‘Baptizing’ by Alice Munro

In Munro’s first short story collection, Lives of Girls and Women, Del Jordan, wildly bright and stuck in rural Ontario, is trying to win a scholarship to college: “I got A’s at school,” she says, “I never had enough of them”. In one of the final stories, she falls for a boy, the excellently-named Garnet French, and it’s love at first sight. Munro’s version of love at first sight is far sexier than I’d have guessed before reading her; it is something to lose yourself in. At church, Del and Garnet’s hands touch and she is in ecstasy: “I felt angelic with gratitude, truly as if I had come out onto another level of existence.” This story of sexual awakening is perfectly done: “Sex seemed to me all surrender… not the woman’s to the man but the person’s to the body, an act of pure faith” – but of course it ends badly. There’s a bittersweet pain, facing the end of love and an uncertain future, but Del makes the best of it, understanding that what’s happened is part of growing up. She knows, as she says, that “real life awaits”. I can’t think of anyone who writes better than Munro about this transition from naïve adolescent to shrewd young woman.

First published in Lives of Girls and Women, 1971, Vintage

‘Paper Lantern’ by Stuart Dybek

ZZ Packer picked this story on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, and I listened to it on a long, windy walk. I stood in the street for its final few minutes rather than switch it off and knock on my friend’s door; I didn’t want to leave it (though also it doesn’t end how I’d want it to). It starts as a story of a bunch of scientists, working on a time machine – I’d forgotten this detail – and when they break for lunch, they go their favourite local Chinese restaurant. At some point the narrator takes us back in time to when he was having an affair with a woman, a long matryoshka doll flashback which ends with her trying to give him a blowjob while he’s driving and the car behind is furiously, inexplicably on their tail. Dybek’s themes are memory, what you can and can’t keep, and people you’ll never see again but still think about – but aside from all this, it’s just completely beautiful.

First published in The New Yorker, November 1995, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Paper Lantern: Love Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, and The Start of Something: Selected Stories, Simon & Schuster/Jonathan Cape, 2016. Listen to ZZ Packer read it here

‘Purim Night’ by Edith Pearlman

What’s so good about ‘Purim Night’ is that it’s such a sweet story, and yet it’s set in a dismal place – a displaced persons camp in Germany in 1947, populated by war refugees, concentration camp survivors, and former prisoners of war. One of the characters even recounts the deaths of her husband and best friend, her time in concentration camp, her “one rape and many beatings” – and yet I’d still call this story ‘sweet’. I think it’s partly because there’s a glimpse of a beautiful love story in it, an easy but miraculous love, and a surprise for the reader.

It’s also because despite the fact the camp is impoverished and improvised, there’s an unusual sense of warmth in it. These people, celebrating Purim, have survived annihilation, and they are celebrating in the very land this was meant to happen in; their TB hospital was not so long ago a Wehrmacht stable. The ending is difficult; the woman who has lost her husband and best friend is fixated on going to Israel – there, she is sure, she will be saved. The sad naivety of this, her need for this hope, and the awful reality of such dreams today makes for a gruelling moment – which is, I’m sure, exactly what Pearlman intends.

First published in Binocular Vision, Pushkin Press, 2014

‘Fialta’ by Rebecca Lee

It’s shameful to say the reason I love this story is because it’s set somewhere I’ll never get to go, and would love to – an architectural residency, the equivalent of somewhere like Yaddo or MacDowell for apprentice architects. It’s run by Nostbakken, an enigmatic, legendary architect, who seems, the narrator says, “more substantially of the past than anybody I’ve ever met,” and because it’s that kind of place, the narrator is also in charge of its barn animals. Honestly, I love the setting so much that it hijacks my critical faculties and I’m unable to care about anything else here, even the fleeting love story. I’m there for the pancakes, coffee and snow, and for the milking of cows whilst thinking about architecture.

First published in Zoetrope, 2000, and collected in Bobcat and Other Stories, Text Publishing, 2014

‘Unaccustomed Earth’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

I’m aware that Jhumpa Lahiri isn’t fashionable these days, but her stories weren’t built to be fashionable – ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ is about a dad who goes to stay with his daughter and then, like, he mows the lawn. When I first read it years ago, I was struck by two things – first, Lahiri’s even-handed, neutral narration and second, the sheer amount of detail about domestic lives. Both these things would suggest something beyond boring but instead, they make way for real depth of emotion. There’s bravery in being able to go full pelt for forty pages with the interactions of two or three people in suburban Seattle. I have to admit, I’m not sure how it would hold up to a revisit but when I first read it, almost fifteen years ago, I found it incredibly impressive.

First published in Unaccustomed Earth, Knopf/Bloomsbury, 2008. Excerpted here in the New York Times

The Chet Baker section in But Beautiful, by Geoff Dyer

It’s not cheating to include this – Dyer wouldn’t care! I was going to pick that Wells Tower story everyone loves, but I kept coming back to But Beautiful. It’s a book about jazz, looking at the lives of famous jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington, and it’s considered ‘genre-defying’ because it dips in and out of fact with striking nonchalance. Dyer calls it “imaginative criticism”. I remember pouring over this book with a pencil back almost twenty years ago, trying to figure out how Dyer wrote (and how I could copy it), even though now I think he could have toned it down here and there.

The Chet Baker section haunts me the most. We all know Baker’s story – how a baby-faced, beautiful young man was ravaged by heroin addiction. As Dyer says: “Staring back at him was a face whose features seemed controlled by some internal gravity that pulled everything inward”. Dyer really goes for it with Baker’s destruction here, as well as his total shittiness to women. He was the king of ghosting, but the enjoyment here doesn’t come from this smart, knowing portrait of him, it comes from the flashes of beauty in Dyer’s writing. After all this time, I still love, “Chet’s face had the look of water swirling down the drain”, and “he was staring into the dead pool of coffee, ceiling lights glinting in it like a glimpse of bright fish”. You could write these lines into any story and they’d work fine, but here they just serve to pull you deeper into But Beautiful’s unforgettable, dream-like world.

Abacus, 1991

Introduction

Hello, Personal Anthology subscribers! We’re Han Clark and Gary Kaill, and we run the online literary journal Lunate Fiction. We met at the Manchester Writing School at MMU in 2018 while studying the MA Creative Writing. That course of study not only changed the direction of our own work, but it impacted significantly on the type of fiction we read and enjoy. We founded Lunate shortly after graduating, largely because we felt that those particular tastes and preferences might just provide for a new journal where the like-minded could find a home. We’ve enjoyed showcasing short stories, poetry and book reviews for nearly three years now, and we hope we’re now seen as a home for ambitious work, as well as being a safe and inclusive space for all.

We were honoured to be asked to contribute to A Personal Anthology and we hope you’ll find something to enjoy in the stories we’ve chosen. There is no theme, no pathway, no real attempt to formulate our choices. We both simply grabbed a piece of paper and began to scribble a list of short stories we love. Some of them have been with us for a while, some just a matter of months. Our intent, on reflection, was not to critique to any meaningful degree, or even to curate. It was more the case that we wanted to express something more wholly instinctive, and seize upon the opportunity to share with you all these twelve exceptional stories.

‘How to Be an Other Woman’ by Lorrie Moore

Of all the stories by Lorrie Moore that I could have chosen, I decided to go with ‘How to Be an Other Woman’, the first story in Moore’s debut collection Self-Help, because I was re-introduced to it recently at a writing workshop given by Lara Williams (more on Lara later!) and reminded of how utterly sublime it is.

‘How to Be an Other Woman’ is the kind of short story we all want to write: witty, charming, irreverent, and original. It is also written in the second person, the literary equivalent of hair gel; some writers think it is really cool, others can’t stand it, but love it or hate it most of us have given it a go at some point with varying results. ‘How to Be an Other Woman’ follows the doomed trajectory of a love affair between Charlene and Jack, and what I find special about this story is the calm authorial undertaking to explore poor life choices and the acknowledgement that sometimes it is these same choices that glitter amidst the mundanity of an ordinary life. Yes, it can be messy. No, it is not always dignified. But, Moore reminds us quietly, perhaps life is not supposed to be. (HC)

First published in Self-Help, FSG/Faber, 1985 and then in the Collected Stories, FSG/Faber, 2008

‘Portrait of a Friend’ by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Dick Davies

It may not be quite proper to include this marvellous piece of writing here, because in truth it is an essay, or perhaps we would say now ‘Creative Non-Fiction’ rather than a short story. But I am including it anyway, because it has a story-like quality that deserves mention. Written to honour Ginzburg’s friend, Cesare Pavese, who took his own life via an overdose in 1950, ‘Portrait of a Friend’ is a masterclass in understated emotion – something we seek with fervour in our publications at Lunate.

It is also a spectacular example of how to weave character and place together so that one cannot be cleanly picked from the other. Her depiction of the city of Turin is hauntingly beautiful:

‘In summer our city is deserted and seems very large, clear and echoing, like an empty city-square; the sky has a milky pallor, limpid but not luminous; the river flows as level as a street and gives off neither humidity nor freshness. Sudden clouds of dust rise from the streets; huge carts loaded with sand pass by on their way from the river; the asphalt of the main avenue is littered with pebbles that bake in the tar. Outside the cafés, beneath their fringed umbrellas, the little tables are deserted and red-hot.’

Within Ginzburg’s writing, the city absorbs both her own quiet grief and the desolation that her friend must have felt. Tragedy can become a delicate thing and, when presenting it to an audience, sometimes it is all the more devastating for its unassuming fragility. (HC)

First published in Italian as ‘Ritratto d’un amico’, Radiocorriere, 1957. First published in English in The Little Virtues, Carcanet, 1985. New edition from Daunt Books, 2018

‘Blood and Water’ by Banana Yoshimoto

Delicacy is something I have come to appreciate more and more in fiction. Not necessarily delicate subjects, but a light authorial touch and I find myself returning again to Banana Yoshimoto. In much of Yoshimoto’s early fiction, love is given an unerringly positive place in the world she creates and has the power to offer both giver and receiver intense spiritual healing. In the case of ‘Blood and Water’ this power is literal, in the form of an amulet gifted to Chikako from Akira, but it is the gentle care he shows her which provides the greatest protection against her fear of loneliness. Yoshimoto’s work is often filled with the Japanese aesthetic of effervescence: objects perish or are lost, exchanging hands and living many different lives. Impermanence, Yoshimoto tells us, only sharpens our experiences, and love is no different. It’s loss is not to be feared, it is simply a gift to help us “forget, for a brief while, the sorrow that clings to life”. (HC)

Published in Lizard by Banana Yoshimoto, Faber and Faber, 1995

‘Penguins’ by Lara Williams

Most stories I read flitter through my mind and then they are gone, and there are others that simply settle in and nest there forever. ‘Penguins’ is an example of the latter. It is wry, it is funny, and there is a dawning awareness that the nameless characters you are reading about are suffering a kind of muted pain: the sort of discomfort that shares a likeness with a deep bruise that is felt long before it is seen.

Williams’ debut short story collection is full of modern-day madness, the torments we put ourselves through to fit in, and the unwitting traumas we cause each other in our quest to belong somewhere, anywhere, even if it is only to ourselves.

In ‘Penguins’ we meet an unnamed twenty-nine-year-old woman, who, after suffering the frequent indignities of online dating, meets a man who is good with her friends, visits art galleries with her, and eventually tells her he loves her. Then one day he says they need to talk “About. Um. Sex.” and he proceeds to tell her that he wants her to dress up as a penguin and incubate some eggs. After an initially shocked and passive acceptance, she becomes obsessed with the specifics of what he would like her to do, seeking details that he either cannot or will not provide, until he eventually asks her to forget the whole thing. ‘Penguins’ is a delightfully absurdist glimpse of the compromises we make and passive-aggressive contortions we form to keep a relationship going, whether we are sure we want it or not. (HC)

Published in Treats, Freight Books, 2016

‘The Crane Wife’ by CJ Hauser

I have a soft spot for stories that use a basis of folklore for their launch. When done well they can read like a literary inheritance, a gift from a long forgotten relative. CJ Hauser uses a story of the same name from Japanese folklore about a crane who falls in love with a man and tricks him into thinking she is a woman so that he will marry her. Every night while he sleeps she plucks her feathers out, concealing her true identity, erasing her true self night after night to make herself into someone he will love. It is a cautionary tale.

In Hauser’s story she flits between telling the reader about the unfulfilling relationship she found the courage to leave, ending her engagement but avoiding the fate of the crane wife; and the expedition she embarked upon ten days later to study whooping cranes and their habitat. The two threads weave together perfectly and as the story progresses the uplifting message that one’s first duty is to honour thyself shines through with reasoned and compassionate good sense:

It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive? (HC)

Published by The Paris Review, 2019, and available to read online here

‘Formerly Feral’ by Julia Armfield

The bond between sisters is a strange and complex thing, explored from every possible angle in literature, and yet Armfield manages something utterly original in ‘Formerly Feral’. The protagonist is a twelve-year-old girl. When her parents divorce she remains living with her father, whilst her mother leaves and takes her older sister. Her father swiftly marries a woman who has adopted a wolf, and is raising that wolf, named Helen, as a daughter – from then on the girl and the wolf are effectively treated as sisters.

The day they moved in, she dressed the wolf in a blue pinafore dress she described as its special occasions outfit and presented me with a copy, in my size, which my father suggested I change into before helping with the unpacking.’ I love this story for so many reasons: its sumptuous language, the hypnotic pace of Armfield’s writing; but most of all I adore the humour with which she confronts the savagery of female adolescence. There is much to be made about a creature with base instincts and desires being scrubbed with perfumed soaps and forced to blend into a world it has never asked to be a part of! (HC)

First published in Salt Slow by Julia Armfield, Picador, 2020. Available to read online at Electric Lit here

‘The Garden’ by Sarah Trounce

I remember being stunned when first reading ‘The Garden’, jolted to the point of having to pause and take a breath before continuing. It is so difficult to write about grief: so many pitfalls for even the most scrupulous writer, especially if they are attentive to the reader’s needs and wish to be generous enough to position that reader such that they do not feel overwhelmed or instructed. ‘The Garden’ is set several months after the death of its sharply realised (unnamed) narrator’s partner, John, and he floods the story with his presence — or, more accurately, the weight of his absence.

Trounce carefully balances two initially opposing elements: the agonising and emerging unpacking of memory, and the requirement (on the part of her protagonist) to move forward and make “something admissible” of her life. The latter is sparked by a visit from John’s young son, suggested by the wife he left for our narrator and results in a sleepover that coincides with a hellish storm, one that wrecks the untended garden of the title:

The storm deals discord. Its fluid, skilful fingers pluck conifers, fling wrought iron furniture over demolished boundaries. A flying shed is evidence of a whole nation’s timid pursuits.

“So, the ruin is coming then,” our narrator muses, as the storm hits, and one is reminded of her equally beguiling equivalent in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond: a no less compelling voice. Again, it requires the deepest level of craft to make one’s characters so absolute, so angular. Here, they burn bright enough to crisp the page. This astonishing story ends as it begins (“In the end it is the garden that saves her”) and you apply the strongest hope for this damaged but reconstituted pair. I think Trounce is quite remarkable: an uncommonly insightful and compassionate writer, alive to the poetry of what might at first pass as simple lives. I cannot wait to see what she does next. (GK)

Published in The London Magazine, April/May 2020