‘Stirrings Still’ by Samuel Beckett

I’ve carried a false memory with me for many years now, that on the occasion of Beckett’s death the Independent newspaper (re)published ‘Stirrings Still’—that I cut it out and pasted it into a notebook I had at the time and which I still have (and in which are also venerated: Rainer Maria Rilke, Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie and Mark E. Smith). It’s the notebook of a boy, but when I leaf through it now, it’s all there—it seems I’ve grown older but not up.

But I can find no evidence that The Independent ever did this. It turns out that the Guardian had run ‘Stirrings Still’ nine months earlier—I must have got it there. Beckett’s was the first death of a public figure at which I felt visceral, gutting emotion (the second was Mark E. Smith, thirty years later).

We’re just one letter short of being able to anagram ‘distill’ from the story’s title, and that is what it really is. The theatrical works are what went out into the world but for me it’s all about his short fictions and above all ‘Stirrings Still’—it’s my if-you-only-ever-read-one-thing-by-him perennial.

First published in a limited edition illustrated by Louis le Brocquy, John Calder, 1988. Now available in Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still, Faber, 2009

‘The Rule of Names’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

It was a delight to discover this story in the collection, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, not so long ago. Le Guin has plenty of admirers, of course, and for a multiplicity of reasons—much has been made of her feminism, her activism, her advocacy for writing itself. For me, it was really about the dragons, and the possibility that a boy might become a wizard. But then I was a boy when I read A Wizard of Earthsea in the course of a summer night, by clandestine torchlight under my duvet. ‘The Rule of Names’ is one of two stories in the collection that were early ventures into the world of Earthsea and its magic. There are two rules: you never ask anyone their name, and you never tell anyone yours. This is because “the name is the thing”—too powerful to reveal. The magic in Earthsea is premised entirely on language—on names, on words—and it seems as though that may have begun here in this story of (mistaken) identity. I have wondered to what extent Alan Moore is influenced by Le Guin, in his assertion that fiction is essentially—and not metaphorically—magic, and vice versa. I feel the same way. I want it to be true because it would mean the boy did become a wizard after all.

Originally appeared in Fantasticmagazine in 1964, now collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Harper Perennial

‘Henri Bergson Writes About Time’ by C.D. Rose

It may be self-serving of me to pick this story out from a uniformly brilliant collection—my reading habits as a lazy student were both adventitious and incomplete, and being these days in close service to my own efforts, have not improved—so it isn’t often I can truthfully say “Yes, I’m somewhat familiar with this philosopher’s work”.

Bergson sits at his desk and considers time. And time, and time again. And again. Rose laces the story with Bergson’s concept of duration and the fluid, immeasurable nature of what language obliges us to call the moment as we pass through.

And yet, and yet—it is also a story about cold coffee and tired women, about the 20^thcentury, about age and arthritis.

It isn’t the first Rose story to strike me as something of a Gymnopedie—a series of variations, a circling, a fugue of not-quite-repetitions. I’m misusing the musical terms, but you will know what I mean. Like walking around a sculpture and never getting bored.

Collected in Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, Melville House, 2024

‘The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace’ by Donald Barthelme

Perhaps the most astonishing thing that as a reader I’d ever seen—I first came across it in the collection Forty Stories. I’ve learned since that, as well as being the son of a reputable architect, Barthelme was an accomplished jazz drummer. Both show in his work. If Beckett had pared short fiction to its bare bones, Barthelme disassembled the skeleton, reassembling it into any number of anatomical collages and using the leftover bones to play a difficult—but delightful—jazz.

A series of antique engravings—illustrations, diagrams, architectural draughts—prompt the language of the piece, an account of the putting on of a theatrical spectacle which, of course, is the story itself.

I suppose the strategy had a sort of antecedent in Max Ernst and works such as Une Semaine de Bonté, but I didn’t know about Ernst’s collages then so it seemed entirely new to me. And because it seemed entirely new it was entirely new. Completely unprecedented. I’m glad I didn’t know about Une Semaine de Bonté—these little nuggets of ignorance, which I still treasure, can afford a reader a sort of revelation they would not otherwise have known. A personal literature is mapped out in them. And who wants an impersonal literature?

First published in The New Yorker, then collected in Sadness, 1972, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Now available in Forty Stories, Penguin Modern Classics

‘Wants’ by Grace Paley

I was late to the Paley party and went there with precisely the wrong attitude—determined to like her work because all the right people seemed to. In spite of this impulse or perhaps because of it, I struggled at first. I think she is a slippery customer. She has been dubbed a “writer of voice” and I think that’s right. At first I heard only the voice—I couldn’t make out anything it was saying.

‘Wants’ is the story that made Paley click, for me. A woman bumps into her ex-husband on the steps of a library, on her way to return two Edith Wharton books which are 18 years overdue. He follows her to the Returns Desk to talk about the end of their marriage, the reasons for it. His tone is somewhat accusatory, and his diagnosis is tethered to specifics. The narrator’s responses are not so easy to pin down. When he laments (if that’s the right word) that she has never wanted anything (he has always wanted a motorboat, for example) it cuts her to the quick, and when he has gone she reflects on what she does want—a list not of objects but of better ways to live.

There’s a pregnancy to everything in the story—each detail and aspect might be symbolic of some other detail or aspect, but never in a simplistic way. For example, I’ve seen analyses of it that have the husband a symbol of phallocentrism, but I can’t believe it of Paley, whose work I have since been able to greatly enjoy, that she would have set out with so trite a goal. These reductive analyses disregard the kindness, the regard, shown him by the narrator—and this kindness imbues all of Paley’s work: a tolerance for people’s shortcomings and mistakes and for the shortfalls of reality versus expectations.

Her stories do not reach simple conclusions. There is no rush to judgement. The most powerful voices, for me, have been either those with a similar perspective to mine that nevertheless help me see other perspectives, or those with a different perspective to mine that nevertheless help me feel seen. Paley is the latter.

First collected in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974. Now available in The Collected Stories, Virago Modern Classics

‘You (Plural)’ by Jennifer Egan

Can you hear that, folks? That’s the sound of a shoehorn. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is usually considered a novel but there has been just enough discussion around whether these are in fact linked stories to license my inclusion of one here. Very few writers produce prose that has the impact-per-word, for me, that Egan’s does.

‘You (Plural)’ is a tale of lost time from a place not at all relatable to me—the LA of poolside parties, music business moguls and their girls (the Plural of the story’s title?). But Egan gives this short piece—eight pages—a Proustian sweep, and in her invocation of clueless youth giving way to clueless something else, of the guttering flame of diminished possibilities, of the past as another country that we can neither return to nor ever really leave, creates something very relatable indeed. To me, at least.

From A Visit from the Goon Squad, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010

‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka, tr. Willa and Edwin Muir

It was almost certainly ‘The Metamorphosis’ that I read first, when it comes to Kafka. I’m not sure I was ready—it was more perplexing to me than anything else. Despite the striking premise, I couldn’t make out what the story was about, and it seems that was important to me at the time because I set it aside—not unimpressed, exactly, but unengaged. In the years since I’ve gone back to it many times, a different and evolved reader on each occasion with a deeper understanding of both life and literature and . . . just kidding—I still don’t know what it’s about and still very much perplexed. It’s just that, now, those are good things.

So much is glimpsed in this story—but only glimpsed. Glimpses of Gregor’s new body, glimpses of him under the sofa in the gloom at floor level where the light from the streetlamps doesn’t reach, glimpses beneath the sheet he uses to conceal himself, glimpses of his family when they leave the door open. Glimpses of a troubled self-loathing, of longstanding resentment. From the other side of a door, familial dynamics will flash in the glint of an overheard interaction. Anything more than a glimpse spells trouble: for Gregor to be in the full presence of his family, and they in his, is for something bad to happen—some escalating, uncomprehending confrontation to send him scurrying and injured.

A happy ending is delivered that costs us the protagonist. Real life, happy life, good life is only possible sans Gregor Samsa.

First published in German, as ‘Die Verwandlung’, in Die Weißen Blätter, 1915. This translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, is from Metamorphosis & Other Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 1987

‘Awkward’ by Raymond Queneau, tr. Barbara Wright

It seems a caprice to pick out a single entry in Queneau’s iconic Exercises in Style. However, for the sake of sticking to format, I choose ‘Awkward’, which begins “I’m not used to writing. I dunno. I’d quite like to write a tragedy or a sonnet or an ode, but there’s the rules. They put me off. They weren’t made for amateurs. All this is already pretty badly written.”

Exercises in Style introduced me (indirectly) to Oulipo and the idea of Oulipian writing. Much like Barthelme’s The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace, it astounded me. It wasn’t just a new (to me) way of writing, it was writing for an entirely new set of reasons.

New York poet Mike Silverton puts it this way: “If the superficial dazzles, depth need not apply.”

As Barthelme was to do, Queneau directs the reader’s attention away from a linear notion of narrative and towards other possibilities for play. It is quite true that no reading of Exercises in Style could ever alight on character development or (odious phrase) emotional depth. But not to discern a beauty in it would be a form of blindness, I think.

There’s an analogy to be drawn between the intellectual attractions of music in the Western tradition—its themes and developments, motifs, its suspensions and resolutions—and the trance-inducing effect of those other musics which rely most heavily on repetition or drone.

The premise and structure of Exercises in Style allow for the possibility of dipping in, reading it piecemeal. I’d urge the reader to read it as they would a novel, cover to cover. Altered state.

First published by Gallimard Editions in 1947. First translated for Gaberbocchus Press in 1958. Now available as a New Directions paperback

‘Sand Castles’ by Richard Brautigan

I’ve chosen ‘Sand Castles’ from Brautigan’s only short story collection, a brief account of a visit to Point Reyes Peninsula, which is “fastened like a haunted fingerprint to the California coast” and where “Hawks circle in the sky like the lost springs of old railroad watches”. The author parks his car and hikes down through a canyon “which of course unfolded like layers of abstraction and intimacy” to a beach “like a photograph if they’d had cameras in the time when Christ lived.”

But it’s a sham. What I really want, if Brautigan is new to you, is to get you to read his novels—Sombrero Fallout, in which a black cat is described as a suburb of a Japanese lover’s hair, The Abortion, a kinder and more uplifting work than its title would suggest, or maybe Trout Fishing in America. Any of them, really.

Another from ‘Sand Castles’: “I stared at the watercress in the creek. It looked wealthy.”

First collected in Revenge of the Lawn, Simon & Schuster, 1971, now available from Canongate Press, 2014

‘A Way Home’ by Theodore Sturgeon

I read an awful amount of science fiction while growing up in a small Cotswold town, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. An addiction chiefly fed by the local public library and, in Woolworths, trays of cheap paperbacks and magazines from the US, supposedly shipped across the Atlantic as ballast, which is where I discovered a collection by Theodore Sturgeon, and this story. Unlike that of most of his contemporaries in the so-called Golden Age of SF, Sturgeon’s fiction is emotionally complex, sometimes sexually challenging and always humane. This brief tale is barely fantasy: its dreams of escape interrogate genre fiction’s escapist stories. The protagonist (who shares my first name, which seemed significant to me back then) is a bright young boy who runs away from the suffocating milieu of his small town, where nothing much changes. When he reaches the highway, an expensive car draws up and its driver, a caricature of a self-important business man, with an exotic woman at his side and chocolate-covered cherries in the glove compartment, boasts about the fortune he’s made and asks for directions to the place he left twenty years ago, telling the boy, Paul, that he aims to give “give the folks in the old town a treat”. Paul points out the way and accepts a handful of cherries, but cherries and car vanish as he walks on, he tells himself “It’ll just be like that,” and we realise that the businessman was his fantasy of what he might become: that the narrative, a perfectly pitched parody of pulp fiction cliches, is fed by his imagination. He dreams up two more unlikely future selves – a globe-trotting hobo with a maimed hand, and the dashing pilot of a sleek aeroplane – before the town sheriff draws up in his patrol car, reality reasserts itself, and Paul decides to go home. All the other ways of getting back – making a killing on the stock market, acquiring an aeroplane, even losing his hand – would take too long, he thinks, but the sheriff’s car “would go right past his house, soon’s it got in town. Wasn’t much of a house. In it, though, was his own room. Small, but absolutely his own.”

First published in Amazing Stories, 1953. Collected in A Way Home: Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1955 and Thunder and Roses, Gateway/Orion, 2003

‘Running Down’ by M. John Harrison

Science fiction’s New Wave, its experiments with form and content, and emphasis on subjective fantasies of ‘inner space’, gave my teenage addiction shape and direction. Its chief venue was the magazine New Worlds, which by the 1970s had become a series of paperback anthologies, and it was in one of those where I first read this story, which repurposes a favourite science-fictional trope, the gift of a special power, to critique SF’s fantasies of power and the state of Britain, back then, in the 1970s. The running down of the title refers to entropy, metaphorically embodied in Lyall, the accident-prone, self-pitying acquaintance of the story’s narrator, whose disasters ramp up from minor domestic accidents to the terrible end of a rancorous marriage, and a catastrophic earthquake in the Lake District. There’s no pat solution to Lyall’s plight, no practical or heroic use for the entropy he embodies. Spurning the narrator’s attempt to help him, he sets off on a crazed trek across iconic crags and peaks, triggering a geological collapse that’s quickly forgotten when a right-wing insurgency issues “from dusty suburban drill halls and Boy Scout huts” and swiftly takes over the country. Harrison’s savage irony refuses any sense of escape or triumphalism; all that’s left is the narrator’s residual guilt, and his attempt, in the story’s hauntingly lyrical last paragraph, to nullify or escape the memory of Lyall’s “final access of rage and despair” by casting backwards into the unsullied past.

First published in New Worlds 8, Sphere Books, 1975. Collected in Things That Never Happen, Night Shade Books, 2003

‘Hay’ by David Hayden

A concise, vividly rendered fable, presented with the dead-pan absurdism of a Buster Keaton skit. An engineer, travelling by train across the parched landscape of an unfamiliar country, sees a man floating in the air under a hay bale, and a mountain-high stack of teetering, slowly shifting bales. No one else seems to find any of this remarkable, and at his destination the engineer discovers that the mine he’s been sent to repair has been flooded with the tears of its miners: “A thousand men are sitting or standing, alone or in groups, their silvery issue sluicing across the floor: a great self-syncopating orchestra of misery.” He swiftly restores the mine to good working order and organises shifts of weeping miners to irrigate the surrounding desert, but this triumph of pragmatism is swiftly undercut by Hayden’s sly surrealism. When he returns to the now-prosperous mining town some years later, where the “sound of discrete crying arrives with the odour of ripening fruit,” the engineer sees from the balcony of the new resort hotel the tower of shifting hay and, silhouetted against the moon, a solitary man held aloft by a bale. The rational world and the world of fantasy and dream logic are equally real, but one cannot define, or be contained by, the other.

First published in The Stinging Fly, Spring 2010. Collected in Darker with the Lights On, Little Island Press, 2017

‘Useless Things’ by Maureen F. McHugh

A meticulously constructed, quietly devastating story of precarity in a day-after-tomorrow future in which drought is rendering the south-west of the US uninhabitable. The life of thoughtful liberalism the narrator hoped for is gone. She lives with her two dogs in a house she bought with the last of her savings, fears that her charity to passing migrants has made her vulnerable, worries about paying taxes and buying water, and that her business, sculpting lifelike dolls of newborn infants, may at any moment give out. There’s little drama, but the story is saturated with anxiety, a sense of things falling apart. One of the narrator’s best clients turns out to have been using her dolls as part of an odd, sad hoax; her home is broken into and one of her dogs goes missing; she buys a gun for protection, but a confrontation with a pair of migrants ends in misunderstanding rather than a shoot-out. There’s no triumph in survival, no colourful Mad-Max style anarchism, “just a couple of guys from Nicaragua or Guatemala . . . And me, sitting watching the desert go dark, the moon rising, an empty handgun in my hand.”

First published in Eclipse Three: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2008. Collected in After the Apocalypse, Small Beer Press, 2011

‘Under the Microscope’ by John Updike

In this parody of a metropolitan cocktail party, the guests are various species of ravenous, microscopic pond life and literary ambition is transformed into a stark Darwinian struggle. Updike once wanted to be a cartoonist; the original version of this jeu d’espirit, with its tipped-in artwork, zestfully aspires to that condition. It’s a shame, I think, that he decided to omit the illustrations in this and several similar experiments when they were published in the first slab of his collected oeuvre.

First published in The Transatlantic Review, Spring 1968. Collected in Museums and Women, and Other Stories, Knopf, 1972 and The Early Stories 1953 – 1975, Knopf, 2003