‘Thanksgiving’ by Joyce Carol Oates

Oates can command any genre in which she chooses to write, it seems (or which chooses her through which to express itself}, yet her tales of the weird are often overshadowed, in the collective critical eye, by her more politically engaged, directly accessible stuff. To this reader, however, her ‘dark fiction’ pieces are amongst the very best in the field. In this, a young girl, through whose eyes we see, is taken by her father on a Thanksgiving shopping trip in a world which has somehow slipped sideways into pure nightmare. In a supermarket lifted out of an insane brain, the girl hopes her father is not muttering a prayer under his breath because ‘it would have made me disgusted to hear. The age I was, you don’t want to hear any adult, let alone your father, yes and your mother, maybe most of all your mother, praying aloud to God to help them, because you know, when you hear such a prayer, there won’t be any help’.

Shudder.

First published in Omni, December 1993, and then in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, E. P. Dutton, 1994

‘Soprano Home Movies’ by Diane Frolov, Andrew Schneider, David Chase and Matthew Weiner

A perfect piece of narrative. When this episode appears, we know these characters, we know how they relate to each other, we’ve seen clearly the interconnected grid of their psychodramas, yet this episode works as a standalone piece; still we get backstory, introduction, the careful explication and examination of their enmeshing. The entire basic premise of the show is encapsulated here. Tony and his wife go on a cabin lakeshore holiday with one of Tony’s lieutenants, Bobby, and his wife, who happens to be Tony’s insufferable sister. There is envy, a toxic emotional stew, a type of terrible blackmail, awful violence. The closing scene – Bobby, shattered, holding his baby daughter tight to him as ‘This Magic Moment’ swirls and soars – is shattering, moving in a million ways, even strangely heroic. One of the very best episodes in one of the finest items of television.

Sopranos Season 6, Episode 13, first broadcast April 2007, HBO

‘Roma Kid’ by Kevin Barry

A gypsy child leaves ‘the chalets of the asylum park’ next to one of the frantic arteries that serve Dublin and she walks and trains across Ireland until she is taken in by a strange anchorite, a ‘ferny, mossy, twisted old thing’ who takes her with him into his trailer in the woods. Barry’s language, as always, is astounding, his grasp of concision and of what is best to leave unsaid is exemplary. Something bad is going to happen here, you’ll be thinking, and your nerves will be tautened, zinging, waiting for that badness to come down. Does it? Well, on finishing this story, my beam could’ve been seen from space. I hovered three feet off the ground.

First published in The New Statesman, then The Berlin Quarterly, and collected in That Old Country Music, Canongate, 2020

I paraphrase…

‘He was the best cat. He was my favourite. He knew things. If I was upset or scared or the heart was across me he’d stay by my side all night. He wouldn’t leave my side until I felt better. White, he was mostly, with a black patch on his head and he wore his wars in his fur. The best mouser. Paws on him the size of plates. He was very old at this point, this night I’m after telling you about, and I was very young, and I was sitting by the fire with him for the warmth against the storm outside and he was sleeping, the very perfect picture of peace, contentment in that way cats have. Came a knock at the door, my Daddy answered it, it was the feller from the cottage down the lane. Wet through he was. Looked not right in himself. A funny thing just happened, he said; he came across a black cat in the lane, just sitting there in the storm. As he passed, he could’ve sworn he heard the cat talk, and it said: you can tell the king to come home now, it’s safe for him to do so. And he said this and my white cat jumped off my lap and straight up the chimney he went, flames and all, and that was the last anyone ever saw of him’.

First heard at my granny’s knee, circa 1973

‘Pages From Cold Point’ by Paul Bowles

An anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, but wonderful nonetheless:

When Bowles sent this story to his British agent, he was told that it just would not find an outlet in the UK. Bowles asked why, and the agent is alleged to have said: “because your English readership may take the incest. They may take the buggery. But, by God, they will not take the blackmail”.

How can you resist?

First published in Wake, 1949, then in The Delicate Prey, Random House 1950, now in Collected Stories, Penguin, 2009

‘Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong’ by Tim O’Brien

The title story of O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is heavily anthologised and studied and pored over but, for me, this is the collection’s standout tale. A young medic in Vietnam, Mark Fossie, smuggles his all-American sweetheart Mary Anne into his jungle camp. All is oddly frolicsome and gambolling, there is a wedding proposal, Mary Anne learns to cook and dress wounds and then things go tar-black dark. Haunting and unforgettable. ‘Build Your Own Gook’. My skin still crawls.

Published in The Things They Carried, Flamingo, 1991

‘The New Mother’ by Lucy Lane Clifford

A much, and unjustly, neglected writer, Lucy Clifford was, in her time, friend to such writers as Kipling and Hardy and Henry James and Darwin. The only affordable collection available, it seems, is the clumsily printed Oneiros one, with the grotesque phantasmagoria of d m mitchell to accompany the tales. They’re ostensibly children’s stories, cautionary and fabular, but boiling within them is a kind of terrible dread; in ‘The New Mother’, children called Blue Eyes and Turkey, and an unnamed infant, live with their mother in a woodland cottage – the father is away at sea. Returning from the village one day, after another fruitless quest for a letter from the father, they come across a curious, feral girl (who declares herself ‘very rich’) who speaks to the little people she says live in her strange musical instrument (which she calls a ‘peardrum’) and who she will reveal only to naughty children. Blue Eyes and Turkey announce their intention to be naughty to their mother, who says she would then have to leave them and ‘send home a new mother, with glass eyes and a wooden tail’. And that is what happens. That is exactly what happens. The closing paragraphs left me aghast.

First published in The Anyhow Stories, McMillan, 1882 and in The New Mother and other stories, Oneiros, 2012

‘Mary’ by Liadan Ní Chuinn

Ordinarily, I find the work of new writers as hyped as Ní Chuinn underwhelming, to say the least, but in this case, do believe the hype. Ní Chuinn continues the long line of writers out of Ireland (Barry, Barrett, Erskine etc) who shake up the short form and explore voice and structure with a confidence and ingenuity that staggers. ‘Mary’ is a second person address to the partner of one Christy, who, we are told in the opening sentence, is ‘gentle’. What follows is an examination of squalid compromise, of good people being forced, through circumstance, to do not-so-good things. Needless to say, this is not the Ireland of rolling green and jolly fellers singing in bars; this is a land of exploitation and trafficking and awful anger and a marrow-deep sorrow that can never be eradicated. That such a place consistently produces writers of immense skill and stature is a mystery the world cannot do without.

First published in The Stinging Fly, 2024, collected in Everyone Still Here, Granta, 2025

Introduction

What’s the relationship between fiction and truth? Any piece of writing is both a fabrication and “based on a true story” (the story behind its author’s decision to write it, for example). Nowhere is this more manifest than in the short story genre, whose very definition can be bent in various ways. It shows that truth is rarely absolute and, moreover, that no two readers understand the same word in the same way. These stories were chosen for the spectrum of interpretations they offer: one that spans the entire space of meaning, from false to true.

‘April Truth’ by Ilya Zverev, translated by Anna Aslanyan

Set in a country where the central press organ was called The Truth, this story by an underappreciated Soviet author, who made his name as a journalist in the 1960s, puts the very notion of veracity in perspective. The premise is simple: a group of schoolchildren, tired of April Fool’s pranks, swear “to speak the truth and nothing but the truth…and not to deceive, nor pull anyone’s leg, nor make anything up, nor make any false statement, nor lie, be it with word or voice or gaze”. The results, naturally, are catastrophic.

There is no “truth” in the original title, which translates as “The second of April”, but I had my reasons (too complex to give here) to change it. In a footnote Ilya Zverev thanks several children for providing him with material, suggesting that the story is based on real events. It is not known if he ever swore the same oath.

Originally published in Russian as ‘Vtoroe aprelya’, 1963. Published in translation in gorse 3, 2014, with an extract available to read here

‘Blow-Up’ by Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn

“I know that the most difficult thing is going to be finding a way to tell it,” the narrator (if that’s what he is) of Julio Cortázar’s masterpiece tells us early on. “It’s going to be difficult because nobody really knows who it is telling it, if I am I or what actually occurred or what I’m seeing…or if, simply, I’m telling a truth which is only my truth, and then is the truth only for my stomach, for this impulse to go running out and to finish up in some manner with, this, whatever it is.”

The “I” in this story is as hard to define as its plot. An amateur photographer captures a scene he does not quite know how to interpret – and that’s the beauty of it. Later, looking at the developed film, he sees details that make him regret he is “only the lens of my camera, something fixed, rigid, incapable of intervention”. The story inspired Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1967), which in turn gave it the new title.

No matter how many times you reread the piece, you can never be sure of what the “real” story is; nor do you care. Its essence is that of all fiction: “It might go like that, it might very well go like that”.

Originally published in Spanish as ‘Las babas del diablo’, 1959. Collected in Blow-Up and Other Stories, Pantheon Books, 1985

‘An Alien Flower’ by Mavis Gallant

The narrator of this story doesn’t try to hide her unreliability from the reader. She is indignant at her daughter’s accusations that she is responsible for the tragic fate of a refugee who came to live with the family. She says coolly that she doesn’t mind her husband’s infidelities. She protests too much.

The narrator knows that her husband “lied sometimes, but so do all divinities. Divinities invented convenient fables and they appeared in strange disguises, but they were never mistaken”. The family’s private dramas are played out against the background of postwar Germany, where the past often gets distorted in interpretation.

When Mavis Gallant moved to Europe from Canada in 1950, it was to understand what really happened in the preceding decade. This short story convincingly demonstrates both the futility of such attempts and their absolute necessity.

Originally published in The New Yorker, 1972. Collected in The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Bloomsbury, 2004

‘The Street of Crocodiles’ by Bruno Schulz, translated by Celina Wieniewska

The street where we walk with Bruno Schulz appears peculiar: grey and shoddy, definitely dodgy yet with plenty to offer, including is a shop selling books, drawings and photographs of the most licentious nature. The “girls” that work here even enact the poses in the images for the client’s pleasure.

It’s all a sham, we soon realise. “Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.” Worse still, this “improvised masquerade is already disintegrating” – so we need to hurry up to grab a piece. Whose fault is this: the shopkeeper’s, the author’s, the reader’s? Here’s a clue: “Our language has no definitions which would weigh…the grade of reality”. If this is our only tool used to describe, or perceive, what’s around us, we shouldn’t be surprised when the whole picture dissolves right before our eyes.

Originally published in Polish as “Sklepy cynamonowe”, 1933. Collected in The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2008

‘Alphabet for Stämpfli’ by Georges Perec, translated by Ian Monk

The title of the anthology where this piece appears is a reminder that experimental prose, like its traditional counterpart, follows the never-confuse-fact-with-fiction rule. Georges Perec, who never took reality for granted, offered this beau present to Peter Stämpfli on the occasion of the Swiss artist’s exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1980. You could call it a poem or a short story; the author would not have minded either way. The opening part uses only the letters in the recipient’s name; then other letters appear and disappear in succession. The translation by a fellow Oulipian, Ian Monk, loses none of the original constraints. “As a still, I trap real life’s stiff seams,” the piece begins. “Realities gestate images; as images, realities,” we read in the fifth stanza (the letter “g” having just been introduced). The author plays with us for a while, before returning to “real life” to tell us, “I affirm its verities.”

Originally published in French as ‘Alphabet pour Stämpfli’, 1981. Included in All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo, 1963—2018, McSweeney’s, 2018