‘Police Rat’ by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews

‘Police Rat’ is a Kafkaesque tale that has stayed with me, almost a decade after I first came across it. Bolaño’s Pepe the Cop is a regular police rat, dealing with a disturbing phenomenon he’s never before come across: a rat who kills other rats for pleasure.

Rats are capable of killing rats. The sentence echoed in my cranial cavity until I woke. I knew that nothing would ever be the same again.

Pepe is also the nephew of the famous ‘Josephine the Singer’ of the Kafka story, which you can read here. The Bolaño story is, like Kafka’s original, a profound meditation on what makes us human, despite its setting in the underground sewers of rat world.

Published in The Insufferable Gaucho, New Directions, 2010

‘The Daughters of the Moon’ by Italo Calvino, translated by Martin McLaughlin

In ‘The Daughters of the Moon’ the space race and American consumerism collide with the concept of an ageing and decrepit moon, leaving its orbit and crashing to Earth – New York’s East River, to be precise, witnessed by the goddess Diana and her acolytes. Calvino, who began writing as a neorealist, is better known for his later fabulist and metafictional works. These emerged when, instead of producing the novels he felt were expected of him, he began writing the kind of book he loved to read, one that felt as if it was ‘by an unknown writer, from another age and country, discovered in an attic.’

First published in the New Yorker in 2009, and available for subscribers to read here, then collected in The Complete Cosmicomics, Penguin Modern Classics, 2009

‘The Clinic’ by Uschi Gatward

It’s always a delight to discover a new talent and prize -winning short story writer Uschi Gatward’s first collection contains twelve delicately paced, coolly sinister concoctions. Her liminal territory occupies the gap between mundane present and dystopian future, with a dash of folk horror thrown in; every story feeling spookily prescient for these times. ‘The Clinic’ begins with a familiar scene and characters: doctor, parents and a clever baby but soon spirals into unnerving and desperate flight, from surveillance into the unknown.

Published in English Magic, Galley Beggar Press, 2021. You can read the story here

‘Magic For Beginners’ by Kelly Link

I love Link’s longer short stories, which allow her unique storyworlds to develop. These worlds veer from our own at a tangent, guided by a singular dream-logic, and are perplexing and fascinating as our own dreams. In the title story, Jeremy, along with his high school cohort, is fannishly obsessed with a TV show called The Library, which appears at irregular intervals on formerly defunct TV channels. Jeremy’s parents are separating and he’s having a terrible time when Fox, a character in The Library who may or may not have been killed off, crosses from the show into his everyday existence. ‘Magic For Beginners’ is as metafictional as television can be and entirely as addictive.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2005 and available to read here. Subsequently collected in Link’s collection Magic for Beginners, Small Beer Press, 2005

‘The Watery Realm’ by Yūko Tsushima, translated by Geraldine Harcourt

Tsushima, an acclaimed Japanese writer was the daughter of famous author Osamu Dazai and ‘The Watery Realm’ deals with the subject of her father’s suicide. The story moves between the protagonist, her son’s wish for an aquarium toy, which reminds her of the ‘Dragon Castle’ of Japanese myth, and her elderly mother’s viewpoint. The mother recalls her husband’s death, refracted through her fear of Suijin, Shinto spirit of the watery realm, who finally claimed him. Delicate and heartbreaking like all Tsushima’s work, only a fraction of which has been translated into English.

Published in Of Dogs and Walls, a £2 Penguin Modern, 2018

‘Sultana’s Dream’ by Begum Rokeya

‘Sultana’s Dream’ is a fascinating early feminist utopia, written in English by the Bangladeshi activist and writer Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain. In her fictional ‘Ladyland’ not only are men confined within the zenana (women’s quarters) but war, disease and famine are conditions of the past. ‘Ladyland’ is also an eco-utopia, a garden city complete with solar power, cloud condensers and hydrogen-powered flying cars.

Originally published in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, 1905. You can read the text, accompanied by wonderful linocut illustrations from US artist Chitra Ganesh here

‘What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky’ by Lesley Nneka Arimah

In ‘What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky’, Nneka Arimah takes a future dystopian world ravaged by climate change as given. Africa is now the destination of refugees from a drowned Europe, to this she adds her concept of the Formula, a discovery allowing mathematicians to unburden humans of grief and potentially free them from the forces of gravity. That is, until a man falls from the sky and our broken protagonist, talented mathematician Nneoma, becomes aware of the limits of human invention and intervention, as well as her own complicity.

Published in What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Tinder Press, 2018

‘Kelso Deconstructed’ by Zadie Smith

Smith’s outstanding story, from her only short story collection, takes the 1959 racist murder of Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane in London’s Notting Hill as trigger for a metafictional foray into narrative’s inadequacies. We are witnesses to the final day of Kelso Cochrane’s life and follow him through an imagined 1950’s London, where the voices of luminaries such as Toni Morrison and Paul Gilroy ring out in metafictional proclamations from tube station announcements and Speaker’s Corner. These voices warn Kelso and his girlfriend, as well as the reader, that innocence when entering a fictional account of such tragedy, is no longer possible.

Published in Grand Union, Penguin, 2019

‘Across the Rooftops’ by Kevin Barry

I could select any number of Kevin Barry stories for the joy they create from his use of language. Here, an unnamed twentysomething narrator wrestles with himself as he tries to figure out how to make the first move on a young woman he has desired for at least three months which for him seems an eternity. The story is filmic and the camera is close up, so close that we see the “opaque down of her bare arms, each strand curling like a comma at its tip.” After a kiss that doesn’t take, the young woman leaves and his heart opens and takes in “every black poison the morning could offer.”

From Dark Lies the Island, Graywolf Press/Jonathan Cape, 2012. Available to read online at pen.org

‘The Wedding’ by Dennis Bock

Bock’s collection of linked stories draws on imaginary outtakes of Riefenstahl’s film about the 1936 Berlin Olympics to unite the stories of post-war German immigrants. ‘The Wedding’ is my favourite. Narrator Peter’s grandparents decide to renew their vows for their 35th anniversary. Olympians themselves, they were in the stands when sprinter Jesse Owens changed the course of history. We know from the opening sentence that something has gone awry, everyone subdued from the night drive home from the lake where they “have been for the last day and a half, sorting out details with the police.” Quietly and masterfully shifting between present and past, the story becomes a photograph itself.

From Olympia, Doubleday Canada, 1998

‘And So to Bed’ by Barry Callaghan

City night life is in vibrant relief in this tale about Booker, a man who buys two or three books a week and reads them in the early mornings by the window of his cheap waterfront flat. At night he breaks loose to prance and play, “cool as the breeze on Lake Louise.” He meets the new club singer, Empress Angel Eyes, who tells him “everybody wants to break your heart like Piaf except she breaks your heart better.” The two do a flirtatious dance that ends with them tumbling into bed after plenty of boozing. He looks to the book titles on her shelf above her bed and not finding anything to get his mind and body going in the way she anticipates, Booker disappoints. In disgust, Angel tosses his clothes in the hallway and Booker follows them, naked and laughing at himself and I laugh along with him.

From All the Lonely People, Exile Editions 2018

‘The Story of an Hour’ by Kate Chopin

I’ve taught this early feminist piece many times, mostly to adolescent boys, who appreciate all of the twists and the way Chopin manipulates the reader’s emotions as the tone shifts. The narrative drives to its pitch-perfect ending: “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills.”

First published in Vogue, December 6, 1894. Widely collected, including in The Awakening and Other Stories, Oxford World’s Classics. Available to read online at katechopin.org

‘The Jade Peony’ by Wayson Choy

This perfectly constructed story emerged out of a writing workshop Choy took with Carol Shields. She put the names of colours on scraps of paper and had each student select one at random to use in the short fiction they’d write. Choy plucked pink. He was staying with his aunts. They had peonies blossoming in their Vancouver garden. Some of them were pink. The colour appears several times in the story, the pink eyes of a white cat, the eyes like pale fire of the albino juggler, the pink, blushing towards red, of the piece of jade that grandmother Poh Poh gives to her grandson Sek-lung, a talisman, that after her death seems to beat “like a beautiful cramped heart.”

Often anthologized, appearing as chapter 9 in the novel The Jade Peony, Douglas and McIntyre 1995. Available to read online at sundayat6mag)

‘Requiem’ by Martha Gellhorn

When I was researching my book about Martha Gellhorn in her restricted personal papers in Boston, I discovered many stories she never submitted for publication. ‘Requiem’ is about abortion. She wrote on the manuscript pages that she thought it was written in 1931. In December 1930, Gellhorn returned to the United States from living abroad in Paris for most of the year. She was pregnant and felt like a failure at 22. In January 1931, she had an abortion in Chicago. Just as she would write unflinchingly about what she saw and heard during the Spanish Civil War and WWII, Gellhorn turns the lens on her own experience in unforgiving detail, but manages to evade self-pity. With the permission of Gellhorn’s literary executor, I included this astonishing story at the end of my book.

Written 1931. First published in Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War 1930-1949, Firefly Books 2019