‘King of Jazz’ by Donald Barthelme

King of short stories. As a recovering trombonist, I can hardly fail to be moved by the opening sentence: “Well I’m the king of jazz now, thought Hokie Mokie to himself as he oiled the slide on his trombone.” Sold! What follows is a riotous send-up of the endless “cutting contests” by which old-time jazzers, men to a man, fought their way to the top. Is there more to this story than the virtuosic language-games which Barthelme played almost better than anybody else? The answer lies in a strange paragraph which marks the turn of the tale. Here Barthelme, admittedly while describing Hokie’s solo on a tune called “Cream”, changes tack and embarks on a rapturous long list of improbably beautiful real and imagined sounds: “like an oyster fungus growing on an aspen trunk” for example. Which elicits the comment “That was the dadblangedest thing I ever saw!”

(1977; now in Sixty Stories, Penguin. Online here) 

‘Journey through the Night’ by Jakov Lind

This story is what I offer as proof that when I was a lad, it was only in fiction that people voluntarily made arrangements to be eaten by cannibals. The story features two men in a locked train compartment. One man is a cannibal with a suitcase full of butcher’s equipment. The other has been mistaken by the cannibal for a willing victim. I read this when I was about seven, by the way. Cheers, Dad. Re-reading it a century later, I see that behind the grotesquerie which I enjoyed (and still enjoy) are much more serious questions of collusion and coercion. There’s also the loaded fact that it’s set on a train. Throughout, Lind’s very black humour taunts the reader’s motives for continuing. Haneke territory.

(1962; now in Soul of Wood, NYRB Classics. Translated by Ralph Manheim.) 

‘Wants’ by Grace Paley

Here is an object lesson in how to take a seeming triviality (these don’t really exist of course) and, in barely three pages, create from it a long life— several lives, in fact— laid bare and interrogated to the full. Paley does this every single time. The really important thing with Paley is the voice. From the highly specific milieu of working-class Jewish New York, this voice jumps off the page as if you’re reading a direct transcript of conversation. The choices here, though, are a writer’s choices. So much has been left out, with just enough left in to imply everything else.

(1971; now in The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, Little, Brown. Online here) 

‘The Job Application’ by Robert Walser

Robert Walser is a bit like Marmite, if you can imagine a variety of Marmite that nobody could possibly hate. I could have chosen any story; they are all exactly the same. If an adult can be innocent, then this is surely true of Walser. Technically, is he any good as a writer, or are we really just seeing the world as described by a man with certain cognitive areas exaggerated at the expense of others? Imagine caring about the answer to such a hideous question. Read Walser and see the world, really see it. This story takes the form of a job application letter which only Walser could have sent. Maybe he really did send it. I hope so. Don’t look him up on Google images, it’s depressing.

(early 1900s? Now in The Walk and Other Stories, Serpent’s Tail. Translated by Christopher Middleton. Pdf here) 

‘A Matter of Taste’ by Alex La Guma

Not unlike Grace Paley, Alex La Guma takes a tiny moment and with great economy conjures an entire time, in this instance the years of apartheid in South Africa. Impoverished people at the margins of society are shown as emotionally intelligent and imaginative, capable of a rich fantasy which can alleviate the pain at least for a while. When I say people, I mean men, and men officially divided by race. I’ve made it sound more sentimental than it is, probably because I chose it instead of O. Henry’s ‘Gift of the Magi’ for fear of ridicule. The story also contains the word “portjackson” which I assume is a plant or tree, but to look it up would be to ruin the frisson of seeing the word. Portjackson.

(1967; included in A Walk in the Night, Heinemann African Writers Series, which seems to be out of print.) 

‘Never Trust a Man Who Bathes with His Fingernails’ by Ann Quin

Since her death in 1973 it has been really hard to get hold of Quin’s short pieces: credit for their reissue is down to Jennifer Hodgson, who also has an academic work on Quin in preparation. This is writing from the inside, which is to say that any superficial realism is only there to provide an arena where another, far subtler struggle is taking place, almost not articulated at all. In this story, An unspecified threat runs through the piece. As every event occurs, and there aren’t many, dangerous further possibilities appear without having been written. Death is never far from the action. I have already been sniffy about plot: there is a plot here, but it’s been messed with, as if parts of it (particularly the dénouement) had been excised. Good.

(1968; now in The Unmapped Country, due in 2018 from And Other Stories.) 

‘A Bit of a Smash in Madras’ by Julian Maclaren-Ross

This story is worth reading for its energy level, which stops just short of delirium, and the writer’s knack for capturing the wild lexicon of 1940s slang. He knows how to start: “Absolute fact, I knew damn all about it”. In the middle, he mainly knows how to swear brilliantly and how to display the excesses of colonialism— let’s just say he is a very flawed narrator indeed. And he really, really knows how to end with a very sly “look to the camera”. The brilliant last sentence gives away the tawdry fact that, in life as in fiction, Maclaren-Ross was overfond of delivering bombastic monologues at the bar. But they don’t make bar-room bores quite like him any more, alas.

(1940; most recently in Selected Stories from Dewi Lewis, but out of print I think.) 

‘Let Me Tell a Story Now’ by Bessie Head

I would never have heard of Bessie Head if she hadn’t been strongly championed by Alice Walker, who particularly admires her devastating novel “Maru”. Bessie Head also wrote many short stories, of which this is among the shortest. It relies on a rhetorical device which is hardly new, but the timing is really well judged. She begins by decrying the frustrations that go with any identity once it has been imposed upon you: her identity as a writer and the identity chosen for her by the state mean, she says here, that limits are put by others on what she can and cannot do, on what she can write. Here comes the device: “For instance, I would like to write the story about a man who is a packing hand at the railways…” and then she writes the story, or most of it anyway, before saying that she can’t write it. Apart from the obvious joke here, there is a powerful sense of a writer working against the times and against the form of the story itself.

(Heinemann African Writers Series, 1989; again, out of print I’m afraid.) 

‘Report on the Thing’ by Clarice Lispector

For Lispector, any everyday object can be the start of meditations on time, the universe, God, as well as her own domestic routines. In this instance we’re dealing with an alarm clock which serves as the pretext for a wild, incantatory resistance to any notion of categorisation or predication. The story is littered with what is and what isn’t this or that: “The Sun is, not the Moon. My face is. Probably yours is too.” Philosophical ideas are combined with intensely physical description, making this a typical Lispector piece where any and all assumptions are reclaimed through the medium of the body, the body which writes.

(1974; in Complete Stories, Penguin. Translated by Katrina Dodson. Online here) 

‘At Sea’ by Guy de Maupassant

As a student of French, way back, I was taught that Maupassant (together with Prosper Mérimée) was a master of the short story. He published about 300 of them. I don’t remember how many I actually read, but I’ve never forgotten the vivid central image in this one, of the fisherman whose arm is cut off to save the catch. It’s firmly in the nineteenth century French realist tradition that Maupassant learned from Flaubert (Madame Bovary etc), and that encompasses all those gritty urban stories by Zola. Maupassant’s first love was the sea rather than the city, but he made as strong a social comment about the inhumane priorities of the fishing bosses in a short story as Flaubert did about the bourgoisie and Zola the factory and mine-owners in their novels.

(First published in 1888. You can read it in English here)

‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’ by Rudyard Kipling

I still have the red leather bound edition of The Jungle Book from which my father read to me and my brother when we were children. His reading to me kindled my love of stories, short and long. My memories are about comfort and excitement in equal measure. There was something so exotic about the names of Rikki-tikki-tavi the mongoose and Nag and Nagaina the cobras, killed by Rikki-tikki to protect his young master, Teddy. But we were cosy and cosseted by the fire; there were no snakes in the English Midlands. Reading the story now, so many years on, I’m struck by Kipling’s descriptive powers “… a noise as faint as that of a wasp walking on a window-pane – the dry scratch of a snake’s scales on brick-work.” And my heart weeps afresh for Chuchundra, the sad little musk-rat who “whimpers and cheeps all the night, trying to make up his mind to run into the middle of the room. But he never gets there.”

(From The Jungle Book, Macmillan,1894.  You can read it, with the original illustrations by W. H. Drake, here)

‘The Luncheon’ by W. Somerset Maugham

This is the story I always quote if I want to give an example of a story with a sting in the tail. Somerset Maugham is an old-fashioned storyteller, spinning out the story of a self-important woman who flatters and then mercilessly takes advantage of a young writer living in Paris. Her recurring refrain that she never has more than one thing for luncheon couldn’t be further from the truth, as she feasts on out-of-season salmon, oysters and asparagus and drinks champagne. In a few pages Maugham creates two utterly believable characters, and draws deftly the arrogance of the woman and the vulnerability of the young narrator as he sees her eating and drinking her way through the money that was supposed to last him for the rest of the month. She goes off laughing, but it is he, eventually, who has the last laugh. It’s a gem.

(Originally published in Nash’s Magazine, London, in 1924 and available alongside with other of Maugham’s works in modern editions from Penguin)

‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ by Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas developed this story from a piece called Memories of Christmas which he wrote for broadcast in 1945. I read it every Christmas, preferably out-loud and, if I get a chance, at least part of it to an audience, though of course I can never equal Thomas’ own delivery. The anecdotes are charming and the language and images incomparable. For example, while the boys are waiting to snowball cats in Mrs Prothero’s garden, a fire breaks out in her house and they run down the garden with snowballs in their arms – “and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii.”

(First published in 1950, and now in the author’s Collected Stories by Orion Books. The author himself reads the story here)