‘Big Milk’ by Jackie Kay

I first read ‘Big Milk’ when I was deep in the early years of first-time motherhood – a weird time that nothing had quite prepared me for. I loved (and still love) how this story captures some of that weirdness and how it’s effortlessly breezy and, at the same time, as tightly-woven and meaty as a fairy tale.

As the story opens, we meet a mother, her breastfed two-year-old daughter, and the mother’s breasts, which the daughter has named ‘Big Milk’ and ‘Tiny Milk’ and with whom the daughter has charming conversations. However, the story’s protagonist is none of these characters, but the mother’s lover, who is quietly nursing her resentment at being excluded from this cosy, milky world. This jealousy sparks the protagonist to set off on a slightly manic quest to address her other unresolved issues about mothering. The reader is swept along on this compulsive journey towards an ending which seems a perfect example of Flannery O’Connor’s maxim that an ideal story should be at once surprising and inevitable, or as she put it, “both totally right and totally unexpected”.

First published in Why Don’t You Stop Talking?, Picador, 2002

‘The Tulip Plate’ by Georgina Hammick

I came across this story in an anthology of women’s short fiction, edited by Susan Hill. Amongst the stories by familiar and famous names (such as Fay Weldon, AS Byatt and Margaret Drabble) was this understated marvel by Georgina Hammick, and I wondered why on earth I’d never heard of her before. She published two collections of stories (in 1987 and 1992), which are all wise, observant and devastating, and sometimes, as in ‘The Tulip Plate, make you feel as if you’ve just been told a strange secret.

In ‘The Tulip Plate’, Margaret has come to visit Nell, an old school friend she hasn’t seen in years. It’s soon clear that the two women have little in common anymore, and a weekend of awkward conversation looms ahead. Georgina Hammick excels in picking out the irony in moments where people’s perceptions are entirely at odds (Margaret is quietly appalled by Nell’s dour home and unappetising food but forces herself to eat the grim cottage pie provided for dinner, while Nell is quietly appalled by Margaret’s gluttony and had hoped they might save some of the pie for a second meal). And then, while they are walking Nell’s dog by a muddy lake, the story comes suddenly to its ineffable conclusion. The transcendent climax has the feel of a Flannery O’Connor story (and I’m sure she’d have approved of it, since it’s also “totally right” and “totally unexpected”).

First published in People for Lunch, Methuen, 1987, and included in The Penguin Book of Modern Women’s Short Stories, Penguin, 1991

‘The Lampshade Vendor’ by Allen Woodman

‘The Lampshade Vendor’ is just two pages long, so I’ll take its lead and keep this brief. I’ll simply say that this was one of the first pieces of flash fiction I read that really captured my imagination and opened my eyes to the possibilities of the tiny story. It’s eccentric and tender, and it involves a flea circus.

Included in Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories, W.W. Norton, 1992, and collected in Saved by Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald and other stories, Livingston Press, 1997

Introduction

By way of an introduction, what introduction can there be, that you, dear reader, since you’re visiting here, will not have heard before? All the quotes, the eulogies, the paeans to the short story form, you’ll be familiar with. You won’t want to read them again. Nor will you want to hear what brilliant pieces I’ve left out, or how I feel strangely guilty about omitting some of my favourites. But I’ll say this: that, in the largely bookless working class household in which I was brought up, stories, orally delivered, were colour, excitement, thrill, even transgression; sitting shock-headed at the knees of my grandparents and absorbing their tales of war, of the old countries, of ghosts and the restless, garrulous dead, the world seemed at once comprehensible and less confusing but also more terrifying and ineffable. What a strange power narrative has.

‘Evie’ by Sarah Hall

I can hear your groan: this one, again? How many times? Yes, but its reappearance is testament to its brilliance. It’s a perfect piece. Jonathan Gibbs, of this parish, has written a precis which I cannot better, so all I’ll say is that the gutpunch I felt on first reading it, the knowing that, from now on, I’d have to undergo some harsh and hurtful self-examination, will forever be a component of my personal luggage.

First published in The Sunday Times, 2013, and collected in Madam Zero, Faber, 2017

‘Some Rain Must Fall’ by Michel Faber

This is the title story of Faber’s first collection of short pieces and it is a grenade. It works like a booby trap; or, rather, like one of those aposematic creatures that draw you towards them with their beauty before you realise, too late, that their iridescence is a warning, not a lure. The way it combines dismay at the brokenness of humanity with awe at its resilience and capacity for care and love is supremely, almost ecstatically done. I first read it alone in the corner of an Edinburgh pub, steaming with people sheltering from a storm: part of me is still there.

Published in Some Rain Must Fall and Other Stories, Canongate, 1998. Winner of the Ian St James Award

‘Be This Her Memorial’ by Caradoc Evans

Darker, as the saying goes, than a coal miner’s arse at midnight. Evans, praised in England and reviled in Wales at the height of his fame during WW1, still shocks; his Welsh peasantry are not noble or rawly pure; the corruption of the Liberal non-conformist hierarchy has polluted all of the society Evans examined. Here, all is venal, rank with hypocrisy; this tale of ‘Nanni, who was hustled on her way to prayer-meeting by the Bad Man [and] who saw the phantom mourners bearing away Twm Tybach’s coffin, who saw the Spirit Hounds and heard their moanings two days before Isaac Penparc took wing’, is a forebear of today’s folk horror. And horrible (and glorious, and grotesquely funny) it is.

First published in My People, Andrew Melrose, 1915, and in My People, Seren, ed. John Harris, 1987

‘Acid’ by James Kelman

Yes, here it is again. This little uppercut of a story has, I notice, appeared on several of these Personal Anthologies, but I could not omit. It’s, what, 500 words or so? A paragraph? Two minutes to read and a lifetime to get over. Kelman’s mastery of the short form is truly astonishing.

First published in Not Not While the Giro, Polygon, 1983

‘Thanksgiving’ by Joyce Carol Oates

Oates can command any genre in which she chooses to write, it seems (or which chooses her through which to express itself}, yet her tales of the weird are often overshadowed, in the collective critical eye, by her more politically engaged, directly accessible stuff. To this reader, however, her ‘dark fiction’ pieces are amongst the very best in the field. In this, a young girl, through whose eyes we see, is taken by her father on a Thanksgiving shopping trip in a world which has somehow slipped sideways into pure nightmare. In a supermarket lifted out of an insane brain, the girl hopes her father is not muttering a prayer under his breath because ‘it would have made me disgusted to hear. The age I was, you don’t want to hear any adult, let alone your father, yes and your mother, maybe most of all your mother, praying aloud to God to help them, because you know, when you hear such a prayer, there won’t be any help’.

Shudder.

First published in Omni, December 1993, and then in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, E. P. Dutton, 1994

‘Soprano Home Movies’ by Diane Frolov, Andrew Schneider, David Chase and Matthew Weiner

A perfect piece of narrative. When this episode appears, we know these characters, we know how they relate to each other, we’ve seen clearly the interconnected grid of their psychodramas, yet this episode works as a standalone piece; still we get backstory, introduction, the careful explication and examination of their enmeshing. The entire basic premise of the show is encapsulated here. Tony and his wife go on a cabin lakeshore holiday with one of Tony’s lieutenants, Bobby, and his wife, who happens to be Tony’s insufferable sister. There is envy, a toxic emotional stew, a type of terrible blackmail, awful violence. The closing scene – Bobby, shattered, holding his baby daughter tight to him as ‘This Magic Moment’ swirls and soars – is shattering, moving in a million ways, even strangely heroic. One of the very best episodes in one of the finest items of television.

Sopranos Season 6, Episode 13, first broadcast April 2007, HBO

‘Roma Kid’ by Kevin Barry

A gypsy child leaves ‘the chalets of the asylum park’ next to one of the frantic arteries that serve Dublin and she walks and trains across Ireland until she is taken in by a strange anchorite, a ‘ferny, mossy, twisted old thing’ who takes her with him into his trailer in the woods. Barry’s language, as always, is astounding, his grasp of concision and of what is best to leave unsaid is exemplary. Something bad is going to happen here, you’ll be thinking, and your nerves will be tautened, zinging, waiting for that badness to come down. Does it? Well, on finishing this story, my beam could’ve been seen from space. I hovered three feet off the ground.

First published in The New Statesman, then The Berlin Quarterly, and collected in That Old Country Music, Canongate, 2020

I paraphrase…

‘He was the best cat. He was my favourite. He knew things. If I was upset or scared or the heart was across me he’d stay by my side all night. He wouldn’t leave my side until I felt better. White, he was mostly, with a black patch on his head and he wore his wars in his fur. The best mouser. Paws on him the size of plates. He was very old at this point, this night I’m after telling you about, and I was very young, and I was sitting by the fire with him for the warmth against the storm outside and he was sleeping, the very perfect picture of peace, contentment in that way cats have. Came a knock at the door, my Daddy answered it, it was the feller from the cottage down the lane. Wet through he was. Looked not right in himself. A funny thing just happened, he said; he came across a black cat in the lane, just sitting there in the storm. As he passed, he could’ve sworn he heard the cat talk, and it said: you can tell the king to come home now, it’s safe for him to do so. And he said this and my white cat jumped off my lap and straight up the chimney he went, flames and all, and that was the last anyone ever saw of him’.

First heard at my granny’s knee, circa 1973

‘Pages From Cold Point’ by Paul Bowles

An anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, but wonderful nonetheless:

When Bowles sent this story to his British agent, he was told that it just would not find an outlet in the UK. Bowles asked why, and the agent is alleged to have said: “because your English readership may take the incest. They may take the buggery. But, by God, they will not take the blackmail”.

How can you resist?

First published in Wake, 1949, then in The Delicate Prey, Random House 1950, now in Collected Stories, Penguin, 2009

‘Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong’ by Tim O’Brien

The title story of O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is heavily anthologised and studied and pored over but, for me, this is the collection’s standout tale. A young medic in Vietnam, Mark Fossie, smuggles his all-American sweetheart Mary Anne into his jungle camp. All is oddly frolicsome and gambolling, there is a wedding proposal, Mary Anne learns to cook and dress wounds and then things go tar-black dark. Haunting and unforgettable. ‘Build Your Own Gook’. My skin still crawls.

Published in The Things They Carried, Flamingo, 1991