‘Heartbeats in the Night’ by Douglas Adams

A bit of a cheat, this one – it’s a chapter from a book, not a standalone story. But it does stand alone. And it’s Douglas Adams, so there.

The book is Last Chance to See, his 1989 expedition with zoologist Mark Carwardine to find animals on the brink of extinction. It is, incidentally, the book of which he was most proud.

There is Adams’ trademark turn of phrase (“If you took the whole of Norway, scrunched it up a bit, shook out all the moose and reindeer, hurled it ten thousand miles round the world and filled it with birds then you’d be wasting your time, because it looks very much as if someone has already done it”), there is a nice description of their guide, Don Merton (“a benign man with the air of a vicar apologising for something”), and there is, at the heart of it, a dumpy flightless parrot on the brink of extinction.

Evolving flightlessness on islands free of predators, the kākāpō got quite the shock when we turned up. We – along with the dogs, cats and rats we take with us wherever we go – very nearly did for it. Its pickiness in the areas of diet and mating haven’t helped, but mostly its problems have stemmed from its inability to recognise a predator as a predator.

Adams looks at the natural world with a sense of wonder, without descending either into wordy excess or over-reverent gushing. He acknowledges its ridiculousness as well as its beauty. “The kākāpō is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, though you know that it probably will not be.”

And he shines a light on human behaviour, especially the ravages we have wrought on the natural world, with a sense of resigned exasperation. “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

Adams has been a hero of mine for more than 40 years, a status not even remotely dented by his sheepish admission that he’s not that keen on birds (“I think I find other birds rather irritating for the cocky ease with which they flit through the air as if it was nothing.”) After all, nobody’s perfect. And while I have a deep and abiding love for all his work, it’s to this book that I find myself turning if I want a hit of DNA.

PS The kākāpō is doing better now. There were 40 when Adams wrote Last Chance To See; today there are 252. It’s taken an awful lot of sustained work, of course, and 252 is still distressingly few.

From Last Chance to See, William Heinemann 1990

‘Roast Chicken’ by Simon Hopkinson

Do I see any contradiction in being an enthusiastic birdwatcher as well as an enthusiastic birdeater? Not a bit of it. Our history of eating birds is far longer than our history of observing them as a pastime, after all. And we do love a chicken, to the extent that it is the planet’s commonest bird (about 26 billion of them, apparently).

Simon Hopkinson’s 1994 book, Roast Chicken and Other Stories, is based on a simple concept: 40 ingredients, each given its own chapter – an introductory essay and a handful of recipes. The title is, as Hopkinson says himself, “inviting and uncomplicated”. And so is the writing. Hopkinson’s writing and cooking are both forthright and pretension-free. He writes about cooking – ingredients, process and end result – with love, knowledge and skill. Pleasingly, he also brooks no nonsense: “A frightful word that often rears its ugly head in British menuspeak is the term ‘gratinated’. It is horrid and should be banned.”

On roast chicken: “Even the sound of it causes salivation, and the smell of it jolts the tummy into gear.” His recipe – lemon, garlic, thyme, a metric fucktonne of butter, and, crucially, permission and suggestions for variations on the basic theme – does exactly that. I have cooked it many times over the years. Hundreds, possibly. It never fails to please. And the book, like all the best food writing, makes you want to stop reading and head for the kitchen.

From Roast Chicken and Other Stories, Ebury Press 1994

‘A Peregrine’s Eye’ by Richard Smyth

An essay now. (Yegods! Children’s books, recipes, field guide entries and now an essay! Has the man no respect for the sacred form of the short story? Probably not. Soz.)

It’s a celebration of birds, and in particular birdsong – a subject close to my own heart. But more than that, it’s a reflection on how we experience the world, on the nature of paying attention. As Derek Smalls observed as he stood alongside his fellow Spinal Tap members at the grave of Elvis: “it certainly puts perspective on things”.

The perspective here is the peregrine’s – “its vision is around eight times better than mine: easily good enough to make out the Eeyores on my daughter’s pyjamas”. What can it see from its perch 70 metres up on the nearby mill chimney? “A hundred different towns, a half-dozen different cities, all that sprawling human landscape … is drawn as if by a drawstring into the scope of one bird’s raking binocular vision.”

Too much fucking perspective, you might say.

From sight to sound, so much of it mere background noise to humans, if indeed we notice it at all. Smyth makes a case for noticing: “standing with your back against a forty-metre beech, you feel that you’re inside a cell of bird noise”. And he touches on the strange untouchability of birdsong: “As the birds’ noise yard-by-yard maps out the landscape, we’re not just here, we’re everywhere.”

I forgive him the shade he throws on the dunnock’s “pointless reeling” (we will never see eye to eye on this – I love a dunnock’s scattery babble) for this delightful description of the back yard blackbird – “that familiar rustic hurdygurdy burble”.

Most of all this is a welcome placing of nature observation in the context of real lives. Not for Smyth the worn idea of Lone Man Communing With The Nature. “I don’t know who has the time for transcendence.”

Damn right.

First published in Songs of Place and Time: Birdsong And The Dawn Chorus In Natural History And The Arts, edited by Mike Collier, Gaia Project 2020. You can read it on Richard’s website here

‘Crex-crex’ by Kathleen Jamie

Another essay.

Crex is both the sound and the name. ‘Corncrake’ in English – Crex crex in scientific, a representation of its call: “two joined notes, like a rasping telephone.”

Like Adams, Jamie goes on a journey to find a rare bird. It takes her not to New Zealand, but closer to home, the Hebridean Isle of Coll – where people are scarce and corncrakes, sadly, scarcer.

The extent of this bird’s eradication at our hands (in the UK, at least) is unthinkable. From ubiquity to near extinction in less than a century.

The corncrake is “a brown bird, a kind of rail, not ten inches tall, which prefers to remain unseen in tall damp grass”, the problem being that mechanised mowing has almost completely done away with that habitat. It is also, delightfully, “the kind of bird who’d want to be excused games”.

Jamie’s writing oozes attention. She has the gift of bringing you to the place – not with overwrought descriptions, but with a quiet vigour that seeps into you. “The sea and its surf is never far away, a constant Atlantic soughing, a sense that the land is an interruption in a long conversation between water and sky”.

Lovely stuff.

Like Adams, she doesn’t claim expertise. “Knowing birds is like being fluent in a foreign language, or adept with a musical instrument”. But her ability to notice is more than enough.

“I want to see a corncrake”.

And so, having read this several times, do I.

From Findings, Sort Of Books 2005

‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’ by P G Wodehouse

Any excuse, frankly, to include some Wodehouse. The only problem being that he wasn’t much of a bird person. Pigs, yes. Cats and dogs, certainly. The odd newt from time to time. But birds featured seldom.

Praise be, then, for ‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’, from his 1930 collection Very Good, Jeeves. And praise be for its menacing swan.

There’s no shortage of the Wodehousian wit. You know the kind of thing, I’m sure. “Bingo uttered a stricken woofle like a bulldog that has been refused cake.” “When it is a question of a pal being in the soup, we Woosters no longer think of self; and that poor old Bingo was knee-deep in the bisque was made plain by his mere appearance – which was that of a cat which has just been struck by a half-brick and is expecting another shortly.”

There is also a welcome appearance of the word ‘oojah-cum-spiff’.

And there is that swan.

Bertie finds himself, as you do, trying to rescue a cabinet minister from an island in the pouring rain, a project fraught with problems even if it weren’t for “one of the largest and shortest-tempered swans I had ever seen.”

The swan, of course, had reckoned without Jeeves.

“As swans go, he may have been well up in the ranks of the intelligentsia; but, when it came to pitting his brains against Jeeves, he was simply wasting his time. He might just as well have gone home at once.

Every young man starting life ought to know how to cope with an angry swan, so I will briefly relate the proper procedure. You begin by picking up the raincoat which somebody has dropped; and then, judging the distance to a nicety, you simply shove the raincoat over the bird’s head; and, taking the boat-hook which you have prudently brought with you, you insert it underneath the swan and heave. The swan goes into a bush and starts trying to unscramble itself; and you saunter back to your boat, taking with you any friends who may happen at the moment to be sitting on roofs in the vicinity. That was Jeeves’s method, and I cannot see how it could have been improved upon.

First published in The Strand Magazine 1926. Collected in Very Good, Jeeves, Doubleday 1930

‘Eeyore Has A Birthday’ by A A Milne

The wisdom of owls is often overstated. They are magnificent hunters, yes, using a combination of acute vision, asymmetrically aligned ears, and special ‘stealth’ flight feathers to give them an advantage over their hapless prey. But wise they are not.

The wisdom of wols, on the other hand, is well known. Especially when compared with a bear of little brain. Mind you, all it really takes to seem an intellectual giant in such company is the ability to write “A Very Happy Birthday with love from Pooh”.

Or, even better, “HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY”.

From Winnie-the-Pooh, Methuen 1926

‘Summer Night’ by Elizabeth Bowen

* Picked by Jonathan Gibbs

This is, structurally, rather an awkward story, that sets up a small cabal of characters in a tight little tangle of relationships, and then develops them only halfway along what might be called a plot before getting bored. (And it’s true, they’re mostly quite boring, as characters.) But Bowen’s writing throughout is characteristically luminous – though the light it gives is that of the moon, rather than the sun, even when the sun is out, as it is at the start of this story. And it’s that prose that makes this story worth the reading, equally crisp and arch, a mandarin version of the style that Muriel Spark would push through a nervous breakdown, to become something more aggressively strained. Here’s the opening paragraph, which evokes a summer evening so forcefully that you could keep yourself warm in deepest February just by reading it out loud.

As the sun set its light slowly melted the landscape, till everything was made of fire and glass. Released from the glare of noon, the haycocks now seemed to float on the aftergrass: their freshness penetrated the air. In the not far distance hills with woods up their flanks lay in light like hills in another world – it would be a pleasure of heaven to stand up there, where no foot ever seemed to have trodden, on the spaces between the woods soft as powder dusted over with gold. Against those hills, the burning red rambler roses in cottage gardens along the roadside looked earthy – they were two near the eye.

First published in Look at All Those Roses, Gollancz, 1941, and collected in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, Penguin, 1983

* Jonathan Gibbs is the author of two novels, Randall, and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He curates A Personal Anthology. You can read his individual Personal Anthology, plus other occasional contributions, here.

‘Here We Are’ by Lucy Caldwell

Picked by Pragya Agarwal

I love the line “It is the best summer of our lives”: summer, when everything seems possible, surmountable, within our reach. There is a feeling of time rushing past but also slowing down that Lucy captures so masterfully, and the claustrophobic nostalgia of moments that were filled with possibility but also out of reach. This story captures perfectly in such a few words the summer of young love that was filled with so much happiness but also pain, and an acute observation of how we stigmatise love in many forms that do not fit our norms, and what it does to young people, and the weight that people have to carry all their lives of what could have been, and never was because of societal expectations. Everytime I read it, I expect it to turn out differently- I hope it would- and then it stays with me for many days and nights.

First published in Granta 135, 2016, and available to read online here. Collected in Multitudes, Faber, 2016)

* Pragya Agarwal is the author of (M)otherhood: On the choices of being a woman, SWAY: Unravelling Unconscious Bias and Wish We Knew What to Say: Talking With Children About Race.

‘The Adventure of a Bather’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

* Picked by CD Rose

Several years ago, having just returned to England after a long time living in Italy, a group of newish acquaintances invited me to spend a day at the beach with them. I happily accepted the offer, though on arriving was disappointed to find that all the men, despite being mostly in their mid-to late 30s and early 40s, were wearing these absolutely fucking hideous ‘board shorts’ things, looking like they were all off to see Carter USM or some such horror at the Camden Underworld in 1991. I’d turned up wearing a pair of proper swimming trunks, which caused these overgrown man-children much hilarity, the ladhood (and I use the phrase carefully: it is a universal truth that irrespective of age, ethnic background, sexual orientation, level of education, income, or political affiliation, any group of more than three men immediately become the lads) attempting to mock my choice of (stylish, practical) costume.

Later, out in the water (freezing, gusty), a larger than anticipated wave sunk us all, and on finding our feet again in the shallows several of my companions were horrified to find that the force of the water had filled their ghastly baggy apparel completely, like sails, and swiftly removed them. Their shock rapidly turned to hilarity (they were, after all, the lads) but few were spared the sight of pallid, eggy buttocks, shrivelled scrotums and tiny wriggly penises (in all fairness, it was the North Sea, whose cold spares no one.) My snug trunks, however, remained firmly in place.

I tell this story not out of mere schadenfreude, nor because it is one of my few personal anecdotes that does not end up with me being the rube, but because it is – indirectly – the premise of Italo Calvino’s story ‘The Adventure of a Bather.’ Signora Isotta Barbarino loses her cozzy while out swimming at the beach (though her misfortune is attributed to poor quality of manufacture rather than poor sense of style), and treads water, then hangs onto a convenient buoy for most of the day. It’s a tiny thing, but with Calvino’s characteristic leggerezza it becomes a story about bodies, shame, men and women, small acts of kindness, reflections on a life, and even – that dread phrase – what it might mean to be alive, in not much more space than it has taken me to tell you this story.

First published as L’avventura di una bagnante, from Gli amori difficili, 1957. Translation first published in Difficult Loves, 1983

* C.D. Rose’s The Blind Accordionist is out now in paperback from Melville House Publishing. You can read his own Personal Anthology here.

Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov

* Picked by Peter Ahern

It’s that beautiful Russian summer landscape, a million miles from the sea, but the centre of the world, where you think every Chekhov story is set, certainly this one, with the central, but gratuitous, swim in the pond in the rain. Yes, that’s a nice touch: rain in the summer. So it must be one of those places, here in the unending summer countryside, where you cannot but be happy.

Somehow Chekhov stories always seem to be right here: you are surrounded by an infinite steppe, grasslands stretch away into the distance, trees glitter forever, and there are always sparkling streams and lakes. And though you’ve read this story a dozen times, and you know what happens, knowing all too well the grim and pathetic story within the story, to the point of being haunted by it, as the characters themselves will be, you still find yourself just where you want to be, so that what comes next, how things unfold, is both impossibly far away, as well as just around the corner. How could anybody not be happy here? Here of all places?

And now you remember, it was just such a Russian summer landscape that had captured the imagination of the story’s central character. How it had haunted him. And now you remember the plate of gooseberries. And you get the most awful, if subtle, shiver down your spine. Ah yes, this isn’t really a summer story. no, not at all. And isn’t it odd how you always forget the rain.

First published in Russian in Russkaya Mysl, 1898. Variously translated, including by Rosamund Bartlett in About Love and Other Stories, Oxford World’s Classics, 2004)

Peter Ahern is a teacher of great stories and other things. He blogs about the best novels and stories, as well as teaching them, at www.onehundredpages.wordpress.com

‘Boys Go to Jupiter’ by Danielle Evans

* Picked by Jo Lloyd

Full disclosure: it’s technically a winter holiday that kicks off this story, but a steamy Florida winter featuring all our favourite summer holiday ingredients – mean stepmother, resentful college girl, bored days by the pool, unsuitable boy picked up at burger joint, photo in Confederate flag bikini posted on social media. Oh. Dear. Claire doesn’t get it – she had Black best friends as a kid! – so on her return to college she doubles down with some spectacularly bad decisions. Everyone takes sides and things escalate rapidly. We might think we’re heading straight for something reductive and preachy, but we’d be wrong. Claire is no monster – she’s spiky and a bit self-destructive and she gets all the best lines. Her history with those Black best friends is tangled with love and grief. To say any more about the issues explored here would do a disservice to Evans’s handling of her material – funny, provocative, knowing, nuanced, and yes, angry. The story is both challenging and hugely enjoyable – as is the whole of Evans’s brilliant second collection.

First published in Sewanee Review, Fall 2017, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Office of Historical Collections, Riverhead 2020/Picador 2021

* Jo Lloyd won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2019. Her 2021 collection, published in the UK as The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies and in the US as Something Wonderful, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize.

‘The Summer Room’ by Giles Gordon

* Picked by Nicholas Royle

A man is sitting in a summer room. It is only mid-April, but he has sat on the settee in the summer room on six separate occasions during the last three weeks. We all know and, dare I say, love that feeling: the promise of summer while the calendar still says spring. The description of the room – for instance, the relative dimensions of the window frame and the newspaper the man is holding – is minutely, obsessively detailed and repetitive, recalling the similar approach of Christine Brooke-Rose in her story ‘Red Rubber Gloves’ in Tales of Unease (1966, ed John Burke) and of Alain Robbe-Grillet in the stories that make up his short collection Instantanés (1962, translated as Snapshots). Tension builds over the four pages of Gordon’s story and a sudden movement provides release. I wish the last sentence had not made the final edit, as it feels unnecessary.

First published in Pictures From an Exhibition, Allison & Busby, 1970

* Nicholas Royle is the author of seven novels, two novellas and three volumes of short fiction. He is Reader in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize. He runs Nightjar Press and is an editor for Salt Publishing. You can read his own Personal Anthology, plus other occasional contributions, here.

‘The Man in the Shed’ by Lloyd Jones

* Picked by Wayne Connolly

‘The Man in the Shed’ is the story of a summer, a beach, a family and the disruptive presence of a visitor who takes up residence in their garden shed.

On the edge of a small coastal town in New Zealand, the beach is an escape but it’s a squalid liminal space, where kelp gets washed up after storms, and beer cans, fag ends and used condoms gather near the sea wall; where the caravan park smells of hot plastic and dog shit; where fish feed in frenzy when the meat factory discharges into the water of the estuary.

The beach is where people try to escape each other, even when they are together. It’s where adults go when they want to have a serious talk, but little gets discussed. Everyone gazes in different directions, looking for different things. The only searing moment of intimacy in the story is when the father of the young narrator reels in his wife, who has been hooked by a fisherman surf casting while she swims offshore. She arches her back like a fish as he removes the hook embedded in her shoulder.

This is a parched story in which terrible things happen, but are barely acknowledged and even less understood by its characters – like the mysterious figure of the man in the shed, who may or may not be responsible for any of them.

The Man in the Shed is a great introduction to the writing of New Zealander Lloyd Jones. He is best known in the UK for his Booker short-listed novel Mr Pip, but his short stories and other novels are all worth seeking out. Just wait for the sun to shine and be careful where you are walking on the sand …

Collected in The Man in the Shed, Penguin Books New Zealand, 2009

* Wayne Connolly’s first chapbook of short stories, Intensive Care, is published by Hickathrift Press. He was long listed for the Galley Beggar Press short story prize in 2022

‘All the Pubs in Soho’ by Shena Mackay

* Picked by J.L. Bogenschneider

The pansies were in a blue glazed bowl on the kitchen table, purple and yellow, blue and copper velvety kitten’s faces freaked with black… There was not a trace of blood. Joe’s father’s words had conjured up a wreckage of broken flowers, spattered with red; the scene of a gory murder.

It’s summer 1956 in the village of Filston, Kent, and Mr Sharp has vituperated all over the breakfast table; something about “those bloody pansies”. Intrigued by his father’s florid outburst, eight-year-old Joe goes out looking for the offending plants.

His search takes him to Old Hollow Cottage, where Guido and Arthur have just moved in. Joe comes across them lounging like bohemians, shirtless and smoking. Guido grabs the intruder by the collar, but Joe explains he was “only looking for the bloody pansies”. It’s Arthur who resolves the mystery: “Here we are duckie. Allow us to introduce ourselves.” Joe introduces himself too. Arthur takes a look at him and asks if he’s sure his name’s not Josephine. Joe’s full-bodied blush prevents him from answering, but Guido steps in: ‘If he says it’s Joe, it’s Joe.’

And so the summer begins. The three of them sit in the garden, with no expectation of etiquette or manners. It’s red tea for Joe and whisky for Guido and Arthur. They sprawl in the long grass and in his new friends Joe finds unquestioned acceptance. He becomes a regular visitor to the cottage, where he’s always Joe, never Josephine, despite his mother’s insistence. He reads poetry, leafs through Guido’s art books – even though they’re foreign – and feels that “… if he could read them they would tell him everything that he wanted to know, although he did not know yet what that was.”

Later, a visit from Guido and Arthur’s London friends leads to a promise that they’ll soon take him to “all the pubs in Soho”.

Soho shone over the horizon, a golden city of shimmering spires where he would go with Guido and Arthur and be happy.

What is Soho anyway? Joe asks his mother, who tells him “It’s not the sort of place people like us go to.”

The lazy haze of halcyonic summer days lingers throughout this story, which is a near-awakening for Joe, who finds more of a home with Guido and Arthur than he’s ever had with his own family. The idyll can’t last, of course – the best stories won’t allow it – and by the end, Joe’s friends are hounded out of Filston, and the promise of all the pubs in Soho – amongst other, more literal things – goes up in flames. All he has left is his vision of that mysterious, wonderful place…

…its name in letters of gold shining through the power and steam. It was exactly the sort of place people like him went to.

First published in Dreams of Dead Women’s Handbags, Heinemann, 1987; collected in The Pneumatic Railway, 2008, Jonathan Cape

JL Bogenschneider is a writer of short fiction, with work in a number of print and online journals, including Cosmonauts Avenue, The Interpreter’s House, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, 404 Ink, PANK and Ambit. Their chapbook, Fears For The Near Future, is available from Neon Books. You can read their individual Personal Anthology here.