‘The Englishman’ by Douglas Stuart

Queer longing, lemons, and the rural Scottish countryside — what’s not to love? I read this story before the explosion of Stuart’s Booker-Award winning Shuggie Bain, and it stayed with me long after reading. The protagonist, and his to-and-fro with the Englishman who employs him as a ‘houseboy’, are perfectly captured. The dynamic between them is uncomfortably realistic. I adore the contrast in this story: between rich and poor, old and young, the rural Hebridean landscape and the bright lights of London. I love the ever-present thread of lemons that runs through the story, a reminder that no matter how far from home we travel we are always tethered to our past. Stuart’s reflections on family and relationships are always so deeply moving. I particularly enjoyed: “I am the youngest of five brothers, each son fading slightly, becoming paler, more flaxen. It was as though our mother were a rubber stamp that was running out of ink—and she was. She always seemed to be weary.” Ugh! Delicious. A pleasure to read from start to finish.

First published in The New Yorker, September 7 2020, and available to read online for subscribers

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This story hits so many of my favourite themes. Feminism! Hysteria! Hideous home decor! It’s impossible to extricate the story from the context and climate it was written in, the forced rest-cures of the Victorian era that the writer herself was victim of. I first read and studied the story at university, and as I get older (and during the long, dark months of living alone during a global pandemic) I relate more to the protagonist — driven to madness when left to her own devices in forced solitude. A deliciously gothic exploration of motherhood, mental health and oppressive patriarchal structures.

Published in The New England Magazine, January 1892. Widely collected and published, including as a £1 Penguin Little Black Classic. Available to read online here

‘Sons at My Feet’ by Grahame Williams

I’ve gone a bit full immersion with Stinging Fly lately. I treated myself to a subscription the other day so I’m trying to absorb some of the power of the great talents they publish just by reading and reading and reading. I loved ‘Sons at My Feet’ because of its unusual format — it’s told via the medium of Whatsapp messages. I’m also a sucker for a story about alcohol use and abuse within families, and the storytelling ramble of the protagonist is captured perfectly by late night stream of consciousness Whatsapps. Very memorable, and I love the way the structure and storytelling give us the same sense of panic as the narrator recounts a frightening event.

First published and available to read in The Stinging Fly, Issue 40, Volume 2: Summer 2019

‘Graceland’ by Philip Ó Ceallaigh

Another Stinging Fly! I love this story. It depicts a father’s day out with his daughter so beautifully that it made me reminisce about father-daughter museum days I’m not sure I ever had. It’s also a very touching look at how children perceive the world, the things they notice that adults have become blind to. It’s an honest depiction of a fractured marriage and the protagonist’s frustration at being unable to see his child. This image, in which the father is acknowledging and making peace with his rage, particularly struck me: He hushed the violence. He whispered to it and caressed it like you would a cat to gain its trust then he gripped the loose skin of the nape and removed it squirming from the room.”

First published and available to read in The Stinging Fly, May 2021. Collected in Trouble, The Stinging Fly 2021

‘Butterflies’ by Ian McEwan

I am HAUNTED by this collection and not in any good way. I actually couldn’t keep the book in the house after I read it, I should have buried it in the garden. The protagonists here are often sociopathic perverts and the stories are traumatising. ‘Homemade’ is a very explicit tale of a boastful adolescent boy who has sex with his 10-year-old little sister in order to get one-up on his friend. The whole description of the event is grotesque. Similarly in ‘Butterflies’, an older man accosts a young girl down by a canal to fulfil his sexual needs and then murders her without a second thought. Terrifying and deeply troubling. Not sure this is a recommendation… Obviously very well written and Ian McEwan’s first published works I believe….but yes. Nightmares.

First published in New Review, 1974. Collected in First Love, Last Rites, Cape, 1975

‘Homemade’ by Ian McEwan

‘Homemade’ first published in New American Review 15, 1972. Collected in First Love, Last Rites, Cape, 1975

‘Your Shoes’ by Michèle Roberts

This is probably the first short story I ever read. We were given it at Standard Grade (age 13/14?) to study in English, and we were to write our own short story of the same title. I feel like I wildly plagiarised Michele’s work for my story — the themes, the format. All I did was swap out characters and dial the violence and dread up a notch, if I remember correctly. It was my first insight into short story structure and so I thought it deserved an honourable mention in the anthology. Thanks, Michèle for the introduction to the form (and to my teacher Mrs Stirling, wherever you are).

First published in During Mother’s Absence, Virago Press 1993

‘The Hunter’s Wife’ by Anthony Doerr

I love stories that play with the natural and supernatural, and ‘The Hunter’s Wife’ is a perfect example. I adore being so absorbed in a story that any paranormal, psychic or supernatural elements seem perfectly plausible, or secondary to the main plot. The Hunter’s Wife is full of beautiful, vivid descriptions of the hunter and his young (psychic!) wife falling in love in a remote cabin in the woods. God, I am revisiting it as I write this, and I’m just so completely in love with all of Doerr’s words. I challenge ye not to succumb to the infatuation also. An extract: “Their first winter passed like that. When he looked out the cabin window, he saw wolf tracks crossing the river, owls hunting from the trees, six feet of snow like a quilt ready to be thrown off. She saw burrowed dreamers nestled under roots against the long twilight, their dreams rippling into the sky like auroras. With love still lodged in his heart like a splinter, he married her in the first muds of spring.”

First published in The Atlantic, May 2001 and available to read here

‘Girls at Play’ by Celeste Ng

This is a really beautifully written and touching story about childhood, sexuality and class. It’s a coming-of-age tale about adolescent girls who wear ‘shag bands’ (as they were called in the UK during that era) but who actively encourage and allow boys to snap the bands in exchange for sexual favours. It looks at friendship and the complex metamorphosis of little girls into young women. Gorgeous!

First published in Bellevue Literary Review, Fall 2010, and available to read here. Collected in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2012

Introduction

There is a feeling that I get from certain short stories that is probably best described like this: you know those old ghost train rides at fairgrounds? The totally over the top, clunky silly ones? You get in the nasty little cart and jolt off into the darkness, and usually get a few predictable scares, but then it all goes quiet. As you wait for the next loud noise or skeleton face to come leering at you, what actually happens is the cart somehow veers off in a totally new direction. The track you could see ahead was fake and behind some secret curtain lies the real journey you are on. It’s usually accompanied by a lurch that you feel in the pit of your stomach and that sense of powerlessness, the overwhelming, visceral punch is the feeling I’m talking about. I don’t mean plot twists or changes of pace – I mean when a writer picks you up and carries you off into an obscure territory and there is nothing you can do about it. It infantilises and elevates and educates you all at once.

This is my attempt to itemise some of my favourite stories with that blindside ingredient, which I am now hopelessly, horrifyingly addicted to.

‘George and Susan’ by Joy Williams

Joy Williams is one of those writers who can reconfigure a handful of familiar words into something breathtaking, totally violating and adjusting a perspective you thought was established and pedestrian inside of you. This particular story isn’t in any of her collections, which is partly why I love and chose it. In it the Russian philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff haunts Susan Sontag’s childhood home. Williams’ study of Gurdjieff’s point of view, as he tries to embody Sontag and understand her origins and essence, is at once so delicate and so crushing you find yourself swept away, utterly without bearings.

Gurdjieff had made a pilgrimage to the desert, to Tucson, Arizona, where Susan Sontag spent her formative years. G is in love with Susan Sontag. Dead now, sadly, but all the more reason. He’s crazy about her. She hated the desert, but no matter. The desert had her in her formative years. The desert is irreducible and strange and is not merry, it is never merry. Not even the baby roadrunners and javelinas know how to play. It is work, work, work, hopeless living work.

First published in Tin House 62: Winter Reading, 2014. You can watch a fantastic video of Williams reading it here

‘Unstruck’ by Mary Otis

Mary Otis is a personal hero of mine and a very nice person to boot. This story of hers I came across in a Hammer Museum podcast, and after hearing it I immediately ordered her collection Yes, Yes, Cherries, which I’ve read a bunch of times since. In ‘Unstruck’ eleven-year-old Julie is in love with her ‘supposedly eleven-year-old’ foster brother Pritchard, who could be leaving any day to join a new family.

Julie and her temporary brother, Pritchard, had been getting married every single day since they’d heard that maybe a family had been found for Pritchard, since school got called off for a week due to snow, since Julie’s mother insisted every afternoon that they eat four to six orange halves, which they did, sucking out the juicy flesh, grinding their teeth against the orange peel until their lips were on fire and they had burning red mouth shadows.

Their love is so genuine and flawed and relatable that it radiates its own special power, perfectly capturing the kind of banal, thrilling panic of junior emotional discovery. It’s like ten episodes of Wonder Years suburban heartache compressed into 16 pages of perfection.

First published in Tin House 24, Summer Reading, 2005 and collected in Yes, Yes, Cherries, Tin House New Voice, 2007

‘The Winged Thing’ by Patricia Lockwood

‘The Winged Thing’ is one of those stories that is actually an extract from a novel published in The New Yorker,so it’s kind of a cheat to select it, plus it has to work extra hard to impress as a story. But jeepers creepers it does. It’s frighteningly good, truly laugh out loud funny and occasionally so sad and beautiful it makes you want to stand up and throw something.

The narrative in the ‘The Winged Thing’ bounces around a little because of its nature, dipping into the unnamed narrator’s life and obsession with Twitter, but its real thrust comes from her sister’s pregnancy, and the long drawn out process in which the baby is diagnosed with a rare genetic condition. The way Lockwood writes the narrator’s reactions, the family’s experiences, and from the perspective of the foetus are sublime – and I don’t use that word lightly. It’s not simply beautiful – it feels like she’s opening cracks up into something transcendental in each phrase, something that allows this new little life so under scrutiny to exist entirely on her own terms.

Still, the baby would not practice her breathing, would not practice it in preparation for being born. The baby would not practice being in the world—why should she?—until she said to her sister, “I have an idea,” and took out her phone to blare the up‐tempo songs of the Andrews Sisters, sturdy mules and wide lapels and high brass shining in the hospital dark, music for the boys to listen to overseas, far from home and frightened, bright lungfuls for them to gulp before they headed into battle. It had been useful. It was useful again. The baby, where she did not need to, breathed.

I first listened to this story on The New Yorker’s Writer’s Voice podcast whilst rushing to a Covid test centre on a wet December night and I would gladly go back to that dreadful journey and re-insert a stick up my nose if it would allow me to hear it for the first time again.

First published in The New Yorker, November 2020, and available to subscribers to read and listen to here. It forms part of Nobody is Talking About This, Riverhead/Bloomsbury Circus, 2021

‘The Centipede’s Wife’ by Adam Marek

Story premises don’t get better than this: a wounded man is trapped in a cabin with a giant centipede that won’t eat him because he smells like the centipede’s dead wife.

The centipede had been marching through the forest when he heard a scream and went to investigate. A man was caught in a bear trap. The metal jaws had made a mess of his right leg, biting in deep with rusted teeth and dead leaves. The man had forgotten his agony for a second when he saw the centipede, then redoubled his efforts to prize the trap open to escape. The centipede was joyous. This much meat would provide food for a week, but as he leaned in close to paralyse the man with a nip from his toxic pincers, he smelled something familiar. Something in the man’s sweat and fear reminded him of his wife.

This brutal, heartbreaking story is so cleverly constructed, and such a great example of Marek’s technique of fusing the incompatible – in his words ‘making mayonnaise’ – that it really sinks its teeth into you (sorry, I couldn’t resist). Plus Marek makes it all feel so effortless, like this kind of starting point is the most natural and obvious thing in the world.

Published in Instruction Manual for Swallowing, Comma Press, 2007