‘Świętokrzyskie’s Castle’ by Colette Sensier

Klara Świętokrzyskie is a Polish widow living alone in London. Her son Josef is a sporadic visitor and her daughter Gabriela is busy raising her own family. Klara keeps to herself, but is far from lonely as she has an active life in MagiKingdom, a World of Warcraft-esque game.

As Wladyslawa, she wanders the corridors of her castle accompanied by her paid-for-IRL accoutrements, including a leopard: a gift from the divorced Bernard, who occupies the castle opposite hers and with whom she has struck up a friendship. They have much in common: Bernard has known loss – his daughter lives on the other side of the world – as has Klara, who has named her avatar after her other – deceased – daughter.

Bernard is also a secret: neither Josef nor Gabriela know of their mother’s second life. How they find out comprises the second part of the story, which incorporates family dysfunction, grief, the dispersal of the digital in the post– of a person’s death and the online afterlife that we unintentionally inhabit when we’re gone.

From Best British Short Stories 2016, Ed. Nicholas Royle

‘Flowering Judas’ by Katherine Anne Porter

Porter is one of those authors who, on reading their work for the first time, leads me to wonder why it’s taken me so long to find them. ‘Flowering Judas’ is the story of Laura, a young American teacher who has joined the Mexican revolution and finds herself the subject of three warring agitators’ attentions. Although she is desired by these men, ironically, her commitment to the cause is doubted as one of her suitors says that he……

cannot understand why she works so hard for the revolutionary idea unless she loves some man who is in it.

Meanwhile, Laura fears that she is becoming as corrupt as they are. She runs errands for the men but is haunted by the knowledge that her actions may have led to some person’s undeserving death. She is a romantic, disillusioned by the vanity of the so-called revolutionaries and the life she has ended up with. A sense of disaster stalks her, which manifests in the form of a dream, one in which the man whose death Laura believes herself complicit in haunts her. Her ideals are as dust; it is the way of all things…

Some day this world, now seemingly so composed and eternal, to the edges of every sea shall be merely a tangle of gaping trenches, of crashing walls and broken bodies. Everything must be torn from its accustomed place where it has rotted for centuries, hurled skyward and distributed, cast down again clean as rain, without separate identity. Nothing shall survive that the stiffened hands of poverty have created for the rich and no-one shall be left alive except the elect spirits destined to procreate a new world cleansed of cruelty and injustice, ruled by benevolent anarchy…

From Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Penguin Classics, 2011

‘The Unmapped Country’ by Ann Quin

I owe the discovery of Quin to the conjunction of an interest in B.S. Johnson and an article by Lee Rourke, although as the editor of this collection, Jennifer Hodgson, has said, the association of Quin – and other writers of the period – with Johnson may be loose at best.

Better known, if known at all, for her debut novel Berg, the stories and fragments collected in The Unmapped Country show the work of a writer adept at a range of styles. The contents were written in the sixties and seventies, so certain details are necessarily of their time, but the writing itself feels intensely modern.

In the titular story, Sandra finds herself in a psychiatric ward following a breakdown involving what sounds like a dissociative episode. Her lover, Clive, visits briefly and even then, only from a sense of duty. Sandra’s days are filled with interactions with the other residents and the doctors, with whom she is at odds, a situation made clear from the outset:

‘Good morning and how are we today?’
‘Bloody rotten if you must know.’
‘Why is that – tell me more?’
Silence. Patient confronted psychiatrist. Woman and man.

Sandra’s antipathy is reasonable. In the ward her activities are scheduled like a schoolchild’s; the nursing staffs’ manner with her and the other patients is similarly infantilising and their prescribed treatment has damaged an essential part of her:

Once she had understood the language of birds, now no longer, it took all her time to understand her own language, and that of those who attempted communication… Had ECT done that – damn them?

As well as a critique of institutional care at the time, ‘The Unmapped Country’ is a model of what the short story can be: experimental yet accessible, funny and sad, everything and more. Quin herself once wrote to her publisher, ‘The short story medium is something new, exciting…’, much like the stories that make up this collection.

From The Unmapped Country, And Other Stories, 2018. ed. Jennifer Hodgson

‘Builders’ by Richard Yates

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is the perfect album of short story collections. ‘Builders’ is the final story and is the ideal bookend to the preceding ten. It takes on the cliché of the failed writer and forms from it something true.

Bob Prentice is a young romantic, a Sensitive Writer backed by his wife Joan, who discovers an unusual personal ad for a freelance writer. In responding, Bob meets Bernie Silver, a New York hackie who’s looking for a ghost writer to work his homespun anecdotes into a bestselling book. Bernie is no writer himself, but he has a grand theory that he wants Bob to follow – a story is a house: start with the foundations, add the walls and the roof and don’t forget the windows.

It’s not quite a scam: the intent to defraud doesn’t seem to be there anyways, but it’s far from what Bob’s enthusiasm – and vanity – leads him to initially believe. But he gives it a go and the Prentices become friendly with the Silvers, for a short time at least. Bob starts with the foundations of Bernie’s stories and builds adequate-enough houses with them, but the bestseller list remains elusive.

There is something of the delusional about Bernie Silver: sweet, but pitiful, and his friendship with Bob falters; perhaps the foundations simply aren’t strong enough. The same could be said for Bob and Joan’s marriage, which falls apart under the weight of itself in the end. The story ends on a melancholic note, signing off on the tone of the preceding ten preceding stories.

And where are the windows? Where does the light come in? Bernie, old friend, forgive me, but I haven’t got the answer to that one. I’m not even sure if there are any windows in this particular house. Maybe the light is just going to have to come in as best it can, through whatever chinks and cracks have been left in the builder’s faulty craftsmanship, and if that’s the case you can be sure that nobody feels worse about it than I do. God knows, Bernie; God there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.

From Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Vintage, 2006

Introduction

In compiling this anthology I am very conscious of what an Alexandrian library this website has become. While this is very much my own personal selection, I have also tried to enter into the spirit of what Jonathan Gibbs is building here by weighting my choices towards writers who have not yet featured, though I hope their worthiness is self-evident. I have also included a few stories that are available online so that you might enjoy some down payment of enjoyment and immediate value for your interest.

‘Nobody Mourns the City’s Cats’ by Muhammad El-Hajj, translated from Arabic by Yasmine Zohdi

In this subtle and beautifully executed story Egyptian writer Muhammad El-Hajj portrays the life of a man in emotional transition. The writing evokes a backdrop of famous Cairo alleys and insidious political menace, but it is his masterly skill in the foreground that is particularly memorable where he explores the space between intimacy and uncertainty.

We’d been playing the same role in turns throughout the ten years we’d been friends; she’d take care of me, and then I’d take care of her, and sometimes we’d both be in so much pain that neither of us could hear the other. Yet the comfort of knowing we were not alone was always enough to make it better.

(I would like to thank the editor of ArabLit Quarterly Marcia Lynx Qualey and the author for agreeing to make this story available online for the purposes of this anthology.)

Published in translation in ArabLit Quarterly Summer 2019: The Sea, and available to read online here

‘Natterbean’ by June Caldwell

There is nothing as universal and yet highly localised as a taxi ride. In this masterpiece of technicolour vernacular, June Caldwell buckles us into a story that celebrates the colour of spoken Dublinese, matched only by her gift – synaesthesia I would say – for imagery. An invigorating story, studded with twisted poetry.

The docks had a sheeny buzz since they’d done them all up on Fine Fáil chips. No more rust bunks sitting on giant metal plinths. Through civil wars and world wars and the IRA’s gun-running gobshites on the run from themselves, they’d all hid down here, heads low. First batches of heroin were holed up in derelict warehouses full of pigeons. Prozzies from Eastern Europe were brought in through the sea gates. Young lives spent sucking on office peckers dreaming of getting out in a footballer’s convertible before being shot in the head as a favour to a crack baron in Cabra for a write-off of a few quid or other.

First published in Room Little Darker, published by New Island/Head of Zeus, 2018 and available to read online here

‘The Drizzle on the Windscreen’ by Manus Boyle Tobin

This second in a duet of Dublin taxi stories is very different, inhabiting the interior world of a homeless taxi driver who sleeps in his car. It is the seamlessness of it that is so impressive. Using a single sentence, it switches between melancholic dreaming and the grim normality of the Dublin streetscape. For the homeless character, the distinction between inside and outside becomes ever less clear.

has he worked so long that he’s entered this trance, unaware of anything; barely just the steering wheel in his sleepy hands, the pedals at his feet, the windscreen where his eyes appear to have gotten lost upon looking through it, through the drizzle, and the occasional brake lights of other cars, the driver is resigned to sleeping in this same seat, perhaps that’s why his foot is so soft on the accelerator; he has already arrived at his destination

Winner of the Emerging Fiction and overall prizes at the Hennessy Literary Awards 2018 and published in The Irish Times, March 2018 and available to read here

‘Doors’ by Rania Mamoun, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jacquette

Set in Khartoum, this debut collection in English by Rania Mamoun is one of my favourite books of recent years. Her narrative skill creates space for us to observe the characters, and her non-judgmental depiction of Life and lives is filled with humanity. In ‘Doors’ the main character is tantalised by the prospect of escape from poverty, but is ultimately reminded of his powerlessness and dispensability. In a few short sentences about the bus journey to a job interview we get a glimpse of the everyday chaos:

‘Get everyone in the doorway to move back into the bus, boy,’ shouted the driver. ‘Good lord, getting fined is the last thing we need this morning.’
As soon as the driver stopped speaking, the man felt himself being pushed by many hands and a struggle began.
‘Brothers, please, move all the way in, God bless…’
One man punched his neighbour, the person next to him stamped on another one’s foot, and a tall man was hunkered down so much it looked as if he were praying.
‘Guys, open the window… it’s hot, and meningitis is going around!’ someone yelled.

First published in translations in Thirteen Months of Sunrise, Comma Press, 2019, and available to read online here

‘The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away’ by Bushra al-Fadil, translated from Arabic by Max Schmookler

Bushra al-Fadil, a Sudanese writer based in Saudi Arabia, won the 2017 Cain Prize with this deceptively sophisticated story. It opens with chaotic street scenes in Khartoum, before switching into his dream-like fascination with the eponymous Girl.

There I was, cutting through a strange market crowd – not just people shopping for their salad greens, but beggars and butchers and thieves, prancers and Prophet-praisers and soft-sided soldiers, the newly-arrived and the just-retired, the flabby and the flimsy, sellers roaming and street kids goraning, god-damners, bus waiters and white-robed traders, elegant and fumbling.

While it is not uncommon for short stories to spring something on us, the skill is in the unfolding; the way in which this story transitions from liveliness to something more mournful reveals how layered it is.

Published in The Book of Khartoum, edited by Raph McCormack and Max Schmookler, Comma Press, 2016. Available to listen to, read by Elmi Ali here

‘Moonlight Shadow’ by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Megan Backus

Usually included with Banana Yoshimoto’s zesty debut novel Kitchen, Moonlight Shadow encapsulates much of what I so admire about her writing. Though she is emotionally unguarded, her cheerfulness is often tinged with stoicism and grief. In this story a young woman recovers from the death of her boyfriend and, as is typical in Banana Yoshimoto’s work, the supernatural and natural worlds open to each other to bridge the gap between what we feel and what we understand.

A lover should die after a long lifetime. I lost Hitoshi at the age of twenty, and I suffered from it so much that I felt as if my own life had stopped. The night he died, my soul went away to some other place and I couldn’t bring it back. It was impossible to see the world as I had before. My brain ebbed and flowed, unstable, and I passed the days in a relentless state of dull oppression.

Published in Kitchen, Faber 1997

‘The Neighborhood Phone’ by Gabriella Ghermandi, translated from Italian by Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi and by Victoria Offredi Poletto

The Italo-Ethiopian writer Gabriella Ghermandi was born in Addis Ababa in 1965 and moved to Italy in 1979. This evocative story tells of her return to Ethiopia, and the strange homelessness of those who belong in two places and therefore neither place. The story revolves around the only telephone in the village and the people whose lives are connected by it. This is a place of sleepy inefficiency and poverty, jarringly so for the author; however, within the story there is the flowering of a sense of home and continuity.

I cried all of the following days, in front of my old house with the abandoned garden, at my father’s grave, whenever the phone rang, when I saw the witch. I cried and I washed the anger of such a long separation out of my heart. Finally, I felt light in my heart and I no longer minded the waits by the phone, the buses that never seemed to leave, the lines to buy sugar, the haggling with taxi drivers, the hugs of dirty children. My land was once again familiar to me.

First published in English in Words Without Borders, December 2008, and available to read online here

‘Pursuit’ by Naguib Mahfouz, translated from Arabic by Roger Allen

This is one of eighteen lost stories by Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian writer and first Arabic author to win the Nobel Prize. Though not his strongest work, the collection – recently discovered, and published in English by Saqi press – captures the timeless storytelling touch of Mahfouz and his ability to wrap the individual into society to make something universal. In this story a woman returns to town nursing her illegitimate baby; powerless and poor she seeks redress by her will and wits.

In one hand she would hold a basket full of halva squares and in the other she clutched her baby. She began to move from face to face, hawking her halva, but it seemed she was making a special point of standing in front of Boss Uthman’s shop. She made sure that he could hear her voice or see her in person. He could not ignore her forever.

First published in The Quarter, Saqi Press, 2019

‘This Hostel Life’ by Melatu Uche Okorie

This title piece from a three-story collection is by former asylum seeker Melatu Uche Okorie, originally from Nigeria but now living in Ireland where she is doing a PhD in creative writing. It tells of the experience of the controversial direct provision system with a clear voice and gift for voicing her characters. Irish writing is still very much lacking in diversity and this collection offers a perspective on Ireland and Irish people we have not seen in fiction before.

In my last hostel dey give you provision any day, but it’s gonna be one month since you collect last. So if you get toilet paper today, it’s gonna be one month before you get another. Dat is why me I happy when dey give me every week for here, now, me I don feel happy again. Dis direct provision business is all the same, you see, because even if you collect provision for every week or you collect for every month, it is still somebody dat is give you the provision. Nothing is better than when you decide something for yourself.

First published in This Hostel Life by Skein Press, 2018. Also available from Virago, 2019