‘The Appropriation of Cultures’ by Percival Everett

This is a short, satirical story that imagines a black man ‘appropriating’ the white culture of the American South, playing ‘Dixie’ with full-throated passion and driving a pickup truck adorned with the Confederate flag – or, as he calls it, “the black power flag,” drawing the attention and confusion of his white compatriots:

‘What are you doing with that on your truck, boy?’ the bigger of the two asked.
‘Flying it proudly,’ Daniel said, noticing the rebel front plate on the Chevrolet. ‘Just like you, brothers.’

It’s a very funny story, propelled forward by its commitment to the bit – which it takes to a maximalist conclusion – but the humour is underpinned by a cool hardness and a realist style the keeps the story grounded in the social reality it satirises.

First published in Callaloo in 1996 and collected in Damned If I Do, Graywolf Press 2004, reissued by Influx in 2021. Available to read here

‘A Little Fable’ by Franz Kafka translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir

I first read this story when I was 16, during a period when I was very lost and unhappy in the wake of my father’s death. It was one of the first texts to open up the possibilities of literature for me and it still lifts my spirits. The story is tiny, so short that I can insert the whole thing here:

Alas,’ said the mouse, ‘the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.’ ‘You only need to change your direction,’ said the cat, and ate it up.

First published as ‘Kleine Fabel’ in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1931, and in English in The Great Wall of China, Schocken, 1946

‘The Particles of Order’ by Yiyun Li

This is a strange and surprising story, centred around a dialogue between two women in the Devon home of a dead writer of murder mysteries named Edmund Thornton. Ursula is Thornton’s former typist and now runs his cottage as a holiday rental. Lilian is her guest. Like Li herself, Lilian is a writer who lives in the US and has lost both of her sons to suicide. If at first, when Ursula is its main subject, the style has a touch of the twee murder mystery, that changes as its focus turns towards Lilian. The story’s true concern reveals itself at the revelation that the writer William Trevor also used to live just down the road. Lilian asks:

‘There’s something comforting about the idea of living in his fiction, don’t you agree?’

Comforting? Ursula thought of the years she’d spent as Edmund’s typist – nearly half her life. All that time, however, could easily be condensed into a single image in a William Trevor story, no more than two or three sentences. A woman walks alone by the sea. A man, whom she has not stopped loving, lives without returning her love and then dies without thinking of her. ‘I suppose very few people in William Trevor’s work get themselves murdered, if that’s what you mean by ‘comforting.’

The story becomes a thoughtful reflection on how the two characters’ lives might have fit – or not – into the works of these two different writers, and, in turn, on the way that new experiences need to produce new kinds of writing.

First published in the New Yorker in August 2024. Available to subscribers to read here

‘And Then My Dog Will Come Back to Me’ by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searles

By the second page of this story, the narrator has been informed by a neighbour that a man has just shot his dog. By the fourth, he has decided to kill the man in revenge. By the sixteenth page, the narrator is standing over the dog-killer while he sleeps and driving a pitchfork into his heart: “His mouth gapes open, he is breathing heavily. His jowls are shaking slightly. I look at the left side of his fat hairy chest, I hold the pitchfork handle as tight as I can, tense my body, breathe in a deep breath, tense the muscles in my arms. I am staring at the left side of his chest and I plunge it in.”

This being a Jon Fosse story, all of this takes place beside a fjord, by which the narrator approaches his victim’s house in a rowboat, and by which he escapes: “I row away from land, out into the fjord, I row on, straight ahead, straight out into the fjord, row on. And I say, now that devil is dead, as he should be, it’s what he deserves, that fat bastard, fucking demon, fucking bastard, now that devil’s where he belongs, that fucker.”

First published as ‘Og så kan hunden komme’ in To forteljingar, Samlaget, 1993, and in English in Scenes From A Childhood, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023

‘Signs and Symbols’ by Vladimir Nabokov

This must be one of the most-chosen stories in the archives of A Personal Anthology and I didn’t want to choose it for the sake of variety. But in the weeks that I was re-reading my possible selections and mulling them over, I taught this story and when I re-read it, remembered how much I love it and felt that I couldn’t leave it out.

An elderly couple, Russian-Jewish emigres in New York, are visiting their son on his birthday. He is confined to a psychiatric hospital on account of his “referential mania”, a rare condition that causes the patient to imagine “everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence”. Upon arriving, they learn that their son has tried again to take his own life and are sent home, disappointed. While her husband tries to sleep, the boy’s mother examines some old photographs and a second story briefly overtakes the first, the story of their emigration from Revolutionary Russia to Germany, and from Nazi Germany to America, but this story is interrupted when the father emerges, crying in pain and full of resolve to rescue their son from the hospital. Then comes the enigmatic conclusion. The phone rings and the mother answers to a girl asking for Charlie. She has the wrong number. It rings again, and the elderly woman dismisses the girl, telling her that she is dialling ‘o’ instead of zero. Then the phone rings for a third time and the story ends. Surely, it can only be the girl, once again dialling the wrong number, and yet somehow, we believe that this time, it must be the hospital calling to tell the boy’s parents that he has escaped ­– from this life, from the hospital. There is no logical reason but in the overdetermined circumstances of the story, it seems to make a kind of intuitive, aesthetic sense, and so we are exposed as sharing something of the boy’s referential mania, examining a random event as though it must be full of meaning. Somehow – I’ve never quite understood why – this is extremely moving.

First published as ‘Symbols and Signs’ in The New Yorker, 1948, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, Doubleday, 1958

‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’ by Hilary Mantel

I might have saved my favourite until last. In this story, Hilary Mantel takes a violent revenge fantasy – a counterfactual assassination of Margaret Thatcher by an IRA gunman after a stay at a Windsor eye clinic – and, without neutralising the fantasy’s political motivation, transforms it into a profound reflection on the nature of history.

The narrator is expecting a local workman, Duggan, who is to fix her faulty boiler. But the man who turns up at her door and lets himself in is not Duggan. She assumes the intruder must be one of the hundreds of press photographers who have descended on her neighbourhood since the prime minister arrived:

‘How much will you get for a good shot?’
‘Life without parole,’ he said.
I laughed. ‘It’s not a crime.’
‘That’s my feeling.’

But as he opens his “boiler man’s bag” and removes the “metal parts, which, even in my ignorance, I knew were not part of a photographer’s kit,” the narrator begins to understand that her flat has been chosen for its perfect vantage point over the eye clinic’s rear entrance, from which Thatcher is expected to depart.

The story transforms into something unexpectedly profound when the narrator leads the gunman into a dark corridor to show him a secret exit by which he might be able to escape, and the secret exit becomes a metaphor for the contingent nature of history: “note the power of the door in the wall that you never saw was there. And note the cold wind that blows through it, when you open it a crack. History could always have been otherwise.”

Then the characters return to the bedroom with its view over the clinic ready for Thatcher’s departure, and the story concludes with the event its title promises, an event that never happened but could have, with:

One easy wink of the world’s blind eye: ‘Rejoice,’ he says. ‘Fucking rejoice.’

First published in The Guardian in September, 2014, and available to read here. Collected in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Fourth Estate, 2014)

Introduction

Eight years ago in 2017, I was working for a bookshop called Desperate Literature in Madrid and living in a small room in the back of the shop. While I was working there, we started something called the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize – a prize that aimed to champion the short form and writers of boundary-pushing work, while also providing a network of opportunities for its writers, including prize money, publication, residency programmes and event opportunities, and consultations with editors and literary agents. Around the same time in London, the Brick Lane Short Story Prize started in a similar spirit, also publishing an annual collection of some amazing writers. This month we have joined forces to publish an anthology that brings together writing from the first five years of both prizes – 22 Fictions: New Writing from Desperate Literature and Brick Lane Bookshop. We hope it will introduce many people to some brilliant writers, while also telling the story of DIY publishing produced by independent bookshops during the last ten years.

Putting together the anthology with my co-editor Kate Ellis has made me think a lot about what I like to read and why. With the prize, I would always push for pieces that attempted something different, whether in creating their own artistic form, or in doing something with narrative that made me reframe my viewpoint as a reader. From 19th century Russia to the Streatham Ice Rink, here are some pieces that had that kind of effect on me.

‘Extras’ by Yuri Felsen, translated by Bryan Karetnyk

The Russian writer Yuri Felsen is a fascinating figure – he wrote almost entirely in exile, having fled Russia after the 1917 Revolution, travelling first to Riga and then eventually settling in Paris. Paris became home, and in the 1920s and 30s Felsen became an important figure in the Russian literary émigré scene within France. Known among his contemporaries as ‘the Russian Proust’, he published a series of connected novels and short stories through a Russian language press in Paris. Felsen did not survive WWII – he was Jewish, and was murdered in Auschwitz – and neither did any of his immediate family. As a result, his work fell out of print for over half a century, until it was republished in Russia some ten years ago, and in recent years, brilliantly translated into English by Bryan Karetnyk.

Felsen was a very distinctive prose writer, his writing bores inward in long, lonely, intricate sentences. In ‘Extras’, Felsen’s narrator goes to a film set on the outskirts of Paris, seeking work as an extra in a new film production. Upon arrival, he meets a group of people doing the same, who are all Russian exiles. As they wait around, the story captures the stilted conversation and pained nostalgia for the recent past, while hopefully waiting for the good news of a day’s employment. There is something so powerful about what Felsen leaves unsaid in this story, always humming around the quiet but constant anxiety of statelessness, the struggle of trying to get a foothold anywhere within a world utterly indifferent to one’s presence.

Originally published, in Russian, circa 1930s. Translation found in Prototype Vol. 3, Prototype, 2021. Read here in the LARB

‘The Winter Journey’ by Georges Perec

This is just so much fun. While searching through an archive in an old farmhouse on the eve of World War II, a literary historian finds a novel from the 1860s that contains almost the entirety of modern French literature in the intervening era, containing echoes of everything from the Symbolists to the Modernists, and everything in between. But before he can visit the library again, the war intervenes, and when he finally returns many years later, the book is gone. Tormented by a lost document that could change the course of French literary history, the man’s life and mind begin to unravel, in a story that examines plagiarism and obsession, while never diverting from what always seems to be Perec’s primary concern, which is having a bloody good laugh.

Through the device of the anticipatory plagiaristic novel, Perec manages to pack an entire alternate universe into just a few pages. I bought a thin one-story pocket edition of this story from Burley Fisher Books, but curiously, in writing this piece, I searched my house for the book but I believe that it too is now lost. Perec is laughing somewhere.

Originally published in French in 1979. Translated by John Sturrock, found in The Winter Journey, Syren, 1996

‘Places you Didn’t Think to Look for Yourself’ by M. John Harrison

“In the light falling horizontally along grey lapboards. In very fast light, as on any seafront… In Portsmouth. In real dejection, not just the kind we have now.”

Is this a story? Is it a poem? Is it a list? Can it be all of them? The first time I read this playful, one page piece of short fiction from M. John Harrison, it made me laugh out loud but also feel a bit sad. Oh Mike! In using what might be considered a neo-Oulipian constraint, Harrison manages to convey – without any plot in the conventional sense – a sense of character and an entire lifetime. M. John Harrison is a fabulous writer who excels in basically any form that he chooses to write in, but in his fragmentary short fiction he has great fun in creating new ways of telling stories. This collection is one of my favourites of his many excellent books.

First published in You Should Come With Me Now, Comma Press, 2018

‘Avant-Ice’ by Isabel Waidner

Waidner’s narrator begins by searching the internet for second-hand figure skating dresses and skates. They confess that they came to figure skating late, having been “a butch child” with no time for the monoculture of mid-1980s rural Germany, in which skating at the weekend involves engaging with a repressively conservative culture. Fast forward a few decades and our narrator is writing about the career of the anti-drag artist David Hoyle, and his 2000 show The Divine David On Ice at Streatham Ice Rink. The performance (and perhaps Hoyle’s work more generally) is a revelation, and for the transitioning narrator, figure skating becomes a territory to explore the self. I like how Waidner plays with forms of biography and art criticism within this story and the other pieces by Waidner in the collection, which work really well together. The collection itself had an absolutely seismic effect on me when I read it in 2018, and I think that was true for others at Desperate Literature as well. It was such an exciting book, and I think remains so. Containing work by writers like Isabel Waidner (who edited the collection), Eley Williams, Jay Bernard, Joanna Walsh, and Juliet Jacques, Liberating the Canon introduced me to a new generation of writers doing something that felt so fresh and new. It’s a book that I’m constantly returning to.

First published in Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018

‘Savage Messiah 1 – 10’ by Laura Grace Ford

I’m going to cheat here and include all of the issues of Savage Messiah, originally self-published by Laura Grace Ford as zines between 2005 and 2009, compiled into a collected edition by Verso in 2011. Produced in a collaged graphic form evoking the DIY fan zines of late 70s punk, the collected works here tell a combined story of a disappearing London, set somewhere between the M25 free parties of the early 1990s, and the tail end of the New Labour era. The spectre of the 2012 London Olympics looms significantly throughout Savage Messiah, in the erosion of landscapes, spaces, communities and histories of working-class London from Golborne Road to the Lea Valley. The visually-led nature of Savage Messiah might cause a certain type of reader to question what exactly this book is – is it literature? Is it art? – but the writing in Savage Messiah is extraordinary. Laura Grace Ford is an incredibly evocative storyteller, veering between Ballardian, dystopian depictions of late-Blair London, to bittersweet, often harsh, but strangely formative stories of love, friendship, hedonism, betrayal and strife. There’s melancholy to it but also joy, and each story / edition works well as a self-contained yet uncontainable story of urban drift.

In Savage Messiah, Verso, 2011

‘The Nose’ by Nikolai Gogol

‘The Nose’ by Nikolai Gogol is a masterclass in gaslighting and absurdist humour. A St Petersburg barber is alarmed one morning when he discovers a disembodied nose – recognisably that of a regular customer – embedded in his breakfast. The barber’s wife accuses her husband of being involved in violent crime, and encourages him to take the nose to a nearby bridge and throw it in the river. But in attempting to do so, the barber is apprehended by a police officer who wants to know what he is doing.

Nearby, Major Kovalyov wakes up to discover that, inexplicably, he no longer has a nose. Had he lost it? On his way to report the incident to the police, he sees his nose as a human sized figure dressed in gold, stepping out of a carriage. Major Kovalyov confronts his nose – who is now a high-ranking state official – encouraging the nose to return to his face. However, Major Kovalyov’s nose is not having any of it, and admonishes the Major for lying, and for accusing a higher ranking official, making some vague threats before slipping away in a crowd. The Major goes to the police, and to anyone else who will listen, but is treated as mad, and condescendingly offered snuff by the head of police as consolation for his loss. Social class essentially determines whose truth is more valuable in ‘The Nose’, a brilliantly weird story in which Gogol – with great invention – uses supernatural humour mixed with social realism to depict societal corruption.

First published in Russian in 1836. This translation by Dora O’Brien, collected in Petersburg Tales, Alma Classics, 2014

‘Attrib.’ by Eley Williams

I like this story because it dramatises the lives that we live in the 21st century while we do our isolated tasks and look at our screens, telling a story where there is plot and tension aplenty but perhaps not in an obvious sense. The story centres on a sound artist creating an installation for a Michelangelo exhibition. It’s written in a fragmented, tangential form that through the obsessively detailed repetition of almost comically specific actions begins to reveal a story behind the narrator, who is creating imaginary worlds in solitude. The tension is created by repetition, wordplay, sound, sensation, and an incredible focus on minutiae that ends up revealing a lot about the narrator. When I first read this collection I remember thinking that it expressed how it felt to be conscious in the opening decades of the 21st century. I have heard people describe this book as ‘experimental’, but I don’t really like that word, it implies a kind of failure, or a temporary, perhaps unconfident stylistic digression. Eley Williams work is not like that at all, so how to describe this book? Inventive, bold, adventurous, playful, it creates psychological landscapes of a spirit that are unique to Eley Williams.

Collected in Attrib. and Other Stories, Influx Press, 2017