‘Vertical Motion’ by Can Xue, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping

Can Xue constructs stories that cleave entirely to their own internal logic – it’s what I imagine experiencing an alien civilisation would be like, where everything is taking place due to a prescribed set of laws that you have to learn simply through the process of being immersed. Her stories teach you to read them as you read them. That’s not to say she doesn’t have influences – parts of this story seem to have been written in the margins of Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’ – but her style and world-making is completely hers. ‘Vertical Motion’ might be about insects – though that is the protagonist’s own word for their civilisation, so for all I know they could be anything – who are either buried underground or in a place that we don’t have words for. Can Xue doesn’t seem particularly focused on analogy; her stories might mean something other than what they mean, but of primary importance is that the world within the story operates as a world, with its own logic buzzing away somewhere, half-glimpsed. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to translate this work, but Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping do a stunning job.

First published in English in Vertical Motion, Open Letter, 2011. Available to read in The White Review online, here

‘The Growing State’ by Vanessa Onwuemezi

I like it when I sense that I haven’t fully got my head around a story, that it contains some dormant quality still waiting to be found. I feel this way about Vanessa Onwuemezi’s first collection, Dark Neighbourhood; that it contains multitudes that I’ve not yet discovered. All of these stories seem to occupy some sort of wormhole-y relation to one another, a kind of dreamlike web threaded through with things that emerge periodically; moments of fear or realisation, names and vocations, heat and claustrophobia. I could realistically name any story from this collection, but this one was where I started to see what Onwuemezi was doing, and where the ambition of her vision became fully clear to me, while at the same time remaining gauzy and out of sight.

First published in Dark Neighbourhood, Fitzcarraldo, 2022

‘Landscape with Freckled Woman’ by Gerald Murnane

It’s up for debate whether this is a short story at all, just as it’s up for debate whether any of Murnane’s individual works constitute separate entities or are instead components of one gigantic ongoing work of literature. This is the first part of Murnane’s book Landscape with Landscape, which I’m currently reading. I’ve tried to explain Murnane’s writing to recommend it, and every time I find myself at a loss to describe what he does. I could say this is a story about a man sitting on a committee and imagining conversations with the other members after the meeting has finished, which makes it sound supremely dull. And, of course, this does no justice at all to the way in which Murnane quietly and carefully makes and unmakes time, conjuring possible scenarios built on the bones of others, none of them collapsing even though at every second you expect them to do so. There is a moment in this story where the narrator imagines a woman to whom he imagines speaking reading the hypothetical thing that he will write about his speaking to her, and her reaching the exact same line that the reader has reached at that moment; I felt dizzy, pitched over by the audacity of it, as if I were viewing the page from a great height.

First published in Landscape With Landscape, Norstrilia Press, 1985/Penguin, 1987; the book was republished by Giramondo Press, 2016

‘Industry News and Review No6’ by Françoise Mouly

A perennial hobby horse of mine is that Françoise Mouly doesn’t get enough public credit for being one of the key postwar figures in graphic fiction and comics; she’s heavily responsible for the introduction to America of numerous international artists in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as for physically printing and distributing the brilliant and influential Raw magazine. She’s best known now for her design, and for being art editor at The New Yorker, but she did produce one short single-page, seventeen-panel comic, Industry News and Review No6, which depicts a frustrated printer, barely visible in the margins of the images of the printing plant, wondering if she will ever be able to focus on her own art. At the climax of the page, the art she has been working on is revealed to be the cover of issue 6 of Industry News and Review, which has been drawn from the images of her life we’ve seen previously, and which forms a semi-closed metatextual loop from which her art emerges. It’s such a brilliant conceit, and I think it’s the only comic to which she ever put her own name. 

In Raw Issue 1, 1980. Available to view here

‘The North London Book of the Dead’ by Will Self

This was a very important and formative story for me in my middle teenage years, and I came to it via an episode of The South Bank Show that was dedicated to Self and his writing. The conceit of the story – that when someone dies they just go to live, undead, in another part of London – was the first time that I’d encountered nominally realist fiction that deliberately bent the boundaries of reality – not magical realism, but a kind of grubby and recognisably British weirdness. It was one of those moments where you say ‘I didn’t know you could do that!’ and your world shifts slightly in what seems possible. After that, the short fiction I’d been writing started to change, and in many ways this laid the early groundwork for the kind of writing I’m doing now. If I’d been older, I might have encountered Angela Carter or J.G. Ballard or Alasdair Gray first, but it was this story that opened up that tradition for me, and through that door there was Borges, Lispector and all that other glorious crew.

First published in The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Bloomsbury, 1991

‘Only Skin’ by Joanna Newsom

I’m cheating a little here, as it’s a song. But I include it because not only is it structured like a short story and takes as long to listen to as it does to read a short story, but also because I was present at one of its earliest public performances. There were maybe 300 of us in a field behind Baskerville Hall, and a tiny stage. She began her set by saying ‘I’m going to play mostly new material tonight’, a phrase which usually elicits gasps of horror from an audience, and then she began to play this song, solo. 

And there was a booming above you
That night, black airplanes flew over the sea
And they were lowing and shifting like
Beached whales; Shelled snails
As you strained and you squinted to see
The retreat of their hairless and blind cavalry

It lasted for nearly twenty minutes, and no one in the audience had heard it before, so we had the privilege of experiencing it together. At times, singing and playing, she seemed close to tears, at others almost laughing in sheer joy. No-one could quite believe what they were hearing. When the song finished, there were five full seconds of silence before the crowd erupted. It made me retrospectively realise that the conditions for experiencing new art are rarely collective and public; there’s usually some medium that pre-empts it, or it’s a private moment, in a reading chair or in the dark of a theatre or cinema. But it is different to undergo what you might call a joint epiphany, to catch the eyes of people around you and exchange a look of disbelief at what you’re all going through. It remains one of the great art experiences of my life.

Performed live at Green Man Festival, August 2005. Available to watch here

Introduction

The stories I’ve selected are ones that have left a deep impression at the time of reading and, in most cases, over several years. I have arranged them in chronological order based on the date of first publication. They cover the span of my life as a short story reader and are, in that sense, personal milestones on that journey. Of course, by the very nature of choosing only twelve stories, I omit many writers and short stories that I love: not only many established greats of the canon but also a host of brilliant contemporary writers whom I admire hugely.

‘First Love, Last Rites’ by Ian McEwan

I picked up a second-hand paperback copy of McEwan’s debut collection when I was a student. I didn’t know his work at the time and reading it felt like the most precious discovery. From the opening line: “From the beginning of summer until it seemed pointless, we lifted the thin mattress on to the heavy oak table and made love in front of the large open window.” the story has all the hallmarks of the spare, hallucinogenic style of McEwan’s early work. The story relays a long, languorous summer spent by two lovers in their late teens in a decaying room overlooking a quayside on the River Ouse. The young male narrator embarks on a hapless money-making scheme constructing eel traps. His girlfriend gets a job working in a factory across the river. The summer grows hot, the room airless and increasingly squalid. The torpid atmosphere stirred occasionally by visits from his girlfriend’s annoying little brother. The rest of the time is spent making careless, messy, indolent love, and, as their relationship stagnates, the narrator’s sexual fantasies mix with those about a creature and strange sounds in the wall.

Collected in First Love, Last Rites, Jonathan Cape 1975

‘Human Moments In World War III’ by Don DeLillo

First published in the mid-1980s when fear of nuclear holocaust was at the forefront of public consciousness, this story feels very relevant now, even though ironically, in the story itself, nuclear weapons have been banned, making war more prevalent: “The banning of nuclear weapons has made the world safe for war.” The story is narrated by the commander of a two-man spacecraft orbiting the earth, gathering intelligence during the course of World War III. Much of it bears witness to what his rookie partner Vollmer experiences for the first time—human moments—and what he sees as he looks upon the earth from space. Through virtuosic language we too are able to envision afresh the beauty of the planet we inhabit and, in doing so, acutely sense the fleeting nature of our existence upon it. The final three paragraphs of this story are sublime, ending on a simply gorgeous refrain.

First published in Esquire, July 1983 and Granta, March 1984, where you can read it online. Collected in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, Picador 2011

‘The Prospect From The Silver Hill’ by Jim Crace

Jim Crace writes books that are difficult to categorise. Continent was initially published in 1986 as a novel in seven stories. This is the last story, portraying the lonely life of a company agent, suffering from “phrenetic insomnia”, assigned to a remote hill to test drill cores for precious metals and gemstones. “He sorted clays as milky as nutsap and eggstones as worn and weathered as saint’s beads into sample bags.” In such exquisite prose, Crace documents the protagonist’s slow descent into madness or perhaps, more sympathetically, to a higher plane of environmental awareness. To an imagined state of innocence, living as a hunter-gatherer with a family he’s never had. Treading lightly on an ancient landscape the civilised world, after silver is discovered, is bent on destroying for profit.

Collected in Continent, William Heinemann 1986, and available to read on the British Council Transcultural Writing website here – there is an accompanying self-commentary here

‘Lichen’ by Alice Munro

I adore Alice Munro, so a story by her was an absolute must. But which one when she has written so many superb stories over a long career dedicated to the form? After much deliberation, I came to a shortlist of three: ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’ and ‘Dance of the Happy Shades’ from her debut collection, and this story from The Progress of Love. Like the other stories in the collection, it explores the mysterious, unpredictable, and multifaceted nature of love. Love is complicated, Munro amply illustrates, is often illogical and contrary, seldomly does it meet our expectations, and it stubbornly refuses to fit comfortably into our lives. Stella is visited by her serially unfaithful, conceited, and misogynistic husband David (whom she has been separated from for many years yet remains married to and still loves) and his current girlfriend (the delicate Catherine whom we find out David is also cheating on), at Stella’s old, family summer house on the shore of Lake Huron. Masterfully rendered through an ever-exacting eye, an acute ear for dialogue, and an abundance of compassion for her characters, as with many of Alice Munro’s stories, she is able to achieve in a few thousand words the complexity and density of a novel.

First published in The New Yorker, July 1985 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Progress Of Love, Douglas Gibson, 1986/Chatto & Windus, 1987; also in Selected Stories, McClelland Stewart, 1996

‘On The Rainy River’ by Tim O’Brien

The Things They Carried is both true and entirely fictional. After being conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War, ‘On The Rainy River’ tells the imagined story of the twenty-one-year-old O’Brien fleeing to the Canadian border and staying at a dilapidated lodge for six days where he agonises over whether or not he should avoid the draft by crossing the Rainy River which separates Minnesota from Canada. His host is the owner of the lodge, an old man named Elroy Berdahl, who while understanding the narrator’s predicament remains steadfastly silent on the matter, making no attempt to sway his decision either way. O’Brien writes about Elroy and the narrator’s dilemma: “…, the man understood that words were insufficient. The problem had gone beyond discussion.” I won’t go as far as to reveal what he finally decides to do—though you might guess—but what I will say is that O’Brien’s account of the inner turmoil experienced by the narrator as he finally arrives at his decision is among the most authentic and gut-wrenching writing I have ever read. Indeed, I would count The Things They Carried as not only the best war literature I’ve encountered, but also place it high among the finest works of literature created by any author.

First published in Playboy, January 1990. Collected in The Things They Carried, Collins 1990

‘Terrific Mother’ by Lorrie Moore

Everybody who knows thirty-five-year-old artist Adrienne tells her that she “would make a terrific mother.” But at the beginning of the story, there is a fatal accident. While holding her friend’s baby at a picnic, Adrienne loses her balance, drops the child, and the child dies of a head injury. Adrienne is left traumatised. She drifts into marriage with Martin, an academic, whom she accompanies to a villa in northern Italy which doubles as their honeymoon. The villa, full of scholars that are experts in their various fields, is an emotionally sterile environment, perfectly mirroring it seems Adrienne’s state of mind, who for most of the story only appears to emotionally engage with thoughts of the dead baby: “Adrienne felt a light weight on the inside of her arm vanish and return, vanish and return, like the history of something, like the story of all things.” And later when she goes to a masseuse to help her relax, she hears lullaby music: “She was to become an infant again. Perhaps she would become the Spearson boy. He had been a beautiful baby.” The story, though, treads lightly when dealing with the aftermath of tragedy, the startingly accomplished writing shot through with black humour and acerbic wit that makes it all the more powerful.

First published in The Paris Review, Issue 124, Fall 1992, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Birds Of America, Faber, 1998 and Collected Stories, Faber 2008; also a Faber Single, 2019