‘A Late Encounter with the Enemy’ by Flannery O’Connor

Another author who doesn’t flinch from being cruel to her characters – in her famous ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ she takes it to a tragic extreme. The tone in ‘A Late Encounter’ is more darkly humorous, and the victim not entirely undeserving. To test this idea you could take this story’s General Sash, the 104-year-old veteran and make him swap places with the old rogue in Elizabeth Taylor’s story and see if you still have the same feelings at the end.

First published in A Good Man is Hard to Find, 1955; her complete stories are published by Faber and Faber, 2009

‘Juliette McRee is Accused of Gluttony’ by Ethel Anderson

Sorry, I think this story will be hard to track down. I came across it in a second hand copy of an anthology of Australian short stories from an Australian publisher (Houghtoin Miffin) published in 1983. It may crop up in more recent anthologies but it seems there isn’t a good current anthology of Australian Short Stories available, which is a pity because Australian literature is particularly rich in this form. There was in fact a boom in Australian short stories around the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, thanks to the support of magazines like Bulletin. Barbara Baynton, Frank Davison and Alan Marshall all used the form to write powerful evocations of life in the Outback. Ethel Anderson is a very interesting figure, an essayist, poet and painter as well as a short story writer. The story I’ve chosen is another that focuses on cruelty and childhood trauma, but with a peculiar, darkly comic slant. The story’s opening sets the tone for what’s to come – “Dr Phantom did not really care for children.”

First published in At Parramatta, F. W. Cheshire, 1956, available in The Oxford Book of Australian Short Stories, ed Michael Wilding, 1994, available second hand or online at the Internet Archive

‘Josefine the Singer, or The Mouse People’ by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann

I first read Kafka as a teenager and fell in love with his ideas. When I read him now it is the language that I love, the way he uses words with such precision. Reading him is like having a world built around you brick by brick (word by word) relentlessly until you are an inhabitant. Strangely, the experience is quite joyous, even when the subject matter is extremely dark and unsettling. It is the joy of being in the company of a completely liberated imagination. I could have chosen almost anything, but have gone for this slightly lesser-known story. Although we are never quite sure if we are reading about mouse-like people, or people-like mice, the story of the hold Josefine has on her downtrodden and fearful people, who otherwise have no understanding or appreciation of music (“when she is gone, music will disappear – perhaps for ever – from our lives”), is entrancing, terrifying, heartbreaking and hilarious all at once. Oh – and it breaks all the rules of short story writing.

First published as ‘Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse’ in Ein Hungerkünstler, Verlag Die Schmiede, 1924. Translation published in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Penguin, 2007

‘The Argentine Ant’ by Italo Calvino, translated by Archibald Colquhoun

Having very little money at the time, in the early 90s, I remember having a book fund, a sort of piggy bank for loose change which I would spend on books, and I remember I used this to buy a copy of Alberto Manguel’s anthology of fantastic literature Black Water, a big volume published by Picador of 72 short stories. An influential book, I think, bringing together classics like ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ with lesser known works like the Calvino story I’ve chosen here. ‘The Argentine Ant’ is built on a very simple premise – a family, and a community, is driven mad by the relentless presence of ants. It inspired the title poem of my third poetry collection, Island to Island.

First published as ‘La formica argentina’, 1952, and in translation in 1957. Now available in Difficult Loves and Other Stories, Vintage, 2018

Introduction

Some of the short stories I have chosen were not published as short stories. That might be taken as a tired comment on form, though actually I just don’t read very many short stories. I generally find them too long, though when I do make the time I regret that perspective.

As to the form question, I guess one could take the list as a departure point for ‘what constitutes a short story’, but I have long since stopped finding those conversations interesting. Embarrassing memory: a few years ago I was sitting with the Australian poet Louis Klee and asked him whether Anne Carson was more of a poet or an artist. He looked bored and said “if you’re asking that question you already know the answer”. I nodded in agreement but wasn’t sure whether that meant the answer was “yes” or “no”. I still don’t have much of a handle on the relationship but, as I say, the point has long ceased to be interesting.

I haven’t seen Louis since, but remember that day as basically happy—it was early spring in Cambridge and rare sun was coming through the windows. We talked about Les Murray and Louis read me “Bat’s Ultrasound”. It was the first time I had heard it and it seemed closer to a piece of music.

‘For a Traveller’ by Jessica Greenbaum

Greenbaum is a poet and this is from a book of poems. She helps me out with the opening line, though: “I only have a moment so let me tell you the shortest story”. Do you think she is saying something about the nature of the prose poem? See introduction: not interested.

As a short story this leaves us to fill in a lot of blanks, though we come to understand that much of the speaker’s life is defined by absence. I find it heartbreaking, and often repeat the question in the last line.

First published in Poetry, May 2014, and available to read here. Collected in Spilled and Gone, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

‘The Instruction Manual’ by John Ashbery

Ashbery is usually obscure, and this must be one of his more straightforward pieces in terms of narrative and syntax. A speaker is writing an instruction manual on the uses of a new metal, and lets their mind wander to Guadalajara. This is the appropriative act that Michel de Certau, in the Practice of Everyday Life, called “La Perruque” — doing creative work surreptitiously while on the company payroll.

I now realise that, like the Greenbaum story, this ends on a question I often repeat to myself: What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do.

Published in Some Trees, Ecco Press, 1978. Also available to read on the Poetry Foundation website, here

‘It Happens Like This’ by James Tate

James Tate breaks that rule where you are supposed to show something in the middle of action rather than giving specific exposition. Almost every piece opens with a paraphrase of setting and person. Here: “I was outside St. Cecelia’s Rectory smoking a cigarette when a goat appeared beside me”. His stories cause me concern because they describe things that happen to all of us. We almost understand them, and he was the only one who could begin to begin talking about it.

Published in Lost River, Sarabande Books, 2003. You can read it on the poets.org website, here, and hear Tate read it here. I find it upsetting that people are laughing because I think he was serious

‘Do You Belong to Anybody?’ by Maya Binyam

A short story that comes dressed as a short story. It is quite long, actually, but look at the opening few lines:

“In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up. The radio announced traffic due to an accident involving a taxicab driver, a police officer, and a woman whose occupation the dispatcher did not care to identify. But there was no traffic. My ticket was in the breast pocket of my jacket, which was handed to me as I exited the passenger door”.

The story doesn’t graduate to anything more specific, and the first few times I read it I thought it was concerned more with the materials of a story than with the story itself. Who is this person, where are they, and why? What happens to the character is not really the point; the story is about their journey and the absence of a destination.

I’m pretty sure I’m missing some larger comment on dispossession, particularly because of one violent piece of dialogue around the middle. It happens and then moves on as if it didn’t. This bears careful re-reading.

First published in The Paris Review 241, Fall 2022, and available to subscribers to read here. I am told this is actually an excerpt from Binyam’s novel Hangman, published in 2023 by One

‘Seasonal Dresses’ by Jane Dabate

This is a story by a young writer named Jane Dabate. A lot of her work seems like poetry to me because it is drawn in by feelings and images:

“I found myself cold on the streets, in between brownstones, in between boyfriends, begging my favourite professor to be my guarantor in a series of emails that would go unacknowledged. It was cold in every sense. Summer had passed. Nobody was saying: stay for the weekend!”

Every new writer in London is American now but it turns out some of them are human.

Published in New Papers 2, 2025

‘Thank You’ by Alejandro Zambra

Alejandro Zambra is my favourite living writer. His short stories are all basically about the same thing, or at least use the same materials. Here, an Argentine woman and a Chilean man in an ambiguous relationship have an ambiguous experience in Mexico City. This has happened to all of us, or is going to.

First published in Spanish in Mis documentos in 2023, translated to English by Megan McDowell as My Documents, Fitzcarraldo Press, 2015. Available to read online here

‘The Woman on the Dunes’ by Anaïs Nin

Anais Nin is a pervert, and so is everyone else. In selecting ‘The Woman on the Dunes’ for this series Leone Ross commented she respected Nin “for her insistence on including the erotic in all things”, but I think Nin really recognised the erotic in all things.

I like this story because it diverts in the final third into another story, spoken by one of the characters. It is overwhelming and mildly evil, much like sex itself.

First published in Little Birds, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979