‘The Green Zone Rabbit’ by Hassan Blasim, translated by Jonathan Wright

While a would-be assassin, Hajjar, waits for news of his mission, an egg appears in the hutch of his pet rabbit, creating panic and paranoia.
 
For me, this story viscerally personalises the swift and dizzying ways in which a conflict can derail a life. Blasim skilfully connects Hajjar’s current predicament with his childhood under sanctions, which featured obsessive research into kissing in the animal kingdom – books read by candlelight when the electricity failed. He reads about an insect called reduvius, which kisses the mouths of sleeping humans, secreting poison in microscopic drops.

First published by The Iraqi Christ, Comma Press, 2013

‘Transmission’ by Blánaid McKinney

I was amazed by Sinéad Gleeson’s anthology The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories. It sent me off in loads of new directions: Wendy Erskine, Cathy Sweeney, Deidre Sullivan. I hadn’t encountered McKinney’s work before this story about a businessman methodically destroying his BMW on a patch of waste land in a small town. It’s located very much in concrete detail, but – like lots of stories I fall for – seems to rise carefully and gradually above reality into some sublime other zone. ‘And that was how they spent that particular evening, long and warm, doing nothing in particular, except watching a car die, and the sun go down.’

First published in Big Mouth, Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Phoenix House, 2000

‘The Girl Who Raised Pigeons’ by Edward P. Jones

One of the reasons I love short stories is because they so often replace plot with relationships. This is the story of a relationship between a young girl, Betsy-Ann, and her dad, Robert, in Washington in the late 50s, early 60s. I’ve no idea how Jones manages to get so much into these pages: the social background of the changing neighbourhood; the desolation of a father – 19 years old – finding himself alone with a baby; Betsy Ann’s growing wilfulness; and a coop full of pigeons. There’s no showing off, and yet I found myself gasping several times at the sentences. He takes a zen-like care over each moment, and really earns the sentiments of the soaring final paragraph.

In Lost in the City, William Morrow, 1992

‘Brokeback Mountain’ by Annie Proulx

Okay, this is not a recent discovery. I read it at least once a year, for its technical deftness and the gut punch of its emotions. Sometimes I write the first line of each section on a piece of paper, trying to figure out how Proulx managed to string the decades together with such ease. The balance of scene and summary is perfect. There’s a bit where she describes how the bodies of Ennis and Jack have changed over the years – broken noses healed crooked, teeth filed down, moustaches grown, accents shifting. And it’s just so moving. I think it was the first story that ever made me cry. There’s something devastating about the clash between the lovers’ wordless feelings and so-called traditional wisdom – “If you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it.”

First published in The New Yorker, October, 1997. Collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Harper Perennial, 1999

‘In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried’ by Amy Hempel

If I could only read one story for the rest of my life it would be this. The fact that this was the first story she ever wrote – the product of a prompt by Gordon Lish in his writing class – is nothing short of miraculous. The prompt was to write a story that would ‘dismantle’ their sense of self, and Hempel wrote about a friend who died too young of cancer. The narrator is flawed, brutally honest and unsentimental (almost willing us to dislike her) But, by the end, the voice is one undone by loss and a gnawing regret. It’s a masterclass in the importance of blank space on the page, of what isn’t being said. Hempel herself stated “You want to be underneath the bleachers in a story, looking for what’s left”. 

First published in TriQuarterly Magazine, 1983, and collected in Reasons To Live, 1985, Harper Collins. Read it online here

‘Signs and Symbols’ by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov is a favourite writer of mine and his stories are slices of perfection. This story, on the surface, is very slight – an elderly couple return from visiting their son in a sanatorium on his birthday, after he has attempted to take his own life, and they sit at their table at midnight and eat some jam – and yet not one word is wasted. Small details devastate (their son’s unopened birthday present on the table, the realisation that knives need to be kept in a locked drawer if he returned home) During the story, the couple receive two apparently misdialled telephone calls from a girl asking for Charlie; and the story ends abruptly when the phone rings for a third time. It is, frustratingly, never answered and the delicious ambiguity of it means that, whenever I re-read it, I’m always slightly hopeful that this time the father will pick up the phone. 

First published – as ‘Symbols and Signs’ –  in The New Yorker, May 15, 1948, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, Doubleday, 1958 and Collected Short Stories, Knopf, 1995. Also in the Penguin 70 Cloud Castle Lake, 2005

‘Tangled Up in Blue’ by Bob Dylan

When I was a kid, my dad had this beat up leather case he stored his albums and 7” singles in which I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere near (which obviously meant that all I wanted to do was see what was inside!) One day, when I was about 11, I sneaked it into my room and was flicking through the records when the title of a song caught my eye – Tangled Up in Blue. I had no clue what it meant so I took the single out and played it on my cheap little record player. From that first verse – “Early one morning, the sun was shining, I was laying in bed, wondering if she’d changed at all, if her hair was still red” – I was intrigued. I didn’t know songs could be life stories like that, I was totally immersed in the lyrics and invested in this relationship with the singer and the redhead who worked in a “topless place” who gifts him a book of poems written by “an Italian poet from the thirteenth century”. I played it over and over. Some of the language was confusing, his phrasing too clever for my youthful mind, and it felt like a riddle I had to solve, or hieroglyphics on a tomb I needed to decipher, but it definitely made me feel something. A connection. A sensation of words transporting you someplace else. I never had that with a song before. ‘Tangled…’ feels like poetry because it is.

From Blood on the Tracks, 1975, Columbia Records

‘Tralala’ by Hubert Selby, Jr

There was a gnarly guy named Kenneth who was in my English class in college. He had a shaved head, a fetish for plastic buttons and lived on a diet of bongs and Kraft cheese slices. Importantly, he also had a flat where me and my mates could go and drink vodka and listen to records. To say his flat was monastic, is an understatement – stained mattress in the living room, bare floorboards, cigarette butts everywhere – but he had a ton of vinyl and even more books. Mounds of them, all piled up in precarious piles, floor to ceiling. It was here I discovered Thomas Pynchon, Aleister Crowley, William Blake, Plutarch, Alexander Trocchi. It was like the best, most fucked up, library ever. It was also where I discovered – Kenneth’s hero – Hubert Selby, Jr. He, reluctantly, gave me a loan of his dog-eared copy of ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’.

Which brings me to ‘Tralala’. 

She picks up sailors, takes them to a room, knocks them unconscious then robs them. Her world is bleak and unrelenting, like a fever dream that keeps escalating and escalating, but you can’t look away. The horrifying last paragraph of the story provoked an intense, almost violent, physical reaction from me. I carried the image of it with me for days. Weeks. Took me a decade before I could brace myself to read it again.

Some stories can be parasites that infect you and alter your DNA a little. 

First published in Last Exit to Brooklyn, 1964, Grove Press)

‘Birdland’ by Patti Smith

When I was a teenager, I used to lie on my bed in my room in the dark and listen to John Peel on the radio. One night he played a song called ‘Birdland’. I didn’t realise at the time that it was inspired (just like Kate Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’) by Peter Reich’s memoir of his father, Wilhelm Reich. The first line – “His father died and left him a little farm in New England” – is softly spoken by Patti, over a mournful, sparse piano, and the story is about a boy, at his father’s funeral, who believes he sees a UFO being piloted by his dead dad. There are too many achingly beautiful lines to quote, but I always loved “It was as if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars, ‘cause when he looked up they started to slip…”

I went out and bought Horses the next day. (God, I miss John Peel)

From ‘Horses’, 1975, Arista Records

‘Blood’ by Janice Galloway

I once wrote in a short story of mine – “a woman is fluent in the language of blood”. Never was it more evident than in this visceral, almost carnal, story about a schoolgirl who starts her day having a sanitary towel jammed into her mouth to stem the bleed from a tooth extraction at the dentist and ends with her, at school, stuffing toilet paper in her underwear to stop a heavy, unexpected, period. She seeks solace in a music rehearsal room with a rosewood piano and Mozart playing, but the door won’t lock, and she hears the approaching footfall in the corridor of the students as the ‘unstoppable redness’ seeps from her, unable to stanch the bleed. 

The story is sinewy, compressed, with not one ounce of flab. Truthfully, I could have picked any of her stories. Janice Galloway is not Scotland’s best writer, she is simply the best writer, full stop.

From Blood, Vintage, 1991, and also The Picador Book of the New Gothic, Picador, 1991

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff

The last paragraph of this – the final, split-second thought (of a childhood baseball game in the heat of summer) as a bullet shatters through his skull – is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful things I’ve ever read. 

First published in The New Yorker, September 1995, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Night in Question, Bloomsbury, 1995

‘Game’ by Donald Barthelme

A great short story is tightly wound, not one wasted moment, and ‘Game’ is a breathless, claustrophobic, paranoid tale which takes place in a single room in an underground bunker. The two protagonists – Shotwell and the Narrator – are bored and restless, armed with pistols and rocking each other to sleep at night. The story feels as suffocating and airless as the bunker they live in. They are frustrated and strange, and in charge of possibly releasing a missile that could destroy a city. Power to destroy is always in the wrong hands, ‘Game’ suggests, because that degree of power can warp a soul.

First published in The New Yorker, July, 1965, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968, and Sixty Stories, GP Putnam’s Sons, 1981

‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ by Raymond Carver

So many Carver stories could have been on this list, but I chose this one because – in only 1600 words or so and set entirely on a driveway where a garage sale is being held by the alcoholic narrator – we see the broken remains of a life, and how important connection is, however minimal that may be. 

A young couple scope out the furniture pieces, possibly to buy for their own apartment, but there are no price tags on any of the items. As the girl is looking through his record collection, they put a song on and dance together.

There is no traditional ‘plot’ and the reader is only drip fed certain tiny, but crucial, elements of information. Nothing is resolved, everything is implied. 

First published in Quarterly West, 1978. This version first published in the Paris Review, 1981. Collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981, and Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic, 1988