‘Baster’ by Jeffrey Eugenides

From one Jeffrey Eugenides to another Jeffrey Eugenides. When I read The Virgin Suicides, I couldn’t believe how well Eugenides – a middle-aged man – was able to portray the world of the teenage girl. Also, those uncontrollable crushes you have at that age (and afterwards). Another thing I like about Jeff is that he isn’t particularly prolific. As someone who writes slowly, this appeals to me. So when the short story collection Fresh Complaint came out it was many Christmases rolled into one. What I love about ‘Baster’ in particular (as well as how skilfully it is written and how funny it is) is the premise: a not particularly eligible man with bad teeth secretly in love with his old girlfriend inserts himself into her life forevermore by replacing the sperm of a much more eligible candidate (with excellent teeth) in the baster in her bathroom, which is charged ready for her to inseminate herself. I didn’t see it coming at all. But now you will, sorry about that.

First published in The New Yorker, June 17, 1996, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Fresh Complaint, FSG, 2017

‘From Stones to Stars’ by Rebecca Elson

From a writer who stunned me by writing a world I knew so well to one who stunned me by allowing me to enter a world I assumed closed to me. This entry comes from a book of poetry, but it is a piece of prose, included at the end of the collection. Reading Elson was the first time I had ever witnessed a mind spanning the two worlds of art and science: she was both brilliant astrophysicist and stunning poet. Until then my own, limited little mind had assumed you could only do one or the other. Like here, is the ‘enterprise’ she speaks of her poetry or her research? “There are times when the enterprise seems mechanical, when the constraint to pursue the truth seems to suffocate the imagination.” As it says in the blurb on the back of the book, the extracts from her notebooks record the ways in which she refined her understanding of “The known human forces, love & hunger, fear and hope.” This extract allows a glimpse into her backstory, how such a mind was developed and what we can learn from it.

Included in A Responsibility to Awe, Oxford Poets, 2001

‘The Clothes They Stood Up In’ by Alan Bennett

My string of connections ends here, I can find no link between Elson and Bennett, other than they both came into my life not entirely through free will. Elson was on a reading list for that same creative writing master’s and Alan was an impulsive purchase in a charity shop. In Spain, where I live, it’s not all that easy to get hold of books in English, not in a physical bookshop anyway. My parents also live in Spain, in an area where a lot of British people live. And where there are British people, there are charity shops, it seems. Whenever I go and visit them I always hunt for books in English and that is how I found this collection. I love this story because it is so multilayered and also because it features lots of stuff. I also like stuff, like the stuff you can buy in charity shops, for example. But the idea that someone would plunder an entire apartment in order to recreate it exactly as it was in a storage facility is so random and intriguing as a premise, and also much more than the sum of its parts.

First published in The London Review of Books, 28 November 1996 and available for subscribers to read here; collected in Four Stories, Profile Books, 2006

‘Walk Away Reneé’ by Billy Bragg

A wildcard to end. I heard a rumour that the personal anthology permits the occasional piece of writing that isn’t strictly a short story. This, I guess, is a poem. Or a prose poem. Or is it a song? Billy Bragg speaks his words over Johnny Marr’s guitar, and it is one of my favourite pieces of writing of all time. I wanted to round out this anthology where I started – with obsession. As, in my reading and writing, it is a topic that has always surrounded me, book-ended me. Here it is in all its glory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHrFkSeLukA

Included in A Lover Sings: Selected Lyrics, Faber and Faber, 2015

Introduction

For this list, I decided to go simple. Twelve stories that I like today. You can search for themes if you wish. For me, these are all stories that resonate. They’ve moved me, surprised me, enlightened me, stayed with me. They have made me look at the world in a different way, perhaps only for a moment, but that’s enough, surely. These stories are not obscure, some have been listed many times, but I don’t think that rules them out. This is my list, after all. Making it has reminded me, if I ever needed reminding, how brilliant, weird, varied, life affirming, how glorious the short story form is.

‘The Bloody Chamber’ by Angela Carter

I’m starting with Angela Carter. I read Carter in a great big glorious gobble when I was young. I loved her stories and her novels, and they stayed inside me. Then, I didn’t exactly forget about her, but I did shelve her. 

Last year I went to see Emma Rice’s Bluebeard. It was theatrical and flamboyant and of course borrowed heavily from Carter. There was a contemporary strand to the show which split the audience. Lots hated it, thought it was unnecessary, I loved it. It gave me a gut punch like the domestic violence it so viscerally portrayed. After the show I went back to Angela Carter’s collection and re-read the stories. I’d forgotten the lush language, the sensual, erotic charge, the luxurious words and images, the sheer originality. I’d also forgotten the violence, and the danger. 

The power of this story is the language, but it is also the tension, the way that Carter creates edge-of-the-seat fear. And then gives the power back to the women. Fantastic. Oh, and Angela Carter lived in Bath for a while, just down the hill from where I now live. She called Bath ‘the town of dreams’. I like her for that.

From The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Gollancz, 1979. Now widely available, including as a Penguin Classic, 2015

‘The Husband Stitch’ by Carmen Maria Machado

I’ve come late to the Carmen Maria Machado party, having only started to read her work in the last couple of years. I love her memoir In the Dream House, which I played as an audio book on a long car journey. Machado read it herself and the story was mesmerising, so now I know her voice and I think of her as my friend. Which of course she’s not. I could have chosen any of the stories from Her Body and Other Parties, but I opted for ‘The Husband Stitch’ because of its form and its power. Machado speaks directly to us as readers, which is so compelling, as she weaves the story of desire and horror, of a green ribbon around a woman’s neck and the desperation of a husband to see what is underneath. This is a deeply unsettling, multi-layered story, it touches so many aspects of female experience whilst using an old campfire tale as a loose structure. It feels very true. It’s an incredible piece of writing.

First published in Granta, 2014, and available to read here online. Then collected in Her Body and Other Parties, Graywolf/ Serpent’s Tail, 2017

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

How could I not have ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ on the list. It is an important story, graphically illustrating the inhumane treatment of the mental health of women at the end of the 19th century. This is another piece where the way it’s told is essential. A masterclass in storytelling, this unreliable narrator has woven her tragic ‘rest cure’ into our hearts. The image of a woman trapped behind the pattern in the wallpaper is so strong and chilling, as the narrator herself gradually inhabits that woman. I can’t get her out of my head, creeping, creeping around the room, scraping at the walls with her broken fingernails, gouging at the paper, tearing it off in strips.

“I’ve got out at last … and you can’t put me back. Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”

The ‘rest cure’ that is forced on the narrator, forbidding her to work, is an echo of Gilman’s own doctor who treated the author’s nervous exhaustion by advising her to lead as domestic a life as possible, and “never touch pen, brush or pencil for as long as she should live.” It’s enough to make a writer’s blood boil.

First published in 1892 in the New England Magazine. It has been widely anthologised and republished, including in The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings, Virago, 2009. It is available to read online here

‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid

I love Jamaica Kincaid’s work, and I particularly love this story. It is a To Do list from mother to daughter, and in one long sentence Kincaid sums up all of the concerns of a girl moving from adolescence to womanhood. The tone is hectoring and loving at the same time (although mainly hectoring, to be fair). The story is a mix of instructions and warnings. The mother is bossy and exacting, both domestically:

“Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk bare-head in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil;”

And about relationships:

“…this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man, and if this doesn’t work there are other ways, and if they don’t work don’t feel too bad about giving up;”

But the story is also funny and joyous:

“…this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn’t fall on you;”

Kincaid manages to convey the whole of life on one page, in 650 words, a miracle of compression, voice and character. She also gives us a cracking final line.

I was thrilled to be able to go and hear Kincaid speak a couple of years ago, on one of her rare visits to the UK. She talked about her garden, her writing and her life and I have rarely felt as enriched as I did at the end of her session. Suffice it to say I’m a bit of a super-fan.

First published in The New Yorker, 26 June 1978 issue, and available to read here; collected At the Bottom of the River, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983, and now Picador, 2022

‘The Distance of The Moon’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

Sometimes there is a story that takes my breath away at the sheer delight of the writer’s imagination. This Calvino story is such a one. It is story about the Moon, with a love triangle providing the narrative. Calvino takes an old scientific theory that there was a time when the Moon was very close to the Earth and suggests it was so close you could row out to the celestial body and climb up to it on a ladder. Calvino is wonderfully exact about the mechanics of clambering onto the Moon’s surface, which the narrator says is scaly and smells faintly of fish. 

“The only odd thing was that when you raised your eyes you saw the sea above you, glistening, with the boat and the others upside down, hanging like a bunch of grapes from the vine.”

Great use of ‘only’ there. This story is like a Chagall painting, charming, strange, surreal, particularly when Captain Vhd’s wife, with her long silvery arms, is stranded on the moon playing slow arpeggios on her harp. Joyous.

First published in Calvino’s collection Cosmicomics in Italian in 1965 and in English in 1968. It is now available as a Penguin Modern Classic

‘Tower Of Babylon’ by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang’s stories are extraordinary. I first read them when doing a deep dive into speculative short fiction to teach a class, and was blown away. Chiang doesn’t publish often, but when he does he scoops up just about every award going. He uses science fiction to grapple with some of the universal questions of the age, and while sometimes I find his stories research-heavy (I felt I needed a linguistics degree to grasp ‘Story Of Your Life’), they are always original and thought-provoking. I chose ‘Tower of Babylon’ because of how imaginatively Chiang retells this biblical myth. It’s beautiful. 

In the story, the citizens of Babylon have spent centuries building a tower up to the sky. Hillalum, a miner from Egypt, has been hired to pierce through the final vault to get to Heaven on the other side. I was right there with him on his four month climb up the tower to the final point, where I was terrified that he was going to let loose another Flood to sweep away the world. Spoiler alert: the world and Hillalum survive, but what a journey.

First published in 1990 by Omni. It was collected in Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others, Orb Books, 2002

‘The Wild Windflowers of Kotal’ by Farhad Pirbal, translated by Jiyar Homer and Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse

During lockdown I started a short story group on zoom. We met every fortnight to read a story out loud and discuss it. It was a brief place of safety cocooned from the madness of the world outside. We have carried on, rather less frequently, ever since. It’s simple and fun, and has led me to read a huge variety of stories, throwing my net as wide as I can.

Last year, inspired by the wonderful Farhana Shaikh at Dahlia Books who curates Short Story September, I bought a copy of The Potato Eaters by Farhad Pirbal, a renowned Kurdish writer, poet, philosopher, artist, singer and activist. He has published over 70 books, but this is the first to be translated into English. Many of the pieces were tragic stories of displacement and isolation, but I found this one, about a soldier returning from war, both specific and universal.

The soldier has been dreaming of the idyll that was his home and the woman he loved, but on his return both have been irreparably damaged. They no longer exist. Although it’s always tricky to read work in translation (I have no idea what I am missing from the original) the story was still poetic and moving. We found a lot to appreciate and discuss about it, and it was one of my favourite stories of 2024. I also have the added pleasure that now I follow Pirbal on Instagram, and he looks exactly like Einstein.

First published in English in The Potato Eaters, Deep Vellum, 2024. The Potato Eaters was originally published in Kurdish by Sharafkhan Bidlisi Publishing House, 2020

‘Mom Is in Love with Randy Travis’ by Souvankham Thammavongsa

I will go far for a story which makes me laugh. This one, about a family of Lao migrants to Canada, is by a writer who was herself born in a refugee camp and brought up in Toronto. The humour in this story draws the reader into the family relationships, which are written with warmth and compassion. The father who spends his first pay check on a record player, something only rich people in Laos would have, the mother who is obsessed with country music and in particular, Randy Travis:

“The songs always told a story you could follow—ones about heartbreak, or about love, how someone can promise to love you forever and ever and ever, Amen. My mother did not know what Amen meant, but she guessed it was something you said at the end of a sentence to let people know the sentence was finished. ‘Three apples, Amen,’ she would say at the corner grocery store. Because of this, our neighbors thought my mother was religious, and even though our family was Buddhist, she caught a ride to church with them every Sunday.”

The mismatch between Lao and Canadian society is so poignant, particularly the differing views of love. The father thinks it’s fine to give his wife a twenty dollar bill as a birthday present, then buys cowboy boots in a failed attempt to look more like Randy Travis. The mother makes her daughter write hundreds of (unanswered) love letters to Travis, which her daughter sabotages. Vinh Nguyen, who recommended this story on Electric Literature, talks of a refugee’s faith in ‘unimaginable possibility’. It is the hope and faith of both the mother and the father that breaks my heart.

The only flip side to this piece was that it sent me down a terrible rabbit hole on Spotify. I take a secret very uncool pleasure in country music (‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’, anyone?). Obviously it was really research. Many of the songs are like short stories, after all.

First published in How to Pronounce Knife, Bloomsbury, 2020. Available to read on Electric Literature here

‘Sparing The Heather’ by Louise Kennedy

This is the best kind of story. Emotionally complex and rich, with a simmering political backdrop, it is understated and seething with subtext. I came to this piece though a session at the Word Factory, and then went on to rip through the rest of Louise Kennedy’s work, including her fantastic novel Trespasses.

‘Sparing the Heather’ is set in Ireland near the border with the north, where the Troubles inform everything. The sense of place is impeccable, the description creates a doom-laden atmosphere, as the main character nearly treads on “a crow from an earlier cull, squeaking with maggots”. The characters are deftly skewered: the Englishman Hugh who “only ate meat he had killed himself”, and Brendan, his fingers tapping to the “those dreary pipe solos he liked to listen to”. An excellent read.

First published in Banshee Press Issue #8, spring/summer 2019, and available to read here; collected in Kennedy’s collection The End of the World is a Cul De Sac, Bloomsbury, 2021