‘Fucking Martin’ by Dale Peck

The One That Taught You an Unexpected Lesson:

Like me and all other right-thinking people, you are obviously well aware that there are no ‘rules’ to what a short story should be or do or aim at or look like – and you know that anyone who says different is a liar and a crook who has no love for the format, or writing itself, or the world, or the two of us.

But.

But if I, or you – if either of us – were ever forced to talk about examples of short story writing ‘craft’ or ‘technique’, about pacing, and narrative tricks, and all those sorts of sneaky things? Well, we could do a lot worse than make people read Dale Peck’s short ‘Fucking Martin’, which, like Kij Johnson’s ‘Spar’, is about sex and grief and personal erasure, but which also has a one-line reveal/ reverse (if that’s the right name for it) toward the end that’s so powerful that I can still remember, twenty-some actual years later, the feeling of being punched in the stomach the first time I read it.

I don’t want to say anything else in case I spoil the effect for first time readers, but if you want to borrow my copy give me a shout.

(Read in Cowboys, Indians and Commuters: The Penguin Book of New American Voices, 1994. Also collected in Martin and John/Fucking Martin, St Martin’s Press/Chatto & Windus, 1993)

The One You Wish You’d Written: ‘Lord Royston’s Tour’ by Lydia Davis

I’m ashamed (or maybe a bit proud) to say I’d never read any Lydia Davis until a couple of years ago when I accidentally Won a Short Story Competition that I don’t like to talk about at every opportunity, and Lydia Davis’s was one of the names mentioned by someone trying to describe my Award Winning Short Story. And then I read ‘The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis’, and went “of course!” and “I am not worthy!” and also, sometimes, “what?”

Davis is usually ranked with Barthelme (that’s my Barthelme, remember) in the Whirlwinding Cavalcade of Fizzing Idea Fireworks! genre, which is fair enough because they are and she does and it is. But she’s less glib than The Donald, more rooted in real, complicated emotions and reactions to things (Davis does quite irritated better than anyone else I can think of).

And, like me, she loves, subtitles.

‘Lord Royston’s Tour’ is a story I wish I’d written, and one I’d have loved to write: a deadpan reconstruction – based on actual letters – of the real Philip Yorke, Viscount Royston’s 1806 tour of the Russian Empire, including his accidental death, full of delicious local colour and detail, told like an epic historical novel in miniature.

With the Help of Some Bark:
Over the Caucasus

As soon as he can sit on a horse he takes leave of his Georgian friends, and rides out of town. The snow and ice on Mount Caucasus, along with the help of some bark he gets from a Roman Catholic missionary, restore him to perfect health and strength as soon as he beings ascending the mountain.

Etc.

Is it a parody? A commentary? A narrative experiment? What does it mean?

Enough with the theorising talk, and shut up: it’s just a great story.

(In Almost No Memory, FSG, 1997 and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, 2009)

‘Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains’ by AL Kennedy

The One with The Devastating Ending:

Everyone knows that, line for line, AL Kennedy is the best prose writer in the English language (including non-fiction; read her book ‘On Bullfighting’). This story was the first thing I ever read of hers, and ever since I’ve carried around the phrase “the good weight of him” as an example of how to get things perfectly, exactly right.

It all felt very pleasant. The good weight of him, snuggled down there, the smell of his hair when I kissed the top of his head. I did that. I told him I could never do enough, or be enough, or give enough back and I kissed the top of his head. I told him I belonged to him. I think he was asleep.

Kennedy deals with small, specific things. With the important details – of relationships, and train timetables, and the way couples arrange themselves together in bed. She’s the opposite of flashy, of show-offy writing, of fireworks. This story is about the importance of small lives, of the everyday, and of the awful, awful fragility of it all.

(in Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, Polygon 1990)

‘Strawberries’ by Joseph Roth

The One That Got Away:

If you haven’t already read ‘The Radetzky March’ go away, do that now, then come back and thank me. Actually you should probably read ‘The Legend of the Holy Drinker’ while you’re at it, too. But then, then read this.

The first 1,000 words or so are available here, but that’s only an extract from the much longer piece, which is itself only an extract of a planned novel that Roth never finished before his death, and which is very much our loss.

The story, or what there is of it, describes life in a small town very much like the one where Roth grew up, on the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century – a town so criminal and insane that it feels like a cross between Franz Kafka and Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I don’t think anyone had papers where I came from. There was a law court, a prison, lawyers, tax offices—but there wasn’t anywhere where you had to identify yourself. What did it matter who you were arrested as, if they arrested you? If you paid taxes or not—whom did it drive to ruin, and who derived any benefit from it?  The main thing was that the officials had to live. They lived off bribes. That’s why no one went to prison. That’s why no one paid taxes. That’s why no one had papers.

There’s the construction of a gigantic, unnecessary hotel, and some digging for buried treasure, and a money-making scheme involving the rope from a hanging, and scenes from the narrator’s childhood, all told in Roth’s ironic, laconic style, and it all doesn’t come together, at all, and it’s wonderful.

What it might have been, had Roth ever finished the book, I have no idea.

Somebody should write the rest of it. There’s an idea for you.

(In The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth, Granta, 2002)

‘Ventimiglia’ by Joanna Walsh

The One That May Represent Some Sort of Platonic Ideal:

Officially, this is an extract too, but the first time I read it was as a standalone piece, so I’m going with that.

I used to think Hemingway’s ‘Canary for One’ was my favourite short story: the way it describes a train journey – initially along the French Mediterranean coast – via the landscapes flashing by outside the window, the way it talks about relationship ending without really talking about the relationship at all…

Then I read this, which starts by travelling the same geographical territory, but heading East rather than West, and also talks about/ doesn’t talk about a relationship ending, and is more perfect, more right, word for word, than anything has a right to be.

I won’t go on about how great Joanna Walsh is because you already know – you, of all people – and also because I’m not qualified to do so, and I detest theorising talk, but if I had to come up with some sort of example of how I wish I could write then it would look a lot like this.

(Available to read on Granta.com. Officially part of Break.up, Serpent’s Tail, 2018)

‘The Elephant’ by Slawomir Mrozek

The One with the Inflatable Elephant: 

You’ve obviously already read this classic short story because you’re smart and literary as well as being gorgeous to look at, but I’m still going to talk about it because it’s perfect (just like you).

When a provincial zoo in communist Poland is allocated an elephant, the ambitious zoo director instead suggests exhibiting a fake, inflatable elephant in order to save money. But the keepers tasked with inflating the model elephant decide to save time and effort by attaching it to a gas pipe…

In the morning the elephant was moved to a special run in a central position, next to the monkey cage. Placed in front of a large real rock it looked fierce and magnificent. A big notice proclaimed: “Particularly sluggish. Hardly moves”…

Totalitarian regimes are always ripe for satire, but Mrozek’s deadpan (there’s that word ‘deadpan’ again, hmm) stories are more like fairy tales than straight allegories. There’s always something else going on – the anarchic joy of anticipation as we wait for the inevitable disaster, the ‘astonished monkeys’ watching the elephant fly away, the brief mention of children turned into drunken hooligans by the horror of what they’ve witnessed…

(in The Elephant, 1957)

‘Blood Rites’ by Daisy Johnson

The One with The Sense of Place: 

I could have chosen just about any story from Daisy Johnson’s magnificent debut collection ‘Fen’ and it would be a textbook example of How Your Short Stories Should Have a Sense of Place, but this one is (just about) my favourite.

Three women (Vampires? Monsters?) flee Paris and move into a wrecked house out on the fens, where they start seducing and eating the local men. But it turns out that ‘fen men were not the same as the men we’d had before. They lingered in you…’

Johnson’s story (and the others in the collection) is full of tastes and smells, of earth and dirt and meat, of land and weather and sex. There are echoes of Angela Carter, and Dylan Thomas’s gloriously ripe early short stories, but Johnson is already very much her own writer.

And she writes landscape and place as well as, if not better than, just about anybody.

(In Fen, Jonathan Cape 2016)

‘Elvis: Fat, Fucked Up Fool’ by Simon Crump

The One Which Makes Most Sense in Context: 

Broadly, I don’t have much time for realism in short stories. To be honest, I don’t have much time for it in real life either. I get why a novel might need to be, to some extent, grounded. To follow certain, accepted rules of character and plot. You’re asking people to invest a significant amount of their time and attention, you don’t want to take the piss. But when you’re only borrowing 10 minutes of someone’s day, why not shoot for the moon? And when you collect a bunch of short stories together into a themed collection…

‘My Elvis Blackout’ is a very odd book about fame and celebrity that manages to find something new to say about one of our most overexposed and exhausted icons (Crump pulled the same trick with 2007’s ‘Neverland’, about Michael Jackson), via surreal weirdness, extreme violence (some of it featuring Chris de Burgh), dark comedy (some of it featuring Chris de Burgh), and surprising moments of pathos.

Sometimes it wobbles, and you almost, almost think Crump is just taking the piss, but then…

His greatest fear was of being poor and he dwelled upon it constantly. He took handfuls of jewels and cash into the backyard at Graceland and buried them – little treasures to call upon should he suddenly find himself penniless. The guys would watch Elvis digging in the dark. He cut a pathetic figure as he grunted and sweated over a growing heap of earth, and they would laugh to see his white jump-suit soiled with mud, and thy would laugh as this very sad, but nevertheless highly entertaining creature trying to ward off his worst nightmare, and the would laugh and laugh and laugh until the tears ran down their bloated piggy faces and down their fat pink cheeks and into their fancy silk shirts which Elvis had brought them all from Lansky Brothers, because he loved them so…

(in My Elvis Blackout, Bloomsbury, 2001)

‘The Berg’, by Richard Smyth

The One No One Else Can Read (Yet):

I know, I know, this is cheating – but sometimes you read a story that’s so good you want to simultaneously jump for joy and quietly give up writing, and this was one of those times. Smyth has known what he’s doing for a while. He’s a fantastically sharp nature writer, and a great short story writer (he was a finalist in last year’s Galley Beggar short story competition), and he gets Narrative Voice better than just about anybody – and in this story, the details of which I won’t give away unless anyone steals it, he combines all three.

It’s beautiful and funny and sad and daring AND YOU CAN’T READ IT YET. But hopefully you will soon…

Theres a Cormorant comeing by us off the larbord bow. A black and ragged looking Bird flying bearly above the waive tops. Like somone threw a hand rake. Devilish harty apetites they have. There was a pickture of a Cormorant in a boke I had as a boy. The boke was Millton I beleive and was an Alegory but weather the Cormorant was Christ or the devil I cant recal.

The Penguine makes a croke.

Hallo I say.

The pore thing chafes at its chane.

He is the propety of our Biscayan a fello named Ineko or similar who got him in New-found-land while hunting Whales he sayes. The Penguine is as big as a goos tho’ like all of us he is Thin. He has the look of a Gillimotte such as we see at Flamboro’. Black and wite and a beke like a Cleaver. He doesnt have a Name. He is onlie the Penguine.

(Unpublished)

Introduction

Forgive me, I suspect some of these aren’t even short stories. I can’t say I’m at all sure about what a short story is – any more than I’m certain about what a novel is. The (definite article, capital letter) Novel is different, of course, I know what that is. And whatever short stories are, I can’t help but think they’ve flourished partly by dint of not being pressed into service as a repository for something else entirely (national identity, masculinity, human frailty, even) and then endlessly handwrung about in a similar way. In any case, collecting these together has made me think that the novels I like most all aspire somehow to the status of short stories: little hothouse miniatures that say hardly enough, or too much too quickly, or both. If you’d asked me before doing this what kind of short stories I liked the most I would’ve had myself pinned as a fan of the “epistemological thriller” – I’d have had no qualms about calling them that either. It seems clear, looking down this list, however, that what I really can’t get enough of are stories about quiet desperation.

‘Self Portrait on Christmas Night: Year 1961 age 19 almost 20; Homage to George’ by Joe Brainard

Oh, Joe. You’re pure as anything.

There’s no genre called “rumination”, but I think perhaps there should be. This little fragment of gorgeous juvenilia is a big gush of worry about daring to disturb the universe – so wise and so Tiggerish. I was going to write “in a manner that only those aged ‘19 almost 20’ can muster”, but that’s an absolute lie.

From The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, The Library of America, 2012

‘Tropisms I’ by Nathalie Sarraute, translated by Maria Jolas

These little fragments are ur-short stories, really, for how they name and give slimy, botanical form to all that’s unspoken and not-quite-speakable, those “movements that are hidden under the commonplace, seemingly harmless instances of our everyday lives.”

First published in Tropismes in 1939, by Robert Denoël. First published in English in 1963. New Directions edition produced in 2017

‘The Balloon’ by Donald Barthelme

I first read this printed on the bible paper of Volume E of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. It was the first year of my English degree, and I was too tight and too skint to buy my own. Luckily, a flatmate in my halls of residence jacked in the course after the first week. She left her full complement of Nortons stacked on our kitchen table, with a note instructing me to “take these – or burn them, whatever”. Anyway, I’m not one for memorising anything but, I think if challenged I might be able to recite whole swathes of this off-book. Every time I read it, I get the distinct impression that these lines have been running in my head all the while.

First published in The New Yorker in 1961. Collected in Sixty Stories, 1984, and The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume E, Norton, 2002

‘Break It Down’ by Lydia Davis

I bought the big doorstep of collected stories a few years back and wolfed the whole thing right down, fully agape, all in one go, so that my belief got totally suspended and for a few days everything became Davisworld:  totally deadpan and credulous.

I pressed this copy on a friend and never got it back and I was happy, actually, just with the impression that these stories had left. But then just recently I found a different collection of hers at my boyfriend’s house and I dipped into it one morning while he was making coffee and somehow it wasn’t the same at all. It seemed flat and puny, not at all like the stories I’d been carrying around with me all this time. So, I bought another copy of the collected stories just to check, but I’ve been too wary to open it until by chance I heard this one read by a kind American voice (a Judy Blume voice, a Sesame Street voice) on the radio a few weeks back and there I was all agape again.

First published in The Paris Review. Collected in Break It Down, FSG, 1986. Also in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davies, Penguin, 2009. Hear ‘Break it Down’ read aloud here