‘Art, For Fuck’s Sake’ by Leone Ross

Come Let Us Sing Anyway is one of my favourite collections and I could have chosen any of the stories from it, but I’ve decided not to shy away from erotica here. When any writer asks about sex scenes I direct them to Ross. This story in particular is sensual, sexy, powerful and beautifully written. “We have no co-ordination. It doesn’t matter. It’s okay. We’re purring. Cleaning whiskers.” I particularly love this description of orgasm – “I’m up the ladder. I am at the top of the fucking ladder, I am falling over the ladder.” The sex scene comes late in the story and it is graphically described, but it never feels voyeuristic. It’s triumphant, as we witness the woman who has been celibate for a year find a joyful sexual encounter on her own terms. 

first published in Brown Sugar 2: Great One Night Stands – A Collection of Erotic Black Fiction, Simon & Schuster, 2002. Collected in Come Let Us Sing Anyway and Other Stories, Peepal Tree Press, 2017

‘Following’ by Irenosen Okojie

I was fortunate to attend a writing workshop run by Okojie a few years ago. A lovely, friendly, encouraging teacher. I was sort of relaxing into myself when she started to read an excerpt from ‘Following’ and I sat right up. How could I not? “I stared at the tiny slit in your miniature penis, growing it with my mouth.”
 
I still don’t know how to categorise this story, one where the protagonist taunts and tortures a tiny man she has plucked out of her garden after using a resurrection spell. It’s violent, it’s graphic, it’s not an easy read. But it’s enthralling. It’s a great example of pushing ourselves to dark places, of seeing how far you could go as a writer, and then taking it just a little bit further. 

First published in Speak Gigantular, Jacaranda, 2016

‘1-800-FAT-GIRL’ by Emily Geminder

I love coming-of-age stories, and if something weird is happening in them, all the better. This is a very short story, that begins with a gang of pre-pubescent girls making calls to an unknown entity from a phone box. “They were ten, flat-chested in bathing suits. Secrets smooth as sea glass.” The descriptions are spot on, we are right there with the giggling girls, playing pranks and laughing about nothing. Then, as they grow and drift, we veer into ever more surreal territory, and the language with it, until the girls are “fleshless, formless, their hearts flung open.” I love the swift transformations here, and how much this story achieves in so little space. 

first published in American Short Fiction, 2017, collected in Dead Girls and Other Stories, Dzanc Books 2017, and available to read online here

‘The Husband Stitch’ by Carmen Maria Machado

I almost didn’t include this. So much has been said about it already, but this is a personal anthology. In October 2014, when this was published, I was heavily pregnant with my first child. I saw the story being passed around and praised but I knew from the title that I wouldn’t be able to handle it. It was a good decision. When I did read it, maybe a year later I cried, I cringed, I drew breath. I remember swearing and thinking – this is what writing can do. None of this should work – the weaving in and out of stories and times, the interruptions directing or addressing the reader, the melding of fairy tale with realism. But it does. And it’s perfect. 

first published in Granta, October 2014, collected in Her Body and Other Stories, Graywolf Press, 2017, and available to read online here

‘Half Sick of Shadows’ by Kirsty Logan

Another collection where I truly could have chosen any story, but this one spoke to me the most. A couple arrive at Camelot theme park with their young daughter with the intention of leaving her there. The sense of dread as I read this was also joined by a sense of understanding and recognition. This story, then, is a painful read for me. It felt as if Logan had seen the darkest thoughts in my mind and plucked them out onto the page. It makes me think of every time I’ve dismissed my daughter when she wanted to play, every time I’ve just wanted to be left alone, every time I’ve thought I can’t cope with this anymore. “- Was she really that bad? Maybe if we’d tried harder with her. Everyone else manages it.”I’m not sure I’m supposed to relate to the cruel parents in this story but I do. In my darkest days, deep in post-natal depression, would I have left my own daughter in a magical abandoned theme park if someone had given me the option? The answer to that, as the title of the collection alludes to, is not something I would dare speak in daylight. 

first published in Things We Say in the Dark, Harvill Secker, 2019

A Kafka Personal Anthology

Editor’s note: Toby’s 12 stories are gathered as a single entry in the Personal Anthology archive so as not to skew the author statistics. Only German publication details are given. The stories are available in English in many different translations and publications.

I am going to try and write about Kafka subjectively, without making generalizations that aren’t personal. It would be a generalization to say, ‘There have been too many generalizations about Kafka’, so I will just say, ‘I’ve read a lot of generalizations about Kafka.’

It wasn’t until I was twenty, and living in Prague, that I read Kafka. I’d finished a whole English literature degree without doing more than read essays (generalizations) about him. Before Prague, Kafka had been – for me – someone cool people read, i.e., the boy who sat beside me in third form maths, both of us bottom of the class, who had a hardback copy of The Castle. He told me it was ‘very funny’, before putting it away. His father subscribed to The Morning Star and smoked roll-ups. Theirs was the kind of house which had Kafka in it. Our house had Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet.

‘Before the Law’ (First published as ‘Vor dem Gesetz’ in Selbstwehr in 1915. Collected in Ein Landartz, Wolff, 1919)

‘An Imperial Message’ (First published as ‘Eine kaiserliche Botschaft’ in Selbstwehr in 1919. Collected in Ein Landartz.)

I’m going to take these two sort-of stories together. I know they’ve been ripped out of longer pieces, and aren’t necessarily standalone. But I met them as stories. The pale blue Penguin Collected Stories of Franz Kafka was the first edition of him I ever owned. The translations are the early ones, by Willa and Edwin Muir, Tania and James Stern, and Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. I still like these best. Kafka, in German, may be scratchier, or more bureaucratic; these translations seem to me to have a fitting chunkiness. They are immersive, and they ache.

‘Before the Law’ is one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever read. It does something Kafka often does – distort time. A man arrives at a gate, and waits there, hoping for justice, talking to the gatekeeper. A lifetime passes, or the duration of the universe. The story ends without consolation. “‘No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.’”

To balance this comes ‘An Imperial Message’, which begins in terror and ends in sentiment. ‘Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.’ This is unlike the Kafka I know from elsewhere. He’s almost turned into Wordsworth. There is no certain knowledge, in this dream – I suppose that’s an anxiety. The dream could be merely a dream of consolation, of communication. It is less sure than the fact that the gate in ‘Before the Law’ was made only for the man who never entered it. But, deluded or not, ‘An Imperial Message’ reaches a lyric calm. That’s not a state the remainder of Kafka puts me in. I don’t bite my fingernails, yet reading him makes me feel like gnawing. I constantly feel ‘I don’t get it’ – even whilst I’m aware, particularly with the parables, that they are constructed to be ungettable.

I’m not going to be perverse, so the next two choices are automatic.

‘The Metamorphosis’ (first published as Die Verwandlung, Wolff, 1915)

When I first read ‘The Metamorphosis’, I was concentrating on Gregor. The greatest change was his: man to bug. When I reread it just now, it seemed to be much more about the Samsa family. For a story that is fantasy, it’s notable that – given a bit of historical triangulation (wages, rents) – you could very accurately reconstruct the Samsa’s accounts book. Their descent from the bourgeoisie to the working class takes place in lurches but Kafka itemizes the details of each new, lower level. It is Grete, Gregor’s sister, who is the suffering romantic individual.

‘In the Penal Colony’ (First published as In der Strafkolonie, Wolff, 1919)

This story changes each time I read it. At one point, I thought it was the greatest of the twentieth century – with ‘The Metamorphosis’ at number 2. Now, I find it harder and harder to get through. (And ‘The Metamorphosis’ is back on top.) Kafka’s relation to the reader here seems to be a sadistic. In other stories, he is suffering with us. If there is an unjust divine order, Franz is going to fall victim to it just as inevitably as we are. ‘In the Penal Colony’, with its stylistic assurance, seems to gloat. The prose wears a uniform that, if it isn’t neat any more, was manufactured by a state capable of making neat uniforms. In order to render his similar world bearable, Graham Greene scruffed up the writing in The Power and the Glory. Kafka seems to show himself as up to recording or inventing the unbearable – and that, at least the last time I read it, makes the story seem bizarrely chipper about the general calamity of it all. Kafka is on the side of Yawheh; matey with Him. But I’m getting close to generalizing. And next time I read the story, Kafka will probably seem as abject as Gregor Samsa with the apple in his back.

‘Investigations of a Dog’ (First published as ‘Forschungen eines Hundes’, posthumously, in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1931)

This is the Kafka story I love most. A few years ago, I did a report for Radio 3’s The Verb – hosted by Ian McMillan – on novels and stories with dog-narrators. I knew in advance, before looking into the various dog detective novels, that ‘Investigations of a Dog’ would be the best. The narrator, like most of Kafka’s narrators, is in decline. “Also my researches have fallen into desuetude, I relax, I grow weary, I trot mechanically where once I raced into the question: ‘Whence does the earth procure this food?’” The erasure of humankind from the doggy world is comic and a good lesson in decentring. Deleuze and Guattari’s book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature is brilliant on Kafka’s writing about animals. It’s the kind of angle J.M. Coetzee constantly rips off.

‘Description of a Struggle’ (First published in fragmentary form in Hyperion, 1908 and 1909, and in Betrachtung, Rowohlt Verlag, 1912. Published in full, posthumously, as ‘Beschreibung eines Kampfes’ in the collection of that name, 1936.)

This was one of the last stories by Kafka I read. I think I’d heard someone saying it wasn’t very good. It’s early, and not typical. But here is a paragraph that stunned me: 

It’s the beauty of girls altogether. Often when I see dresses with manifold pleats, frills, and flounces smoothly clinging to beautiful bodies, it occurs to me that they will not remain like this for long, that they will get creases that cannot be ironed out, dust will gather in the trimmings too thick to be removed, and that no one will make herself so miserable and ridiculous as every day to put on the same precious dress in the morning and take it off at night. And yet I see girls who are beautiful enough, displaying all kinds of attractive muscles and little bones and smooth skin and masses of fine hair, and who appear every day in the same natural fancy dress, always laying the same face in the same palm, on returning late from a party, this face stares out at them from the mirror, worn out, swollen, already seen by too many people, hardly worth wearing any more.

The whole story reminds me of the sequence of Amadeus where Mozart’s Don Giovanni is being travestied in the Theater An der Wiesen, and everything is going weirdly wonderful. Entrances are made through the walls and the ceiling.

I also see Kafka through the films of The Quay Brothers – their dusty, magical stop-motion animations. If you haven’t encountered any of them, watch one right now. If the Quays were to adapt anything of Kafka’s, I think this story might be possible; the better known ones might be too image-trampled. I know, from DVD extras videos, that what they obsess over most are Kafka’s letters and diaries.

‘A Hunger Artist’ (first published as ‘Ein Hungerkünstler’ in Die neue Rundschau, 1922. Collected in Ein Hungerkünstler, published posthumously by Verlag Die Schmiede, 1924)

I can imagine this being many people’s favourite Kafka story, particularly writers. I’ve admired it more than I’ve loved it, because I am wary of the delight in suffering it exhibits.

‘A Hunger Artist’ seems to be one of a group of what I’d call riff stories. Not quite what the NME (borrowing from the band Alberto y lost trios Paranoias, who had a hit with a song of this title) used to call ‘Heads Down, No-Nonsense, Mindless Boogie’, but definitely connected – in my mind – to the 4/4 motorik of the band Neu! The story chooses a direction and goes in it; there isn’t a huge amount of dynamics or modulation. Degeneration reaches a kind of steady stage, even though we know degeneration’s what it is. Until the end. Which feels optional. Here, in the Hunger Artist’s words, “I always wanted you to admire my fasting”, I detect a little self-pity. Or an appeal to the reader’s own self-pity. At the very least, it’s not a merciless story, like ‘In the Penal Colony’. And I feel I can come to the end of it – it doesn’t fade out into something ineffably recursive, like a lock groove slowly turning into William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops.

‘The Bucket Rider’ (first published as ‘Der Kübelreiter’ in Prager Presse, 1921. Collected in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer)

This is Kafka at his most folky. He seems to shake hands with Marc Chagall, mid-air. And together they agree that fantastical weightlessness, though surely one of humankind’s commonest desires, is still a weirdness worth enacting. Both do flying in a beautifully matter-of-fact way.

A completely separate thought about Kafka, but one that’s come to obsess me, is also simple: I don’t believe he would have written any of his stories the way he did had he lived in a centrally heated, double-glazed house. His works seem to me those of a man who woke up, most mornings, in a very cold room. To venture out of bed was to be stripped of heat. The world meets man with coldness. But Kafka, I think, appreciated this. In his writings, chill is usually clarity; fug is sordid and obfuscatory. (I think Dickens, who Kafka sometimes felt he was only copying, agreed with this.) Maybe there are exceptions; maybe I’m just wrong. Kafka’s characters seem to come closest to a state of rightness when they are alone beneath icy stars.

‘The Wish to be a Red Indian’ (first published as ‘Wunsch, Indianer zu werden’ in Betrachtung)

I can include this in full, so I will: 

If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would already be gone.

Every time, this story does pulls a vanishing act on me; every time, I’m amazed. I re-read the shorter short stories most often: ‘The Truth about Sancho Panza’ and ‘The Silence of the Sirens’. This one, I read almost every time I pick up the book.

In the last novel I published, Patience, the main character – who is called Elliott and who is almost completely paralysed – imagines himself galloping towards the horizon like Kafka’s ‘Red Indian’. I’m pretty sure this story is Elliott’s start point.

‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk’ (first published as ‘Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse’ in Ein Hungerkünstler)

Being of that generation, I can’t read the title of this story without thinking of the children’s TV show Bagpuss (1974) and the ‘Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Organ’ that appeared in one episode.

‘Josephine’ is a story that I know I don’t understand, and probably will never understand, but– partly for that reason – it feels as if it still lies ahead of me. There’s something folky about it that a great deal of reading around the subject might clarify. But I can’t understand why, at this point in his life and in the decline of his body, Kafka wanted to write this story. Is it a return to the maternal? Is it about a distorted childhood myth? No idea.

‘The Great Wall of China’ (First published, posthumously, as ‘Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer’ in Der Morgen and collected in the eponymous collection)

In 2003, I went to China, and visited the Great Wall. I was travelling with the British Council. Our guide, and minder, taught us a phrase in Mandarin: “He who has not gone to the Great Wall is not a true man.” In the original, when I pronounced it, it sounded much gruffer than this; a bit like a coughing fit. (Bù dào cháng chéng fēi hǎo hàn.) I was thinking about Kafka all through the time I was there. Rather than read guidebooks about China, in advance of going, I had decided to learn as much of the language as I could, from a Teach Yourself book, and to read Kafka’s Chinese writings. I took a copy of his stories to the Wall, and snatched time to read a few paragraphs in tribute. We were on a guided tour up the most touristy bit of the Wall. But Kafka still seemed as good as any Western guide to China is likely to be. Of course, Kafka never went anywhere near China.

‘The Burrow’ (first published, posthumously, as ‘Der Bau’, in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer)

Of all Kafka’s stories, this is the one that has had the biggest influence on my writing. I re-read it whilst writing Patience. I came up with a whole theory of writing, most of which I’ve forgotten. It was about some stories not narrating experiences but being them. Part of the experience, with ‘The Burrow’, is extreme frustration and claustrophobia. Like Tarkovsky, you wish for some parts of it to be over – enough! This has gone on long enough! Then you break through into a new appreciation of time, and you wish the whole thing could extend to the eternal horizon. Something like that. Something like Patience.

In this way, Kafka’s later writing is zazen – the Soto Zen practice of just sitting. Just sitting with infernal leg pains, sexual fantasies, financial anxieties, imaginary and real enemies chorusing away. Just sitting with the weight of the body. This isn’t positively pleasurable, until just the repeated doing of it becomes so.

Few readers will enjoy ‘The Burrow’ – enjoy enjoy. But I see it as a way forward for literary writing – one that a number of writers have undertaken: Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Clarice Lispector, Claire-Louise Bennett. Not coincidentally, these are all favourite writers of mine.

‘The New Year’s Tree’ by Mikhail Zoshchenko, translated by Ross Ufberg

Mikhail Zoshchenko’s story was a childhood favourite, and, rereading it more than thirty years after I’d originally read it, I find myself surprised anew by the turns it takes. It opens with the description of a tree, decorated for the holiday with “beads, bunting, lanterns, walnuts, pastilles, and Crimean apples […] and underneath the tree were presents.” As a child, I was mesmerized by the idea of a tree decorated with edible items: that tradition had all but disappeared in the 1980s. 
 
Brother Minka and sister Lyolya begin eating the sweets off the tree, though knowing that they’re doing something against the house rules. Soon, their desire for sweets escalates. “If you took another bite from the apple, then I won’t stand on ceremony anymore and I’m going to eat a third pastille and in addition I’m going to take this bonbon cracker as a souvenir,” Lyolya says to her brother. The main turn of this story comes after the guests arrive and the children’s mother discovers that the gifts she had meant for the visiting children have been destroyed. The conflict escalates further, from being between children to being between parents, and the moment when the mother takes offence at her son being called “a bandit” (or “a brigand” in this translation) and lashes out at the other parent was deeply satisfying to me as a young reader. 
 
The mother chooses to drop the rules of polite behaviour, and sides with her children against the visiting families. Today we talk about attachment theories and unconditional love between parents and children: these ideas were far from mainstream in the Soviet Union. To me, as a small child and even as a teen, this story was the ultimate wish-fulfilment fantasy. Not only do the kids get to gorge on sweets, but also their mother supports them with unconditional love – all done with humour and merriment. Happy New Year!

Collected in A Very Russian Christmas: The Greatest Russian Holiday Stories of All Time, New Vessel Press, 2016

Chosen by Olga Zilberbourg. Olga English-language debut, Like Water and Other Stories was published in September 2019 (WTAW Press). She is the author of three Russian-language collections of stories.

‘The Story of Babushka’ retold by Arthur Scholey

I had a book of Christmas stories as a child, and the one I loved most was the story of Babushka, the Russian Father – or Mother – Christmas. (I have no idea if it’s really Russian or some retro-fitted Christian interpretation of the wooden doll character.)

In the story, Babushka is too busy cooking and cleaning to go with the three Kings to meet the infant Jesus, but later regrets the decision, and follows after the kings, carrying a basket of toys for the baby. When she reaches Bethlehem, she finds she is too late and they have already left – but she carries on searching, “for time means nothing in the search for things that are real”. And every time she passes a house with a sleeping child, and hears of “good deeds”, she leaves a toy, just in case, and carries on looking for the Christ Child. 

As a child, it just seemed like a lovely fairy tale: re-reading it as an adult, I can’t get through it without crying (it’s the same with The Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant). Managing to combine Father Christmas with the Nativity, and a hint of Martha and Mary in there – the choice between domestic drudgery and the calling to something higher – makes for a very tear-jerking combination. But with a happy ending for the children because they wake up to find a toy by their bed… as long as they’ve been good. 

Published in The Lion Christmas Book, ed. Mary Batchelor, Lion Hudson, 1984

Chosen by Alison Gibbs. Alison is an English graduate turned advertising exec turned local community worker and folklore & fairy tale enthusiast.

‘The Junky’s Christmas’ by William Burroughs

I think I first came across this story in the Serpent’s Tail collection The Junky’s Christmas and other Yuletide Stories, edited by Elisa Segrave. Later I hear Burroughs himself read it, over a musical collage, on the album Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales by William S. Burroughs and Disposable Heroes of Hypocrisy. It tells the story of a Junky trying to score a hit on Christmas Day, but it’s Christmas Day, and nobody wants to have to deal with a wheedling junky. I went on to record my own spoken word version, where I played the narrator and my late and much missed friend, and Sheffield legend, Mozaz played the junky. We played it out on Christmas day on Radio Sheffield, bookended by Girls Aloud and The Sugababes, as I sat in the radio studio with my kids ripping open presents on the floor, and choosing the music. It’s a bittersweet, mostly bitter, story that I always think of at Christmas.

First published in Interzone, Viking, 1989. Currently a Penguin Modern Classic, 2009.

Chosen by Dan Sumption. Dan lives in Sheffield, and his first short story collection, To Scent but not To Hold, will be published in 2020 by Polyversity Press.

‘Tiger Bites’ by Lucia Berlin

It’s Christmas time in 1956 and Lou, a soon-to-be-single mother of toddler Ben has arrived in El Paso, Texas for a family reunion. Her glamorous cousin Bella Lynn picks her up from the train and informs her: “Your mama and my mama started drinking and fighting right off the bat. Mama went up on the garage roof and won’t come down. Your mother slit her wrists.” 

I knew as soon as I started reading Lucia Berlin’s ‘Tiger Bites’ that it was the Christmas Story for me. My Christmas memories are marked by neighbourhood violence, breakdowns, cold radiators, cash shortages, and a kind of squalor that we all wished would magically go away. ‘Tiger Bites’ takes place in a different time and place, but the trouble that eclipses Christmas in this story seemed so familiar to me that I wanted to claim Lucia Berlin as family when I read it. 

Lou is pregnant with a second child and her husband Joe has left her. Rather than finding solace among her family on the Southern US border, she’s persuaded to travel to Juarez, Mexico where, for $500 cash, she can obtain an abortion at a secret clinic. Her journey there and what she witnesses is terrifying. And yet, there’s also a kind of magic to the story. It’s not redemptive, but even as Lou observes and endures terrible things, she conveys what’s happening with humour and warmth. And the terrible things don’t destroy Lou; she keeps going.

First published in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015. Also available online at LitHub.

Chosen by Linda Mannheim. Linda is the author of three books of fiction, most recently This Way to Departures, a collection of stories about people who have left the places they consider home. Her work has appeared in Granta, Catapult Story, Ambit and other magazines. You can read her full Personal Anthology here.

‘The Sleep’ by Caitlin Horrocks

The snow came early that first year, and so heavy that when Albert Rasmussen invited the whole town over, we had to park around the corner from his unplowed street.

It starts small: one family in a hard-pressed midwestern town, declaring that there’s nothing to like once Christmas is over, chooses to sleep through the rest of winter. They save money, avoid homework, wake up slim and rested, years of worry smoothed from their faces. “‘I dreamed I was in Eden, but it was mine. My farm. I picked pineapples every day.’ Al Rasmussen had wintered in Eden, we thought. We started to feel a little like suckers.” 

The next year more families join in, then more again, starting earlier, waking later, until almost the whole community is sleeping throughout winter. Racoons move into abandoned buildings, the last hold-out dies alone in her wool coat and orthopedic shoes, TV crews film the wall of uncleared snow that hides the town, older children away at college wonder what to do with a Christmas they haven’t seen for years.

Caitlin Horrocks is a writer I admire hugely – I am always recommending her collection, This Is Not Your City, to anyone who will listen. With characters and detail that easily carry its symbolic freight, ‘The Sleep’ is both a compelling read and a subtle and lovely meditation on what-the-fuck it’s all about. When I reread it last week I was surprised to notice it’s told in the first person plural, and wondered if it had influenced me into that same choice in a recent story. If so, thank you Caitlin. 

First published as an Atlantic Fiction for Kindle download, 2010. Anthologised in Best American Short Stories 2011

Chosen by Jo Lloyd. Jo won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2019. Her short fiction has appeared in Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and the O Henry Prize Stories. She likes winter better than almost anything.

‘The Red Dress – 1946’ by Alice Munro

Alice Munro was a twin god of my late grandma’s literary universe, along with William Trevor, and as a teenager I always thought of both writers dismissively as being short, quiet and a bit boring. It turns out (of course) that the pizzazz of both lies in the sort of tiny detail a teenager skates rapidly over, but that will leave a fifty-year-old woman staring out the window for a good eight minutes feeling nauseous with recognition. 
 
‘The Red Dress – 1946’ has an insistently dress-making mum who reminded me of my own, always trying to poke me with pins in the construction of something that wasn’t QUITE as decadent as what I really wanted from a shop. This mother hovers, and tries to make a joke along the same lines as her child’s friend, and I cringed for the mom, but also for all of us who have tried a bit too hard with a teenager. 
 
The dress, the narrator and her friend are off to a Christmas school dance, pictured in painful colour, and there is a real sense of the traumatic moment-by-moment potential for rejection in being a thirteen-year-old girl. I read it out loud with a weekly group I facilitate, each taking it in turns, and there were conversations about high school dances in 70s Ireland, teenage heartbreak, and the sheer shame, aged 13, of acknowledging you have a mother at all. MERRY CHRISTMAS!
 
First published in Montrealer Magazine, 1965, and collected in Dance of the Happy Shades, 1968. It is available online at Narrative magazine.

Chosen by Emma Townshend. Emma is a journalist and writer and runs a book Instagram @anicegreenleaf 

‘The Christmas Shopping’ by James Kelman

Like much of Kelman’s fiction ‘The Christmas Shopping’ (written in the demotic Glaswegian dialect of the author’s hometown) begins in medias res, plunging the reader if not so much into the heart of the action, then at least somewhere towards the fag-end of a rambling, apparently inconsequential anecdote: 

That obelisk thing I was talking about, it was lying stranded down the back of Argyle Street.

As observed by the story’s unnamed narrator, the obelisk thing (its description is later refined to “more like a Celtic Cross”) causes minor waves of interest in the steady stream of Christmas shoppers. A couple of men from one of the local bars give it a cursory glance before moving on (“one of them was fucking pished anyway”); a group of teenagers laugh at the object, possibly contemplating mischief (“Teenagers, you’re never quite sure,”); a businessman (“a posh cunt with bowler and brolly”) seems less annoyed at an obstacle in his path, more at the unexpected disturbance in the natural order of things; while an elderly lady is so intrigued that she decides to take a closer look, free from any hint of embarrassment (“You notice that a lot about old folk; seen it and done it”). Finally, a young woman in a red hat approaches the obelisk. Up until now the narrator has been a largely unknown quantity (though the reader will have been able to glean a pretty decent thumbnail sketch of his character from his attitude towards the various passers-by). But the arrival of the woman in the red hat moves the narrator to action, bringing the story to a close which, at first glance, is as innocuous as its beginning:

I felt like asking her if she fancied going for a coffee or a cup of tea or something but then I noticed something in her face when she sees me so I says to myself, Fuck that for a game, and I just crosses ower into Ingram Street and I carried along the way I was going. Some women are funny, I wisni taking any chances.

 At just over two pages in length, ‘The Christmas Shopping’ a beautifully succinct example of Kelman’s talent for capturing transient scraps of the quotidian; holding them up to the light for us to marvel at for a fleeing moment; before the world moves on and they’re gone forever. And while it may be tempting to read allegorical meaning into it (the fallen cross, the lone bystander, the yearning for companionship/shelter during the festive season, etc) to me it is simply, and more affectingly, a snapshot of a lonely man in a crowd; the bland irony of the title only adding to the story’s poignancy and its underlying sense of frustration and pathos.

First published in The Burn, Secker & Warburg, 1991

Chosen by W.B. Gooderham. Gooderham is a freelance writer. He blogs at http://livesinlit.com and http://bookdedications.co.uk/

‘To Everything There is a Season’ by Alistair MacLeod

I wasn’t always Jewish. I converted as an adult; as a child I celebrated Christmas. At some point, I can’t remember when or how, it became a tradition in my family for me to read this story aloud on Christmas Eve. Reading it now, I can see that it is set probably in the late 1940s, though back then it seemed timeless, almost mythical to me. 

The narrator, writing from the vantage of the 1970s, looks back to the year when he was eleven and living with his family in rural Cape Breton, the beautiful island at the northeastern tip of Nova Scotia. (Little did I know then that I would later go to university in Halifax and take a last vacation after my graduation with my family across the Cape Breton highlands.) This is the year the boy’s wavering belief in Santa Claus, maintained through a determination to remain a child a little longer, will finally be put to rest. The man he is really waiting for is his older brother, Neil, who works on a freighter on the Great Lakes. Everyone in the family—the narrator’s five other siblings; his anxious mother; his father, sitting beside the fire coughing into a handkerchief, an old man at 42 (now I think he must have been a miner suffering from silicosis)—waits on tenterhooks for the golden son to be released from his toil by the vagaries of the weather: the lakes have to freeze first.  

On the morning of the 23rd, a strange car rolls up: out tumbles Neil, along with three buddies who still have to make it to Newfoundland. Neil takes matters in hand: he chops down the tree the narrator has been eyeing for months, he supervises the decorating, he shoes the horse and takes the children to midnight mass over the mountain in a sleigh that is warmed by heated stones, he is solicitous of the father who has clearly declined alarmingly in his absence. When the children return half-frozen and exhilarated from church, the narrator is for the first time invited to stay up. He’s pleased, but also forlorn; he knows a door has closed behind him. The father says, “Every man moves on, but there is no need to grieve.” The boy thinks he is talking about Santa Claus; the adult knows the father is talking about himself. 

I think about myself, leaving one life for another. It’s common for Jews by Choice to miss Christmas, and I certainly did the first years. Now the loss the story evokes for me is mostly about the snow, the cold, the Canadian winter I’ve also given up. Reading the story again, I think about how we’re all giving up this weather, no matter where we’re from, as the planet warms and winters like the one MacLeod vividly describes become scarce. Some things no amount of equanimity can redress; some things have to be grieved.

First published in the Globe & Mail, December 24, 1977 and collected in As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories, McClelland and Stewart, 1986. Read the story here or listen to it here.

Chosen by Dorian Stuber. Dorian is the Isabelle Peregrin Odyssey Professor of English at Hendrix College. He writes about books at www.eigermonchjungfrau.blog. You can read his full Personal Anthology here.