‘The Gnomes’ by Jorge de Cascante

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

‘Some Other, Better Otto’ by Deborah Eisenberg

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

‘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