‘That Colour’ by Jon McGregor

Chosen by Grahame Williams
 
I don’t want to write too much about this story because the story is so short itself (it will take you just about as long to read as it will to read this). A man does the dishes while his wife tries to describe the turning colour of the trees outside their house. It reminds me of the love my Dad showed my Mum when he used to reach out and squeeze her hand whilst he was driving: a reflection of deep, long-lived love. I have a copy of the story framed next to my front door. I don’t read it or even properly notice it every time I leave the house, but I really ought to. 

First published as a broadside by Jon McGregor, and in his story collection This Isn’t the Sort of Things That Happens to Someone Like You, Bloomsbury, 2012
 
Grahame Williams is a fiction writer from County Down and his work has appeared in the Stinging Fly, the Lonely Crowd and, most recently, on BBC Radio 4.

‘The Adventure of a Clerk’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver and Ann Goldstein

Chosen by Jane Roberts
 
(Dedicated to those of us who have loved for one night only, and equally to those of us who have never loved for one night only.) 
 
We meet our protagonist in the early hours of post-coital bliss: “It so happened that Enrico Gnei, a clerk, spent a night with a beautiful lady.” Bedroom antics are hinted at, allowing the reader to wander off the pages of the present and join Enrico in his imaginings of the sensual and tender “inheritance of that night”, whilst embedded in the converse mundanity of the morning’s necessities. The basic human urge to broadcast his nocturnal exploits, seems here something more than the braggadocio of a lad about town. This is the middle class, middle man, middle of the road, clerk who has undergone an abrupt metamorphosis from the constrains of his bourgeois humdrum. The moment merits marking; as we bask in revelation and comedy, Calvino, the descriptive master of both microcosm and macrocosm, ensures the world breathes into life with an intense – almost pixelated – ecstasy of “boundless Edens”.
 
From the exquisite idealisation of those early hours of the morning when he leaves the house at the top of the hill, Enrico the Adventurer descends back down to earth – or the office – “mad with love among the accountants” – with a bathetic crash. The unexpected illicit beauty and joy of the day is stripped away by thwarted communication of various kinds; and his fate is to wonder the “what if” of a one night stand. Often love can be realised when the moment passes – the orgasmic glory, a fleeting moment of tenderness never to be reclaimed, maybe never to be spoken of again once passed: all eventually fades into a “ secret pang of grief” and a closed account book of passion.

First published in Difficult Loves and Other Stories, 1953. Available in Vintage Classics, 2018
 
Jane Roberts is a freelance writer living in South Shropshire. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published in anthologies and journals including: Litro, Bare Fiction Magazine, The Lonely Crowd, Wales Arts Review.

‘A Love Match’ by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Chosen by Stuart Heath
 
While on leave in London, having survived the horrors of the Battle of the Somme, Justin finds solace in the arms of Celia, a young widow. Justin and Celia, however, are brother and sister. Living in a society that would be shocked by their love for each other, the couple go on to establish an outwardly conventional life together in a Northern English town. Included by Sylvia Townsend Warner in her 1966 collection A Stranger with a Bag (published in the US under the title Swans on an Autumn River), ‘A Love Match’ is a tale that permitted its author to comment indirectly on her own position as a lesbian in a long-term relationship in mid-20th Century England. Her prose here is, as nearly always, sharp & precise, yielding ample evidence of her wit and intelligence. Straightforwardly happy endings are as hard to come by in Warner’s fiction as they are in life, but this story of lovers never parted, and of a secret kept safe, comes closer to having one than most.

First published in A Stranger With a Bag and Other Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1966. Available to read online here, with a short introduction by Edith Pearlman
 
Stuart Heath is a middle-aged IT Consultant based in South Wales with no literary ambitions.

‘And Back Again’ by Eley Williams

Chosen by Susanna Crossman

‘And Back Again’ by Eley Williams is a DIY of how I’d like to declare my love this year, not in ”units, deeds, quests, behests” but through an imagined trip to Timbuktu staying in a cheap hotel with a blue painted face, because, as the 1960 Oliver West End musical song goes, “I’ll do anything. For you dear anything.”  As the narrator’s romantic daydream unfolds, mesmerizing details lure us to a Mali hotel where a fan “slices the air into swallowable rashers.” A lorry draws up outside, advertising La Vache Qui Rit, driven by a guy wearing Chelsea away strip smoking cloves-scented cigarettes. 

In ‘And Back Again’, language is dissected, turned inside out and upside down. Song lyrics thread through the story, and words are examined from all angles, metaphorically and visually: the word Timbuktu “has just the right mix of spiked and undulating letters…the verticals of boat masts riding easy waves…” Yet the conceptual nature of ‘And Back Again’ doesn’t override the vivid narrative and delicate poetry, as love will be declared on a morning “woken by the starlings…shouldering the dawn.” 

Following my reading, for Valentine’s Day, I have booked my flight to Timbuktu, and for the blue face paint am contemplating a Klein bleu. Thanks Eley!

First published in Attrib, Influx Press, 2017

Susanna Crossman is an Anglo-French prize-winning essayist and fiction writer. Her debut novel Dark Island is currently under submission. More here.

‘Souls Belated’ by Edith Wharton

Chosen by Catherine Taylor

“I didn’t know that we ran away to found a new system of ethics. I supposed it was because we loved each other.”

In Edith Wharton’s story, published in 1899, Old New York meets fin-de-siècle Europe as Americans Lydia Tillotson and Ralph Gannett, a younger writer for whom she has left her wealthy husband, run away together to the Continent – but instead of finding the freedom to pursue their relationship, society dictates that they pose as a married couple. We first encounter them on a train in Northern Italy, where all discussion around the ‘thing’ resting in a bag in the luggage rack is avoided – ‘the thing’ being  the divorce papers from Lydia’s husband which have caught up with them – and while Lydia is now free to marry her lover, the nub of this complex, emotional story is that she does not want to. 

She reasons that their love has opposed convention,  so why enter into a legal binding that defies, rather than defines, their feelings: “the secret fear of each that the other may escape, or the secret longing to work our way back gradually – oh very gradually – into the esteem of the people whose conventional morality we have always ridiculed and hated.”‘Souls Belated’ is one of Wharton’s earliest and finest stories. I first read it when I was selecting  short fiction by 19th-century women writers for a Folio Society collection. It is intensely emotional, but also pragmatic, and neatly skewers the hypocrisy of a society which thwarts natural happiness, and wears down real love, while upholding the sham of status or protocol, as resonant this Valentine’s day as it was 120 years ago. 

From Roman Fever and Other Stories, Virago Press, 1998

Catherine Taylor is a critic, editor and writer. She has been a judge on prizes from the Guardian First Book Award to the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate and is part of the team behind the Brixton Review of Books. You can read her full Personal Anthology and other selections here.

‘Flor’ by Natalia Borges Polesso, translated by Julia Sanches

Chosen by Joanna Harker-Shaw
 
There are words that perplex and fascinate us when we are children, words adults will not explain, but hush us when we echo them. This beautiful short story from Natalia Borges Polesso tells of a young narrator’s search for understanding, her innocence starkly contrasted by adult prejudice (a prejudice quickly learned as twelve year old Celoi explains with exasperation – do you like pink or blue, dolls or tag, boys or girls).

Flor herself is iconic, captivating, an indisputable denial to the adults claims that machorra is a kind of sickness.

Collected in Amora, Editora Dublinense, 2016. Translation from Amazon Crossing, 2020
 
Joanna Harker-Shaw is a poet, illustrator and writer. She is working towards a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.

‘A Spot of Love’ by Giles Gordon

Chosen by Nicholas Royle
 
In this three-page story by the late experimental novelist, short story writer, anthologist and agent, who would have been 80 this May, baby comes first, sitting unclaimed in the middle of a room full of women, wearing a nappy. The story proceeds to look for the baby’s mother, allocating that role to a young woman, an unhappy and unmarried company director, who then needs to be found a man. It is 1978, after all. The story is included in Gordon’s third collection, published in that same year. My copy contains a handwritten set of notes. Referring to the present story, the reader writes, ‘Does the inability to have “a single decent relationship with anyone” prevent one from having an identity?’

Published in The Illusionist and other fictions, Harvester, 1978
 
Nicholas Royle is the author of seven novels and three volumes of short fiction. He has edited twenty anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories (Salt). Reader in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met, he also runs Nightjar Press and is head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize. You can read his full Personal Anthology and other selections here.

‘A Rose for Emily’ by William Faulkner

Chosen by Hazel Boyle

She carried her head high enough–even when we believed that she was fallen. Miss Emily Grierson lives with her father in Jefferson, a town known for The Battle of Jefferson in the War of Northern Aggression. The mood is such that you can smell magnolias and trepidation below the surface. Miss Emily puts a foot wrong, so the townspeople believe, when, after her father’s death, she takes up with Homer Barron, a manual labourer and a Yankee! [pass me the sal volatile!] Not only that but she refuses to acknowledge that property taxes are required of a woman of her status, nor does she need to provide a reason for purchasing arsenic. Various cousins arrive to provide companionship/spying for the family, but Miss Emily is going to do what she is going to do. Spoiler: Miss Emily and Mr. Barron do not live happily ever after but they do stay in close contact.

This is a twisted tale that I first read in 8th grade when I thought I was a genius and invincible and that I would still never have a boyfriend. This spoke to my inner awkwardness and anger, but also gave me a creepy forbidden thrill that Emily just did it. “Don’t you know how amazing I am! Why aren’t you willing to stay.”

First published in The Forum, April 1930. Collected in the Collected Stories, Vintage, 2009

Hazel Boyle has a lifelong obsession with books and writing and works as an office manager to pay her husband’s library fines.

‘Captain Patch’ by T. F. Powys

Chosen by Michael Caines
 
Theodore Francis Powys – a younger brother of the now more celebrated novelist John Cowper Powys – has always seemed to me the more interesting of these two prolific brothers. (I think, or I kid myself perhaps, that I can see why people rave about JCP, but he usually leaves me cold.) One more attractive feature, perhaps, is T. F. Powys’s particular mastery in shorter works of fiction, such as his Fables (in which, for example, a church mouse talks theology with a holy crumb dropped from the communion table). ‘Captain Patch’ is a nice piece of silliness in which a tailor, in a coastal town, lives modestly but dreams of being great: “He rose to glory, he commanded, and he was obeyed”. In this precursor to James Thurber’s ‘Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ (1939), the fantasy life takes over for a while; there is indeed, on a comically modest scale, glory of a kind; but there is also love. Reading it again now, with great pleasure, some years after my Powys-mania was perhaps at its height, I think of ‘Captain Patch’ as a story of misplaced love, and a chance encounter making things right. Not everybody in a Powys story is so lucky. (Spoiler: that church mouse eats the crumb.)

First published in book form in Captain Patch: Twenty-one stories, Chatto & Windus, 1935
 
Michael Caines works at the Times Literary Supplement. He is writing a short book about literary prizes, and a slightly longer book about Brigid Brophy. He is founding editor of the Brixton Review of Books. You can read his full Personal Anthology and other selections here.

Introduction

I used to think I was someone who didn’t really like short stories. I mean I used to think that back when I was a dumbass, which I’ve obvs recovered from. Now when I look back I realise how very many short stories really affected me and held onto me over the years. Stories in books with scrawled writing of admiration beside them, or stories I can still vividly remember despite not having ever possessed a hard copy of my own. 

I think nowadays I am aware of the form’s tremendous potential for exploring blur, ambiguity and mood, for fucking with our heads, and almost betraying us as readers, in a way that would be difficult to do over the length of a whole novel. We allow a short story to mess with us. The shortness lets us both play, and also be played with. It can take a misreading and make it almost the entire subject of the tale. And over recent years, reading with a group who have no particular skills beyond basic literacy, I see that when a story really grapples with these kind of things brilliantly, it can take even the least experienced reader far, far from where they started, without requiring any more investment than an hour.

‘Porcupines at the University’ by Donald Barthelme

I somehow believe I can actually remember the feeling of standing in a bookshop in America and reading this story for the first time. How completely it blew my mind that Barthelme’s bonkersness was a genuinely possible way of doing the job of ‘writing stories’. It also made me sort of die laughing, having just spent a first year at university being party to the kind of anxious conversations the Dean has with his wife about ‘facilities’. And whether they have sufficient for ‘thousands and thousands’ of porcupines, currently marauding their way across the plains towards the university, and now on close incoming approach. “Maybe they won’t enroll”, says the Dean, trying to reassure himself: “Maybe they’re just passing through”. Honestly, Donald. That was enough for lifelong love. Porcupine emoji, heart emoji. 

First appeared in The New Yorker, April 1970 and available here. Collected in Forty Stories, Putnam, 1987. Also available online here

‘A Conversation With My Father’ by Grace Paley

Once a week I facilitate a reading group in some sheltered housing where we read one short story, out loud, together, stopping every paragraph or so to talk about what’s happening. It’s a therapeutic thing more than a critical or literary thing, but I still try to pick stories that work in both ways. The narrator is sitting with her father, 86 years old and confined to his bed for health reasons. The father says, I would like you to write a simple story, just once more, like Chekhov or Maupassant. And then they start to have a deeper, more critical conversation about what that means, with her attempting to do what he asks, using neighbourhood characters as her material. As she tells and retells the neighbour’s story to her father, adding and subtracting detail, the actual hard work of fiction in defining what we think of as ‘character’ is laid bare. After listening to the whole thing, one of our group member’s Polish carer, who’d come in to push her wheelchair and help her drink a cup of tea, piped up “This story is like a Matryoshka doll!!”. At which point you know the story has won: smiley face emoji. 

First published in the New American Review, 1972. Collected in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 1974, FSG, and Collected Stories, FSG/Virago, 1994. Hear Ali Smith read it on the Guardian podcast here

‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, by Jorge Luis Borges

I first read this when I was really young, way too young to understand that it wouldn’t be viewed by adults as part of a continuum with my other twelve-year-old reading, such as Joan Aiken and Isaac Asimov. And yet actually when I think about it, the story’s odd dark invention of an imaginary encyclopedia article that appears and disappears, an apparently unknown region of the world, hints of hidden brotherhoods, huge conspiracy and mysterious new planets, subject to the intervention of fate – those two authors are in some ways exactly where he belongs. 

First published in Argentinian journal, ‘Sur’, in 1940. First published in English, translated by James E. Irby, in the April 1961 issue of New World Writing and collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1961. Variously translated and collected since. Available online here

‘Launderama’ by Toby Litt

These days lots of us know that Toby Litt writes his fictional works in alphabetical order, but when I bought Adventures in Capitalism in 1996 he was still only on the A and the revelation of that stylistic flourish was well in the future. What I did immediately know from reading it was that I was encountering a witty intelligence that wanted to fuck with my head. Plus I knew the geography of Ealing so well that I could picture precisely the real-life location of the spooked launderette, its neighbouring Indian restaurant AND funeral directors. This excellent tale of a wash with a ghostly difference, reread this 2020 morning, still makes me go OOOOH at the very end. 

First published in ‘Adventures in Capitalism’, 1996 and available online here