‘Still Life with an Open Door’ by Jon McGregor

Listening to stories is one of life’s great pleasures. For many years I ran a live lit event Story Fridays here in Bath, where writers and actors would read new stories on stage. I loved reading the submissions, curating a varied evening of stories that would work well out loud, and then watching as an audience focussed in and listened. They’d laugh and gasp, and sometimes there would be that moment of silence at the end where they were holding their breath, still in another world, before they exhaled, came back to earth and cheered and clapped.

So I wanted to choose a story or a writer whose work I have listened to rather then read. David Sedaris is an obvious choice, but I think that his work is more creative non-fiction than short stories. So I’ve gone for Jon McGregor. I first encountered his writing when I heard The Reservoir Tapes on Radio 4, a captivating series about a girl who goes missing, with 13 stories taking 13 different points of view of the incident. McGregor has recently created a new series for Radio 4, Still Lives. He said on Twitter/X: 

“I wrote some stories where absolutely literally nothing happens, mostly to stick it to the Dramatic Arc dudes. It’ll probably be too quiet for you. Come for the bowl of fruit, stay for the cheese-board, stick it out until Friday’s grand finale, the one with the drying paint.”

I think quite a lot happens. The stories might be subtle and understated, but they are exquisite microscopic portraits of lives, full of distinctive three-dimensional characters. They brim over with the reality of life. The stories are linked, but can be listened to as standalone pieces. My particular favourite is ‘Still Life with an Open Door’ where an elderly woman has fallen over. She is waiting for an ambulance, she doesn’t want to be a bother. Give them all a listen, they’re brilliant.

First broadcast as part of Still Lives in September 2024 on BBC Radio 4. You can listen the whole collection on BBC Sounds here and to ‘Still Life with an Open Door’ here

‘Fat Tuesday’ by Caio Fernando Abreu, translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato

This is my most recent favourite. I was told a few weeks ago that I needed to read Caio Fernando Abreu’s work. He was one of the most influential Brazilian writers of the 1970s and 80s, had I really never heard of him? I slunk away and got hold of this collection. The stories are atmospheric, soaked in alcohol, drugs, sex and loneliness. People are ringing on telephones, hanging around in apartments listening to music (he’ll sometimes provide a soundtrack for the story), as everyone searches for meaning in their lives, full of fear and desire and existential angst. It all felt very familiar, I have spent many hours deep in those conversations. A character walks down a dingy street, a bottle of vodka in one hand, drenched by the rain, pounding on a door that doesn’t open. Abreu’s characters are insecure and lost, but sometimes hilarious, sometimes surreal, and I wanted to spend time with them.

In ‘Fat Tuesday’ it’s all sweat and male desire: “We kept rolling in the sand up to where the waves crashed, so the water would wash the sweat and sand and glitter off our bodies.” It’s Carnival and dancing and glitter – until it isn’t. This is Brazil during the AIDS epidemic, under a military dictatorship where Arreu’s writing about queer erotic life was heavily censored and he was put on the wanted list. “Ai ai, they yelled. Look at them queens.”It’s shocking, and so sad. Seek it out, for this story and the rest.

Originally published in Portuguese in 1982, and first published in English in Moldy Strawberries, Archipelago Books, 2022

‘The Happy Prince’ by Oscar Wilde

I wanted to finish with one of the stories that kicked off my love of the form. I still adore Saki’s short stories, and would name a cat after his mischievously wicked character Clovis. Saki’s sense of fun is unparalleled. But I think that Wilde and his ‘children’s stories’ pip Saki to the post (not that the stories should be restricted to children). There’s wit and vivid imagery in Wilde’s stories, but also a moral heart, and an anger at the state of the world. I read The Happy Prince and Other Stories when I was little, and then read them again, and had the stories on audio tape, when my daughter was young. I remembered them clearly. Neither my daughter or I can listen to ‘The Infanta’s Birthday’, it is far too painful, and although I like the imperious ‘Remarkable Rocket’ and the tragic nightingale giving her lifeblood for the wastrel lover in ‘The Nightingale and The Rose’, I think ‘The Happy Prince’ gets my vote.

A golden statue and a swallow, who plucks off the Prince’s gold and jewels and flies them to the student in the garret, the mother in the poor house and the match girl who has dropped her wares, all the time dreaming of his trip south to the warmth of Egypt. I think of the swallow in this story every time I see one swooping over my garden, and I think of the most precious things in the city, a leaden heart and a dead bird. Blimey, Wilde knew how to tug at the heartstrings.

From The Happy Prince and Other Stories, first published in 1888, and now widely published. Available to read online here

‘The Sound Sweep’ by J. G. Ballard

Madame Gioconda is an opera singer who lives in a noisy future. The daytimes are full of traffic noise and nighttime brings “the mysterious clapping of her phantoms”. She calls Mangon, who tries to tidy up the psychoacoustic mess with his “sonovac”. But the story is by J. G. Ballard, whose rectangular concrete head was furnished entirely with messes, so peace and quiet are not on the menu for Madame Gioconda.

Sometimes I like to think ‘The Sound Sweep’ is an elaborate cautionary tale about the kind of miracle cures for tinnitus that occasionally appear in the little advertising zones of my laptop screen. Sometimes I like to think it’s an energetic plunge into the idea that sounds exist as objects, or a berserk exploration of the relationship between noise and waste. It’s a big philosophical hoover, and it’s heading directly for your house.

First published in Science Fantasy, February 1960. Collected in The Voices of Time, Orion, 1992

‘Radio Baby’ by Deborah Kay Davies

As soon as radios were invented, people believed they could transmit messages from the afterlife, and the foggy notion that electromagnetic waves have supernatural clout has been with us ever since. The radio in this story, instead of receiving messages from the dead, prevents communication with the living.

Grace’s mother returns home early from the hospital after giving birth. She locks the baby in a bedroom and turns up the radio so she can’t hear the newborn crying. Grace is forbidden to phone her absent father because it’ll “scramble the sounds”. The radio must be tuned to a musical station – speech is intolerable.

Eventually, Grace’s mother decides that a single device is not enough to defeat the baby, and drafts in a record player for support. The two of them have to sit in the resulting dissonance and “listen for instructions, make sure we’re tuned in.” Her mother, slumped in a chair while her “face gleams dully in the small light of the on switch,” draws a very unsettling picture of the baby on a sketchpad. Attuned to the frequencies of horror in everyday objects and situations, Davies produces a brilliant, haunting conclusion.

In her fiction, Davies attends to sound as a multi-sensory experience, and deftly anchors her characters’ peculiar ways of listening in their material and historical surroundings. In this story, sonic technology allows tension to flow around the family network, and acts as a catalyst for post-natal mental upheaval.

Collected in Grace, Tamar, and Laszlo the Beautiful, Parthian, 2008

‘Nineteen Fifty-five’ by Alice Walker

Two weird white men come to Gracie May Still’s house. She’s a singer, and they buy the rights to one of her songs. Later, she sees one of the men, Traynor, singing the song on TV, and he’s “looking half asleep from the neck up, but kind of awake in a nasty way from the waist down”. She has an uncanny feeling: “If I’da closed my eyes, it could have been me. He had followed every turning of my voice, side streets, avenues, red lights, train crossings and all.”

Traynor’s version of the song is a global mega-smash, but after a couple of years he returns to Gracie May’s house to confess that he doesn’t know what the lyrics mean. The story follows Traynor’s Elvis-ish career over the decades, his letters and visits to Gracie May, his artistic incomprehension and his increasingly soul-less, machine-like vibe. “It was dark but seems like I could tell his eyes weren’t right. It was like something was sitting there talking to me but not necessarily with a person behind it.”

Collected in You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down, The Women’s Press, 1982

‘The David Thuo Show’ by Samuel Munene

A classic of everyday goading. The narrator’s family watch TV together, and their reactions to the shows are a proxy for arguments.

The mother laughs at The Jeffersons because the “short, bald and clumsy” Mr Jefferson resembles the father. The father starts coming home late to avoid The Jeffersons but makes sure to catch Love and Hate. The narrator watches a quiz show and gives the correct answers out loud, because “I wanted to make [the family] feel brainless and annoy them”. Each of the family members has a distinctive laugh, which they use as an extra weapon to annoy the others.

Munene’s neat wry prose produces a subtle but definite tellyish feel, while the atmosphere ‘flicks’ between sitcom, soap opera, and serious drama. When the TV breaks, the repairs take three weeks. The narrator reads “Emotions, a pornographic magazine”. The parents quarrel about having affairs, and the mother leaves the family.

When she returns, she brings a new TV, to everybody’s relief. The real-life quarrelling is over, the proxy-quarrelling can resume. The TV is a chattering object that emits a kind of stabilising wave.

Included in A Life in Full and Other Stories, the Caine Prize for African Writing 2010, New Internationalist, 2010

‘There’s Someone in the House’ by Ludmila Petrushevskaya, translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers

There’s a poltergeist in the narrator’s house but she doesn’t tell anyone, since its activities are low-key. It also seems a bit like a TV itself: “Something has definitely moved in, some kind of living emptiness, small of stature but energetic and pushy” (we’re in the cathode ray tube era, before the plasma screen took over).

For distraction, the narrator “immerses herself” in the “bluish rays” of the television, and thereby “floats off to foreign worlds, becomes frightened, intrigued, heartbroken – in short, she lives.” Naturally, the poltergeist wants attention, and attacks the sound-machines: it trashes a shelf of records so it falls onto a piano the narrator used to practise on as a girl. She then transforms into a being called “the mother-daughter”. To outwit the poltergeist, she destroys half of her possessions. “The television is the worst. She has to wait for dark and then throw it out the window with all her might, [then] carry the remains to the trash in her little grocery cart”. She’s left with her books and records, and a sewing machine. I like how this story explores the weird presences of audiovisual devices – how they change the emotional gravity of a house. I’ve used the same hi-fi for 24 years but still await my own poltergeist.

Collected in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill her Neighbour’s Baby, Penguin, 2011

‘New Year’s Eve Adventures’ by Arno Schmidt, translated by John E. Woods

Schmidt pulls you sideways by the ear into murky and frantic language-battles, clattering around in the sound-drenched possibilities of so-called silent reading. He rarely resorts to telling us what’s happening. The stories spurn orthodox creative writing handshakes such as [X] was [Y] when [Z] occurred. Instead they begin like this:

“(Snipping=snipping=snipping slips o’ paper : if somebody had sung me that lullaby at my clothes basket, how at age 50 I’d be helping construct an index for a 12 volume lexicon of saints . . . ! And glance at the things one more time from the idle corner of my eye : a thing with no guts, but only a spine; (and sometimes not even that : a book, a sick book, a terribly sick book); I took more and more exception to this ALBAN BUTLER !). – “

What is going on here? It might help to know that you’re not supposed to say ‘equals’ to yourself when you see that symbol between the snippings. Schmidt discarded the hyphen in favour of its double-decker cousin, whose mathematical resonance suits the madcap exactness of the prose. He uses other punctuation to startle and contort and hiccup and glitch and pause. “Let us retain the lovely=essential freedom to reproduce a hesitation precisely,” he says. The very deliberate space between the end of BUTLER and its exclamation point above reads to me like a comic gesture, a tilt of the speaker’s head a split-second after their utterance.

In the story, the characters are listening to each other and to the radio on New Year’s Eve. There is some snipping of printed texts and some walking in the outdoors and a return to the indoors, where we see one of them “bent to the lemon glow of the dial”. And another “eagerly directed his large ear to the government=apparatus. / Where, predictably, there resounded the beloved hodgepodge of bullschmaltz & observations by Leading Politicians”.

Having identified the radio as a bullschmaltz delivery unit, the protaganists revel in their homemade sonic-linguistic explorations. I think they’d agree with the philosopher Marie Thompson’s conception of noise as a productive, transformative, inescapable, and necessary thing. Schmidt’s abrasive and invigorating style, where the text feels scrambled but the narrative pulse feels strong, is like a lo-fi recording played through a distorted amplifier to get a thrilling, moreish surface that operates as the perfect antidote to I’m not sure what exactly but I like it.

Collected in The Collected Stories of Arno Schmidt, Dalkey Archive, 2011

‘Machinery and Modern Industry’ by Karl Marx, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling

Speaking of snipping, here we see Marx doing vocal collage. Within a lengthy analysis of the English factory Acts, he pauses to assemble a large number of very short excerpts from a select committee report on mining in 1866. The select committee interviewed mine owners and mine workers about whether or not the recently introduced laws on working conditions in mines were actually being followed, and their answers were recorded in the report. “The whole farce is too characteristic of the spirit of capital, not to call for a few extracts,” says Marx.

What emerges from the rapid question-and-answer snippets that follow reveals, of course, that the mine owners couldn’t give a shit about laws or people or the conditions they force their adult and child labourers to work in:

“Why do you not apply to the inspector?” “To tell the truth there are many men who are timid on that point; there have been cases of men being sacrificed and losing their employment in consequence of applying to the inspector.” “Why; is he a marked man for having complained?” “Yes”

During the collage, Marx throws in the occasional sassy comment, or gives one of the speakers a name like “Bourgeois Vivian”. It’s like reading an experimental radio play for the page, where voices with all their antiquated diction install themselves in your head, right alongside your personal rage about the state of capitalism, late capitalism, too late capitalism, techno-feudalism, etc.

First published in 1889, collected in Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Unwin, 1947

‘The Mad Bell-Ringer’ by Samira Azzam, translated by Ranya Abdelrahman

Alain Corbin’s Village Bells is a classic work of “campanarian history” that presents bells as a technology of regulation and an auditory aspect of collective identity. Samira Azzam’s very short story about a bell-ringer is a condensed evocation of this technological truth. Instead of being located in revolutionary rural France, though, this bell is being rung in at an unknown time in an unnamed location, but it doesn’t seem too far from Lebanon or Palestine.

Abu Masoud is the old bellringer being replaced by a young upstart after a long career. “Abu Masoud and the bell were one and the same thing,” we are told. The sound of the bell is the sound of the old man. But “he was coming apart”. Growing deaf, trembling, weak. The youngster’s not going to get the proper tone – he doesn’t know the right way to strike the bell. But the old man’s losing his touch.

Azzam’s stories in this collection proceed at a measured pace, with much allegorical resonance. I recently saw Adania Shibli explain the not-overtly-political resonance of Azzam’s fiction as a strategic move. When censors read her work in the 1960s, they found no obviously negative depictions of Zionism, and so allowed it to be published. What they didn’t realise is that Azzam’s fictions dared to imagine a world without Israeli apartheid.

Collected in Out of Time, ArabLit Books, 2022

‘The Preserving Machine’ by Philip K. Dick

Doc Labyrinth invents a machine to store music, after having a vision of a paper Schubert score burrowing out of a bombed building, “like a mole” with a “furious energy”. Reasoning that animals possess a survival instinct, he decides to build a machine that converts music into creatures, to preserve their longevity.

The snag is that, much like our present-day racist billionaire innovators, he can’t build anything himself. So he enlists the help of “a small midwestern university,” who for some reason build it and send it to him.

Then we get the mozart bird and the beethoven beetle. “The schubert animal was silly”. The composers’ names lose their capitalisations, and become mere characteristics. Doc makes loads of these animals, and they live in the woods near his house. He has ensured they can’t reproduce. But they can still mutate.

A mutated bach bug is fed back into the machine, producing a score of “hideous, distorted, diabolical” music.

The story reminds me of the Lexicon of Musical Invective, Nicholas Slonimsky’s compilation of critical hatchet jobs of famous composers’ symphonies. Critics, says Slonimsky, tend towards a particular “psychological inhibition: Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar”. As does Doc Labyrinth. He has to learn that music and technology have lives of their own.

First published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1953. Collected in The Preserving Machine and Other Stories, Pan Books, 1972

‘The Revolution’ by A. Naji Bakhti

It’s a chapter from Bakhti’s hilarious and moving novel, Between Beirut and the Moon. The scene is a schoolyard in the city, where an Egyptian boy called Abed with “a deceptively deep, strong voice” stands in the middle of a football pitch and commentates on the matches that play out around him. Abed reminds everyone of an Egyptian football commentator whose voice could be heard throughout Beirut during the 98 world cup. But unlike that guy, Abed uses his commentary to influence the game.

When he finds a loudspeaker to amplify his voice, the emotional weight of his words is also amplified: “he seemed to know strange, intimate matters” about some of the boys, and he puts them off their game by speculating about their family lives.

The loudpseaker remains at the physical centre of the pitch while it becomes a political centre of gravity. When a fight breaks out, Abed turns his commentary upon the fighters, playing them like fools with his expert provocations.

When Abed gives up commentary and takes up football, he kicks the speaker across the ground, and the people are spared from his weird verbal habits. Throughout the episode, the quickfire comedy comes from nested acoustic contexts: the close-range conversation between the boys playing the game, the mid-range commentary through the loudspeaker, and the wider context of the city and its history.

Published in Between Beirut and the Moon, Influx Press, 2020