‘Renegade’ by Shirley Jackson

Back to the violence of children: Shirley Jackson is another writer who knew how wicked people, and especially children can be. Her work is deeply entrenched in American Gothic but found within the domestic, the horror of a loveless marriage say or children who can’t wait to punish their bad dog as in this story. It contains all the hallmarks of Jackson’s longer work: mistrustful neighbours, small-town gossip, children who revel in the punishment of others a little too much, a propensity towards cruelness and a killer last line.

First published in Harper’s Magazine, November 1948, and available to subscribers here. Collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, Farrar, Straus and Company, 1949, republished by Penguin Classics in 2009

‘Eight Bites’ by Carmen Maria Machado

I don’t know about you but sometimes when I read a really good story it is like a film playing in my head, sometimes I forget if a scene I can see so clearly in my mind is from a film or a book. Reading ‘Eight Bites’ I can so vividly recall its metaphor made real, a body made of flesh once part of a woman, now cut away but not dead, living inside her house, friendly, soft, alone, abandoned: something, “body-shaped. Prepubescent, boneless […] one hundred pounds, dripping wet.” A body that trying to hide itself but which continues, fleshily to haunt.  ‘Eight Bites’ shows the transformation women’s bodies can go through, the weight seen or not that is carried with them, the pain they can endure. That to be a woman is to inhabit a body that will be appraised, that this is inescapable. Machado effortlessly blends reality and something more real than reality to create a story that embeds itself in your own flesh and leaves you gnawing away at its ideas. A story that asks you to be kinder to your body and embrace it as your own.

First published in Gulf Coast magazine 29.2, Summer/Fall 2017 and available to read online here. Collected in Her Body & Other Parties, Graywolf/Serpent’s Tail, 2017

‘Sweetness’ by Toni Morrison

There are some stories you read as a reader and there are other stories you read as a writer with one eye fixed on the how each word makes the sentence, how each sentence stacks up into paragraphs of meaning and emotion. This is a story I read and reread to learn how to write character, to learn how to turn character into plot, to learn how to tell a story before the reader even notices they are in the middle of one. Morrison teaches you how to tell a story that pulls no punches, that doesn’t care if the reader likes the narrator or not, that leaves much for the reader to figure out for themselves while pertaining to state plainly what they mean. There is no better school than this.

Published in The New Yorker, 2015. Read online here. Later formed part of Morrison’s novel God Help the Child, Knopf/Chatto & Windus, 2015

‘The Ghost Club’ by Kirsty Logan

I first came across Kirsty Logan when I read her debut collectionThe Rental Heart, a queer reimagining of fairy tales, and have devoured all her stories full of magic and queer women. In A Portable Shelter Logan cleverly links her short stories through a framing narrative, a Scheherazade-like tale of two women, Liska and Ruth, who take turns telling stories in secret to their child growing inside Ruth. There are stories of selkies and fisherman of lighthouses and witches but it is the final story that I have never been able to forget. The premise is a sort of support group for people who see ghosts of loved ones and who want to disprove their existence. It’s a thoughtful and sensitive exploration of what it’s like to grieve and the role that death plays in the lives of the living. Logan writes, “If no one ever died, maybe we would never learn what it meant to miss them.” That this is the last story in the collection is fitting, a death to balance Ruth and Liska new baby, a poignant reminder to question how much we can prepare our loved ones for the harsher realities of the world. What portable shelters can we carry with us as protection? How safe can you make the world? How much of death do you need to know to truly live?

Collected in A Portable Shelter, Vintage, 2015

‘The Owl Who Was God’ by James Thurber

‘The Owl Who Was God’, as a title, is good enough on its own to qualify as an excellent short story, which is true of many of the choices I’ve made in this selection. A story’s title, maybe given the brevity of the form, maybe given the context in which the decision to read a particular story might be taken (the contents list in an anthology), carries a special force: of course you read the one with the weirdest title first (that or the shortest). For many of these stories, the title feels somehow of equivalent weight to the narrative, as though the story and its title might be interchanged. ‘The Owl Who Was God’, which is accompanied by one of Thurber’s own great, manic illustrations, tells a fable-like narrative about the imputation of enormous gravitas, even godliness, onto the deeply stupid. (Any resemblance to current events is, of course, entirely coincidental.) By asking an owl a sequence of questions it can only answer in its own call (‘“Can you give me another expression for ‘that is to say’ or ‘namely’?” asked the secretary bird. “To wit”, said the owl’), a group of woodland animals are convinced of the truth of the story’s title, with hilariously tragic consequences.

First published in Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated, Harper Brothers, 1940, and included in The Thurber Carnival, Hamish Hamilton, 1945, and available online here, but without the illustration, so don’t bother

‘How to Become a Writer’ by Lorrie Moore

Choosing a single Lorrie Moore story is a problem. Choosing a single Lorrie Moore sentence is a problem. Take out all of her descriptions, for example, in this masterpiece (it’s a masterpiece), of blank facial expressions, assemble them into a short paragraph, and it’s still one of the best stories you’ve read. ‘Blank as a vandalised clock.’ I imagine the title sort of answers itself: this is how.

Available online here. Collected in Self-Help, Knopf, 1985, now also Faber Modern Classics, 2015, and Collected Stories, Knopf/Faber, 2008

‘Where the Door is Always Open and the Welcome Mat is Out’ by Patricia Highsmith

The title is a promise whose unravelling, during a familial visit, is what drives the story forward, but isn’t what makes it linger. A young woman, living in a tiny New York apartment, rushes to prepare for a visit from her sister from Cleveland. Highsmith’s mastery of building tension out of absent-mindedness (did she leave the eggs on the stove or not?) is as enjoyable here as it is in any of her novels, but it’s the moment when Mildred, the city-dwelling sister, rails, mildly and politely, against her sister’s haughty assessment of New York’s unfriendliness that the story’s generosity breaks open. The description of her watching a police parade in the rain is a very beautiful moment: “Why, they even call them New York’s Finest!”

Included in Nothing that Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories, Bloomsbury, 2005 and Selected Novels and Short Stories, Norton, 2010

‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’ by Vladimir Nabokov

This story, written in 1937 and set in a parallel Germany of enforced leisure and institutional bullying, might easily be passed over as a straightforward political allegory, were it not for the fact that it’s by Nabokov, and is therefore studded with precise observations that remind us of his greatness as a comic writer: the cigarette butt Vasili is made to eat, for instance, or the lacquered nose of the trip’s leader. Vasili, the somewhat Pnin-like central character who’s clearly an authorial avatar – he’s introduced at the beginning as “my representative”, and at the tale’s end, “of course, I let him go” – is obliged to take a tiresomely upbeat journey with a bunch of grotesques who first won’t let him read in silence, then chuck his prized cucumber out of the train’s window. On the trip, Vasili sees the scene of the story’s title, which looks, in the mind’s eye, a little like a Claude landscape, whose transcendent beauty is the source of the story’s spring of joy and horror. The title’s cadence and rhythm captures that imprinting of a sight upon the memory. It stays with you as though it’s your own.

First published in The Atlantic, June 1941, and collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, 1958 and Collected Short Stories, 1995, and available online here

‘The Musicians of Bremen’ by the Brothers Grimm, retold by Philip Pullman

“The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put a robin redbreast in a cage.” This is from Philip Pullman’s introduction to his great book of Brothers Grimm retellings. His ‘The Musicians of Bremen’ is, then, built to be embellished, localised, extended or truncated, but, thanks to his brilliantly economical characterisation of the animal characters, it’s not nearly as flattened as fairy tales are (by his own reckoning) supposed to be. A donkey, a dog, a cat and a cockerel, all recently laid off, form a band and decide to move to Bremen to make it in the local music industry. They never make it to Bremen nor launch their musical careers, but live happily ever after in spite of – or perhaps because of, since they’d have been hounded, sorry, out of the city had they made it there – the title’s suggestion. There is a bronze statue in Bremen of the four animals, stacked on top of each other, which is quite an odd choice for a public sculpture if you’ve read the story.

Included in Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, Penguin, 2012

‘Diary: Morrissey: My Morning’ by Craig Brown

Not that parodying Morrissey’s prose style is itself a great challenge – it mostly does that by itself – but Craig Brown’s Morrissey diary manages to build a world of grandiose self-pity that is almost as affecting as Brown’s evocation of Princess Margaret in ‘Ma’am Darling’. A bottle of champagne “chilled as an unborn baby’s grave”. A royalty cheque falling out of an envelope like “a fallen soldier of the Somme, sent out to die on a foreign field by the uncaring upper classes”. Tears falling “like so many sad people from the top floor of a skyscraper onto the unforgiving ground below.”

Published in Private Eye, October 2013, available online here

‘The Impresario of Human Drudgery’ by Ben Katchor

Ben Katchor’s short comic strips (for lack of a better term) take place in a parallel Manhattan of fleapit cinemas and bizarre small businesses, which, as in Nicholson Baker’s fictions, pay homage to the act of attention itself: there are strips on liquid soap thievery, an opium den-style ‘Nail-Biting Salon’, the romance of the take-out menu. Katchor’s nervy, scratchy line is part of his work’s focus on the shabbily pre-owned, as is, somehow, his arcane, lovely prose. “The faint odor of a month’s worth of wanted posters under glass taints the otherwise thrilling scent of yet-to-be-delivered mail.” “A number of dramatists have turned to the sightseeing tour bus as a unique and affordable method of realising a theatrical spectacle in the midst of a depressed economy.” “The milk of human kindness, condensed into a dented sixteen-ounce can, turns up on a shelf outside the men’s room.”

Included in Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, Little, Brown, 1996

‘The Swan as Metaphor for Love’ by Amelia Gray

The amount of time it will take for me to describe exactly what makes this story so great could be much better served actually reading it, because nothing need be explained: you will read it and know, almost straight away. It’s also full of brilliant, oddly-phrased and very precise details that open up avenues of thought that will make you want to read it again, almost straight away. Go.

Included in Gutshot, FSG Originals, 2015, and available online here

‘Going for a Beer’ by Robert Coover

It’s over before you know it. That might be a criticism of the short story form. It might imply something else, though. Coover’s story pits form against content, rattling through a character’s life as though against his will, with nothing but Kewpie dolls and crutches to cling to. If the short story form is about compression (and maybe it is, sometimes), Coover’s is like a car crusher, squeezing its poor protagonist, who only wanted a beer, into a helpless cube.

Originally published in The New Yorker, March 2011, and available online here. Collected in Going for a Beer: Selected Shorter Fictions, Norton, 2018

‘On the Marionette Theatre’ by Heinrich von Kleist, translated by Idris Parry

Two friends meet in the park, and, because it’s early 19th Century Germany, they immediately launch into philosophical chat. The conversation, which is really a sequence of anecdotes, is about the idea of grace: a condition found, according to one protagonist, not in humans per se but in human surrogates – statues, animals, puppets. What emerges is a kind of horror story about human consciousness, which is of course not about early 19th century Germany at all, but about right now, whenever you happen to be reading it.

First published in German in The Berliner Abendblätter, December 1810 and available online here. Collected in Selected Writings, Hackett, 2004, in a translation by David Constantine