‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’ by Bruno Schulz, translated by Celina Wieniewska

Perhaps one of the most haunting of Schulz’s stories, the narrator’s elderly father must go away to a mysterious Sanatorium where reality works differently. He is both dead and not, both sick and fervently active, both visitable and unrecoverable to the world. The story stretches one’s understanding of narrative logic, of time and mortality and creates an internal experience of agitation not unlike how I imagine degenerative brain diseases to feel, stirring up the overwhelming desire to escape without a clear course of return in mind. It is now also impossible not to read this story as a foreshadowing of the Holocaust, calling to mind Aharon Applebaum’s novel Badenheim 1939, another story of a health resort from which the denizens are forbidden to return home. Schulz himself was a Polish Jew who was murdered by a Nazi officer in 1942.

First published in Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą, 1937. Published in translation in Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2008

‘What (Not) to Do with Your Hands When You Are Nervous’ by Eley Williams

This story takes in Keats’s foreknowledge of his own mortality, the term ‘mortmain’ and the history of the Royal Worcester Parian vase depicting the sculptor’s wife’s hands among other related ideas. It flows forth as a series of frantic disquisitions on seemingly loosely connected things as the narrator is stuck on a Tube carriage underground, growing ever later for her job interview. What I especially enjoy about Williams’s writing is the way she often explodes narrative time, replicating the experience of a mind fizzing with ideas and subterranean connections experiencing consciousness moment by moment. There is also an enjoyably smutty undercurrent as the reader starts to realise why the queer narrator has chosen to fixate on hands in particular, even if she disguises it as serious academic enquiry.

First published in Seen from Here, ed. Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat, Unstable Object, and collected in Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good, 4th Estate, 2024

‘The White People’ by Arthur Machen

Another tale within a tale, a heated discussion between two men about the existence of evil leads one of them to bring out an unusual artefact to prove his point. In the ‘Green Book’, a young girl recounts her supernatural education, first by her nurse and then by the strange forces which live in the nearby woods, diving deeper and deeper into obscure occult knowledge, including lost fairy languages and ‘Troy towns’, the real but mysterious English folk practice of dancing through ancient turf labyrinths. Part of the power of this story is the nostalgic longing provoked by the possibility of access to a forbidden, vanished world – though too much curiosity comes at a terrible price. Despite the antiquated style, her voice still has the power to compel and shock, as does the savage conclusion the men draw from her diary.

First published in Horlick’s Magazine, 1904, and collected in The House of Souls, 1906. Now available in The White People and Other Weird Stories, Penguin Classics, 2012

‘Drownings’ by Helen Oyeyemi

Playful, fantastical and achingly sad, ‘Drownings’ is the story of a land ruled over by a mad tyrant, who drowns so many people that they form a lake of skin and keys, still conscious and lapping away at the shores of the kingdom. Arkady is so poor he can no longer protect his family, comprised of gentle, naïve Giacomo and the clever dog Leporello – and decides to kidnap the tyrant’s daughter, whose own life has been torn apart by the tyrant’s obsession with executing his perceived rivals. Arkady has a bit part in much greater machinations, of which he and the reader are only permitted glimpses. Drownings’ offers glimmers of hope but no easy answers. Oyeyemi has that rare gift of planting wild coincidences into a story with such self-assurance that you believe her entirely.

First published in What is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi, Picador, 2016

‘The Sad Tale of the Sconce’ by Camilla Grudova

Teetering between comically pathetic and genuinely heartwrenching, this story recounts the surreal picaresque existence of a seemingly inanimate object, born from the chance encounter of an octopus with the mermaid on the prow of a decommissioned ship. The sconce is stolen by USSR soldiers, sexually mistreated, sold, sold again and so on until even the author loses sight of him. He has emotions like loneliness, pain and longing for his mother but no control over his destiny. The bizarre footnotes about a boy with sardines for fingers and women finding severed fingers in sausage tins also enhance the sense that this is a world in which anything can happen to anyone regardless of whether they are believed. The tale captures with great acuity the sensation of living through history both as spectator and unwilling participant.

First published in The Doll’s Alphabet, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017

‘Hai’ by Yan Ge

The quarrelling disciples of Confucius stage their disputes for a crowd of eager would-be adepts, using concepts from the analects to surpass and baffle one another as they vie to be recorded by the chroniclers of the school’s activities. When Zixia returns to the school from a failed coup at a regional court, holding a jar of his fellow disciple’s minced remains, chaos breaks loose. The senior Confucian leadership begin to vent their long-held grudges and the dangerous secrets they have been keeping are no longer secure. The way Yan Ge breathes life into a very remote set of concerns and transforms the disciples into real people with families and rivalries makes this a gruesome delight of historical short fiction.

First published in Elsewhere, Faber, 2024

‘The Sin Eater’ by Jane Flett

Flett reworks the British folk practice of sin eating, in which the village outcast symbolically consumes the sins of the recently departed in exchange for monetary reward, into a joyful celebration of carnality, gluttony and pleasure. In her telling, the Sin Eater is privy to all the most shameful secrets of the community they serve, while thoroughly enjoying their strange and abject status. The Sin Eaters gather together to feast, drink, fornicate and make merry in spite of the heaviness of their role. It’s both a metaphor for the act of reading and writing itself and a beautiful meditation on jealousy, friendship and the expansive possibilities of the unconventional life.

First published in Electric Literature, 2022, and available to read here

Introduction

I selected the twelve stories in this anthology with the following test in mind: if I were to arrive at a secluded holiday rental and discover I had left my bag of books on the bus from the nearest town (several hours away on foot and anyway without a bookshop), and if the only book on the otherwise empty shelves were this Personal Anthology, would its twelve stories sustain me happily for several weeks, become richer with each re-reading, and leave me glad that I had left my books on the bus, even wishing the same fate on the next guest? I hope they would.

‘Sensini’ by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

When the narrator of this story, a young writer working odd jobs and living alone in Barcelona, makes fourth place in a short story competition, he discovers among the shortlisted authors the name of Luis Antonio Sensini, an older, under-recognised Argentinian writer whom he admires. “The fact that I had been his fellow runner-up in a provincial literary competition—an association that I found at once flattering and profoundly depressing—encouraged me to make contact with him, to pay my respects and tell him how much his work meant to me.” The two begin an epistolary friendship, Sensini ending his replies with encouragement for the younger writer: “Pen to paper now, no shirking!” The story is a great homage to short story competitions, “those precious supplements to the writer’s modest income,” and, as it reaches its conclusion, transforms into a moving reflection on the lessons we learn from our writer mentors, dead and alive.

First collected in Llamadas Telefonicas, Anagrama, 1997, and in English in Last Evenings on Earth, New Directions, 2006. Available to read online at the Barcelona Review, here

‘The Garden Party’ by Katherine Mansfield

I always think of ‘The Garden Party’ as a perfect story of epiphany. Like Joyce’s ‘Araby’, it introduces its protagonist in place, time and milieu, and ends at the moment she learns a new and irreversible lesson about the world, a lesson that does not need to be named outright because the story up to that point has carefully made the substance of that epiphany legible:

‘Isn’t life,’ she stammered, ‘isn’t life—’ But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood.

‘Isn’t it, darling?’ said Laurie.’

When I first read this story 10 years ago, I understood Laura’s epiphany to be about death – the accidental death of a working-class neighbour on the day of her family’s garden party causes the young protagonist to realise that death looms over life and that she too will die one day – and missed the extent to which the story is about her burgeoning class-consciousness. From the beginning of the story, when she is sent out to instruct the workmen assembling the marquee and disarmed by their friendliness, to the end, when she has to confront the squalid living conditions of her neighbours, the story is about her coming to understand not only that death always looms over life, nor that some people live well at the expense of others living poorly, but that death looms more closely and meanly over the lives of the poor than over those of the wealthy.

First published in The Westminster Gazette in 1922. Collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories, Constable and Robinson, 1922). Available to read online here

‘The Siege’ by James Lasdun

This story describes the relationship between Marietta, a refugee from an unnamed, war-torn country, and Mr Kinsky, the man for whom she works as a cleaner and in whose basement she lives. Mr Kinsky develops an erotic fascination with Marietta, which she rebuts, and Lasdun brilliantly describes the subtleties of their charged relationship:

‘Hello, my dear.’ He used the endearment with the authority of someone who has aquired it precisely by virtue of his grace in defeat as a prospective lover.

I first read ‘The Siege’ after hearing about it in a conversation between the author and Adam Shatz, which you can listen to here (they discuss the story around 11 minutes in, and you can hear Lasdun read a short excerpt, accompanied by some of the Schubert that Mr Kinsky plays on his piano in the story).

Collected in The Siege: Selected Stories, Vintage, 1999

‘Los Angeles’ by Emma Cline

For the protagonist of this story, a young woman working at a chain clothing outlet in Los Angeles, opening a box of clothes: “all stuffed and flattened together in a cube without tags or prices, made their real worth suddenly clear – this was junk, all of it.” But although she sees through the illusion, that does not free her from the work of maintaining it. “Before they put the clothes on the racks, they had to steam them, trying to reanimate the sheen of value.” Everything in the world of this story is reducible to its exchange value: beauty can be used to entice customers, the aspirations of young actors pay the bills of their jaded older teachers, and the story leaps into motion when the protagonist discovers that even her used underwear can be sold: a younger, savvier colleague regularly sells hers to men on the internet and the perverts who come into the shop, so the protagonist decides – though decides is hardly a word that belongs in the world of this story – to try it too.

In the final scene, the protagonist climbs into a car with a man to whom she is selling her underwear and during their uncomfortable interaction, she remembers a previous, unpleasant incident that she endured by imagining it as a story: “something condensed and communicable.” Even the story form itself is subjected to the same economic logic as the clothes that arrive, flattened into a cube and ready for sale. In its terrifying final moment, she realises that he has locked the car and she can’t get out. Then the ironic, affectless screen behind which this sad life plays out is torn away, and its awful violence is laid bare.

First published in Granta in 2017 and collected in Daddy, Chatto & Windus, 2020. Available for Granta subscribers to read here

‘Winter in the Abruzzi’ by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Dick Davis

Perhaps this ought to be considered an essay. It’s often called one and, in fact, I first read it for a course called ‘The Essay’. Nevertheless, it’s filed away with the short stories in my memory, I suppose because it is so rooted in a place, a time, and a set of characters, and because when I think of it, it’s not an idea I remember but the mood of its narrative voice, its geographical details, and the aesthetic effect of its moving final paragraph. It is a story about the years during the fascist period in Italy that Ginzburg and her husband, Jewish communists, were forced into internal exile and lived in the village of Pizzoli, in the mountainous Abruzzo region. It describes the changing seasons, their relationships with the villagers, and the sadness they felt as the snow settled over the mountains. Its beautiful, devastating final paragraph never fails to send shivers up my spine.

First collected as ‘Inverno in Abruzzo’ in Le piccole virtù, Einaudi, 1962, and in English in The Little Virtues, Carcanet, 1995, and then by Daunt Books, 2018. Available to read here

‘Prosinečki’ by Adrian Duncan

‘Prosinečki’ takes place in a lower-league football stadium somewhere in Northern England and its narrative duration is very short: it begins during a break in play while one of the narrator’s teammates lies “splayed on the ground amid plumes of vapour and hunkering medics” and ends minutes later, when play has resumed, and the narrator has dinked a cross for his striker to head into the net. Really, though, the story takes place in that expansive non-time which is the domain of great writers and footballers alike, and which its writing perfectly evokes:

I was on the midway line, with my back to goal, and as the ball sped to me through the sleet I feigned right and clipped the ball with the inside of my foot, back across my body and past my left knee. Then, feeling the entire earth rushing over my right shoulder, I span left, and the pitch, the stadium, the lights, the forest cleaved open before me.

The story never makes the analogy explicit – part of what makes it so good is that it speaks only in the language of football – but you can also read ‘Prosinečki’ as a reflection on the development of a writer, who like a footballer, endures years of pain and rejection in pursuit of the brief, transcendent moments when it all comes together.

First published in The Stinging Fly in summer, 2018 and collected in Midfield Dynamo, The Lilliput Press, 2021. Stinging Fly subscribers can read the story here. Non-subscribers can also listen to a great reading by Wendy Erskine here