‘Hills Like White Elephants’ by Ernest Hemingway

What is remarkable to me about this Hemingway story is how timeless the exchange is between the characters. And, how Hemingway trusts the reader’s intelligence to figure out what is going on in that train station by what is not being said. There is the story and then there is the experience that each reader brings to it. And, it is interesting that final words belong to the girl: “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.” Has her lover convinced her to do what he wants? Each re-reading, I change my mind.

First published in transition August 1927 and in the collection Men Without Women, Charles Scribner’s Sons 1927. Widely anthologized

‘The Way the Light Is’ by Lisa Moore

Moore’s story is a hybrid form that includes screenplay scenes which are scaffolded on top of a poem, John Steffler’s ‘The Green Insect’. When trapped, the insect “unwound its history, ran out its spring in kicks” just as the protagonist does. There’s a dinner party where a guest opens a bottle of champagne with a machete, a provocative reason to introduce yourself to Moore’s imaginative landscapes.

From Open, Anansi, 2002

‘In Sight of the Lake’ by Alice Munro

Truly, I could write about any Munro story based on the vibrant and convincing interior lives she constructs for her characters. And, although there is also her well-known story about Alzheimer’s, ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ (adapted by Sarah Polley for the screen as Away From Her), this one is a curare dart to the heart. Such exquisite beauty and pain.

First published in Granta 118: Exit Strategies, 2012, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Dear Life, McClelland & Stewart/Chatto & Windus, 2012

‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ by J.D. Salinger

The way Salinger calibrates the different voices of the characters in this story from the nagging mother, to the bored young married daughter Muriel, to Muriel’s war-damaged husband Seymour, to Sybil, the child at the beach, always strikes me as masterful. Sybil, for example, says “my daddy’s coming tomorrow on a nairiplane” and “I like to chew candles.” Like any five-year-old would, she stomps on a sagging sandcastle as she runs down the beach. The tripartite structure of the story creates tension and serves the pace, and you have to read right through to the final phrase to know what happens to whom.

First published in The New Yorker, January 1948, and available online to subscribers here. Collected in Nine Stories, Little, Brown, 1953

‘The Pallbearer’s Gloves’ by Michael Winter

If you’ve read Ezra Pound’s ‘In A Station of the Metro’ the lasting image of the white pallbearer’s gloves on a wooden casket will be familiar. What is extraordinary, to me, about this story is the way Winter handles grief and folds time back in on itself with aplomb.

From One Last Good Look, Porcupine’s Quill, 1999

‘The Last Thunderstorm of the Summer’ by Katie Zdybel

Zdybel’s first collection is the best domestic short fiction, each phrase so aptly tuned to emotion, that I’ve read since Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness. Her incisive, pared-down prose and her insight into family life and friendship mark her as a writer to watch in the years to come. In this story, a twentysomething woman discovers her own notion of feminine sexuality while skinny-dipping with her best friend’s mother during a thunderstorm.

First published in The New Quarterly, Fall 2018 and in the collection Equipoise, Exile Editions 2021

‘Francine’ by Anna Wood

Summer in Anna Wood’s ‘Francine’ means festivals. It means pitching a tent and creating a base camp, going with the flow, drinking pints of cider and stretching out for a snooze on a shady patch of grass whenever the mood suits. A group of friends head to an unnamed festival for a long weekend of hedonism, and they throw themselves straight into the thick of it with henna tattoos and pitchers of cocktail, settling in for a weekend of music, dancing, and staying up all night. It’s idyllic, a playground for grownups. When a stranger pitches her tent on the fringes of their camp, it feels like an imposition, but keen to shed their ‘London snark’ and embrace the free-wheelin’ Glasto lifestyle, the group adapts to let the mysterious Francine into their circle. The brilliance of this story is that Francine doesn’t actually do anything: content to sit on a hay bale, she doesn’t seem to have any needs or desires of her own. Happy to accept cups of tea, flapjacks, joints and drinks, she takes from the group but gives them nothing but a bright smile in return, and this unnerving presence casts a shadow over the weekend. ‘Francine’ is the perfect summer short story, drenched in sunshine but simmering with tension.

Picked by Alice Slater. Alice is a writer from London. She’s co-host of literary podcast What Page Are You On? and writes about short stories for Mslexia. She edited the short story anthology Outsiders for 3 of Cups Press. You can read her individual Personal Anthology here.

First published in Outsiders, ed. Alice Slater, 3 of Cups Press, 2020

‘The Seaside Houses’ by John Cheever

Each year, we rent a house at the edge of the sea and drive there in the first of summer – with the dog and cat, the children, and the cook – arriving at a strange place a little before dark.

So begins John Cheever’s ‘The Seaside Houses’ – with a first sentence that is possible to be read as a distillation of the story to follow: the up-with-the-larks! buoyancy of that “in the first of summer” doesn’t even make it to the end of sentence, but, instead, is brought back down to earth with the gloomy image of the family’s arrival “at a strange place a little before dark.”

But this melancholic foreshadowing is easily overlooked on an initial read. For, rather than continue along this downward trajectory, the narrator is keen to return to the optimism he had momentarily (and perhaps unconsciously) allowed to slip, declaring himself ready to enjoy “a month that promises to have no worries of any kind” and that “there is the sense that we are, as in our dreams we have always known ourselves to be, migrants and wanderers – travelers, at least, with a traveler’s acuteness of feeling …”

Naturally, such a quasi-mythical outlook on life has its hubristic consequences. And having boasted of possessing an “acuteness of feeling” the narrator is immediately struck by the idea that the owners of the house “seemed to have left that day, seemed in fact to have left a minute earlier. There were flowers in the vases, cigarette butts in the ashtrays, and a dirty glass on the table…” He claims that “[t]he stir, the discord of the Greenwood’s sudden departure still seemed to be in the air” and is disappointed that “in the twilight the place seemed drab, and I found it depressing. I turned on a lamp, but the bulb was dim and I thought that Mr Greenwood had been a parsimonious and mean man. Whatever he had been, I seemed to feel his presence with uncommon force.”

As the holiday continues the narrator’s mood worsens: he becomes short tempered and quarrels with his wife and children. He discovers empty bottles of whiskey hidden behind books and inside the piano; a stash of nudist magazines under the cushions of the settee; a piece of graffiti (“My father is rat”) scrawled on the baseboard in his son’s bedroom; and when a visiting neighbour drops hints that Mr Greenwood’s marriage was troubled and that his actual achievements had fallen far short of his aspirations, the narrator invents an excuse to flee back to New York for a couple of days – where he promptly gets drunk in a bar and spends the night with a “sloppy woman” from his office. And when he returns to the house the situation just continues to deteriorate further.

There is an uncanny, dreamlike quality to Cheever’s prose – infusing the narrative with a wonderful ambiguity – so that the reader can never be sure if the sadness of someone’s life can be such that, even in their absence, it is able contaminate places and other people (especially those people possessed of an aforementioned “acuteness of feeling”); or whether this claim of possessing such preternatural sensitivity is merely an excuse for a fatal flaw the claimant is unable to recognise within themselves (as the narrator was oblivious to that quiet note of melancholy in the opening sentence). Cheever, of course, never shows his hand. Merely allows his subtle alchemy to work upon the text until a sublime reckoning has been reached and, once again, the golden glow of high summer has been transformed into the sad and leaden drabness of “another seaside house, with another wife”.

Picked by W.B. Gooderham. W.B. is a freelance writer. He blogs at http://livesinlit.com and http://bookdedications.co.uk/

First published in The New Yorker, July 29, 1961, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Stories of John Cheever, Knopf, 1978

‘Love is Not a Pie’ by Amy Bloom

At the heart of Amy Bloom’s sun-drenched story ‘Love is Not a Pie’ is a memory of the narrator Ellen’s giddily perfect childhood summer, spent in a ramshackle cabin next to a lake, the place filled with her family and much-loved guests, Mr DeCuervo and his daughter Gisela.

Surrounded by pines, birches, mossy rocks, eating pancakes and peanut butter sandwiches, swimming, rowing, drinking orange crush, Ellen is drunk on her freedom. This is such a beautifully evoked slice of heaven. Even when the monsoon comes and the electricity packs up the holiday isn’t spoiled. Monopoly is pulled out. Ellen’s mother cuts oranges and starts her rainy day ritual of making sangria. The kids stomp about naked on the porch in the rain.

The adults here are in the background, free of rules, in their own summer utopia, fishing, drinking, playing poker, dancing to Billy Holiday, holding each other, Ellen’s mother and father and Mr DeCuervo even sharing a bed.

What I love about this story is that Ellen is remembering this holiday inside the grief of her mother’s funeral, where, as an adult, she realises clear as a bell that Mr DeCuervo was also her mother’s lover, and that her father knew and embraced it. As her mother states on her deathbed “love is not a pie” – there is plenty to go round.

This revelation doesn’t mean the story becomes clouded in darkness or confusion; it opens it out. Mr DeCuervo and Ellen’s father hold each other weeping at the wake, and, amongst this pathos, there is a celebration of love in all its complicated forms.

Amy Bloom, as well as being a writer, is a psychotherapist, and I think she hits on a truth here: that sometimes in the disconnect of grief there is a wisdom that allows you to accept something that otherwise would have been untenable. Or maybe it is unrealistic, but I’m here for it anyway. I grew up in my own complicated hippy family that I either remember with hazy nostalgia or hot shame. I know which I prefer. Amy Bloom chooses optimism and joy in this story and I’m grateful for that. Last thing – this whole collection is full of killer first lines and ‘Love Is Not A Pie’ is no exception. It begins:

In the middle of the eulogy of my mother’s boring and heart-breaking funeral, I began to think about calling off the wedding.

Chosen by Shelley Hastings. Shelley is a writer and dramaturg based in London. Her short stories have been published by Galley Beggar Press, Southword Magazine, The Common Breath and The Mechanics Institute Review. @peckhamshell

First Published in Room of One’s Own, 1990. Collected in Best American Short Stories, 1991, and Come to Me, HarperCollins, 1993

‘The Summer People’ by Kelly Link

Kelly Link’s ‘The Summer People’ shares a title with a Shirley Jackson short story and is as unsettling and cautionary as its namesake. In true Kelly Link fashion, however, the story adds adolescent girls, a terrible pact, moonshine and fairies to Jackson’s cocktail of class critique and horror.

Fran, our teen protagonist, lives with her father, who sells moonshine and does odd jobs for visitors whose holiday houses dot their scenic town in the Appalachian foothills. The story opens with Fran desperately sick from flu, doped up on cough medication and abandoned by her father who’s gone in search of Jesus. Ophelia Merck, a rich girl at school, comes to the rescue. Fairy-tale pretty with her “silvery blond” hair and queer, Ophelia’s family are erstwhile summer visitors who have moved to the town permanently, possibly due to the Merck father’s involvement in a malpractice suit.

These echoes of teen addiction and the opioid crisis take second place to the girls’ hallucinatory visits to a mysterious old house, set between apple trees, “one laden with fruit and the other bare and silver black”. This is the home of the sinister ‘summer people’ to whom Fran (and her mother before her) are bound. They give Fran, who can’t risk the emergency room, a cure for her flu in a tiny glass vial. In the past she’s been gifted other things – tiny, magical toys – but these particular ‘summer people’ are exacting taskmasters. Once in their thrall, it’s impossible to escape.

That is, until Ophelia steps into Fran’s life and offers her help. “I can tell you mean it,” Fran tells the naïve Ophelia and later, “Did you mean it when you said you wanted to help?” Fran gains her heart’s desire to escape town, but at a price. Much to reflect on in this pandemic, when disparities between the rich and poor, those who escape to summer homes and those who toil, have been made starkly apparent.

Chosen by Gita Ralleigh. Gita is a doctor and poet who teaches creative writing to science undergraduates. Her debut poetry collection ‘A Terrible Thing’ was published by Bad Betty Press in 2020.

First published in Tin House, Fall 2011. Collected in Get in Trouble, 2015, Random House/Canongate. Also available as a Kindle single from Canongate, 2015

‘Shoes: An International Episode’ by Elizabeth Bowen

When it’s hard to escape abroad is difficult, there’s pleasure be had in reading about the discomforts of holidaymaking. This story, written in 1929, centres on Dillie and Edward Aherne. They’re an affluent pair, two years married, who are travelling in the South of France. When Dillie’s “good brogues” in which her feet looked “a shade powerful” go missing at the hotel, frustration ensues. She has to totter over cobblestones “to inspect local architecture and other misadventures follow. Her husband Edward, a man with a roving eye and a love of liqueurs is little use.

The heat is a third protagonist. At one point Dillie comments, “The glare is so awful.” There is a correspondingly harsh exposure about Bowen’s writing. In just a dozen pages, we are shown the Ahernes’ insularity and ignorance, their deep unease with one another. The story wears the mask of comedy. After Dillie’s brogues are restored Edward asks, “Wasn’t it like a French farce – not the improper kind?” And the ending, in which “Mr and Mrs Aherne, free, frank on terms of perfect equality, clattered down the corridor, disturbing some dozen siestas,” adds to the drollery.

But, as so often with Bowen’s work, there’s a sense of disturbance. The sun may be bright, but it is the lack of warmth which underpins this story. I kept harking back to an earlier scene where the Ahernes enter the cathedral. “Lost to one another, they went silently into the pointed chilly darkness.”

Picked by Sibyl Ruth. Sibyl reads a lot of short stories and occasionally writes them. Her flash fiction ‘The Rose’ was published in Litro last autumn. You can read her individual Personal Anthology here.

From The Collected Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, Penguin Books, 1983

‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ by Joyce Carol Oates

It’s a beautiful day at the height of summer. Connie, fifteen years old, is all alone in the garden, her parents having left her home alone for the day. The “sky was perfectly blue and still”. So, what could go wrong? Everything, of course.

In this story by Joyce Carol Oates there are so many corners at which you’ll be surprised, nonetheless you’re waiting and you’re dreading, always about to have your worst fears realised. The tension is notched up and up and up. The young protagonist, Connie, so adeptly drawn in the seemingly aimless opening, finds herself on the brink of something terrible when a stranger calls.

This stranger is both monstrous and normal. His name is Arnold Friend, which even by itself is creepy. And what follows might well be the best dramatization of the male sexual aggressor: the brow-beating, the oily sweet-talk, the intimidation, the magic of his patter: the gross implausibility and plausibility both. The story is compelling because it is terrible. And it’s terrible because this is just what happens every day. That’s the beauty of this story: it’s the same old story made new.

The way menace is built up in the story, so gently, is itself quite scary. The reader’s experience – not knowing what’s happening, but at the same time knowing all too well – mirrors the young girl’s experience. Just as we are compelled, so too is she. Just as she is caught in the inevitable ways of this world, and the way people are, so too are we. It works as sweetly as a well-tuned Greek tragedy. But the catharsis is contaminated, tainted by our own complicity.

It’s a great short story because it defamiliarises so expertly, showing that the great short story has great utility; great literature does a job; the world is given back to us anew. And it’s more than disturbing when we re-realise that we live in a world like this.

Chosen by Peter Ahern. Peter Ahern is a teacher and reader. Blogs about short stories, long stories and reading at www.onehundredpages.wordpress.com. Find him on Twitter at @ahernahern

First published in Epoch, Fall 1966. Collected in The Wheel of Love and Other Stories, Vanguard, 1970 and widely anthologised

‘Rune Mountain’ by Ludwig Tieck, translated by Peter Wortsman

For Anglophone readers, Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) is surely among the least familiar German Romantic authors. Yet his story ‘Rune Mountain’ – somewhere between short story, fairy tale, supernatural horror, and allegory – is one of the most beguiling works of early Romantic fiction.

Tieck had been a key figure in the Romantic circle that emerged in the late 1790s in the university town of Jena, near Weimar. The Jena Romantics included some of the most famous figures of early nineteenth-century German philosophy and literature, such as the brothers August Wilhelm and Karl Friedrich Schlegel, F. W. J. Schelling, and Friedrich von Hardenberg (better known by his pen name Novalis). Tieck (along with his daughter Dorothea, the diplomat-cum-translator Wolf Graf Baudissin, and A. W. Schlegel) would later produce a German edition of Shakespeare that remains both popular and well-regarded as a literary classic in its own right. In 1802, just as Romanticism was becoming a significant force in German letters, he wrote ‘Rune Mountain,’ which appeared in print two years later.

We tend to associate Romanticism with autumnal storms and bleak winter nights. It is surprising, then, that ‘Rune Mountain’ begins in the bright heat of summer. The narrative opens somewhere in the summer months with a young hunter named Christian filled with melancholy and resting in an isolated valley. He contemplates the world around him and his estrangement from his home village. And yet when Christian is approached by a stranger, his first impulse is to flee. Instead, however, they end up walking together through the night and he tells the stranger of his early life, his frustrations with the mundane world of his childhood, and his departure for a new, more exciting life in the woods.

As they reach the stranger’s home, Christian is directed towards the enigmatic mountain of the title, a source of both dread and fascination. Christian sets out alone. The rest of the story is difficult to describe without giving too much away, but it is a delight of strange and unsettling fiction. Inexplicable apparitions, mysterious woods, ominous arrivals, and incurable obsessions abound. That the most important action takes place in summer – albeit several different summers – only adds to the story’s dreamlike terror.

Doubt and anxiety drive a story that is psychologically rich and deeply disconcerting. Exquisite descriptions of uncertainty and longing take on a peculiar salience in 2021. It is also remarkably moving. ‘Rune Mountain’ is, in my view, one of the finest examples of European short fiction. Perfectly suited for those long, melancholy summer days when the sun seems just a little too bright, and the trees just a little too alluring.

Picked by Morgan Golf-French. Morgan is a lecturer in eighteenth-century European history at the University of Oxford. He enjoys creepy stories and occasionally tweets from @zeno_thankyou.

First published in German as ‘Der Runenberg’, 1804. First published in English translated by Thomas Carlyle, in German Romance,1827. Also translated by Thomas R. Browning in German Literary Fairytales, 1997. Wortsman’s translation is in Tales of the German Imagination, Penguin Classics, 2012)

‘A Bash in the Tunnel’ by Flann O’Brien

John Ryan (1925-1992) was a leading figure in mid-century literary Dublin as an artist, broadcaster, publisher, critic, editor, writer and – not least – publican. He was organiser of the first Bloomsday celebration, in 1954.

Two books by Ryan, both strongly recommended, are Remembering How We Stood (1975) and A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce and the Irish (1970). The former is a brilliant gossipy memoir of Bohemian Dublin in the 1950s, a time when Ryan seemed to know everyone, and everyone else as well.

A Bash in the Tunnel, edited by Ryan, is an anthology of Irish writers which includes eight pieces that had originally appeared in The Envoy, the literary magazine Ryan edited, to mark the tenth anniversary of Joyce’s death. Illustrious contributors included Samuel Beckett, Stanislaus Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, Edna O’Brien, Aidan Higgins, Benedict Kiely and Brian O’Nolan (aka Brian Ó Nualláin aka Myles na gCopaleen and aka, most famously, Flann O’Brien), whose brilliant shaggy dog story gives the collection its title.

It’s about a Dublin man of O’Brien’s acquaintance who comes by a key to one of the Irish State Railway’s Pullman cars, and its well-stocked bar, and who occasionally takes advantage of the arrangement when it’s shunted onto a suburban siding at the weekend. If I choose this as a summer story it’s because I read it first in Dublin one August years ago and the light and heat of the day have stayed with me.

You can pick up a copy of A Bash in the Tunnel for less than the price of post and packing.

Chosen by David Collard. David is a writer and researcher based in London. His latest book is About a Girl (CB editions) and he is currently working on a group biography of writers associated with Ian Hamilton’s New Review in the 1970s. Since March 2020 he has been running Carthorse Orchestra, a weekly online cultural gathering. You can read David’s previous selections for A Personal Anthology here.

First published in The Envoy, 1951. Collected in A Bash in the Tunnel, Clifton Books, 1970