‘The Arcadian’ by Shola von Reinhold

I remember reading this story as an anonymous submission to the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize in early 2019, and just thinking that this was exactly the sort of thing that I was looking for in new fiction. The story an obvious choice for our shortlist that year, and was one of the winners when that list went to our panel of judges. ‘The Arcadian’ features the Utopian, Henrik, who is fascinated with the future, and the Arcadian, Bim, who is drawn to the past. Beginning with a meeting in a 19th Edinburgh hotel bar, the intellectual and sensual interplay between the two characters mediates a narrative gliding through a series of points – Blackness and femininity, gender and androgyny, what becomes history, otherness and sexuality. It ends with a discussion of a painting, specifically whether the Black figures in the painting would have been real models living in Edinburgh in the 19th century. This story is told with incredible lyrical beauty, and perhaps a sense of ambiguity. Six years on and I’m still thinking about it, and when we were putting 22 Fictions, it was the first story on my list. Like Shola’s award-winning novel LOTE, it’s a work of sublime brilliance, and again, is something that creates its own form.

Read online in Hotel / Tenement Press. Collected in 22 Fictions, CHEERIO, 2025.

‘A Double Room’ by Ann Quin

Ann Quin (1936 – 1973) is one of the great British writers of the Twentieth Century – a brilliant working class modernist whose work has had something of a revival in recent years, due in no small part to the efforts of Jennifer Hodgson (who edited this collection, much of which was previously unpublished and unknown) and And Other Stories, who republished Quin’s four novels alongside The Unmapped Country.

‘A Double Room’ tells the story of a young woman in the 1960s taking a train to a seaside town with a married man to have (or continue) an affair. From the off the tension is high, but not exactly with romance ‘If people stopped to look, they would think we were father and daughter on our way to an aunt’s funeral.’ Told from the young woman’s perspective, the couple arrive at the hotel, attempt to have sex, drink whisky, eat steaks, take a walk on the beach, and engage in a few more rounds of unsatisfactory lovemaking and pub exploring. Through the unnamed woman, Quin expresses a complicated set of feelings related to the search for romantic love and illicit thrills – want, disgust, awkwardness, shame, excitement, raging sexuality, boredom – and despite the disappointment experienced throughout, ends on a slightly ambiguous note. Though the story ultimately explores the distance between a desire for a transcendent experience and an underwhelming reality, there is a lot going on underneath surface, a complicated mix of feelings. It feels very 1960s Britain but also kind of timeless – a timeless bad date? The Unmapped Country is a great way into Quin’s writing – read this collection and then her first novel Berg.

Collected in The Unmapped Country: Stories & Fragments, And Other Stories, 2018

‘The Debutante’ by Leonora Carrington

Officially ended by Elizabeth II in 1958, the formal debutante party was a very weird thing indeed. Leonora Carrington famously hated hers in the 1930s, running away shortly afterwards to take up with the Surrealists in Paris.

‘The Debutante’ is a strange comic horror story that lampoons the brutality of ‘sophisticated’ societal ritual. As in her paintings, Carrington’s writing draws from waking reality and dreams, from playfulness and from malevolence. In the ‘The Debutante’, a young woman preparing for her coming out ball meets a hyena at her local zoo. The girl is not at all enthused about the upcoming party, but the hyena is very keen to go in her place. They hatch a plan to squeeze the animal into the girl’s dress. A maid is callously killed so that the hyena can have a face to wear, to complete the disguise. The hyena goes off to the party and the girl stays home and has a nice time. Later, the mother returns furious – the hyena caused a terrible scene, refusing to eat any cake, before eating the face that it was wearing and escaping out of the window.

First published in 1940 in André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour. Collected in The Debutante and Other Stories, Silver Press 2017

‘Arrival’ by Gurnaik Johal

Full disclaimer: I work for the publisher of this book, but what a talented writer Gurnaik Johal is. At Serpent’s Tail we have just published Johal’s debut novel Saraswati, which has been highly anticipated due to We Move. Within the collection, Johal excels at telling intricate, delicate stories crossing the generations of a small corner of Northwest London, centring around the British-Punjabi communities in Southall and Northolt, near Heathrow airport.

Within “Arrival”, Johal finds a way of telling two different love stories through the single device of an abandoned car. The car belongs to Divya, and has been left stranded at the house of family friends Chetan and Aanshi. Chetan is expecting to pick up Divya from the airport, but she doesn’t arrive, and they are stuck with the car. We eventually discover that the no-show is because she has decided not to marry her fiancé, who arrives to pick up the car in a tense scene that opens and ends the story. In between, waiting for news, Chetan and Aanshi begin to use the car. They enjoy taking trips to IKEA, Windsor, and Brighton, their romance reilluminated by the novelty of the vehicle in their lives. It’s very sweet, and even when the car is collected, they are left in a sense of happiness, perhaps with a slight sense of cheekiness at getting caught. The story – which reminds me a bit of Mike Leigh’s films – is told so skilfully. It’s a terrific short story, and won the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize in 2022.

Available to read on the Galley Beggar website, here. Collected in We Move, Serpent’s Tail, 2022

‘The Debt Collector’ by Jen Calleja

I am a huge fan of Prototype, one of the most impressive independent publishing houses of this era in which there are so many brilliant independent publishers. Even what they have published by Jen Calleja alone is quite a remarkable body of work, starting with this excellent collection, published just as the world shut its doors in March 2020.

This is an unsettling story, which, coincidentally, starts with a character reading from Leonora Carrington’s The Debutante & Other Stories. Specifically, the character reads a line within the book in which one character tells another to leave their husband. Reading this, Calleja’s protagonist sees this as a sign, and decides to leave not just her husband but her entire life. She finds a small, barely habitable room above a shop on the other side of town, and slowly moves there in secret, finally leaving a note to her husband one day saying that she is gone, with no explanation, and warning him to not come looking for her. She eeks out a living in the room above a shop on her dwindling savings, before getting a part-time job in a local bakery. Years pass. There is something incredibly stark and brutal about this story – a character wilfully untying the threads of their existence, a process of life transformation that is somehow quite shocking in its detachment from emotion – but it’s completely captivating. Calleja is a great writer. Read this then her novel Vehicle.

Collected in I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For, Prototype, 2020

Introduction

In selecting the stories that have been most important to me over the years, it’s slightly disconcerting to note how many of them deal with instances of cruelty, in one form or another. More than half of them do this. Perhaps it’s better not to linger on why this might be, but perhaps it says something about the need of short stories to have some sharp, defining emotion at their heart – the sharper the better. While some brilliant authors can cover a complex emotional terrain in a short story, for most it is a more concentrated, focussed experience, and the jeopardy, the sense of what is at stake, needs to be apparent and immediate. Or perhaps I’m just drawn to these scenarios because they deal with an aspect of humanness that we have to strive harder to make sense of, and asks us more questions of ourselves. We can recognise and understand love quite easily, but what explains cruelty? It’s one of the greatest puzzles of life.

‘Lost Hearts’ by M. R. James

We think of James as a teller of unsettling stories of ghosts and apparitions taking place in pleasant English landscapes, but Lost Hearts might more correctly belong to the horror genre – its subject matter is so shocking that I can hardly bear to describe it – suffice to say it can be thought of as a variation of the vampire myth with added cannibalism and the destruction of innocence. It is, like all his stories, a masterfully constructed narrative creating a completely convincing and believable world where the unbelievable happens. From the opening with its attention to the architectural detail of the stately home, to the charming little friendship between Stephen, the young protagonist and Mrs Bunch the housekeeper, and the butler’s brief appearance – a whole community of the house is evoked in a few pages. The moments of supernatural horror are grounded with convincing esoteric knowledge, and there is the typical James trope of the signs of supernatural intrusion being mistaken for something trivial – rats or wild animals in this case. A real masterpiece of a short story.

First published in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 1904, and now available in Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James, Oxford World Classics 2013. It can be read online here

‘The Aspern Papers’ by Henry James

The other James was very prolific as a short story writer, but wrote very few that are under forty pages, and the one I’ve chosen is long enough to qualify as a novella. But it is included in the Everyman edition of his collected short stories, and having read all of them recently, I’m finding that there is something to be said for the long short story. When teaching short stories I usually emphasize the importance of making use of the form’s restricted length, but James is having none of that. Which means that his stories have the quality of compressed novels, but suffer no loss as a result. ‘The Aspern Papers’ is James at his most sensuous, playful and charming. Set in Venice, it concerns a literary scholar’s attempts to get close to the ageing muse of a great poet, using gardening, of all things, as a cover for his endeavours. It is lush, seductive, witty and unsettling.

First published in The Atlantic Monthly, 1888, now available in The Aspern Papers and Other Tales, Penguin Modern Classics, 2014

‘The Buffalo’ by Clarice Lispector, translated by Katrina Dodson

This is a remarkable and shocking story – a woman goes to a zoo and tries to deal with her feelings regarding a relationship by imagining committing violence to the animals. When she commits an actual violent act on one of them, it is ineffectual and useless. The psychological depths this story reaches are remarkable – the central character is nameless and no reference is made to why she is in the state she’s in, just that it might be to do with a man. There is a sense of disembodiment – as though she only exists as an emotional state – when she goes on a rollercoaster she feels the material force of gravity making her dance and forcing her to adopt the physical attitudes of happiness. The animals (all wonderfully described) seem to her to be free of the burdens of love and emotional connection (at one point she feels she is in the cage while the animals are free). When she drops her purse the scattered contents reveal to the world all her anxieties “the pettiness of a private life of precautions”. Lispector’s collected stories are full of treasures, often more accessible to the reader than her sometimes more impenetrable novels.

First published in the collection Laços de família, Francisco Alves Editora, 1960, translated as Family Ties, University of Texas Press, 1984, and available to read in Clarice Lispector Complete Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2015, it can also be read online here

‘An Encounter’ by James Joyce

What do you choose from a collection where every story is perfect? Well, how about An Encounter, a story of childhood misadventure? You could construct a map of the city from the stories in Dubliners, and indeed in some editions ‘An Encounter’ comes with a map tracing the journey the boys take over the river Liffey and along the Wharf Road to see the Pigeon House (never explained in the story, it’s a power station). A wonderful evocation of a childhood full of weekly comics and cowboys and Indians, there is a growing sense of menace as the boys make their journey. Dubliners is full of characters who seek to escape the oppression of the city, and the boys get further than most, though what they encounter in the end is a curdled vision of adulthood, rather than the world beyond the city.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards Ltd., 1914: there are many editions now available, including Penguin Modern Classics, 2000, it can be read online here

‘A Distant Episode’ by Paul Bowles

I’ve only read this story once, and a long time ago, when I had some time to kill in a bookshop in Manchester, but it has stayed with me ever since, and I keep meaning to buy a copy and read it again, but I never do. It’s a story about an academic who has returned to a small Moroccan village to look up an old friend, but then finds himself lured into a trap – I can’t really say any more without giving too much a way. It’s the manner in which this story takes an unexpected turn, so that it is almost like two stories, the one emerging from the other, that has been a strong influence on my own writing. It is also unexpectedly dark and cruel, to the extent you wonder why an author would want to do that to one of their characters – but then sometimes you just have to.

First published in The Partisan Review, 1947, now available from Penguin Modern Classics, 2014

‘Spry Old Character’ by Elizabeth Taylor

Taylor is a writer who could rightly be called the Jane Austen of her time – author of beautifully crafted narratives that pick out and play at the hidden tensions between characters, revealing layer upon layer of social and personal meanings, creating fully realised worlds of behaviour and feeling. I love this story for its portrait of an elderly inhabitant of what would today be called an old people’s home (a favourite literary haunt for Taylor) – his is an old rogue rendered helpless by old age and blindness, at the mercy of his well meaning carers, who inhibit every attempt of his to revive his old passions – which are mainly drinking, smoking and gambling. The ending quietly breaks your heart.

First published in Hester Lily and Other Stories, Viking, 1954. Taylor’s complete short stories are published by Virago

‘The Psychiatrist’ by Machado de Assis, translated by William L. Grossman and Helen Coldwell

De Assis is a fascinating writer, often regarded as the foremost Brazilian author, though still little known and hard to obtain in the UK – he is also hard to pin down – a descendent of freed slaves he is a realist who is also surreal and experimental, a kind of South American Sterne or Voltaire or Gogol or Kafka (whom he precedes). The only easily available novel published in the UK is The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas(sometimes translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner), which is published as a Penguin Classic and is a wonderful short novel – picaresque, digressive – one of my favourite moments is when, after a chapter about a donkey that has no relevance to the story, the next chapter begins “damn that donkey for interrupting my thoughts…” ‘The Psychiatrist’ (sometimes translated as ‘The Alienist’) is a wonderful story about a man who builds the first asylum in a town, and then starts widening his definitions of madness until nearly everyone is incarcerated.

Translation published by University of California Press, 1966. I bought this collection secondhand, it is also available on the Internet Archive. There are other editions available including as part of a collected stories from Jollyjoy Books (where the story appears as ‘The Alienist’) but I can’t vouch for the quality of the publication or the others that come up on internet searches

‘The Inherited Clock’ by Elizabeth Bowen

I like to remind students that if you write a story that is built around a defining central image – a clock, say, you only get one chance, so make the most of it. No one is going to want to read another story of yours about a clock, and if you keep writing stories about clocks, you’ll become pigeonholed as the person who writes about clocks. (This doesn’t apply to themes, which can recur again and again in your stories, but usually in different guises, using different and contrasting images and points of focus.) I can’t help thinking that Bowen might have had such a thought in mind when she wrote this story – I’m not going to write another story about a clock, so I’m going to do everything you can do with a clock in one story. In the Inherited clock two cousins are dealing with this particular timepiece – a domed skeleton clock – and in the course of the story everything is done with the clock that can be done – one character puts their finger in the mechanism and is “bitten”, another puts the dome over their head and so “wears” it, and so on. At times the clock seems like another character, a protagonist, and in a narrative sense, at least, could be described as alive. But that’s just one aspect of the story – as with all Bowen’s writing there are layers and layers of history, characterization and meaning contained in beautifully structured prose.

First published in The Demon Lover and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1945. Bowen’s collected stories are published by Vintage, 1999