‘In Sight of the Lake’ by Alice Munro

Alice Munro has written about the world in which she lives so many times, but this story from late in her life tackles the very real muddle of being old, so weirdly that it almost seems like science fiction. An ordinary story of being slightly lost in southwest Ontario is increasingly tinged with disorienting, blurry oddness, ending in what feels for me like tragedy. And the story itself, the prose style, has something of a reality where words are coming unattached to things, and familiar places are losing familiarity. Real and unreal, and the way they can coexist in the life of a confused old person. I want to put sad face emoji.

First published in Granta 118, Winter 2012, and available online for subscribers here. Collected in Dear Life, Chatto & Windus/McClelland & Stewart, 2012

‘The Private Life’ by Henry James

NO ONE DOES A SPECTRAL PRESENCE LIKE HENRY JAMES! There are such a posse of good ones to choose from, but this story fascinates me. A group of creative friends are holidaying in Switzerland together: “We talked of London, face to face with a great bristling, primeval glacier”. The social life of the party is dominated by Clarence “Clare” Vawdrey, an excellent raconteur. However, does he find the time to actually write anything, the group wonders? (It’s like the ultimate short story for anyone who thinks their favourite writer spends too much time on social media.) Then, our narrator has a chance encounter in a corridor, which makes him suspect that Vawdrey’s ‘true’ self may have unsuspected hidden skills. Funny, slightly spooky, and enlightening about the weird ambivalence of the creative life. Henry James emoji. There is one right?

First published in The Atlantic Monthly, April 1892. Collected in the Everyman Collected Stories Vol 2. Available online here

‘To All Their Dues’ by Wendy Erskine

In ‘To All Their Dues’, Mo has opened her own beauty treatment room, precariously starting out and trying to make ends meet, before finding out there’s a hidden cost she hasn’t bargained for. A wonderful starting point, but the story becomes so much deeper, as Mo runs through in her memory the previous version of herself she is striking out to escape from: working in a call centre giving “mystical advice” in sometimes heart-breaking circumstances, only one step away from answering the sex lines. And the same goes for the next characters we encounter. Everyone in the story is trying to run away from what haunts them, no matter how weirdly violent or utterly straightforward they seem. I loved that.

First published in Sweet Home, Stinging Fly, 2018/Picador, 2019 and available online here

‘Grandparenting’, by John Updike

Gosh John Updike divides people. He certainly does like to describe a woman’s breasts. On the other hand, for me, more than any other writer I can think of, he has put into words the intimate experience of being a parent – waking a sleeping child up to hold them over a toilet for a last-thing-at-night wee, for example. “Grandparenting” is the final instalment in the stories of the Maples, a couple who Updike returned to in fiction many times over the course of his and their lives, their marriage, child-rearing, divorce, remarriage, and then, at last, becoming grandparents. In this story, their oldest daughter, Judith, is living in Hartford, and both parents plan to be at the hospital for the actual moment of the birth. Richard’s second wife, Ruth, is deeply sceptical and drily scathing: “Let your poor daughter alone. It’s taken her ten years to get over the terrible upbringing you two gave her.” But, Richard protests, if he stays, and only Joan, his ex-wife, goes, with her respective second husband, the baby “will think Andy’s the grandfather. The kid will get – what’s the word? – imprinted.And yet the truth is that Richard remembers Judith’s own birth vividly, and cannot imagine not being there. In the moment of considering his daughter becoming a mother, he is filled with a rush of memories of being her father, from the first moment he held her onwards. The tenderness of Updike’s description of being what has this week been labelled a “girl daddy”, is exquisite. But the comedy continues. Joan still cannot tell whether Richard is joking; he and his former wife sit awkwardly on narrow hospital chairs “to avoid touching rumps”. When Judith finally gets moved to a delivery room, Joan sends her ex- and current husbands together to a waiting area, which provides many further awkward and touching moments. The Superbowl is about to start: “Mind if I turn on the TV?” Richard asks, naughtily, “we’re missing some great commercials”, before wondering what Andy is like in bed, and how long Joan had been having an affair with this man before he realised. This tense, hopeful moment of waiting for a new presence, a new being, to make its mark on the world, is captured absolutely. This story always makes me cry in more than one place, but I won’t give the WHOLE thing away.’

First published in The New Yorker, Feb 14, 1994 and available to subscribers here. Collected in The Maples Stories, Everyman Pocket Classics, 2009

‘The Mary’ by J. Robert Lennon

100 tiny stories in this collection, most doing the work of a far larger piece by some less skilful writer. In ‘The Mary’, which doesn’t even cover a page, a young narrator tells how one spring he made a thing of his daily back-and-forth walk to a “menial office job”, enjoying looking into backyards and “imagining the lives of the people whose houses I passed”. One garden has a large “weatherbeaten” statue of the Virgin Mary, on an outside table, and so our walking worker begins to imagine the kind of family who would have such an ornament: “pious in a rough-edged practical way, unconcerned with the trappings of high-minded, pompous religiosity”. When summer comes, he is shocked to see the statue has been moved in favour of a picnic umbrella and beer cans, then suddenly he realises he has been seeing a Virgin Mary where there has only been a sunshade all along. The sense of shocked readjustment is rendered. His single moment’s sense of the scales falling from his eyes extends to the “humiliating waste of time” at his work, too: “It was not long before I quit”. Perfect modern American Chekhov moment, there.

Published in Pieces for the Left Hand, Granta, 2005

‘Videotape’ by Don DeLillo

In my copy of this, a story about a murder accidentally videotaped by a child, which has become famous beyond the names of any of the people concerned, which entirely prefigures every debate about real-life stuff being on the internet, at the top of it I’ve written, though I have no memory of doing it: “To me this is conceptual art at its finest & anyone who disagrees can fuck off.”

Whatcha gonna do emoji. It’s Don. Believe it. Shrugs.

First published in Harper’s, December 1994, and eventually incorporated into Underworld, Scribner/Picador, 1997. Available online here

‘Unchosen Love’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

“Sex, for everybody, on every world, is a complicated business”, wrote Ursula, and she wrote a body of stories exploring sex and gender by taking it to other worlds where things are entirely different from our own, and yet strangely familiar. Sometimes I want to laugh at the strange concepts she comes up with, and the ersatz scifi ‘foreign planet’ names; but mostly I can spend a long time wondering what she is really telling us about fidelity, trust, intimacy, sex, love and relationships. This story asks: what does it mean if one person loves more than another? And how much is the relationship worth in comparison to the people within it? What does it mean if a marriage begins with a dishonesty?

First appeared in Amazing Stories, Fall 1994. Collected in The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, HarperCollins/Gollancz, 2002/3

‘Snow’ by Ann Beattie

I think we are always led somehow to imagine that the big fancy meta deconstructors of fictionality are men, and women just get on with quietly telling stories, but Beattie absolutely does both here, in a bravura performance on a piece of ivory two inches wide. Somehow in two pages she gives the whole life cycle of a house, a shared relationship, a community. It seems at first like a rather random collection of fragments until you begin to see the quiet hints tucked within the engraving. “People forget years and remember moments”: as long as I live I’ll remember that perfect Beattie line. Book emoji, heart emoji, book emoji, heart emoji, book emoji.

First published in Where You’ll Find Me and Other Stories, Linden/Simon & Schuster, 1986

Introduction to a Maltese Personal Anthology

Jonathan has allowed us to do something a bit different for this Personal Anthology. We’re going to make recommendations, but it’s highly unlikely that you will be able to read them for the most part, and that’s the point of our selections.

Both of us first met at an English PEN event on multilingualism. It’s quite rare to come across another Maltese or part-Maltese person, even in London, that it always feels exciting when you do. We met for coffee and talked about a whole range of things, including UK publishing, translation, Maltese culture and politics, and what it’s like to be a Maltese person living and working in London (Kat) and a half-Maltese person born and raised in the UK and only speaking English (Jen).

We met up a couple of more times, and then the London Book Fair came around. This year, there was an event on Maltese literature in translation as part of the programming in the Literary Translation Centre at the Fair, which was a follow-up to one the previous year with Maltese poets Immanuel Mifsud and Walid Nabhan. This year’s event was a discussion between Maltese writers Loranne Vella, Lou Drofenik and Antoine Cassar moderated by Jen, and the discussion centred on the uniqueness of the Maltese language and literature, how little is known about Malta and particularly contemporary Malta in the English-speaking world, and how Maltese writers at times resist translation through multilingualism or by keeping their stories focused on the local and national.

The event galvanised our desire to work on a solution to the lack of Maltese literature available in the English-speaking world, and over the last few months we’ve putting the plans in place to start a small press to publish Maltese poetry, fiction and essays in English. Though our plans aren’t quite finalised, we’re working on an anthology of Maltese writing and have plans to do events and partner up with other organisations keen to support Maltese literature in transltion. We also want to meet and work with young writers in Malta directly through writing and literary translation workshops and talks on the UK publishing scene to help make connections and start a real collaborative dialogue between our different literary scenes.

It’s good to remind ourselves that authors we now cherish and celebrate, like Han Kang and Olga Tokarczuk, were completely unknown in the English-speaking world a few years ago, and have gained prominence through translation. Our next favourite author could be waiting for us in another language – including Maltese.

Here below are Kat’s recommendations of a selection of poems, short stories and novels by Maltese writers we think should be better known outside of Malta – some of whom write solely in Maltese, some who also write in English, and a few who have been translated into English and a number of other languages. Hopefully, we’ll soon be able to recommend a whole new anthology of Maltese stories.

‘Il-bandli’ by Marie Gion

Għax id-drogi sbieħ (‘because drugs are beautiful’) is one of my favourite collections of poems ever written in Maltese. Perhaps because it is one of the few works of literature that really captures what it was like to grow up in Malta for my generation. And because the poems possess a frankness and lack of self-consciousness that is so often present in Maltese writing. The collection tells of the ennui, desire, love, heartache and loss experienced by a group of youths, framed through the first-person narrative voice. Their lives are coloured by the highs and lows of drug-taking – a subject that is handled with ambivalence throughout. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read and reread these poems. I keep going back to one in particular, ‘il-bandli’ (‘the playground’). This is because it feels like a personal memory; the boredom, the references to specific places and things, transport me to a past not necessarily my own, but one I recognise intimately. Something shared and yet, unmistakably, Maltese.

from għax id-drogi sbieħ, self-published, 2013

‘Larinġa/Orange’ by Maria Grech Ganado

This poem is from a collection I picked up at a poetry showcase as a teenager, at a time when I was desperately filtering the local literary landscape for writers I could feel an affinity with. Being bilingual, this meant writers who also wrote and were published in English. Maria Grech Ganado is one of those writers I discovered then, and whose writing has stayed with me always. ‘Orange’ is published alongside its Maltese equivalent, ‘Larinġa’ in this collection. It’s a short, anecdotal poem that recalls a moment of intimacy between two lovers who are ‘sitting together on the kitchen step / peeling oranges’. The literal orange is transformed by language into a vehicle for exploring the erotic tension between the couple. I particularly love the repetition of the word ‘felli’ in the Maltese version, which, when read aloud, has a rhythmic pattern that is missing in its English equivalent, ‘segments’.

From Memory Rape, Inizjamed and Midsea Books, 2005

‘Sleeping Woman, Jilted’ by Abigail Ardelle Zammit

This poem reminds me of my conversations with Abigail on the possibilities of writing beyond the boundaries of received stereotypes of national identity, when she was my creative writing tutor at the University of Malta. The prehistoric clay statuette known as the ‘Sleeping Woman’ has become such a ubiquitous icon of the Maltese Islands. Drop into any souvenir shop and you’re bound to run into her in one form or another, as a fridge magnet, postcard, bottle opener – you name it. ‘Sleeping Woman, Jilted’ begins with the blessing ‘I wish you many lovers’ and goes on to carve out the living form of the goddess of fertility in a series of images that reminds me of Carol Ann Duffy’s reclaiming of the female perspective in Standing Female Nude. I consider it a quiet act of iconoclasm against the more lazy, disingenuous explorations of Malteseness.

Longlisted for the 2015 Montreal Poetry Prize. Available online here

Passaport by Antoine Cassar

Antoine Cassar is a polymath with a fascinating relationship towards language and identity, having grown up in England, Malta, and lived and worked between Spain, Italy, France and Luxembourg. Passaport – a poem self-published in the format of an actual passport – is in fact an anti-passport. It reads as a manifesto in defence of universal citizenship, advocating for a frontier-free world. It was written originally in Maltese and has since been translated into over ten languages. The poem is even more relevant now than when it was first published – both here in the UK, but also in Malta, where citizenship has been commodified thanks to the ‘cash for passport scheme’ introduced by the government. In light of this, the poem is a refreshing read, if somewhat utopian in vision, celebrating humanity above nationhood, freedom above borders, love above hate.

Self-published, 2009

‘Sandra’ by Clare Azzopardi

Clare Azzopardi’s short stories are full of humour and irony, with a surprise touch of horror introduced at the coda that reminds me of the stories of Poe or Sheridan Le Fanu. ‘Sandra’ is the first in a collection of eight stories, each named after a different woman. On the outside, these are ordinary women living very ordinary lives. Azzopardi, however, lets us in on their interior consciousnesses, which turn out to be anything but ordinary. Sandra is a young woman with a penchant for keys and lies. From a young age, she understands the power she can gain over people by leaving keys lying around to pique their curiosity. This leads her to ensnare friends, parents, lovers. She gets a huge thrill from these acts of subversion, which always end in misadventure. Like, for instance, losing her job as a car salesperson after luring her male colleague into stealing off the with the keys to the showroom Mercedes that ends in them crashing the car. I’m drawn to this story for its quirkiness and irreverence – the way it tiptoes nimbly between light and dark, like an X-rated fairy tale for adults.

from Kullħadd Ħalla Isem Warajh, Merlin, 2014