‘The Long Crossing’ by Leonardo Sciascia, translated by Avril Bardoni

As far as deceptions go, the one described in this story is perhaps among the most trivial. It’s a classic tale: people desperate to escape poverty entrust their lives to a smuggler. Having paid him for a passage from Sicily to America, after eleven torturous days on a boat, they are put ashore. “Are you sure it isn’t some other place?” one of them asks – not because the landscape looks wrong, but simply because the long crossing was so incomprehensible: “neither roads nor even tracks across the sea…it was left to the Almighty to steer the ship without error between sky and water to its destination”.

Did the travellers ever arrive? In a sense, they did.

Originally published in Italian as ‘Il lungo viaggio’, 1973. Collected in The Wine-Dark Sea, Granta, 2014

‘Three People by William Trevor

The three people of William Trevor’s title are an old man, his unmarried daughter and a younger man who comes to their house. Each of the trio has their own version of why these visits have been happening for years, but only two of them know what’s behind it all. “The darkness of their secrets lit, the love that came for both of them through their pitying of each other” is gradually revealed by the old master of the genre. Even before we learn the true story, or what passes for it, we want to turn away from it, so devastating it promises to be. Towards the end, we come to envy the old man, who will die unburdened by it. “The truth restored, but no one else knowing it.”

Collected in The Hill Bachelors, Viking, 2000

‘Cricket’ by Zinovy Zinik, translated by Bernard Meares

To an émigré in London, a figure often appearing in Zinovy Zinik’s fiction, the world he finds himself in is not what it appears to be. Unfaithful lovers and anti-Semitic bullies, European accents and summer drinks – nothing can be trusted, everything has a twist.

There is no clarity in his own head either. “I seemed to be thinking in English while continuing to speak Russian. But isn’t this an illusion, this separation of thought and word?” These ambiguities make the real state of things as difficult to decode as a cricket match. Yet it is this game that teaches the protagonist a lesson that applies far beyond the pitch. Guided by it, he can make as many runs as he wants without missing the ball.

Originally published in Russian as ‘Kriket’, 1990. Collected in One-Way Ticket, New Directions, 1995

‘Merge’ by Deborah Eisenberg

Deborah Eisenberg’s works are often studies in perception of the world. So it is with this story. Told from different perspectives and introduced by epigraphs from Noam Chomsky and Donald Trump, it is also a reflection on language as a phenomenon inextricably linked to contemporary ills: “a way for us to deceive ourselves into believing that we understand things, so then we can just go ahead and do stuff that’s more ruthless than what any other animal does”.

Our relationship with words is overrated, “Merge” suggests. Some of us make “mental objects out of them”, to quote Chomsky; others simply declare, after Trump, “I have the best words”; in any case, speech alone is not enough to give us human status. Language is nothing but “an extremely plastic faculty, amenable to many uses, but it developed to serve the pressing demands of malice, vengefulness, and greed – humanity’s most consistent attributes”. And then, as you keep reading, the very language of the story proves that wrong.

First published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2018, and available to read to subscribers here, and via JStor here. Collected in Your Duck Is My Duck, Europa Editions, 2019

‘Ceci N’Est Pas un Mémoire’ by Fernando Sdrigotti

The narrator of this story moves from his native Argentina to Europe, having picked his destination at random. What awaits him? Is he an economic migrant, an adventurer, a moody young man with no prospects? All he knows is this: “And this is where I am now, I will think and repeat uncountable times since then, the this and the now jumping back and forth. Ungraspable thises and nows.”

He has just arrived here; he has found a job. Is he to spend the rest of his life washing dishes? No, he will keep moving, without knowing where to. “Because it will take some more immigration officers until I shake off the illusion that I belong this side of the ocean.” And now, writing the story, he muses: “I may be trying to figure out what is actually real, and what made-up…I might be rejoicing in the fabrication.” Who needs a better reason to pick up the pen?

Collected in Jolts, Influx Press, 2020

‘Tortoiseshell’ by Domenico Starnone, translated by Oonagh Stransky

“I have never been honest with myself,” Starnone’s narrator begins. “I can’t accept even the most basic truths.” This is a situation every fiction writer, as well as many people who have never written a single line, will find relatable: telling lies (stories) is compulsive; it starts as a replacement for real life and then it becomes your life. The defining moment in the narrator’s relationship with truth is a short story by Hemingway. The version of “Cat in the Rain” he read as a child had a majolica cat in it, but then things turned out to be different. He was left convinced that what you invent is more truthful than what you stumble across in so-called reality. “[W]hat are facts, if not an endless series of majolica cats?”

Originally published in Italian in L’umanità è un tirocinio, Einaudi, 2023. Published in translation in The New Yorker, April 2025, and available to subscribers to read here

‘Proof of the Pudding’ by O. Henry

O. Henry knew a thing or two about dissembling: before being crowned the humour king of American letters, he did time for embezzlement. Many of his characters end up on the wrong side of the law. “Proof of the Pudding”, however, relates a fully legit transaction between its two protagonists: a magazine editor and a fiction writer who cannot agree on the question of style. “No human being ever uttered banal colloquialisms when confronted by sudden tragedy,” the editor claims. The writer counters that in such situations, “[t]hey talk naturally, and a little worse”.

To find out who is right, a cunning plan is concocted. Before it can be implemented, however, fate intervenes, as it often does in O. Henry’s stories. “My God, why hast Thou given me this cup to drink?” one of the characters exclaims in the finale. The other goes, “Ain’t it hell, now, Shack – ain’t it?” The truth of the matter is thus revealed, and no mistake.

Collected in 100 Selected Stories, Wordsworth Classics, 1995

Introduction

In this selection I have focused on some of my favourite short story collections and have tried to highlight the stories I like best within each collection. These are the stories I keep returning to, always finding something new in each reading.

I love short stories, and I particularly love long short stories that boldly take up space with large casts of characters, and/or numbered sections that unfold like small chapters. I love how a story can be big and long and still slowly circle in around a tiny potent moment, or stay with a conversation, or illuminate a character’s silent solitary thoughts in tight-woven poetic language, with no excess.

‘Prelude’ by Katherine Mansfield

One of the first short stories I remember reading was Prelude by Katherine Mansfield. I read it first in the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, the first book I bought at Shakespeare and Co. in Paris in 1995! I remember the excitement of reading Katherine Mansfield for the first time, and the feeling of absolute immersion in the world of the Burnell children, as Kezia and Lotty are left behind with neighbours as the family move house.

I was immediately seduced by the voices, the silent observations of characters, the way they moved through houses and gardens and lingered in rooms:

“As she stood there, the day flickered out and dark came. With the dark crept the wind snuffling and howling. The windows of the empty house shook, a creaking came from the walls and floors, a piece of loose iron on the roof banged forlornly. Kezia was suddenly quite, quite still, with wide open eyes and knees pressed together. She was frightened.”

…and the careful descriptions of the objects inside:

“A little piano stood against the wall with yellow pleated silk let into the carved front. Above it hung an oil painting by Beryl of a large cluster of surprised-looking clematis. Each flower was the size of a small saucer, with a centre like an astonished eye fringed in black.”

Soon we are with the rest of the household in their new home, following their movements and interactions, and observing the many small private moments in the day that make up a whole life.

First published by the Hogarth Press in July 1918; collected in Bliss and Other Stories, 1920. Available to read online here

‘At The Bay’ by Katherine Mansfield

In the story ‘At the Bay’, Katherine Mansfield continues her observations of the Burnell family, and also their cousins, friends, servants, all in a single perfect summer’s day. So much is captured in the colours and glimpses of life by the sea, the new people they meet, the conversations that conceal dangers beneath their sunlit surface. Even the most placid conversations and languid friendly encounters hold a power to corrupt the idyll.

“That’s right, breathed the voice, and it teased, You’re not frightened, are you?… She was terrified, and it seemed to her everything was different. The moonlight stared and glittered; the shadows were like bars of iron. Her hand was taken.”

First published in The London Mercury in January 1922, Collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories, 1922. Available to read online here

‘When She is Old and I am Famous’ by Julie Orringer

Every single story in How To Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer is unique and moving and wonderful. I have chosen ‘When She is Old and I am Famous’ mainly because it is also very funny. With just the right note of derision, Orringer captures the rivalry between two teenaged cousins as the protagonist Mira is forced to spend her summer in Florence with her cousin Aida, a fashion model.

“Aida. That is her terrible name. Ai-ee-duh: two cries of pain and one of stupidity.”

As Mira navigates her insecurities, wrestling with her envy and resentment of her cousin, she glimpses truths about Aida’s life and learns to understand her.

First published in The Paris Review 149, Winter 1998, and available to subscribers to read online here; Collected in How To Breathe Underwater, Penguin Books, 2003

‘The Woman Who Borrowed Memories’ by Tove Jansson, translated by Silvester Mazzarella

In her precise, pared-down prose, the calm, clear gaze of Tove Jansson observes the return of successful painter Stella to her old studio where her friend Wanda has been living for many years. It is soon clear that Wanda has claimed Stella’s past and identity for her own, and an unnerving struggle between the two women ensues. An eerie story of friendship and envy.

First published in Swedish in Resa med lätt baggage, 1987. First published in English in Travelling Light, Sort of Books, 2010; also in The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories, NYRB Books, 2014

‘Captives’ by Romesh Gunesekera

In Captives by Romesh Gunesekera a couple arrive at a hotel near the ancient fortress of Sigiriya Rock in Sri Lanka and are closely observed by the manager. This is a story of misreadings and the divide between tourists and locals; the tensions between old colonial power and the once colonised.

First published in Monkfish Moon, Granta, 1992

‘Ranvali’ by Romesh Gunesekera

‘Ranvali’ by Romesh Gunesekera is a story that captures, in lush detailed prose the romance of the rural landscape and old dilapidated country houses in Sri Lanka. A daughter is driving down to her late-father’s beach bungalow and reflects on his misplaced idealism and efforts to create a more unified country, giving away his valuable land for strangers to gather in, a project doomed to fail.

“For father the gama was his precious link to the peasants, his masses, even though they treated him like a lord. They brought him pineapple and jak fruit, plantains, jaggery and curd while he sat on the veranda… looking more like Tolstoy than his Lenin.”

First published in Monkfish Moon, Granta, 1992