‘The Mark on the Wall’ by Virginia Woolf

The first short story Woolf published, in 1917 – and it is pure Woolf. It has many of the preoccupations of her lifetime’s writing, among them the instability of perception. This story has some lines that capture so much of her sensibility, such as the whimsical: “Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour – landing at the other end with a single hairpin in one’s hair!”

The line “I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts” is exactly the kind of thing she would write in letters to her friends, or in a kind of self-knowing tantrum in her diary. Woolf would often present her philosophical musings with a tone of lightness and self-mocking flightiness, but they were philosophical through and through. Hermione Lee argues in her biography that, similarly, Woolf’s political views were often expressed through statements that appeared to negate politics, or separate herself from it. Woolf’s need for privacy and her bent towards singularity made her mistrust, whether in herself or others, overt and determined political positions that demanded consensus, but her writing is always political and philosophical, even when it is at its most playful.

And then there are the moments of breathtaking beauty and simplicity. Writing about trees towards the end of the story, she says: “the cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out.” And “a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long.” What I love in this story is what I love in Woolf in general: her ability to roam and wander, while also to be unerringly, shatteringly precise.

In A Haunted House and Other Stories, The Hogarth Press, 1943. 

‘Mon Légionnaire’ by Raymond Asso and Marguerite Monnot

I knew the Gainsbourg version of this heart-breaking story first, when it came out in 1987, as a pop hit, with Gainsbourg hammily whispering the lyrics. I later realised it was a Piaf song. I now associate the song strongly with Claire Denis’s wonderful film about the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti, Beau Travail (1999). Loosely based on Melville’s Billy Budd, and featuring fragments of Britten’s opera in the soundtrack, the film centres on the triangulation of male rivalry and desire around a beautiful young soldier.

In the video, men dance in a bar under Gainsbourg’s ambiguous gaze. This chimes uncannily with Beau Travail, in its reckoning with unacknowledged male desire for men, and with French relationships to Africa and the eroticised African body. In Beau Travail’s famous final scene, Galoup, played by Denis Lavant, disgraced for letting the legion’s honour down in his intent to destroy a soldier he envies, dances alone, maniacally, desperately, to The Rhythm of the Night.

Made famous by Marie Dubas, then Edith Piaf, and then covered by Serge Gainsbourg

Introduction

Twelve you say—how can that be? Such a small amount of water and the pool is so big. To narrow it down first I had to remember, and then I had to read and re-read. Such exquisite pleasure. Such exquisite pain.

A good short story is like an arthouse film or a poem; you jump straight into the action and step off lightly at the end. Nothing is resolved. There is no neat summing up or resolution. The reader is made to work—imagining what came before and what could happen next. The stories that interest me usually focus in some way on the complexities of human interaction—the ways in which we misunderstand, mislead and are cruel to one another.  I like stories that are rooted in everyday life—but explore the dark undercurrents.

These twelve are stories that stayed with me long after reading them. Stories I have found myself thinking about in the supermarket queue or in bed at night. They are stories that trouble me or disturb me, stories that have changed me in some way.

‘The First Several Hundred Years Following My Death’ by Shawn Vestal

My son sometimes eats four meals in a row. The same thing, four times in a row. He walks up to the counter and yells, “Thanksgiving dinner!”

The protagonist exists in an absurd kind of afterlife where everyone remains the age they were when they died and there is nothing to do but relive key moments of your life and eat—one can eat any meal as long as it is something you ate in your lifetime. The result is both comic and strangely profound as the narrator comes to realize that even those happy moments in life are never as untroubled as they may first appear.
From Godforsaken Idaho, Little A, 2013

‘Fox 8’ by George Saunders

One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds.

I love George Saunders. No, I REALLY love George Saunders. A friend saved me this story from her weekend Guardian.  She saved it because it was about foxes and was slightly bemused by my whoops of glee when I saw who the author was.

This is a deceptively simple yet tragic tale of foxes and their difficult relationship with the human-dominated world. But the magic of Saunders is such that his stories work on many levels. This brilliant and engaging story is written in the form of a letter from a fox to a human, and is an allegory not only for our tricky and destructive relationship with the natural world, but also of immigrants and immigration—as seen through an animal’s eyes. Genius.

Published in The Guardian, 21st October, 2017. Read it online here

‘singing my sister down’ by Margo Lannagan

A friend recommended Lannagan’s collection Black Juice after she had read it at another friend’s house. “Read it,” she said, “you won’t have read anything quite like it.” Yeah, right, I thought…

‘singing my sister down’ is a dark documentation of a family’s last day with their daughter as she is sucked down into a tar pit as punishment for killing her husband. It is narrated by the girl’s youngest brother and is by turns touching, disturbing, funny and haunting.

Through our singing, I thought I heard her cry for Mumma; I tried not to, yet my ears went on hearing.
From Black Juice, Gollancz, 2004. Read it online here

‘Elephant’ by Raymond Carver

My mother and my daughter and my former wife. That’s three people on the payroll right there, not counting my brother. But my son needed money, too.

It was hard to choose just one Raymond Carver story but this is the one that has stayed with me the longest, perhaps because of the hopelessly unfair situation the narrator is in. He works long hours in a dead-end job in order to support various family members whose demands become increasingly unreasonable. Carver perfectly captures the overwhelming sense of hopelessness that the narrator feels. Yet despite this he still manages almost angelic moments of optimism and good will towards the world and even his hapless and predatory relatives.
Published in The New Yorker, June 9, 1986 and collected in Elephant and Other Stories, The Harvill Press, 1988 and Where I’m Calling From, The Harvill Press, 1993. Read it online here

‘Butcher’s Perfume’ by Sarah Hall

An in-your-face story about the friendship between two teenagers—the narrator, Kathleen and the volatile Manda. Kathleen is fascinated by Manda and her family. There are dark undercurrents and a sense that violence is always in the wings waiting to erupt.
That’s why we were all afraid of her. That’s why her name went before her — Manda Slessor — and if you heard it said in a room you felt ill at ease, you felt things shift out of the way for its coming into the conversation. Everyone knew she was hard. It was the first thing ever they knew about her. It was her pedigree.
From The Beautiful Indifference, Faber and Faber, 2011

‘Peter’ by Rob Roensch

One of those stories where less is definitely more. It is as much about what is not said as what is said. Every time read it I think it is about something different. Could be compassion, friendship, death, loss, fragility, the minutiae, could be the whole fucking lot of it. Exquisite.
My five-year-old, gleeful weirdo, stands at my knee gnawing on the elephant we keep telling her not to gnaw on. There’s rain in my hair still. I have so much and am so bereft.
First published in Bull, Read it here

‘Revenge’ by Ellen Gilchrist

I have a huge soft spot for Ellen Gilchrist, who I first came across when I was 18 or 19. She never shies away from showing the nastier sides of her characters. Set in 1943 in the Mississippi Delta, the narrator of the story is Rhoda Manning, aged 10—a thoroughly unpleasant, foul-mouthed and narcissistic child whose family refer to her as “dear sweet little girl.” When her cousins and brother build a broad-jump pit and won’t let her play because she is a girl, Rhoda gets increasingly more and more angry.
I began to pray the Japs would win the war, would come marching into Issaquena County and take them prisoners, starving and torturing them…
From In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Faber and Faber, 1981

‘Which Reminded Her Later’ by Jon McGregor

Several of the stories from this outstanding collection by Jon McGregor got under my skin. This is a quietly disquieting story about a mysterious woman who comes to stay with a vicar and his wife but doesn’t give much away about what she is doing—not even her name. Michael (the vicar) is nonchalant about the whole thing whilst the narrator (his wife) becomes more and more spooked.

From This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You, Bloomsbury, 2012. Read it here

‘Home’ by Jayne Anne Phillips

Jayne Anne Phillips was the writer who first turned me onto short stories. I randomly came across her collection Fast Lanes in my local library. ‘Home” is a deeply uncomfortable story about a woman in her twenties who returns home to live with her mother when she is broke. It explores the tensions (old and new) that arise between them, tensions that are compounded when the narrator brings an old lover to stay the night.

From Black Tickets, Faber and Faber, 1979. Extract available here

‘Death in Midsummer’ by Yukio Mishima, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker

A story about loss and the weird ways that each of us deal with our own personal grief. This story stayed with me not only because the loss suffered is so huge, but because of the detached, almost analytical way the main characters think about it. The weeks of rituals and customs surrounding death in Japan further compound the sense of oddity and alienation. And although the characters appear detached the prose is elegant and poetic.
Memory sometimes makes hours run side by side for us, or pile one on another.
From Death in Midsummer and Other Stories, Penguin, 1966, download it here