Writers, critics and others dream-edit a personal anthology of their favourite short stories
Such a clever story. I like clever stories. There is a timelessness to this tale. A plague wipes out a significant part of the population, and those left living rejoice with debauchery. What are the consequences of a life lived without a moral framework? Is the proper frame to live as if you could die at any moment? What do you help bring about as a result?
First published in Jyllands-Posten, 1889. Collected in The Plague in Bergamo, Gyldendal, 1890
Another outstanding story that leaves you wondering. Real or imagined? Young Goodman Brown goes into the forest innocent and comes out suspicious, bitter, and forever changed. All around him, he sees duality and hypocrisy. Where is the forest in our daily lives? Who and what inhabitant it? How do we know that what we perceive is real?
First published in New England Magazine, 1835. Collected in Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846 and The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Doubleday, 1982
Marquez is one in my holy literary trinity (along with N. Kazantzakis and L. Durrell). While there are many stories I could share, I selected this one because of bureaucracy – that which is excessively complex and hard, if not impossible, to engage with or tackle or overcome or… When do we give in to the feeling and thus idea of being powerless? And why?
First published as part of his collection Doce Cuentos Peregrinos, 1992, and in English in Strange Pilgrims, 1993, Jonathan Cape
What if you found a mysterious book that contained infinite wisdom? What would you hope to find in the pages? I like to think that this is a simple treatise on the power of books, but it’s more than that. The story is about a man who acquires a book such as the one I’ve described. He becomes obsessed with it and spends all of his time with it. Until handling the book becomes too much to grasp.
First published in Spanish 1975 as part of a short story collection of the same name. The English translation first appeared in The New Yorker in 1976 and can be found here, and the entire collection was published in 1977.
Old Rosa is a novel in two stories as the title states, so I’m counting this selection for two slots on my list. I recall being profoundly moved upon first reading this book. It was like putting my foot in the river and getting pulled in and rushed along with the current – hard to stop. The stories are harsh in their reality, and ultimately, they are dreamlike and disturbing. Another to reread over time.
Published by Grove Press, 1989
This isn’t a scandalous selection, but outrage was my jumping off point for this personal anthology. I’m an editor at a publisher that produces textbooks for Spanish teens learning English. Because of our demographic, each time a famous person is mentioned in one of the books, part of the editorial process now includes searching the person’s name + ‘scandal’. Just to be sure.
This crossed my mind when thinking of which short stories to include here; should I employ the same editorial process as I do at work? I asked myself. And perhaps also because the first author that came to mind (literally, he appeared there without me actually having to think) was Vladimir Nabokov.
I fell in love with Lolita because of the way Nabokov uses language (This later developed into a full-blown fixation on multilingual authors and a particular use of English described as ‘native and foreign both’.) and also because obsession interests me greatly. When, many years later, the novel was included on a reading list for a creative writing master’s I was studying, I was genuinely surprised at people’s shock. Not that I didn’t notice the abuse, just that, to me, it wasn’t what most struck me about the novel. ‘The Enchanter’ preceded Lolita and they share the same brilliant, twisted premise: marry the ailing widowed mother of a young girl in order to later become her sole guardian. But what initially really fascinated me about this story, was how it came about. In Author’s Note One of ‘The Enchanter’, Nabokov writes: “As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” That this was where the idea for ‘The Enchanter’ and Lolita began, both makes a lot of sense and no sense, which is how the writing process feels a lot of the time, and also how the best ideas are born.
Included in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, Penguin, 1975
From one multilingual writer to another – I discovered Lucia Berlin by chance when I misconstrued the title of her posthumous short story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women. I read it as instructional, like: how to clean women. No idea why that would attract my attention, that would probably require some regression therapy or hypnosis. I fell in love with her writing, encapsulated for me by her idea of ‘emotional truth’ as really the only writing rule to live by. And also by her eschewing of the line between fiction and reality with this undeniable reasoning: “The story’s the thing.” She inspired the name of my own Substack via one of my favourite lines of all time: “Of course I have a self here, and a new family, new cats, new jokes. But I keep trying to remember who I was in English.” It comes from the beautiful, melodic short story ‘So Long’ that recounts her mad, complicated, rich and fascinating life. In many ways, it stands for all lives.
Included in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015
From one woman whose name begins with L to another. Lorrie Moore’s collection Self Help was the catalyst for me to start writing. The first story I ever wrote, I wrote in the second person because I found Moore’s use of it so clever. Which it is. Looking back now, I realise it was also about finding a way into writing that didn’t feel as confidently aggressive as the first person because I wasn’t confident or aggressive. It was like I could side-eye my topics that way before finding a way to sidle up to the first person. Perhaps for that reason, my pick from this collection is ‘How to Become a Writer’, with the great opening line: “First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably.” Who hasn’t been there? Or put another way: How many movie star/astronauts do you know?
Published in Self-Help, Alfred A. Knopf, 1985, and collected in The Collected Stories, Faber, 2008
From one story in the second person to another – mi querido Pedro Almodóvar. He is about 93.5% of the reason I ended up living in Madrid. I love his films and I also love how much he loves books. They utterly furnish his films, both literally and as co-conspirators, like in The Flower of My Secret where he lovingly borrows plot elements from Dorothy Parker’s short story ‘The Lovely Leave’. Or more literally, as with his short film version of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice, or Sigrid Nunez in The Room Next Door. He has written a few books. This story, taken from an early collection (his first, I believe), is enchanting for exactly the reasons he states in the introduction: “… all that remains is to ask you to read this book with the same lack of pretension with which it was written.” I particularly liked ‘Advice on How to Become an Internationally Famous Filmmaker’ for, like Lorrie Moore, also narrating an artist in the making and speaking to those of us with a lot of crippling self-doubt: “To pay for your studies and room and board, your uncle takes you on as a brick-layer’s apprentice. And you gotta smile like it’s all you ever dreamed of […] A voice from within tells you: ‘Whatever you do, you won’t be able to escape your mediocre destiny. Never in the history of film has there been a director who was previously a brick-layer.”
Included in The Patty Diphusa Stories and other writings, Faber and Faber, 1991
From Almodóvar’s coming-of-age Madrid to the sultry south and Andalucia. When I happened upon this book at Madrid’s Sunday flea market, I picked it up more for its cheap price than anything else. Taken as a whole the book is a bit rambling, something which Irving recognised when he republished it with edits after a ‘crude’ first edition had already hit bookshops. But it is as enchanting as the Alhambra itself. It’s like entering a world within a world within a world, as Irving shacks up in this abandoned palace overlooking the city of Granada and then goes on to create his own world within it. ‘The Mysterious Chambers’ is the best example of this for me, as, not content with already living within a fairytale, he discovers a hidden door that leads to sumptuous chambers once destined for Elizabetta of Farnese, wife of Phillip V (If that is to be believed, Irving was given to embellishments – who wouldn’t be in that setting?) and decides to set up camp there, moving from his furnished and serviced apartment in the habitable part of the grounds to this mysterious chamber that has been shuttered up for decades, maybe longer. If you are anything like me, reading stories with a strong sense of place immediately makes me want to visit them. After writing this, I was compelled to book a trip to Granada in May. I think everyone should do the same. Or failing that, read these magical tales.
First published in Tales of the Alhambra, Carey & Lea, 1832
Let’s stay in Spain a little longer, in the company of Jorge de Cascante. I discovered Jorge when I bought a different book of his, an anthology of short stories that he edited called The Big Book of Cats. I loved his introduction, both for his writing style, his humour and most of all his love of cats. Which I assumed to be all-consuming until I discovered he had also edited the anthologies The Big Book of Dogs and The Big Book of Satan. However, his collection An Entire City Bathed in Human Blood won me back around with its narratives both animal, human and somewhere in between. ‘The Gnomes’ is just two short pages, but takes us from Madrid’s Retiro park, to the suburbs of the capital, to a strange underworld of gnomes. It exemplifies how good de Cascante is at drawing us into a place human and otherwise. And he makes that seem very reasonable and natural. Which makes perfect sense to me.
Included in An Entire City Bathed in Human Blood, Blackie Books, 2022
From one cat person to another. Colette’s love triangle involving a cat, is not only a great premise, but single-handedly makes literary my deeply uncool love of cats, for which I am thankful.
First published in French as La Chatte in 1933. First published in English in Gigi and The Cat, Penguin, 1958
From one love story to another. Are you a romantic? I’m pretty sure I am, dangerous as that is. And I get more so the older I get, even though I think it’s meant to work the other way around. I first read this story in Granta’s anthology New American Stories, and then again in another anthology My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead, a selection of love stories edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. So who am I to prevent it from making the hattrick? But that, of course, isn’t the reason I want it here. It’s because it is so very lovely. The hope we all have, that someone deeply good will love us despite ourselves is what keeps the world turning, our hearts beating.
First published in The Yale Review, 1 January 2003, and available to read here; collected in My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead, HarperPress, 2008 and New American Stories, Granta, 2016
A Personal Anthology 