‘Orientation’ by Daniel Orozco

Wow I loved this story. It starts off as a straight-forward office orientation, narrated simply, creating a strong visual image. But the simplicity is deceptive. There is such lyricism and rhythmic quality to this story pulsating with energy underneath as it gets more surreal. Once again like the other stories here, there is that notion of how our perspective changes the stories we choose to tell and believe in. And much like many of the other stories here, it documents the sense of alienation in modern society, in workplaces and in our homes, through digital zoom sessions and skype calls.

First published in Orientation and Other Stories, Faber & Faber, 2011, and available to read here

‘Eleven Orphaned Short-Story Openings (Circa 1996–2012) Looking for a Loving Home’ by Zsuzsi Gartner

As part of a project, Gartner issues adoption certificates to readers who request to adopt the fragments of short stories. This will be familiar to many of us, those notes made for all the story and book ideas that never materialised. There is a larger question here as well, of how some stories start well but never end. And, also how we sometimes do not know how a story will end, whether it will end, and where a story might take us. Can we take over other people’s stories, and make them our own? This has been very thought-provoking for me.

First published in Five Dials Number 25, and available to read here

‘Cipher’ by Lindz McLeod

I love crosswords. This is a story written as crossword clues, asking more questions than answering them. McLeod tries to solve the puzzle of queerness, the way we assumed a homogenous experience, and how homophobia still simmers in our society. There is a sense that while the writer is nudging the reader to ask these questions of themselves, they are also figuring things out about their lives, much like working out the clues of a crossword.

First published in Catapult, May 13, 2022, and available to read here

‘How to Become a Writer, or Have You Earned This Cliché?’ by Lorrie Moore

A self-absorbed narrator wanting to become a writer but failing to observe the world around them. Much like many of Moore’s stories in this collection, it is witty and wry, deconstructing previously held ideas around self-help. Many of us will probably relate to the insecurities and anxieties around writing that the narrator faces. The mother-daughter relationship plays an integral role in this story forming a backdrop to the way society determines who is good enough to write and who is held back.

Published in Self-Help, Alfred A. Knopf, 1985, and collected in The Collected Stories, Faber, 2008

‘Happy Endings’ by Margaret Atwood

How do we choose an ending to a story, and where does it really end? This is a very popular short story from Atwood, one that would perhaps be familiar to many of you. I wanted to include this because it perfectly illustrates what this anthology has tried to do: to say that there is no one way of writing a story, and that all of us are unreliable narrators even of our own lives. And, even if the middle of our stories differs, and the way we shape the paths of our lives, the ending is often the same: we all die. I find this ending quite comforting.

First published in Murder in the Dark, 1983

‘Blue and Green’ by Virginia Woolf

A diptych of short sketches as meditation on perception of blue and green, much like an impressionist painting. I feel like Woolf was trying to establish a different way of writing, a more embodied experience away from the more ‘traditional’ way of writing. Women’s bodily experiences have been seen to be inferior for so long as compared to the more cerebral one, perhaps associated with men, with emotionality and rationality set out as polar opposite. Woolf attempts to challenge this framework, and sets out an alternative where immersion and feelings could also lead to the truth.

First published in Monday or Tuesday, Hogarth Press/ Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921 and available to read here

‘The Huntress’ by Sofia Samatar

I wanted to end with this short story, which has many layers, story within a story, and shows the potential and power of micro fiction. Samatar evokes and sustains a terrifying mood, but there is also the underlying story of what happens when women find their inner fierce voice and rise up against oppression.

First published in Tin House, June 2017, and available to read here

Introduction

Choose twelve short stories. How hard can it be?

It can be impossible.

What we need is some way of narrowing it down. All other paths lead to madness.

So.

How am I to organise (curate, if you must) this list?

My “favourites”? A constantly changing category – daily, at least. Catch me in a certain mood and I would merely chuck a copy of PG Wodehouse’s Meet Mr Mulliner in your general direction with a curt “Here you go”. Or perhaps it would be Saki, if I were feeling, well, a bit sarky.

Easier, really, to pick a theme – however vague – and work from there. So, because I’m the kind of person who takes the first idea going; and because, as I was staring out of the window pondering how best to proceed, a dunnock popped out from under the lavender bush (where it was engaged in some championship-level fossicking) and gave me a look as if to say ‘Well? How about it?’; and because I’m just a bit obsessed with them, the stories on this list have one thing binding them together: birds. It could have been cricket or music or food or any number of other enthusiasms, but, well, blame the dunnock.

It is, I’m afraid, a narrow list. Books could be written about the swathes of the canon that have passed me by, partly because of my own fecklessness (for much of my life I have been, as Eddie Izzard put it, ‘thinly read’, and no amount of belated compensation will ever disguise that fact), and partly because of the simply enormous number of short stories out there. Could everyone please stop writing them? I need to catch up. Ta ever so.

‘Swift (Apus apus, 6 ¾ ins.)’

If you’re a birder, you have at least one field guide. More, probably. How else are you going to identify the blur of brown that’s just disappeared into the hedge?

A field guide description is a lesson in objectivity and observation. What does the bird look like? What distinguishes it from other birds? What features should you look out for? Field guide descriptions deal with phrases such as “prominent white supercilium”, “fine-tipped, distinctively upturned bill” and “powerful undulating flight”.

The Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds is a bit different. A handsome hardback, designed to adorn the low coffee tables of the early 1970s, its cover features a striking portrait of a tawny owl – all feathers, eyes and talons. Inside, there are essays about migration, birdsong, breeding habits, and other aspects of avian life. Fascinating stuff. But the hook for me has always been the single page devoted to each bird. Distribution maps, a single colour illustration, a short pen portrait. Here you get to know the bird – not just its appearance, but its habits, its lifestyle, its character.

I could pick any of them – the perpetually furious great black-backed gull, the craggy golden eagle, the minuscule goldcrest (with which I identified so strongly as a tiny child in a world of giants). But I choose the swift – the answer I most often give to the impossible question ‘what’s your favourite bird?’, and the bird whose arrival each May is the most eagerly anticipated event of the year.

(A nod here to New Zealand artist Ray Ching, responsible for all 230 illustrations. The publishers originally thought the painting of them would take six years. Ching said he could do them in a year. And he did, although it left him a physical wreck.)

From the illustration alone you learn about the bird. You see the long, strong wings and know it is a powerful flier; the short nub of a bill will be good for snapping up insects in flight; the dark plumage – brown all over with a white patch under the chin – suggests that extravagant display isn’t part of its mating ritual.

The bullet-point description of the bird (“long, scythe-shaped wings, forked tail, sexes alike”) is left to the footnotes. The short main text focuses instead on its remarkable life. “They feed on the wing, mate on the wing, sleep on the wing.”

You can never know a swift. Not really. They’re famously unknowable, and that’s part of their appeal. But this page tells you at least a bit of their story.

from The Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds, Drive Publications, 1969

Cockatoos by Quentin Blake

Find yourself a child of between, say, two and six years old. Sit and read Cockatoos with them. Experience glee.

It’s a counting book, and a looking-and-finding book – we’re all familiar with the genres. It is also, subtly, a primer – should you be interested in that kind of thing – in how to construct a simple story with words and pictures, the kind of story that gets repeated readings and eventually falls apart so you buy another copy just as the child decides it’s no longer interested in it. Never mind – you can always pass it on. I have yet to meet a child who is not reduced to giggles by this book.

It concerns Professor DuPont (a silly man) and his ten cockatoos. Tiring of the lack of variety in his daily greeting (“Good morning, my fine feathered friends!” – an excellent opportunity for the theatrically inclined to air their hammiest French accent) they decide to play a trick on him, dispersing through the house into ever more inventive hiding places.

The glee comes from finding the birds on each page (easier than Where’s Wally, but just hard enough). It comes from the illustrations loosely but artfully drawn by a master of his craft. And it comes from the cockatoos themselves, effortlessly outwitting their easily befuddled master.

A joyful advertisement for the pleasures of reading, as well as the idea that birds are brilliant and humans rather stupid.

Random House, 1994

‘Bs’ by Eley Williams

A short love story.

The bird here is anonymous, a “blackbird-slash-thrush-slash-starling-slash-finch”. It sings outside, “toccatas and scherzos and bugled blurts”. Inside, a bee is trapped under a glass, “dink-d’dink-dinking its head against a transparent wall”. It is early morning, the time of half-asleep thoughts “of a euphemism of a metaphor of a ghost”.

Williams takes a single moment and spins a thread of mini-thoughts, turning words – she loves words, comparing ‘larynx’ with ‘syrinx’ (syrinx wins) – and facts – “the bones of a pigeon weigh less than its feathers” – over in her head, indulging a charming, playful flight of fancy. “The bird and the bee could set up, I think, a lovely B&B and serve their guests toast with honey and eggs.”

Collected in Attrib. and other stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘The Open Window’ by Saki

I first encountered Saki as a teenager, and something about his particular brand of wit appealed to me. Perhaps it was the chaos wrought on polite society by a succession of untameable animals. Perhaps it was the sharp one-liners (“the cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went”, the most obvious example). Perhaps it was the celebration of imaginative lying.

Vera is 15, the niece of Mrs Sappleton, and a consummately imaginative liar. Framton Nuttel is her mark – a visitor in search of a rest cure. She sets him up and dispatches him with brutal and delicious efficiency. “Romance at short notice was her speciality”.

The window of the title, Vera tells the nervy Nuttel, is open because the men of the house were consumed by a bog on a snipe-shooting expedition three years earlier, and her aunt (Saki’s world, like Wodehouse’s, is a hotbed of aunts) still lives under the delusion that they will be returning any minute. Or not, as the case may be.

The birds, it has to be admitted, are at best incidental here, but I’m grateful for their inclusion, as it enables me to shoehorn the story into this list. They are snipe, a bird I like to watch and some people like to shoot. Snipe, with their unpredictable flight path, have always been considered particularly challenging to shoot – in which case wouldn’t it probably be best just… not to?

First published in Beasts and Super-Beasts, 1914. Collected many times

‘The Birds’ by Daphne du Maurier

Well, how could I not?

I am, yes, a bird-lover. But there’s more to them than the Fotherington-Thomas “hello birds, hello sky” approach. There is room here for the uncanny, the twisted, the downright scary.

“On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter.” And it’s downhill from there, the birds overrunning humankind against a cold, bleak backdrop of frozen fields and churning seas. And serve us right, quite frankly, given what we’ve done to them over the years.

The genius of the story is the choice of birds as the vehicle of destruction. Familiar, not generally feared (unlike, say, insects), in du Maurier’s hands they are machines, possibly working at the behest of a greater power, united in their intent to do us in.

It starts with the garden birds – “robins, finches, sparrows, blue tits, larks and bramblings, birds that by nature’s law kept to their own flock and their own territory, and now, joining one with another in their urge for battle, had destroyed themselves against the bedroom walls, or in the strife had been destroyed by him” – and escalates from there. When the gulls get involved, you know there’s no way back. “Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands… They rose and fell in the trough of the seas, heads to the wind, like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide. To eastward, and to the west, the gulls were there. They stretched as far as his eye could reach, in close formation, line upon line. Had the sea been still they would have covered the bay like a white cloud, head to head, body packed to body. Only the east wind, whipping the sea to breakers, hid them from the shore.”

You do not mess with gulls.

The hardships of the Second World War hang heavy over the story, leavened with a touch of Cold War paranoia (“They’re saying in town the Russians have done it. The Russians have poisoned the birds.”) The language offers little hope. “It was bitter cold, and the ground had all the hard black look of frost. Not white frost, to shine in the morning sun, but the black frost that the east wind brings.”

It is, let’s face it, unremittingly bleak. Why the hell did I choose it?

First published in The Apple Tree, Gollancz 1952. Collected in Murmurations, Two Ravens Press 2011

‘Unfollow’ by Nicholas Royle

When you know about something, you get picky. Mistakes niggle. It’s tedious, but you can’t stop yourself.

The A437 doesn’t go past that pub.
That plane didn’t enter production until 1957.
String quartets don’t have conductors. (An actual example from the opening pages of a bestselling book in the 1980s).

So when people write about birds, I find myself checking without thinking. It’s a tic.

Waxwings? In England? In July?

Tedious, as I say.

Good news: Nicholas Royle knows his birds.

Even better news: he knows his humans, too. And he has that ability to underpin the normal with a lurking sense of the uncanny, the knowledge that something will be along in a minute to disturb the hell out of you. Everyday life, twisted.

Each of the stories in his collection Ornithology is centred round a species of bird. In this case, a juvenile sparrow brought in by the narrator’s cat. It escalates from there, shining a light not just on the dark behaviour of men in the social media age, but on the dark behaviour of cats in any age.

The kind of story to make you check the front door’s double locked.

First published in British Fantasy Society Yearbook 2009. Collected in Ornithology, Cōnfingō Publishing 2017