, and she smells pretty interesting. Virginia Fur falls for a wild boar called Igname after he declares his love, dressed up for the occasion in a wig of squirrels’ tails and fruit, and with a nightjar perched atop his head. How could she resist? I couldn’t. Sadly, their furious passion is short-lived. Carrington’s stories often tread a line between the fabulous and the wilfully surreal, and ones that tip too far in the latter direction can make for a bewildering read. This one delivers the satisfaction of all Carrington’s strange imaginative flourishes adorning a story that we can recognise: love lost and avenged. I can’t remember where I first found this story, but it has lodged in my imagination ever since. Carrington’s work is a great reminder to let rip when it comes to writing, to embrace ideas and let them ride their wheels into the wild.

in The Seventh Horse and Other Tales, Virago, 1989

‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ by Gabriel García Márquez

Márquez is here because he was such an influence on my young self. As a teenager, I pretty much wanted to be him (I’d have accepted the generous moustache), and my first ‘proper’ short story was a wholesale Márquez rip-off, of which I was quite proud. This story is resplendent with so many of the Márquezian traits I know and love. Days of rain have left Pelayo’s house infested with crabs, and ‘the world had been sad since Tuesday.’ Then he finds a ragged old man face down in the muddy yard. The man has enormous wings. Pelayo ignores his neighbour’s advice to club this apparent angel to death, and instead locks him in the chicken coop. Soon, visitors are flocking from far and wide, and Pelayo is raking it in. Only when a woman who has been turned into a spider arrives with a travelling fair are Pelayo, his family, and his aloof angel left alone. Infestations, transformations, curious crowds, extreme weather, and mystery make this classic Márquez. It strikes me now that all those elements have indeed snuck into my own writing, though I am sadly still short a generous moustache.

In Collected Stories, Penguin, 1996; first published in English in Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories, Harper & Row, 1978; available online here