‘The Lake Shore Limited’ by KJ Orr

Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope (a knot of time and space which provides a fundamental building block of narrative representation) is one that hasn’t been nearly enough studied with relation to the short story. This is quite possibly because, disappointingly, Bakhtin himself completely ignores the form, and moreover, never hypothesizes a chronotope of the train. Such a chronotope is perfect for the idea of a private meeting space, a place for the telling of stories and sharing of secrets (and the not-telling of what is really important) while whizzing through time and space. But Bakhtin’s omission is no great loss, as Orr, with her customary skill and deftness, illustrates the principle perfectly.

First published in Light Box, Daunt Books, 2016

‘Alight At The Next’ by Eley Williams

Although this story has already been cited in this parish by the good Naomi Frisby (and isn’t actually my personal favourite in Williams’s justly-lauded collection – ‘Smote’ is as close to perfection as it gets), ‘Alight at the Next’ shows how a train, even the most squalid packed Tube carriage, and a short story can together stop time and open time up. (This story also contains Williams’s wondrous recognition that her ‘spirit animal is probably a buttered roll.’)

In Attrib. and Other Stories, Influx Press, 2017. Read it online here

‘Hauptbahnhof’ by Joanna Walsh

John Berger has written that ‘Of all nineteenth-century buildings, the mainline railway station was the one in which the ancient sense of destiny was most fully re-inserted . . . in a railway station the impersonal and the intimate coexist. Destinies are played out.’ (I think Walter Benjamin has something to say about stations, too, but I can’t find the reference now – why did Benjamin have to write so bloody much? – and anyhow I’m sure you probably know it better than I do.) Here, Walsh plays with the entirely reasonable idea of taking up residence in a railway station.

In Worlds From The Word’s End, And Other Stories, 2017

‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Donald A. Yates

So as we draw into the terminus, arriving at the end of our allotted dozen, the reader may feel comforted by the appearance of such a familiar story (like a landmark that welcomes us home, much as a glimpse of the Etihad often tells me I am nearly back in Manchester Piccadilly), or delighted by the possibility of something as yet unknown (the thrill of arriving in a city we will now discover!). Much has been written about (and many inspired by) this story, and while yes of courseit is all about labyrinths, endless recursion, the infinite, books fake or otherwise, fate, destiny, and time, what many have missed is that this story in fact entirely hinges upon a train: the one in which Yu Tsun narrowly misses Captain Richard Madden on his way to his fateful encounter with Sinologist Stephen Albert. As Ricardo Piglia has noted in his Theses on the Short Story, ‘a short story always tells two stories’ and the ‘visible story hides a secret tale, narrated in an elliptical and fragmentary manner.’ The train, buried in the midst of this abyme, is surely the ‘secret truth’ and key to both the garden of forking paths, and ‘The Garden of Forking Paths.’ And, as I hope I have demonstrated by now, the short story as a whole.

First published in English in Fictions, 1962. Read it online here

‘The Check-Up’ by Hervé Guibert, translated by Elizabeth Fallaize

Guibert is the author of the beautiful and brutal A L’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life), an account both of Michel Foucault’s death from AIDS and of Guibert’s unfolding illness (he died of AIDS aged 36). He has a completely inimitable style, and this story has all the singularity and ferocity of his writing, over just three short pages. It’s an account, mostly in unmarked dialogue, of a child’s refusal to undress under the gaze of a doctor, and his insistence that the doctor must conduct his investigation blindfolded. I’m not sure what date the story was written, but I find it hard not to see hovering behind it his friend Foucault’s preoccupation with the clinic, with the disciplinary gaze, with relations of power, and with the surfaces and depths of the body.

In The Oxford Book of French Short Stories, OUP, 2002

‘An Actor Prepares’ by Donald Antrim

Reginald Barry, a professor of speech and drama at a liberal arts college, is rehearsing a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. He is pompous and self-serving, though also self-aware, and the story displays the seductive machinations he enacts in directing the play under the guise of its historical authenticity. This is a very funny, carnivalesque exploration of performance, of sincerity, and of rationalization.

In The Emerald Light in the Air, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Granta, 2014

‘Grace’ by Sophie Mackintosh

I’ve recently read Mackintosh’s novel The Water Cure (forthcoming in May), and this shares some of the novel’s themes – ill-understood dangers, the burdens placed on women’s bodies, momentous and terrifying metaphysical decisions – as well as its measured, clear, tones and almost balletic precision of pacing. Mackintosh’s writing makes me feel as if the air around her words is cleaner and clearer than before. I love the sense of disorientation her writing produces, and her fearlessness in resisting over-explanation.

In The White Review, April 2016. Read it online here

‘Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ by Sigmund Freud

‘Dora’ is the crucible for Freud’s thinking about fantasy, reality, and truth, as well as for his developing understandings of dream analysis and transference. It’s been hugely controversial, for Freud’s imputation to a teenage girl of a desire for the sexual advances of a much older man. It has figured in the last decades as a lightning rod for feminist critiques of Freud and psychoanalysis.

But it’s also a remarkable story, one in which the reliability of narration is the central, raging theme – narration by the protagonists in the story (Dora herself), and narration by the narrator and author. All Freud’s early case studies can be read as often dramatic documents in which Freud the scientist and Freud the writer are trying to find a narrative voice, a persona, and a style. His long career of revision, amendment, and revisiting cast him as his own obsessive editor and annotator. In these case studies, his authorial stance, and the voices of his subjects – sometimes speaking with agonizing clarity, and sometimes struggling to be heard, muffled by Freud’s own wishes – jostle for space and authority. The stories he told, with their own conflicting desires, sometimes contradictory aims, unexamined assumptions, erratically brilliant self-analyses, glaring lacunae, their unsteady implications constantly threatening to outpace Freud’s own attempts to keep them in his mastery, are some of the most exciting narratives ever written.

First published in 1905, otherwise known as ‘Dora’. Available from Oxford World Classics, translated by Anthea Bell, 2013.

‘Water Child’ by Edwidge Danticat

This is a beautiful, elegant story of a Haitian immigrant to the US, working as a nurse, wedded to solitude, mulling over a pregnancy termination, wondering how to relate to the “near-father of her nearly-born child”, and grappling with silence: her own and that of the laryngectomised patients she cares for.

(In The New Yorker, 11 September 2000. Available to subscribers here)

‘The Sweater’ by Meryn Cadell

Some of the best short stories, ones that do so much within the constraints of form, are songs – the kind of songs that are voice-driven, narrative, tightly structured, compressed. This is one of my favourite pieces of songly storytelling. It’s a witty, charming, and tender teasing of teenage girls’ crushes without being mocking of the yearning at their heart.

On Angel Food for Thought, 1992. See the video here

‘The Sisterhood of Night’ by Steven Millhauser

A community is destabilized by the apparent existence of a secret society of girls devoted to silence. This story is subtly creepy, with a quiet pulse of revolt and rage. It’s about veracity and testimony, and the writing moves between different forms of witnessing: personal, legal, journalistic reportage. I love its sinister indeterminacy, and I am a fan of anything that suggests the radical and destabilizing threat that teenage girls meeting in secret can pose to society.

First published in Harper’s Magazine, July 1994, and collected in The Knife Thrower, Phoenix House, 1999

‘Don’t Look Now’ by Daphne du Maurier

‘Don’t Look Now’ is wildly brilliant, and genuinely terrifying. A tale of grief, fantasy, and terror, it’s the kind of story I love – where something can turn, can pitch into an altogether different reality and register. The writing has an unsteady heartbeat to it, but a tightly controlled surface; my heart starts racing just thinking about it.

First published in 1971, by Victor Gollancz

‘So Much Water So Close To Home’ by Raymond Carver

I first read this story in my teens as a result of seeing the brilliant Short Cuts by Robert Altman. The story interests me in part because it’s about a gulf of understanding, about a deep disparity of knowledge and feeling that can arise between men and women around questions of violence, degradation, and bodily dignity – something I am thinking a lot about these days. The narrator’s husband goes on a weekend fishing trip with friends; they discover a dead girl’s body floating in the river, but choose not to curtail their trip or inconvenience themselves by finding a phonebox to call the police. Carver makes economical use of the queasy mingling of the fish they acquire and the female corpse they ignore. The narrator’s subsequent horror at the men’s indifference, and her anxiety about her husband’s implication in the story, draw an increasingly violent wedge between husband and wife. There are some killer lines: “He put his arms around me and rubbed his hands up and down my back, the same hands he’d left with two days before.” It’s an uncomfortable and astute rendering of the sickly knowledge of male violence with which women live.

In Where I’m Calling From: The Collected Stories, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988

‘Dream Story’ by Arthur Schnitzler

Nightmarish, hallucinatory, unsettling – I love this exploration of the subterranean underbelly of cities and of the psyche, of the crossing of sexual and religious thresholds, set in early twentieth-century Vienna. Freud was, unsurprisingly, a great admirer of Schnitzler. Kubrick was too, and his 1999 Eyes Wide Shut is a terrific and uncanny adaptation of the story, transferred to a New York that is both well-heeled and seedy.

Published in 1926 as Traumnovelle, and in Penguin Books, 1999, translated by J.M.Q Davis