‘Wild America’ by Wells Tower

When is Wells Tower’s next book coming out? Is what those of us who love his collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, have been asking for ten years. No pressure, Wells. But get on with it. His work is wildly funny, stylistically wide-ranging, and full of painful truths. I’m picking this story over other possibles in the book because of its opening description of a baby pigeon, mauled and dropped by a cat onto a pillowcase: “The thing was pink, nearly translucent, with magenta cheeks and lavender ovals around the eyes. It looked like a half-cooked eraser with dreams of some day becoming a prostitute.”

From the collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, FSG/Granta, 2009. Most of the story is at online here but it seems to cut off about a page and a half from the end…

‘Vertical Motion’ by Can Xue tr. Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping

“I was a little critter submerged in the desert.” The narrating critter – described in passing as an “insect”, but, to me, more of a spindly kind of mole – lives in darkness underground, among other smooth, wiggling creatures. She/he/it starts digging up towards the surface, driven by a species legend about an elder who dug upwards and disappeared. Humans on the surface are mentioned, but I don’t take this story as human allegory. Instead, I believe completely in the narrator’s “critter consciousness”. Why is it so delightful, this dark and wriggling world of creatures with beaks and atrophied fingers? I don’t know, but there’s something fantastic about the narrator whose consciousness treads the border between animal and human (“Hidden in me now was an obscure plan that even I couldn’t explain”) and who can’t help but burst up, fearfully, through layers of soil and sand toward the light.

Collected in Vertical Motion, Open Letter, 2011. Available to read online at The White Review here

‘Leckerdam of the Golden Hand’ by David Hayden

One of Hayden’s short-short stories of the fabula type. This one is so rich and glorious and terrible it’s like cracking open a cursed treasure chest and being blinded by the dazzling hoard within. The narrator is already dead, killed by his children in revenge for violences he’s done to them, though it takes a little while – and it takes the children beginning to “live outside my hate” – for his narrating consciousness to cease. Deep, dark psychodrama with ground-breaking special effects: always a winning combination.

First published in The Stinging Fly, Summer 2016 and available to subscribers online here. Collected in Darker With The Lights On, Little Island Press, 2017

‘Black Box’ by Jennifer Egan

Originally published in bits via 140-character Twitter, this is an 8,500-word super-story of a technologically-enhanced spy whose mission is to bring down the powerful head of a crime syndicate. But it’s really about the cost to her (and her undercover colleagues) of acting as a honeytrap, and the fragmented form is perfect for expressing the internal conflict, as well as cranking up the suspense and the pace. Hopefully we’ve realised by now that Twitter isn’t a decent fiction publishing medium (even with 280 characters), but at least the experiment produced this wonderful, gripping, Egan story.

First published on Twitter.com, Spring 2012, then in The New Yorker and available online here

‘Young Mothers’ by Joanna Walsh

Like much of Walsh’s Vertigo, this story lays out bare units of the quotidian under our noses, bringing taken-for-granted things into question by positioning them baldly outside of a “normal” narrative. This time it’s the mothers of young children who are under the Walsh heat-lamp. ”Our children gave birth to our function”, state the young mothers, their identities subsumed as soon as their child is born. They’re infantilised through the clothes they’re expected to wear and the round-edged objects they handle all day. And, at last, here’s a mention of the way young women so often become “X’s mum” – not only at nursery-gates introductions, but also in those deliberately-non-threatening online handles women feel obliged to use. Seeing Walsh record this so directly and plainly is such a relief, like a thirst has been quenched.

From the collection Vertigo, And Other Stories, 2016

‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’ by Roald Dahl

I was a lucky child who was read to, and then taught to read, and then allowed many, many books from the library. I was also lucky to be the generation that was brought up with Roald Dahl. The Henry Sugar collection is a teenage rather than children’s book, and I’ll never forget the specific type of end-of-childhood excitement and wonder this particular story provoked: a grittier, darker, more promising kind of excitement than that of a child, but the same absolute willingness to believe in the story’s unbelievable premise. I love it when a writer presents the impossible and says, “I know this is unbelievable, but trust me, it’s really true”. I don’t need to be asked twice; I’ll throw off all trappings of sensible rationalism, grab their hand, and go along for the ride.

Collected in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, Jonathan Cape, 1977

Introduction

Short stories have been good to me. At Influx Press we’ve published collections that have won prizes and sold lots of copies. It’s also the form in which I started my own writing career, before I chose the path of least resistance through my valuable academic study of pub carpets. I have always read short stories, but I’ve never once thought about my favourites, or those most influential to me until this personal anthology. I have no real concept of what this list says about me as a reader or a person, something my therapist would be very disappointed to hear, but a lack of insight isn’t necessarily a terrible thing in this case. These are purely stories that have made me feel something; a belly laugh, or a cringing stomach twist, a blubbering weep, or even a burst of pride.

So consider this an Anthology of Feels. And in no particular order, of course.

‘Beating the Bounds’ by Aki Schilz

Right, so this one I edited and published in An Unreliable Guide to London, which is why I have feelings for it. Mostly pride, I think, and admiration. Schilz’s meander through Hanwell and Ealing is an exceptional piece of writing that takes in the history of an unwritten part of London, her own personal childhood, some totally made up nonsense and much more in between. It is lyrical, funny, stuffed with character and energy. I have never visited Hanwell, nor do I plan to any time soon, but it is so fully rendered in ‘Beating the Bounds’ that I almost feel like I don’t need to.

From An Unreliable Guide to London, Influx Press 2016

‘The Appropriation of Cultures’ by Percival Everett

I was introduced to Percival Everett by Courttia Newland (more on him later). Since then I have tried to read as many Everett books as possible (there are over 25), but he is not very widely published in the UK, so books have proved hard to get hold of. Everett is an absolute master of storytelling and subversion. He loves to play with form and narrative and expectations and ‘The Appropriation of Cultures’ is him as his mischievous, provocative best. A black musician, Daniel is playing slide guitar in a bar one evening with his band, when some white frat boys ask him, “Play Dixie, play Dixie!” Dixie being, of course, a famous blackface minstrel song. Daniel thinks about refusing, but chooses to take on the song and repurpose it for himself, “deciding the lyrics were his”, and totally transforms the atmosphere of the room. The story develops remarkably after that, no spoilers, but it’s phenomenal.

From Damned if I Do, Graywolf 2004

‘The Greatest TV Show on Earth’ by JG Ballard

This was my first and still my favourite Ballard story. I think I read this when I was around seventeen years old and I’d only really read books like Of Mice and Men and The Remains of the Day at school. I wasn’t a big reader until I got to my late teens – too busy kicking footballs, throwing cricket balls and playing with my own balls to care about literature. Essentially, I had no idea that you could write like this – with a total lack of characters or plot, no dialogue and certainly no particular literary merit to speak of. What I love about this story is that the concept (time travel meant you could make TV news set in the past by travelling there and filming it) rules the entire six pages. It’s bold and Ballard is clearly just sketching out an idea without needing such bourgeois complications like characterisation. Little did I know that absolutely everything he wrote is like this and it does get tiresome if you binge on it. But this story, it’s still my first love, and it always will be.

1972, from The Complete Short Stories Volume 2, Harper Perennial 2006

‘Walk with Sleep’ by Irenosen Okojie

Irenosen Okojie’s 2016 collection Speak Gigantular will be rated a 21st century modern classic in years to come, I’m certain of it. The imagination, wit, energy and bravura in that book is unparalleled and I’ve loved reading and re-reading it over the last couple of years. The literary punch in stories like ‘Gunk’, the pathos in ‘Why is Pepe Canary Yellow?’ and the oddness of ‘Jody’ make her book an unequivocal joy. My favourite story in the book is ‘Walk with Sleep’, a strange tale of limbo in the London Underground. It is told with real elegance and poise. The central conceit is haunting – that those who commit suicide on the Underground meet each other as ghosts, trying to find their way back to the world, and many times I’m waiting for a train at a Tube station I think about it and imagine Okojie’s characters playing in the tunnels.

From Speak Gigantular, Jacaranda Books 2016

‘Guts’ by Chuck Palahniuk

Now, I don’t know about you, but I remember the hype and furore around this story when it was released. Reports of people fainting in the audience when Palahniuk read it out loud, suggestions to ban the sick filth of it by newspapers, reading it out to your mates to make them squirm and get dizzy. Not until ‘Cat Person’ was published do I remember a short story being so hyped – and this was way before social media existed. The story itself: a boy is finding different, increasingly more extreme methods of masturbating, until one day he is wanking in his swimming pool and is attracted to the pull of the pool drain, leading to what a doctor would call, trans-anal intestinal evisceration. It’s a rough read, graphic and bloody and gross, but it’s brilliantly represented on the page. ‘Guts’ was a total masterclass in extreme literature being allowed in to hallowed spaces like the South Bank (where I saw Palahnuick read it). It was published in Playboy and if I remember correctly, also in a UK newspaper. I think this would prove to be Palahniuk’s last great work, following great novels such as Fight Club, Lullaby and Survivor.

First published in Playboy, 2004, collected in Haunted, Vintage 2005

‘Hurricane Vaij’ by Suresh and Balakrishnan a.k.a. Subha

This story comes from the brilliant Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction I picked up in India earlier this year. Tamil Nadu has a long history of publishing pulp novels and short stories that are traditionally sold at train stations and newsagents across the state (I suppose in a slightly similar fashion to the old Penny Dreadfuls). Tamil writing, much like its cinema, has a unique style and approach and is a fascinating, vital part of south Indian culture. This story from Subha (aka two school friends Suresh and Balakrishnan who, since 1983, have co-authored around 550 short novels, 50 longer novels serialised in magazines and more than 400 short stories – phew!), is a classic – featuring their long running characters Narendran and Vaijayanthi of Eagle Eye Detective Agency. It explores corruption and religion in state politics and power, via slapstick and crime noir. I love the setting and the set up, and it reminds me of the many trips I have taken to south India in the last fifteen years. I’m not going to pretend you should read all Subha’s work, as that would take you a lifetime, but if you’re going to read one story, this is it.

Collected in the Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, Blaft, 2008

‘Dropping’ by Linda Mannheim

This is another short story that I have published. In 2014 Influx released Above Sugar Hill, one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read, regardless of whether I edited it or not! Mannheim’s writing wastes no words and hits you exactly where it you want to be hit by a story. ‘Dropping’ is something else though, I tell you. It is the story of Squire, a paratrooper in the army, his former life in New York and how 9/11, those bodies dropping from the burning building affected his life. Even writing about it now gives me goosebumps and makes my eyes moist. It is extraordinarily well written and with a pathos, similar to the way Okojie writes, that gives you all sides of the character, allowing you to sympathise and understand someone who you may initially be turned off by, say, if they are a gung-ho solider. The rest of the collection centres on the lives of those living in and around Washington Heights in Manhattan, but this is the only story that leaves those bounds. It’s a total masterpiece.

From Above Sugar Hill, Influx Press 2014