‘The Voyage’ by Katherine Mansfield

Fenella is a young girl who travels across the sea with her grandmother, who is taking her to live with her and Fenella’s grandfather. And that’s pretty much it in way of “what happens”. The story starts as Fenella’s father accompanies them to the ship and ends when they reach the house of Fenella’s grandparents. To be honest, it’s not very exciting to read. The strength of the story lies in what is not being told, and in the undercurrents of Fenella’s perception of the unknown environment and of the great unknown which lies ahead. “On the land a white mist rose and fell. Now they could see quite plainly dark bush. Even the shapes of the umbrella ferns showed, and those strange silvery withered trees that are like skeletons…” The story subtly reflects Fenella’s childlike consciousness and emphasizes details that are otherwise quickly overlooked—a woman’s hat, the creak of the ship, the strangeness of the landscape. These sensory observations highlight Fenella’s insecurity, but also awareness, as she navigates a world that feels vast and incomprehensible.

First published in The Sphere, December 24th, 1921. Collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories, Constable, 1922

‘Afternoon in Linen’ by Shirley Jackson

If some authors write short stories which could be considered more like novels, Shirley Jackson writes short stories which can be considered more like flash fiction. They are sleek, slim and minimalistic. Yet somehow the characters manage to shift from the first impression the give off, that of stick figures, to full-bodied people into the lives of whom we get just a thin glimpse. ‘Afternoon in Linen’ captures the tension between children and adults, focusing on a girl and her grandmother during a social visit. Mrs. Lennon and Harriet are visited by Mrs. Kator and her little boy, Howard. As a reader, the story puzzles me. Mrs. Lennon pushes Harriet to show off her skills: play piano or read a poem written assumingly by herself. But Harriet recoils from each one of her grandma’s gentle pushes. “‘I didn’t write it’, she said. ‘I found it in a book and copied it and gave it to my old grandmother and said I wrote it’”. Of course, Harriet not only needs to perform for and in front of her grandmother. Howard, her schoolmate, also assesses Harriet’s performance. And the question remains, who does Harriet want to impress more and to what lengths she’s willing to go for that.

First published in The New Yorker, 27 August 1943, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, Farrar, Straus and Company, 1949. Can be listened to here, with an introduction by Kristen Roupenian

‘The Children’s Grandmother’ by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner, alongside Katherine Mansfield and Chekhov, of course, writes what I define as perfect short stories. Her stories are little jewels that encapsulate single occurrences, but that reflect images of entire lives lived, and contain other stories within. ‘The Children’s Grandmother’ is a bit different, though. An unnamed narrator thinks back on her role as a mother, wife and, more importantly, daughter-in-law. Her story unpacks the dynamics between herself and “the children’s grandmother”, as she mostly refers to her mother-in-law. It quickly becomes clear that the presence of the narrator’s children shapes their relationship, mostly underscoring differences in values and expectations. The grandmother is a formidable, somewhat domineering presence in the household. She exerts her influence with a mix of criticism and care, yet her love for the children is undeniable. She involves herself in their upbringing, and the narrator, shows herself to be a quiet and submissive woman, whose presence in the household counts but for little. As the story progresses, the narrator reflects on how the grandmother’s personality weighs on her mind as the children grow up. Yet as the grandmother ages and finally dies, the narrator gains a clearer understanding of the woman who felt her entire life the pain of being a mother.

First published in The New Yorker, 17 November 1950. Available in Winter in the Air, Faber, 2022. Can be listened to here, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín

‘Rem’ by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Julian Semilian

Mircea Cărtărescu’s first work of prose, Nostalgia, was for some reason published in English as a novel. But it is as much a novel as Joyce’s Dubliners is. Cărtărescu’s collection is similar to Joyce’s in that they both tell stories of people from young to old age, but that’s where the similarities stop. The Romanian writer concocts stories which are a stage of war between character, author and narrator and ‘Rem’ is the most intricate of all five stories in the volume. In this story we have three very different narrators, each with an apparently different goal in the act of storytelling. Nana tells her lover Vali about a summer from her childhood when she kissed someone for the first time. But the story surpasses this simple promise and encompasses the bizarre past of a family searching for “The Entrance,” Nana’s literal future on paper, and above all, the chance of a wasted life. The most charming section is Nana’s recollection of when she and her six friends play in that fated summer of childhood. To pass the time, the girls play a game called “The Queens”, where each girl gets to be Queen for a day. The Queen of the day has an object using which she’s supposed to invent a game and all other girls must play it. In the end, it turns out that it is be the game which plays the girls and the game is nothing short of a life lived. ‘Rem’ is a wonderful story of childhood, and the long shadow childhood throws upon our adult lives.

First published in English in Nostalgia, New Directions, 2005

‘Araby’ by James Joyce

I remember that the first time I read ‘Araby’ all I was left with was that there was a house where a priest died. Those youthful days are long gone, but when rereading the story that first impression hits me straight from the first paragraphs. An unnamed boy is head over heels with “Mangan’s sister”, and when she mentions she can’t visit Araby, the local fair, the boy vows to go and bring her something. “The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me”. The house of the priest is the static element which stays unchanged on each reread, but it’s only this time that I noticed the narrator’s tone. The memory of Araby is painted in the blueish nuances of memory, and the story reads as a weave of bittersweet nostalgia and grandiose, yet gentle, irony. The boy’s feelings for the girl transform the mundane into the extraordinary, but the end of the story reveals the magical bazaar the boy imagined to be for what it really is – a dim, lacklustre place. In the end, it’s not really clear to me who is more disillusioned – the boy for not finding that perfect something to bring back or the adult narrator who knows what lies outside the illusion of perfection.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards Ltd., 1914

‘A Fall of Snow’ by James Turner

What I liked about ‘A Fall of Snow’ was how authentic and natural it read. Nicholas, the narrator, tells of a marking event which happened to him on Christmas when he was fifteen, visiting his uncle in the snowy countryside. The snow plays the central role in the story, but it has a dark edge to it, because it shows an unknown landscape and hides familiarity. “Where before I knew my way about, now everything, the fields, the trees, the church, even the cottages of my uncle’s estate, was strange and terrifying”. When Nicholas and his cousin ride the sledge across snow-covered fields, a terrible accident happens, which shapes his memories of that winter. The occurrence marks the young Nicholas and leaves him in fear of snow, though he barely admits that to himself. What makes the story so resonant is the way it captures the presence of childhood memories in adult life. The memory of that terrible winter clings to the narrator as a fixed image, bright and unwavering with time, as a photograph which can’t be edited nor burnt away.

First published in Staircase to the Sea, Kimber, 1974

‘Voices Lost in Snow’ by Mavis Gallant

It’s impossible to binge Mavis Gallant’s stories. For me, it’s actually even impossible to binge a single one of Mavis Gallant’s stories. Each line is so loaded with impressions and feelings and there are sentences which I need to read several times in a row to even get the gist of. But it’s probably most advisable to just read the story through, then come back to it over the next days (months? years?) and let it take shape in your head. ‘Voices Lost in Snow’ is the perfect example. “Dark riddles filled the corners of life because no enlightenment was thought required”, Gallant writes. Each word, perfectly placed to give childhood its atmosphere. Adult Linnet tells the story of a Saturday afternoon when she went with her father to visit her godmother, Georgie. But the story is so much more than that. It is about the distance between childhood perception and adult understanding, about the way memories shift and take on new meanings as we grow older. As a child, Linnet moves through the world with a sense of unquestioning acceptance, absorbing but not fully grasping the grown-up conversations around her. She sees but cannot yet interpret. The past, as adult Linnet remembers it, is fragmented, shaped by a child’s logic, where certain things are felt rather than known. It is the adult Linnet who recognizes what was hidden in the past moments—the absences, the evasions, the things left unsaid. In Gallant’s story childhood is a time of mystery, filled with codes and signals that only later come into their full bloom.

First published in The New Yorker, April 5, 1976, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Varieties of Exile, The New York Review of Books, 2003, and The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Bloomsbury, 2004; also The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Everyman’s Library, 2016

‘A Sketch of the Past’ by Virginia Woolf

I imagine sitting down with Virginia Woolf and asking her “Virginia, what do you think your best short story is?”. I see her looking at me with pity. “Short story, darling? What might you mean?” Virginia Woolf didn’t believe in the conventional genres of writing. Novel, essay, short story, memoir, biography? These were for her muddles in the large sphere of literature. Before her suicide, she was working on what she called a novel-essay, and what I see as her masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, might very well be called novel-memoir. But of course we, in the world out here, don’t indulge in this kind of dreaming. We deal in “The Short Stories of Virginia Woolf” and “The Complete Novels of Virginia Woolf” and such.

Whether ‘A Sketch of the Past’ published in its current form is a short story is up to the reader’s interpretation. What it is, though, is a series of diary entries from 1939, which Woolf intended to form the base for an upcoming autobiography. Her death in 1941 put an end to that project. In her diary entries, Woolf is writing of her mother, whose memory never stopped haunting her, her father and her siblings. She recalls the vacation house at St. Ives, which shaped her earliest memories, and describes not just events, but the sensory impressions that surrounded them. “Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of these first impressions. When I think of the early morning in bed I also hear the caw of rooks falling from a great height. The sound seems to fall through an elastic, gummy air”. These fragments of memory do not follow a linear structure; they ebb and flow like the very act of recollection itself, creating an impressionistic tapestry of her childhood.

What makes ‘A Sketch of the Past’ read so close to fiction is the fluid quality of the writing and the sense of certainty that there is a narrative thread which will in the end lead somewhere. There is the feel of a narrative voice which is not simply documenting events, but shapes them and draws attention to the shortcomings of memory. Following the Modernist belief, the text rejects a rigid plot structure in favour of mood, perception and interiority. And, after all, isn’t a good short story at its core simply a powerful act of storytelling, which goes beyond the simple narrative?

First published in Moments of Being, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976

Introduction

These are stories I remember the impact of if not always the content of. I seem to forget the details of my favourite stories shortly after I finish reading them, and each reread was almost like déjà vu, like I was remembering the stories as I read them. Except the last one, for reasons that’ll be clear when you get there.

My Canadian-ness is on display here: a quarter of these (or a third, depending how you categorize William Gibson) are by Canadians. They seem to skew to science fiction and horror, two genres which are best suited to the form.

As with many Personal Anthology contributors, these are the pieces that resonate today. If I were to compile this list a couple weeks from now, it might be entirely different. In fact there’s an alternate version on my website.

‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’ by Ted Chiang

This is a perfect Ted Chiang story – speculative fiction about people and relationships, not really about technology. Chiang weaves two timelines together here. In the first, a journalist investigates a new technology called “Remem”, which provides perfect, searchable access to personal memories. In testing the technology, he learns that his memory of a pivotal event is wrong, which makes him doubt his own self-perception.

In the other, Chiang imagines an encounter between the Tiv people in the 1940s encountering the written word for the first time when the Europeans show up. The newcomers impress upon one of them how important accurate record-keeping is, but a conflict arises with the society’s oral traditions.

Taken together they call into question whether absolute truth in history is desirable, or if we as humans are wired to seek harmony over accuracy.

First published in Subterranean Magazine, 2013, collected in Exhalation: Stories, Alfred A. Knopf, 2019

‘New Rose Hotel’ by William Gibson

I grew up in a remote town without a bookstore, but somehow there were books everywhere in my house when I was young. My mom and my sister Norma were science fiction nuts, and every issue of OMNI magazine a proper event. I remember finding the issue that had this story in it, in a box in the basement.

Neither my mom nor sister cared for William Gibson, so he was the first science fiction author I felt was mine. Even though I didn’t always understand the stories on first read, I loved how gritty and high-tech everything was. I’ve recently re-read his books, and the stories in Burning Chrome set the template for all of his novels — including elements of his current Jackpot series.

‘New Rose Hotel’ sets the table for Neuromancer and its sequels. The language is urgent and fragmented, with an edge that felt like a new kind of science fiction, even to 15-year-old me.

First published 1984 in OMNI, collected in Burning Chrome, Arbor House, 1986

‘The Paper Menagerie’ by Ken Liu

I first encountered Ken Liu as the translator two of the three volumes of The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, but he’s a renowned author aside from that work. ‘The Paper Menagerie’ is the story of Jack, the son of a white man from Connecticut and his mail-order bride from China. When he is a child, Jack’s mother makes him origami animals from scrap paper that come to life.

Being bullied at school, Jack begins to resent his Chinese heritage and his mother, refusing to speak the language which cuts off virtually all communication with her until she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer while he’s at college. When she dies, he digs the animals out of storage and finds a letter from her.

I won’t spoil the content of the letter. You should track down the story.

First published 2011 in Fantasy & Science Fiction, collected in The Paper Menagerie, Saga Press, 2016

‘Trogloxene’ by Lena Valencia

It was Valencia’s Personal Anthology that introduced me to this site. Her story ‘Trogloxene’ concerns sisters Holly and Max. The narrator’s perspective stays with Holly, as Max is recovering from a recent misadventure where she spent eight days lost in a cave. But something isn’t right:

There was something weird about Max’s face, thought Holly. Something off. Max had always been the pretty one, while adults used words like “unconventional” to describe Holly. But now Max’s eyes, once a crystal green, were dulled and bloodshot. Her shimmering golden hair had lost its sheen and hung limply around her face, which was sharper now, more angular. She twitched at every fork clank, sniffling and shifting in her chair.

Like many of the stories in her collection, ‘Trogloxene’ has an 80s-horror-movie feel that made me feel like a kid staying up past my bedtime watching TV.

First published in her collection Mystery Lights, Tin House, 2024. Read it online at Electric Literature here

‘Ahegao, or The Ballad of Sexual Repression’ by Tony Tulathimutte

In an interview between the author and Lincoln Michel, they discuss a bit of writing advice that Tulathimutte gave to Michel: “Pick your dumbest idea and write it as seriously as possible.” ‘Ahegao’ seems like an extreme example of that, and the result is almost overwhelming.

This story was almost too much for me. It’s so explicit, so boundary-pushing that I nearly tapped out. But the payoff at the end is unforgettable and makes the discomfort of the preceding pages worthwhile. I still get squirmy thinking about this story, but I’ll never forget it.

First published in The Paris Review, Winter 2023, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Rejection, William Morrow, 2024