‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever

In the space of an hour, more or less, he had covered a distance that made his return impossible.

Published in the same year as Ballard’s ‘The Terminal Beach’, ‘The Swimmer’ is a very different kind of story, although we might say that both are dreams about sorts of endings. Cheever’s premise is in many ways as strange as Ballard’s, but instead of roaming through a post-nuclear wasteland, his protagonist Neddy Merrill leaves a boozy Sunday afternoon party in well-heeled suburbia to “swim home” by connecting all the pools in the gardens of various friends and acquaintances; “that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county.”

Beginning vigorously, joyfully, in the golden glow of midsummer, amongst flowering apple trees, Ned’s dreamlike journey quickly becomes freighted with an “unseasonable melancholy”. As he progresses, he is snubbed and his integrity is questioned and the weather seems to cycle through the seasons: leaves lie upon the ground, the air begins to chill, and one of the last pools he swims has a “wintry gleam”. His strength is fading too. At the beginning of the story, we learn that he has an “inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools.” Yet, at the end, in his own neighbours’ garden, “for the first time in his life, he did not dive but went down the steps into the icy water and swam a hobbled sidestroke that he might have learned as a child.” What has happened? Ned, or time itself, has become unmoored. Finally, he arrives at his house to find it locked up and empty. There is a kind of perfection to the way Cheever achieves all this. His glistening prose seems absolutely effortless.

First published in The New Yorker, 1964, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, Harper & Row, 1964, and The Stories of John Cheever, Alfred A. Knopf, 1978

‘Egnaro’ by M John Harrison

“Are you sure you’ve heard nothing about Egnaro?” he said. “The thing is,” he continued, before I could say anything, “that I’ve just about convinced myself a place like that exists.”

Confession: I’ve only read two of Harrison’s short stories, and none of his novels. It’s an oversight I intend to correct immediately. I’m currently working my way through Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s vast and extraordinary compendium, The Weird (over 1,000 pages of ‘strange and dark stories’ from 1908 to 2020, highly recommended) and came across the puzzle that is ‘Egnaro’ just three weeks ago. The best stories get under the skin. Three weeks. And now I can’t get it out of my head, which is a curious reflection of the central theme of the story. In which the narrator records an associate’s obsession with an idea, a notion which has possessed him but which he finds impossible to verify. Set in a run-down city centre with dingy Chinese restaurants, queasy custard puddings and struggling second hand-bookshops, nothing fantastical takes place. And yet there is the sense that some hidden power is at work and by the end everything has shifted. Let me say this, ‘Egnaro’ is insidious. At the finale, the narrator has himself become obsessed. And now I am too.

First published in Winter’s Tales #27, 1981. Collected in The Ice Monkey, Gollancz, 1983, and Things That Never Happened, Gollancz 2003

‘The Company of Wolves’ by Angela Carter

Now a great howling rose up all around them, near, very near, as close as the kitchen garden, the howling of a multitude of wolves; she knew the worst wolves are hairy on the inside and she shivered, in spite of the scarlet shawl she pulled more closely round herself as if it could protect her although it was as red as the blood she must spill.

This was the first Angela Carter I read. Of course, it blew my mind; not just her audacious reimagining of a seemingly innocent fairy story but the sensuousness of the language, the juicy tactility, the earthiness of the prose, all guts and gristle. It is wonderfully subversive and playful – for in Carter play is deadly serious –and of course the ending does not lead where one expects it to.

I bought The Bloody Chamber but I think I went straight to ‘The Company of Wolves’ because I loved Neil Jordan’s film of it. It may not the greatest of her stories, but it is the one I’ve gone back to the most times.

First published in Bananas, 1977. Collected in The Bloody Chamber, Gollancz, 1979, and in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Vintage, 1996

‘Mrs Fox’ by Sarah Hall

Nerve and instinct. Her thousand feral programmes. Should she not flee into the borders, kicking away the manmade world?

Like Angela Carter, Hall is a great prose stylist. Unlike Carter, who sometimes seems intoxicated by her own linguistic fireworks, Hall is all about control. She is chasing a different kind of literary kick. While Carter deals in mythic transformations, ‘Mrs Fox’ is something almost anti-mythic. It is weirdly mundane, extraordinarily prosaic in its careful and delicate descriptions and scrupulous account of events. It’s as if this kind of thing happens all the time: the metamorphosis of a woman into a feral creature. Hall commits completely to this fantastic notion, leaving no room for doubt. Reading this, one feels that reality is being stretched, being asked to contain more than it should be capable of. It is an astonishing achievement.

Winner of the BBC National Short Story Prize, 2013. First published in 2014 by Faber as a Kindle single, and collected in Madame Zero, Faber, 2017. Available to read online on the Toast magazine website)

‘Black Bark’ and ‘The Blood Drip’ by Brian Evenson

“Something’s wrong,” thought Karsten, “but the worst part of it is that I don’t know for certain what or how much.”

Two great stories in eerie dialogue with each other. And while it may be a bit of a cheat to include two-for-one, once one has read them it is hard to think of them as separate entities.

Evenson’s A Collapse of Horses is a superb example of how to construct a story collection. It’s like an echo chamber, full of strange returns. ‘Black Bark’ and ‘The Blood Drip’ bookend it and bring things full circle. While Evenson is nominally a ‘horror’ writer (and can get pretty gruesome; see, for example, his extraordinary novel about a mutilation cult, Last Days) he plays with genre in fascinating ways. ‘Black Bark’ is nominally a Western. The setting for ‘The Blood Drip’ might be medieval or post-apocalyptic. But it’s the deadpan absurdity and the creeping sense of dread that characterises his best work that I find so compelling. His prose is like Raymond Chandler crossed with Samuel Beckett.

Evenson’s defining quality is, I think, a sense of profound doubt. One strategy he uses again and again to great effect is to have a character assert a particular notion as fact and to then immediately question that very fact. This persistent undermining of certainty means that we find ourselves adrift, questioning everything, seeking resolution (which because Evenson is also the master of the open-ended ending, we never get). Dark and brilliant.

‘Black Bark’ was first published in Caketrain. ‘The Blood Drip’ was first published in Granta, and is available to read here. Both are collected in A Collapse of Horses, Coffee House Press, 2016

‘Dialogue with a Somnambulist’ by Chloe Aridjis

Impatient to inspect the features up close, I shone a halogen lamp onto his face and stepped back. Just as I was beginning to re-admire all the features, Friedrich came running up and redirected the lamp towards the ceiling. Never do that, he said.

Is there anything weirder than waxworks?

Another recent discovery (her 2019 novel, Sea Monsters, is superb) Chloe Aridjis’s writing is wry, dreamlike, surreal and darkly comic. In this oddly moving story the protagonist drifts through a city, drinks in a mysterious bar filled with ‘monsters’, and acquires a waxwork of the dread somnambulist from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. She christens him ‘Pompeii’, lives with him for a while (observing his peculiar compulsion to tidy her apartment), and then donates him to a waxwork museum. And then tragedy strikes.

First published in Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays & A Portrait Gallery, House Sparrow Press, 2021

‘Little Rabbit’ by Maria Reva

I found this assignment devilishly difficult. Should I pick a theme? Should I choose only people I know? Only people I don’t know? I live in fear of leaving people out, even though I know there’s no way. Best to offend everyone, surely.

But I have recently, for obvious reasons, been thinking about my friend and former student, the Canadian-Ukrainian writer Maria Reva, and her flat-out brilliant book Good Citizens Need Not Fear, a collection of connected stories that take place in a crumbling Soviet-era apartment block in Ukraine. The book came out in the early days of the pandemic and didn’t get 1% of the attention it deserved: it is hilarious, dark, every story different, every story intricately connected. Two of the stories were published in editions of The Best American Short Stories. My favorite story is called “Little Rabbit,” which takes place in an orphanage for children with disabilities and includes visual instructions on how to cut an old tire into a swan.

First published as ‘Unsound’ in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 53, August 2018; collected in Good Citizens Need Not Fear, Doubleday, 2020

‘Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology’ by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Here is another story that describes terrible things and outlandish things and makes all these things rise out of the same world. In this case it’s a police shooting of two young men outside a ComicCon. I’ll be honest: I read the book that this is the title story of in order to be polite; I was teaching at the same weekend festival as Nafissa Thompson-Spires and sometimes I lie and claim to have read books, but for some reason I decided this time to proceed on the up and up. The whole book knocked me out but the title story is one I have taught over and over: it’s a story that’s self-aware but also heartfelt; generous but also ruthless. Time folds over itself and the narration is complicated, and funny, and entirely itself, and heartbreaking: you never stop seeing the chalk outlines of the title.

First published in Story Quarterly 49, 2016. Collected in Heads of the Coloured People, Simon & Schuster/Chatto & Windus, 2018. You can read an extract of the story on the Fawcett Society website, here

‘It Had Wings’ by Allan Gurganus

Perhaps the theme of this list is teaching – I have taught for more than thirty years now, and before that I was taught. Before I headed to graduate school, I read the work of those who might teach me my first semester, and I still remember standing in the periodical room of the public library where I worked, reading ‘It Had Wings’ in the Readings section of Harper’s Magazine, feeling lit on fire. The story is short – perhaps it’s the shortest story I’ve chosen – and is about a woman who finds what she presumes is an angel in her backyard. Like all of Gurganus’s work it’s full of the numinous and the charge of sex. Maybe he doesn’t distinguish between the two. It begins, “Find a little yellow side street house. Put an older woman in it.” Those imperatives! I already knew I’d do anything he told me to.

First published in The Paris Review, Winter 1985, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in White People, Knopf, 1991. Also available to subscribers to read online in Harper’s Magazine here

‘Origami Prunes’ by Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

Barefoot Dogs by Antonio Ruiz-Camacho is another book by a friend and former student, another collection of connected stories, each story brilliant, adding up to astonishment. This isn’t a list of my favorite stories – it would be hard for me to come up with a list just of my favorite stories in Barefoot Dogs – but it’s perhaps the one I think of most often, any time I pass a laundromat. It takes place in a slightly alternate Austin, wildfires all around the edges, and is a love story, and a warning, with one of the most eccentric and brilliant plots I’ve ever read in a short story. Antonio would think I’d been remiss if I didn’t mention the one strong disagreement we had is that I told him I didn’t think this was a good title for a story and I spent some time trying to talk him out of it.

First published in Texas Monthly, March 2015, and available to read here; collected in Barefoot Dogs, Scribner’s, 2015

‘A Conversation With My Father’ by Grace Paley

Allan Gurganus read this story aloud to his graduate fiction workshop in the fall of 1988, and because I read It Had Wings, I was there to hear it. Some lines resound in his voice, in my memory. A woman visits her father in the hospital; he asks her for a story. She tells it twice. How to explain the worlds contain herein? The jokes, the disappointments between generations, the imaginary literary magazines, the deep humanity that is everywhere in Paley. Certain turns of phrase in this story have become part of my vocabulary. My favorite Paley story is actually ‘Gloomy Tune’, but it’s so deeply peculiar – an inexplicable short story, in its way – that if you hated it I would understand, and I would also never forgive you. Only a fool wouldn’t love ‘A Conversation With My Father,’ though it, too, is mysterious.

First published in the New American Review, 1972. Collected in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 1974, FSG, and Collected Stories, FSG/Virago, 1994. Hear Ali Smith read it on the Guardian podcast here

‘A Rich Man’ by Edward P. Jones

I don’t think there’s a single person on my list who couldn’t’ve been represented by any number of stories. ‘A Rich Man’ is simply the story of Edward P. Jones’s that I think of most often, because it has a passage that makes me laugh out loud every time, and also has one of the most brutal endings of any story I know. I’m still not over it. I won’t ever be over it, and I’ve read it dozens of times. I generally don’t like praising short stories by saying it’s like a novel or it feels like a novel. To me it’s like saying a hummingbird is good enough to be a pelican. I suppose they have some things in common, but why can’t they just be themselves? The thing that Edward P. Jones accomplishes in his stories – one of the things – is that he manages to get the life force of a whole novel into his stories, the emanations of souls. He does other things, too – in time and point of view and setting, his stories go where they need to go. They go everywhere. Their plots are doglegged and do not care for the paltry shapes and meager occurrences of other people’s stories.

First published in The New Yorker, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, Amistad, 2006

‘The Star of the Story’ by Asali Solomon

I recently taught this long story by Asali Solomon (another former student, another friend) to my graduate class, and I marveled, as I always do, how many notes she strikes in it: deep feeling with notes of satire, the epic feel of decades passing as well as fleeting thoughts, varieties of love from the actual to the delusional. It’s also a story of balancing acts—the work the main characters, a son and mother, do to keep from dropping their whole lives to the ground, but the story itself is both precariously and perfectly balanced as it switches points-of-view and time frames and crises. Her characters are eccentrics, both lovable and worrisome, very dear, like nobody else.

From Get Down, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006

‘Dog Heaven’ by Stephanie Vaughn

If you want to get American fiction writers of a certain age talking, mention this story, which begins, “Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again.” It’s about some army brats at Fort Niagara in Upstate New York, but it’s about life and death and failing to fit in. It has one of the most beautiful ending of any story I know, and one of the best dog characters in all of literature. Like many stories on this list I read it in those days in which I examined every story as though it were a writing manual. I was stymied every time. How did they do it? Eventually I realized that if I could figure that out, the story was no good. ‘Dog Heaven’ is so lovely a story – why hasn’t Vaughn published any more books since Sweet Talk in 1990? – that I don’t want to describe it. I want, instead, to sneak into your house and read it to you, standing a little too closely, so you can feel my hot breath in your ear.

First published in The New Yorker, January 1, 1989, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Sweet Talk, Random House, 1990