‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ by Joyce Carol Oates

Crafted with sharp, simmering tension and a relentless, dread-like momentum, Joyce Carol Oates’ 1966 story has become a contemporary classic. Fifteen-year-old Connie is a typical teenage girl: concerned with her looks, self-conscious, struggling with strained parental relationships. When a stranger arrives, who may not be exactly who he says he is, the story’s conclusion begins to feel inevitable, even pre-ordained. The story has a dreamlike quality that verges horrifyingly into nightmare as it illuminates the specific vulnerabilities of the teenage girl.

First published in the Fall 1966 edition of Epoch magazine, collected in The Wheel of Love and Other Stories, Vanguard, 1970 and widely anthologised

‘The Moons of Jupiter’ by Alice Munro

This Alice Munro story is about the distances that open up between people in a family. The narrator, Janet, has a strained relationship with her older daughter, Nichola, who she is rarely in touch with and misses very much. Janet doesn’t seem to understand why she and Nichola are not close, but later in the story she recounts an event from Nichola’s childhood in which Janet chose to go through the motions of care but withdrew love in order to protect herself. This feels like a very human, self-preserving thing to do, but it has disastrous long-term consequences. This is a deeply affecting story — made even more so by the fact it feels impossible to read any work by Alice Munro and not acknowledge the fact she ignored the abuse of her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner for years.

First published in The New Yorker in May 1978 and available online for subscribers to read here; collected in The Moons of Jupiter, Macmillan, 1982; also in Selected Stories, 1996, Vintage Munro, 2004, and Carried Away, 2006

‘Longshore Drift’ by Julia Armfield

There’s something magical hovering at the edges of this story by Julia Armfield about queer desire, teenage awkwardness and chilly beaches. Though nothing actuallymagical happens, Armfield’s writing of place, and especially the sea, feels dreamlike and otherworldly.

First published in Granta 148, August 2019 and available online here

‘Cat Person’ by Kristen Roupenian

‘Cat Person’ may be most famous now as a movie featuring Emilia Jones and Greg from Succession, but before that, in 2017, it was the first short story to go ‘viral’ on the internet. It was published online around the time the Harvey Weinstein allegations broke. The story became a lightning rod for conversations about the nature of consent and the tricky landscape of contemporary dating. It was discussed and dissected ferociously online, as though it was a work of non-fiction – something which fascinated me. It’s not a perfect story, and with all things that become very popular very quickly, it has been torn to shreds by many. Nevertheless, the story managed to articulate something very specific that resonated with many people, especially women, and for that reason, I return to it often.

First published by The New Yorker in 2017 and available online here

Introduction

The short story is flourishing in the 21st century. It was always a place of wonder and joy, but back in the 20th century it is did not feature much at school for me, except as the ‘essays’ we wrote for homework. Mine were always ‘short stories’. However, my main interest at the time was science fiction. I read the alphabet, from Aldiss to Zelazny. I encountered a lot of advanced science concepts from my avid reading of SF, which were also not covered at school. But these close encounters led me towards a degree in physics. In mid-life, I returned to writing and have published fiction and poetry. My personal anthology begins with an SF story I read as a teenager. It is a pointer to themes in my other selections, and each story has a link to at least one other. I am interested in the worlds evoked by the stories.

Much wonderful short fiction today is published by small independent outfits, and they feature prominently in my selection.

‘Evidence’ by Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov wrote extensively in his fiction about robots. One can trace the fascination with animating the inanimate back through recorded history and religious texts. Consider ‘men of clay’ and the notion of the ‘golem’. Asimov’s robots were made in the shape of men, sometimes uncannily human in appearance, with ‘positronic’ brains. They could operate autonomously, but Asimov set them up constrained by ‘The Three Laws of Robotics’, which prevented robots from harming humans or allowing them to come to harm from inaction on their part. Robots would sacrifice themselves for a human life. I was never clear that we could regard the robots as living beings. But perhaps they could be thought of as ‘sentient’. The emphasis in Asimov’s stories was on the positronic brain, but we humans don’t just think with our brains, our bodies and complex neurobiological activity are part of the story. How would the bodies and senses of a robot affect its thinking? Is it capable of emotion? But Asimov’s robots could be relied upon not to kill you, which is surely a good thing!

This one, ‘Evidence’, written in 1946, stuck in my mind, perhaps because it included a female scientist, Susan Calvin. In this story she attempts to prove the humanity of a character, the lawyer Stephen Byerley, who some believed had replaced himself with a robot after being seriously injured in a car accident.

Byerley ran for the position of mayor against an opponent who was suspicious that Byerley was not human. That he was never seen to sleep or eat was a factor. (Robots don’t need to do these things.) Susan Calvin produces an apple from her handbag. Byerley bites the apple. He must be human! (Reminds me of another story of a woman and an apple…) However, Calvin, privately, considers the possibility that Byerley has a stomach installed. Ultimately, she vouches for Byerley’s humanity, as even though she believes him to be a robot, she also believes that a robot would make a better mayor as he/it would never harm a human being. Susan Calvin lies for the sake of humanity. Byerley becomes mayor and later goes on to higher things. When he dies, his remains are atomised so that the evidence is forever hidden.

First published in Astounding Science Fiction, September 1946

‘Dialogue With a Somnambulist’ by Chloe Aridjis

This was my first encounter with the work of Chloe Ardijis and it was a wonderful surprise. Aridjis is an award-winning writer of Mexican extraction who now lives in London.

This is the title story of Ardijis’s collection, Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays & a Portrait Gallery. We discover the strange progression of a woman’s relationship with a man and a mannequin. One night after her evening meal she decides to take a walk. Should she go left into a busy street, or right into a quieter one? Her decision is to follow a plastic bag buffeted by the wind into the quieter street where the only other pedestrian is “one of those dark city angels who appear like holograms only to disappear a second later”.

The woman and the ‘angel’ end up walking to a bar, described as “the finest in the city”, but “only a select few were ever able to find it”. And the woman and her new companion succeed. Within, they find a collection of grotesques and smoke. She encounters the Somnambulist in a glass case. He is a waxwork mannequin – “Tall and regal and encased in darkness.” The enchantment begins, and the woman becomes a regular at the bar, each time inspecting the mannequin, fretting over his condition. She encounters a former boyfriend, Friedrich, and the two wonder if there is a spark left from their previous relationship. Without giving too much away, the story proceeds – Friedrich procures the Somnambulist – “who ever heard of shutting up a somnambulist when movement was what defined them.” It/he takes up residence in the woman’s bedroom. Pompei, as she calls him, begins to move… Read this excellent book to find out how it goes.

First published in Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays & a Portrait Gallery, House Sparrow Press, 2021. Expanded edition published in 2024

‘The Man Who Walked Through Walls’ by Marcel Aymé, trans. Sophie Lewis

Marcel Aymé was born in France in 1902. ‘The Man Who Walked Through Walls’ is part of a series of absurdist fictions he wrote during the Nazi occupation of France. Written in dead-pan style it concerns a man, Duttilleul, who works in the Ministry of Records. At the age of 43, he discovers he has the power to walk through walls. Aymé has given his character superhuman capabilities, which also happens in other stories in this wonderfully inventive collection.

At first, Duttilleul is disturbed by this ability, and visits a doctor, who diagnoses an ailment of the thyroid, for which he prescribes a bizarre treatment that includes centaur hormones. Aymé’s descriptions are delivered po-faced with a hint of irony, which heightens the sense of absurdism, but allows the reader to suspend belief. (I note that the tilleul, or linden tree, is associated with medical benefits and with truth and liberty. I do not know if this was an intentional reference of the writer.)

What follows is a comedic romp of a story. Dutilleul clashes with his officious new boss who has a “nailbrush moustache” and objects to Dutilleul’s old-fashioned pince-nez and goatee, Moreover, the new man wishes to reform office procedures, and objects to his subordinate’s use of a traditionalist long-winded language in his correspondence. He relocates Dutilleul’s desk to a broom cupboard adjacent to his own office. Dutilleul torments his bullying boss by manifesting his head and upper body through the wall of the man’s office. The outcome of this is that the boss ends up in a mental asylum and Dutilleul is free to return to his usual modus operandi. However, M Dutilleul wonders what good use he could make of his transmural capabilities. He embarks upon a series of robberies, amassing a decent stash of cash and a famous diamond. His calling card is the name ‘Werewolf’ left behind in red chalk. He quickly becomes newsworthy and a folk hero for outsmarting the police. His ever more ambitious thefts undermine the authority of government officials who are forced to resign. Dutilleul becomes a wealthy man. He delights in hearing his colleagues deliver encomiums about his achievements but wishes to become known as the man who is the heroic ‘Werewolf’. This vanity leads him to more spectacular exploits, during which he is arrested and sent to prison, where his abilities allow him to move about the prison and play tricks on the guards. Ultimately, he escapes and changes his appearance, living incognito until he is recognised by the French painter Gen Paul, who had the ability to detect the “least physiological change” in a person. Dutilleul decides to go to Egypt but is stopped in his tracks when he meets an attractive woman. His subsequent amorous adventures weaken his wall-walking abilities, and he develops headaches, for which he takes what he thinks is an aspirin. Of course, it is one of the pills originally prescribed by the doctor. The combined outcome of “over-exertion” and the pill is that he becomes fixed within a wall, where he remains until this day. Herein is the moral! Wonderful stuff and part of a collection of deliciously subversive fiction. There is a sculpture of Aymé portrayed ‘passe-muraille’ in Paris.

First published in French as ‘Le Passe Muraille’ in 1943. Published in English in the collection The Man Who Walked Through Walls, Pushkin Press, 2012

‘Junction’ by Christopher Burns

Christopher Burns has published short fiction and several acclaimed novels. ‘Junction’ is one of his most recent short stories and is included in his new collection of short fiction – Mrs Pulaska and Other Stories, from Salt Publishing.

What would you say to your younger self if you could meet them? In this case you are already dead.

An old man arranges to meet his younger self in a park, just before the young man is killed in a road accident outside the gates. “This can’t happen, can it?” his younger self asks. He is surprised at how he has aged, losing his hair and wearing glasses. The older man has memories of things he believes he did, in the intervening period. It is an awkward conversation. He cannot tell his younger self that he is about to die. There are musings and questions, disagreements and regrets. What can we know? Who are we without memory and can memory define us? What is left behind when we die? The story haunts us with possibilities. One doesn’t expect resolution or answers, but the reading is a meditation.

First published in Mrs Pulaska and Other Stories, from Salt Modern Stories, 2024

‘Recording Angel’ by Helen Garner

There is an epigraph, which is a quote from Rilke: “Every angel is terrible.” This short story, set in Sydney/Melbourne in the late 20th Century is the first in a sequence of linked fiction contained within a single volume – Cosmo Cosmolino. Another short story, ‘The Vigil’, and a novella – ‘Cosmo Cosmolino’ follow on. ‘Cosmo Cosmolino’ translates into ‘small world, big world’. It seems a metaphor for Garner’s work here, she incorporates the small human details and the process of living (and dying) into the of the world at large into her often poetic accounts. What I love about Garner’s fiction is her ability to incorporate the inner lives of her characters, sometimes idiosyncratic and bizarre, into her narratives. Strange things appear to happen.

‘Recording Angel’ is an unsettling and uncanny story of a woman and her memories. Told in the first person, it has a resonance with Burns’s ‘The Junction’. What is memory, and what matters about a memory of one’s life? In this story a woman engages with an old friend, Patrick, who has known her all her life. Patrick “had mapped out the story of my life, and the lives of everyone we knew, into a grid-like framework and nailed it down; and everything done, witnessed, dreamed, heard of or read he had lined up under cast iron headings, those terrifyingly simple categories of his.” She is disturbed by the notion that her history will transcend her life via Patrick’s memory. But Patrick is shortly to have an operation to remove a brain tumour and the implications for his legacy of her life are disturbing.

First published in Cosmo Cosmolino, McPhee Gribble/Bloomsbury, 1993

‘Reality’ by John Lanchester

The ‘reality’ of our selfhood and place in the exterior world has become hard to define in the context of how we fabricate an idea of ourselves on social media. Here, John Lanchester dives into the world of ‘reality TV’. Told via the interior monologue of Iona, an “actress slash model slash influencer”, which her agent describes as “a triple threat” to the other participants, we encounter six young people in a beautiful villa in the Balearic Islands. They wait for the ‘tasks’ to begin, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.

They are being watched… What will the viewers think of Iona? Communications are coded; “Allegiances and alliances were covertly forming. Iona couldn’t say anything explicitly, of course, but she knew she could do a lot with body language and eye talk, grunts and nods and even silences”. She is jealously alert to Nousche, a skilful player of this psychology, and possibly more attractive to the handsome “ripped” guys of the group than Iona. We gain the sense that Iona is not as clever as she thinks, perhaps more a derivative of the world she is attempting to create. Iona remembers her poker player father’s advice about determining whether someone is telling the truth by listening to the echo of their voice. The villa is full of echoes, mocking and derisory. It seems a metaphor for Iona’s world. An ocean of the echoes of others. Like the island she is named for, Iona is surrounded by it. Lanchester is skilful in his use of sound as part of the narrative, and the naturalistic language of the contenders, like the woman Laz’s distinctive “Oi oi”, and Nousche’s French expressions, which give her an exotic edge. The story coalesces after Nousche makes them porridge for breakfast. Misunderstandings, nuanced remarks, and Iona’s comment “I wish I hadn’t had that porridge… Bloat City”. Allegiances turn, and Iona finds herself alone in an echoing sound of laughter. “the sound of souls screaming in pain grew louder and louder”. The scene breaks when one of the men, puts his arm around her. He reassures her; “…the tasks and evictions, they’ll begin soon. It’s not as if this will go on for ever”.

First published in the London Review of Books, 2018 as ‘Love Island’, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Reality and Other Stories, Faber, 2020

‘Three Weddings’ by Sonya Moor

Sonya Moor is a French and British writer living in Paris. I first encountered her work in Confingo Magazine, which published the title short story of her collection The Comet and Other Stories in its Spring 2021 issue. Confingo Press is noted, inter alia, for its list of stylish and unusual arts-linked non-fiction and fiction. Sonya Moor’s platform here is of ekphrasis – writing descriptive of art. As the author says in her introduction, the inspiration derives “from visual to musical, to comedic and criminal”. The stories “present female protagonists inspired by representations of females”.

‘Three Weddings’ is inspired by the film My Fair Lady, which is itself a modern take on the story of Pygmalion. Here, a father’s obsession with his beautiful daughter, Galatea, is visited over a number of years from the perspective of an older cousin, at three family weddings. “Caz and I stare at the baby: a great cream puff of a thing.” “Dressed like that, anyone would think it was the baby getting married, not her brother”. Moor artfully presents uncomfortable family dynamics giving us glimpses into the life of a girl growing up as an ‘ideal’.

First published in The Comet and Other Stories, Confingo Publishing, 2023

‘Margate Sands’ by Uschi Gatward

From Uschi Gatward’s short story collection English Magic. Published by the independent Galley Beggar, in another fine volume from their list. ‘Margate Sands’ is a story of memory and a disjuncture with reality. Two female students, Angela and Lisa, go to Margate in the 1980s, where Angela wishes to return to the ‘shell house’ she saw with her family as a child. She has detailed memories of the visit, even of an old lady and a little shell owl she bought. Tourist information brochures talk of a shell grotto, which the girls visit, but this is not the ‘shell house’ Angela remembers, and she is upset to the point of anger and tears. No one can corroborate the memory. Was it real or manufactured? Years later (2012) Lisa returns to Margate to visit a Tracy Emin exhibition in the newly built Turner Contemporary art gallery. On the way she drops into the tourist information office and reaffirms that the shell house of Angela’s memory does not exist.

As the story ends, there is an ‘ekphrastic element’ in storytelling. Outside the Turner Contemporary, Lisa finds a new Mark Wallinger installation – Sinema Amnesia – overlooking the sea, located in an old shipping container designated – The Waste Land – which shows visitors recordings of a view of the sea from the ‘window’, which is a projection of the view but from the previous day. Lisa observes that “It looks exactly the same as today.” The attendant responds “Doesn’t always”.

Shortlisted for the London Short Story Prize, 2013. Published in English Magic, Galley Beggar, 2021

‘The China Factory’ by Mary Costello

‘The China Factory’ is the title story of the debut collection of short stories by Irish writer Mary Costello.

Costello’s narrative is woven from the social architecture of working-class rural Ireland, where life pivots around the church. Costello’s worlds are very real, allowing us to enter the lives of her characters. A woman reflects on her past, casting her mind back to when she was 17. The teenager, shortly to leave for college, takes a job for the summer as a “sponger” in a china factory. Her mother drives her unwilling daughter to ask a neighbour, Gus Meehan, for a lift to the city every day for work.

“That’s an awful way to live” her mother says when they get into the car to leave. “The people who went before him would be ashamed.” But it happens that Gus is a distant relative. Gus’s life was ruined by a harsh upbringing, and, later, excessive drinking. His story is told indirectly as the story progresses.

The woman recounts: “I could smell the previous night’s alcohol seeping from his pores. I could smell other smells too and I tried not to think of his body. When he spoke, he hung his head a little and lowered his voice. I knew he was trying to deflect from his body and in the effort his words came out full of apology and shame.”

The story unfolds as the girl integrates herself into the life in the factory, knowing that it was temporary for her, but not for those who will work there permanently, including Gus. The other girls are appalled that she shares a car with Gus. “How d’you stick it – the BO?” She denies being related to him. “They’re a bit strange from your part of the country, aren’t they?”

She has told no one that she is leaving for college in the autumn, and dreams about her future. The china they make forms a metaphor for a more gracious life, the factory Visitor Centre selling gilded plates to wealthy American tourists.

Gus’s deeper character is revealed to the young woman through her daily interactions with him. He talks about the factory brochure, “Earth, water, air and fire – that’s what goes into the china. Who’d have thought it? …The same stuff as we’re all made of…”

A dramatic event occurs where Gus intervenes to stop a gunman – a mentally ill relative of one of the other girls. The men exchange quiet words. Later, the woman reflects: “I wonder if it was to the man or to his madness he spoke?”

First published in The China Factory, The Stinging Fly/Canongate, 2012