‘Fresh for ’88’ by Courttia Newland

I have to have a Newland story in here, but I confess I know Courttia quite well and have even had dinner with him on more than one occasion. My excuse for this one not being a buddy-entry is that I read it before I ever met Courttia. Back in 2014 I used to do a radio show on NTS, a local Hackney broadcaster that is now the biggest online radio station in Europe (potentially the world). I did the breakfast show on a Friday morning 9-12pm. It was immense fun. Sometimes I would invite writers on to read stories and talk about their work in between playing banging tunes to start your weekend. Courttia was one of those guests and we had a total blast. I had invited him based on this story, ‘Fresh for ’88’, because I loved it so much I wanted to hear him read it out loud. It’s a simple tale of two young friends entering a rap battle contest in the late 80s with a wonderful little twist at the end (I won’t spoil it for you). The beauty is in the dialogue, the sense of wonderment in the characters and that feeling that youth will go on forever. Newland captures a forgotten element of London’s cultural history so well.

From A Book Of Blues, Flambard Press 2011

‘Light Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands’ by Alexia Arthurs

I discovered Alexia Arthurs totally by accident. We share the Influx Press office with Kobo (the alternative to Kindle) and the Guardian Bookshop. This means there is a shit tonne of proofs and advance copies sent to the office every week. Sometimes you feel like you’re swimming through heat bound paperbacks just to get to your desk. One day last summer Alexia Arthurs’ collection How to Love a Jamaican appeared on the shared shelves. I picked it up out of curiosity and have cherished it ever since. The opening story, ‘Light Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands’ is a fantastic piece of short fiction focusing on a friendship between two black girls in New York. Arthurs writes from the heart and eloquently paints the friends’ gradually disintegrating bond with real grace. The story is about the impact of race and class, white supremacy and immigration on what could have been a lifelong friendship. Great stories have the power to make you see the world from another person’s perspective, and this is certainly of contemporary vintage.

From How to Love a Jamaican, Picador 2018

‘I Told You I’d Buy You Anything You Wanted So You Asked for A Submarine Fleet’ by Owen Booth

The White Review Short Story Prize is one of the best out there right now. It’s where Influx got to know Eley Williams’ work initially (that and Ambit, and at live events) before we published Attrib. and Other Stories. It is also where one of the best short stories by a middle-aged northern man written this side of the 21^stCentury was published. Any story that starts with the subheading ‘The Triumph of Capitalism’ gets my attention, and Booth holds it all the way through. Written in his trademark first-person plural personal pronoun, or ‘we’ as I like to call it, ‘I Told You…’ zips along at a remarkable pace, and all over the globe. I love its ambition and tenacity, I love its humour and oddness. Booth has since worked on novels (for 4th Estate, no less) but I cannot wait for him to release his first short story collection.

From The White Review 2015, available online here

‘Scientific Purposes’ By Thomas Bernhard, translated by Kenneth J Northcott

Bernhard’s book, The Voice Imitator contains 104 very short stories, none longer than a page, most only a paragraph. I genuinely can’t remember how or when I bought this book, but it is something I regularly return to. It changed the way I thought short stories could work, and partly led the way to publishing Clare Fisher’s collection How the Light Gets In, which has a similar concentration of very short stories in it. It’s the perfect toilet book. Which I’m sure Bernhard wouldn’t mind me saying. Each story is its own little world, vignetted to the point of absurdity, and some pack whole lives in to ten sentences. ‘Scientific Purposes’ is so short there’s really no reason to write about it and in fact I think I’ve written more words in this paragraph so far than in the whole story. Thus, I will faithfully rewrite it below so you can judge its brilliance for yourself:

A hairdresser who suddenly went mad and decapitated a duke, allegedly a member of the royal family, with a razor and who is now in the lunatic asylum in Reading – formerly the famous Reading Jail – is said to have declared himself ready to make his head available for those scientific purposes which, in his opinion, would be rewarded with the Nobel Prize within at least eight or ten years.

From The Voice Imitator, UCP 1997

‘The Turd Tree’ by Kate Clanchy

I love this story (as I do much of the great anthology from Comma Press in which it resides). At its heart is a betrayal between two lovers, but it is set firmly in the overarching betrayal that so many of us on that protest felt weeks and months after our ‘biggest demonstration in British history’. I know the characters that Kate draws – the condescending more-political-than-thou boyfriend (yes, recognising elements of myself in there), the liberal, woolly parents with their Fairtrade coffee in the home counties, the rainbow-haired fire eater, the newish mum, Melissa struggling to retain her political commitments with a toddler in tow. I recognise the space, the feeling, the millions on the street. And I keenly felt the hope of political action fade as Melissa gets more isolated in the crowd. The Iraq War demonstration was a peak political moment for my generation and it took us years to recover and rebuild the motivation to engage with politics again. Clanchy’s story reminds me that we can never go back, but we must keep looking forward and try to imagine a different future that is still possible.

From Protest: Stories of Resistance, Comma Press 2017

Introduction

It’s a running joke between my family and friends that I have a terrible memory: my past is a foreign country where I have already forgotten the language. As such it takes something very special to stick in my brain. This Personal Anthology has been brought together by my shoddy memory, some old, some new, but all stories which refuse to dislodge themselves from my porous grey matter. They encompass a great many different subjects and harness voices near and distant to my own experiences. They are all writers capable of making unforgettable work.

‘The Summer Child’ by Tove Jansson, translated by Silvester Mazzarella

Tove Jansson is enjoying a sort of Renaissance in recent years, with two biographies of her life published in 2014 and her 2017 retrospective at the Dulwich Picture gallery showcasing her skills as a painter as well as satirist and beloved creator of The Moomins. Her ‘grown-up’ fiction (whatever that means) has been steadily drip-fed into English by Sort Of books through her novels and short story collections. ‘The Summer Child’ is a perfect place to start if you are new to Jansson’s prose and like many of her novels takes an island family for its subject. Ali Smith writes of this story that it “challenges the way we narrate ourselves” since the boy that the Fredirikson family generously take on for the summer proves to be more trouble than he is worth. It’s a story that is darkly comic and grounded in reality, the slights and small evils of children, the harsh natural world that Jansson never idealises, all told in deceptively straight-forward prose. For an insight into more of Jansson’s excellent, honest unsentimental writing keep an eye of The Paris Review who are publishing some of her untranslated essays for the first time in English.

First published as Resa Med Lätt Bagage, Schidts Förlags Ab, 1987. Later published in English in Travelling Light, Sort of Books, 2010

‘Sweet Romance’ by Tillie Walden

Tillie Walden is perhaps best known now for her epic space opera graphic novel On A Sunbeam but it is in her short fiction comics that her more surreal side emerges. Her work is tinged with longing and melancholy, often taking as their centre female relationships both romantic and platonic and usually drawn in a refined, beautiful duotone. ‘Sweet Romance’ tells the story of a love affair between a giant woman and a young girl. She is literally giant, spanning multiple panels and taller than mountains. Walden often plays with scale in her work, women will lie down across whole cities to ponder their existence, but here she plays out the fantasy full size with the emotional heft to match. Read it and think of your first love and your last love.

Self-published online here

‘Worlds from the Word’s End’ by Joanna Walsh

What would happen if we stopped using words? Walsh’s story charts the breakdown of language and relationships, working through what happens when words are no longer enough and through writing opens up new possibility for articulation outside of language. It is of course delightfully playful in its language, so that people are “dead to the word” and the failing economy places a picture at “five thousand, ten thousand words, a million!” The old writing adage is to show not tell, but in telling us the state of things, Walsh brings language and character to the forefront to create a new word-less world out of her words.

First Published in Best European Fiction, 2015. Collected in The Best British Short Stories 2015, Salt, 2015 and World’s from the Word’s End, And Other Stories, 2017

‘On Monday Last Week’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Of all of Adichie’s short stories this is the one I have read the most, perhaps because it is a story that is focuses on queer desire or perhaps because of its gut-punch of an ending that is entirely unforgettable and remains potent, despite, or because of, multiple readings. As in Americana, Adichie explores the nuances of race and racism that must be navigated as a black woman in patriarchal white America. Kamara, a Nigerian woman waits for a Green card while working as a nanny for an American family. The white father is the main care-giver, while the child’s black mother, a painter, appears only fleetingly to undo everything Kamara thinks she understands. Adichie’s skill is in creating fully embodied people in a sentence or two and then setting each of their lives off down a path to crash and swirl into one another. I can think of no better story that shows this careful crafting: that encompasses motherhood and race and immigration and longing and child-care and labour and artistry in one single heart-breaking story.

First published in Granta 98: The Deep End, July 2007, and available to subscribers here. Collected in The Thing Around Your Neck, Fourth Estate, 2009

‘Smote, or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You In Front Of A Print By Bridget Riley’ by Eley Williams

I almost want to write nothing about this story since I think it’s best experienced for oneself. I will say that I have never forgotten this line:

and you stark me

and I am strobe-hearted

Reading ‘Smote’ for the first time made me rethink everything I thought I knew about words and how to use them.

Collected in Attrib. and Other Stories, Influx Press, 2017. First published online in The White Review, 2015. Read it here

‘An Apocalypse in Seven Stages’ by Helen McClory

Apocalypse stories are everywhere, they always are in times of crisis and uncertainty (that feels like now right?) and it can be hard to read about impending doom when it already feels so close to home. McClory’s flash fiction is a list story, a form I love, and unlike many apocalypse stories didn’t leave me with a deep sense of despair after reading it. It’s darkly comic in its banal bleakness at the end of the world, “Almost all that we have ever done as a species has caused harm to the earth and ourselves. Nothing special, everything so.” The narrator’s deep love for the world it what shines through, endings comes to us all, large and small. This piece of fiction reads to me like truth.

Published by Split Lip Magazine, 2018. Read online here

‘Likes’ by Sara Sherwood

Stories that tackle head-on social media in fiction seem few and far between despite it being something most of us interact with daily. This is a story about a relationship and what happens when a relationship ends and what happens when you still go on Instagram to look at their Instagram and maybe their new girlfriend’s Instagram and maybe when you’re making your Instagram posts you’re really thinking about what they will think when they look at their Instagram. Sherwood captures so accurately the pressure of watching and being watched online, the careful, carefree performance of it, the rhythm it becomes in our daily lives.

Collected in the Bridport Prize 2018 Anthology, Bridport, 2018

‘Bloodchild’ by Octavia E. Butler

Butler is a master at world-building. Often called her “pregnant man” story, this short story follows a day in the life of a human on a distant planet in an arrangement with the insect-like creatures that rule over them. Butler says she wrote it after reading about insects that lay their eggs in other animals as I way to exercise and investigate her dual fascination and repulsion at the thought. It’s certainly not a story for the squeamish (which I had forgotten recently until I reread it and gasped all over again), but those brave enough to read will find a tale told with sensitivity and a slowl sense of dawning horror. As always Butler shows that science-fiction is never just about aliens and spaceships and she has some of the smartest character building and plotting around.

First published in 1984, Collected in Bloodchild and Other Stories, Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1995. I hesitate to link to Amazing, but a free Kindle edition is available here