Writers, critics and others dream-edit a personal anthology of their favourite short stories
As with Anne Enright you could pick any twelve of Wendy’s stories and have a 2019/20 Liverpool of a Personal Anthology. But I love this one because I think of myself as a crime writer and she still wipes the floor with my novels in a couple of thousand words. Boss.
First published in Sweet Home, Picador, 2018. You can hear Wendy read her story on RTE here
Wendy writes in the intro to the Brick Lane / Desperate Lits Prize Anthology 22 Fictions that you can get away with formal experiment of a wild kind in short fiction, because word-count constriction means novelty isn’t exhaustible in the same way as in a novel. What that means, though, is that the formal experiment has to be both highwire and agile, in order to be expansive rather than gimmicky. May-Lan fits a whole pair of lives into this screenplay-format story. Three friends and I had a short-story reading group going for a while. This was our favourite one.
First published in Things to Make and Break, CB Editions, 2014. Now also published by Sceptre
For more Wendy, listen to her reading and analysing Adrian’s story. I feel like I’ve learned about half of what I know about stories from that (if that’s much at all). My favourite stories are mini-novels, like May-Lan’s, and like this one, where a clanky-limbed gladiator of a midfielder nearing the end of his career looks around a clanky stadium, wondering – but not for too long – what the point of his footballing life has been (hint: it is a moment of unrecorded, unrecordable, unrepeatable beauty). In the synaptic gap between his wondering and his realisation, a whole lifetime is recounted, and a whole philosophy articulated,
First published in The Stinging Fly 38:2, Summer 2018, and collected in Midfield Dynamo, Lilliputt Press, 2021. You can hear Wendy Erskine read it on The Stinging Fly podcast here
I once had a dream where I was playing in goal for Liverpool and pinged a long ball over the top of Leicester’s midfield for Colin to bring down and jink past Dewsbury-Hall, to secure an 88th-minute 3-2 winner. My exultant yell woke my family. This has nothing to do with the story. However, his work does bring me a similar, if less weird, form of joy. This story is all shimmer and disquiet, and sad, smoke-touched beauty.
First published in Homesickness, Grove/Jonathan Cape, 2022. You can read an extract from the story at Harper’s, here, and hear Eileen Walsh read it on RTE here
By now I think Tom and I disagree about everything but what a short-story writer he is. This is my favourite one. The dialogue is so crisp you can taste it. The uneasy atmosphere of Is this banter or is this cruelty? is perfect. Finally, the numbered sections make you see how he doesn’t really write paragaphs so much as prose poems. I wish I had his patience and clarity of mind.
First published in We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, Faber, 2015
Again, you might be tempted to pick ‘Muzungu’, but this is the one for me. She turns Beckett inside out without surrendering the deadpan for a moment. It’s a masterly wrestle: she recombs the fabric of the Beckett text to find new, deep, rich infinities that are all their own. I suppose it’s as much a critical essay in the mode of a short story (in this case, a parody commissioned by McSweeney’s). She does have a critic’s eye when she leaps on Beckett’s one properly tin-eared moment, for sure, but a writer’s subtle mercy in making it work in a different way.
First published in McSweeney’s 49: Cover Stories, 2017
The closest thing, I think, that I’ve read, in fictional form, to my favourite film, which is Last Year at Marienbad. There’s such swirl and control to its sentence rhythm. She inches us up as close to the real as May-Lan does in ‘Candy Glass’: here, it’s when “Apollo boogies on the margins” – look at that, packing so much sound and anxiety into the small words. You can’t teach that. You can’t teach “unfunky”, “meat man”, “jiggly bedroom memories”. That’s just the first page. That’s just the language. Wait till you catch the rest. I can’t articulate it: the speed, the tumble, the tuneage of this one leave me a bit too bruised to manage. But Namwali Serpell unpacks this story’s political capabilities in ‘The Banality of Empathy’ – and the clock has really struck out there for that essay.
First published in Lightspeed 185, October 2016, and available to read online here
As she tells us herself, this story isn’t about race or ‘the shame of being alive’ or any of those things. It’s about kiddos, modernism, boba tea, reporterese, dadhood, art-market networking, Tamaki, casual drivebys on Drake, on Flannery O’Connor, on the next gobshite to say craft with a straight face (and thereby risk getting set adrift in one, by me, and probably the author, too), and the limits of genre (literary and non-) for approaching the contemporary, the horror, the horror that is the contemporary, meta-ness (which is not so eighties). It’s about you – and yes, there’s some self-judgement in my deployment of that you. It’s about how the finical temperatures of critical metalanguage can be turned around into the service of a sorrowing humanity that can’t be separated from race or ‘the shame of being alive’ or any of those things. A tremendous Möbius. When Penny asks Kevan ‘What’s your name?’ you feel the deep shattering of the political all the way through the domestic, a busted lift-shaft.
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
My friend Ezra sent this to me. It’s so funny and upsetting. ‘This one did that stomach thing when I first read it,’ he said to me. It did to me as well. The dreamy intensity of the Inside section of Robert Glück’s About Edsprings to mind, but it’s more antic, more manic, less tragic in scale. But you should still also read About Ed.
Collected in Come On, Sternberg Press, 2013
I have to include this one. Why? You’ll have to read my seminal 2025 memoir, THE BLACK POOL (2025), to find out. Don’t want to? Well, that’s fine: apart from Barry Hannah – who is, I think, what would happen if Kenny Powers had written short fiction: and I mean this in a good way – nobody writes janky, apparently offhand, apparently casual improv sentences that begin, taper up, and interrupt themselves halfway along, the way – yes – the smoke of something bad for you does quite the way Denis Johnson does. I just tried to do that and I couldn’t. I feel like he didn’t really write so much as expose, in linguistic terms, through a frightening, zenlike readiness of mind, some chaotic suprahuman principle of words themselves, which always want to do more than we want them to, and which are trying to wipe us out, and which are relentlessly, tenaciously at once human and not the way the bones making up a skull are at once human and not. However, at least they can get us to make some funny jokes whilst we are being squooshed back into our own pre-birth red pulp, the way the lads in this do, God willing, one day at a time.
First published in The New Yorker, September 8, 1991 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Jesus’ Son, Picador, 1992, and widely anthologised, including in That Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the Finest Short Stories, ed. David Miller, Head of Zeus, 2014
I’ve chosen twelve stories that I frequently find myself coming back to and thinking about, whether I first read them years ago or discovered them relatively recently. They all haunt me and, in their different ways, say or reveal something true. Looking at my selection now, it strikes me that one reason they’ve stayed with me is because they are all slightly audacious. By ‘audacious’ I don’t mean showy or experimental, but they’re stories where I can imagine how the same idea might easily have fallen flat (how it could have been taken too far, or not far enough), yet the writer makes it work perfectly, and it’s as if you’ve witnessed someone pull off an astonishing acrobatic feat.
One morning, Faith – “a woman inside the steamy energy of middle age” – goes for a run and finds herself in the Brooklyn neighbourhood where she grew up. In an odd turn of events, she arrives at her childhood home and meets the family who now live in her old apartment. Then, without a second thought, she moves in with them for three weeks. When Faith finally returns home, her partner and grown-up sons are as non-plussed by her explanation of her absence as you might expect.
The story has many things to say – it’s a bit about running (like Alan Sillitoe’s similarly-titled story), and quite a lot about race in 1960s and ‘70s America (in ways that would take a long time to unpack). But what floors me every time is the off-kilter truths it offers about middle age. It reveals something profound about what it means to arrive at midlife, that vantage point from where you can see your own childhood and everything you used to know rapidly receding into the distance, while at the same time you’re looking out ahead and wondering, as Faith puts it, “what in the world is coming next.”
It’s fantastic. And the final paragraph is as sublime and mysterious as a prayer.
First published in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1974, and in The Collected Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994
This was the first work by David Constantine I ever read, and it remains one of my favourites. In this story, Mr and Mrs Mercer’s marriage is turned upside down when they receive a disconcerting piece of news: 60 years ago, before the couple married, Mr Mercer’s then-girlfriend, Katya, was killed in a hiking accident, but now her preserved body has been found in the ice of a melting Alpine glacier.
The prose is both mundane and otherworldly – the small murmurings of Mr and Mrs Mercer’s daily conversations merge into poetry, and lines like this have lodged themselves in my mind:
“whatever is in there behind the eyes or around the heart or wherever else it is, whatever it is that is not the husk of us will cease when the husk does but in the meantime never ages, does it?”
I always enjoy Constantine’s hypnotic stream-of-consciousness style, but ‘In Another Country’ is as much about the startling story itself as the telling of it. Years after I read this story, it dawned on me that it’s a reworking of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. And then I read ‘Unexpected Reunion’ by Johann Peter Hebel (apparently Franz Kafka’s favourite story), and I realised it’s a retelling of that, too. All of which is to say I am still turning this story over in mind and still seeing it in new ways, and it feels a bit like a living thing.
First published in The Reader, 2005, and collected in Under the Dam and other stories, Comma Press, 2005. Available to listen to, as read by the author, here
‘The Rotifer’ is a beautiful, melancholic reflection about the passing of time, and about the ways that other lives can touch our own and how we sometimes become intensely invested in those other lives. I’ve never read anything else quite like it.
It’s essentially three linked stories. We meet the narrator first as a student, anxiously watching a minute organism (the eponymous rotifer) as it wriggles in distress under the lens of her microscope. The rotifer is ensnared in a piece of algae, but the narrator’s attempts to help it only result in chaos – her huge, clumsy body exists on a different scale to its tiny world. The story then pans out to events in other times and places that obliquely echo this first incident and culminates in a casually devastating last line.
Mary Ladd Gavell’s fiction was only discovered after she died at the age of 47, and it was not until 2002 (35 years after her death) that her first and only story collection was published and gained significant acclaim. You read her work differently, I think, when you know this. I imagine her in the neatly coiffured world of mid-century America, busily writing while her children slept and stashing her stories away, unaware of what the future held. Which, of course, is itself a haunting story about the passage of time and the quiet tragedy of other lives.
First published in Best American Short Stories of 1968, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968, and included in Best American Short Stories of the Century, Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Collected in I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly and other stories, Random House, 2002
A Personal Anthology 