‘The Gospel According to Mark’ by Jorge Luis Borges

As with many of his stories Borges begins as if this is something taken from the archives – “These events took place at La Colorada ranch, in the southern part of the township of Junín, during the last days of March, 1928” – though of course we know it’s pure fiction. The first page sketches the background and personality of Espinosa, a young man of “with nothing more noteworthy about him than an almost unlimited kindness and a capacity for public speaking that had earned him several prizes at the English school in Ramos Mejía.” Espinosa ends up trapped by floods on a friend’s farm, his only companions being the farm foreman Gutres and Gutres’s son and daughter. Good-natured and condescending, the young visitor decides to take it upon himself to educate the Gutres by reading to them from the Bible, with disastrous results. The ending is truly stunning. A breathtakingly ironic story about class, belief and unintended consequences.

First published in English, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author, in The New Yorker, October 1971, and collected in Doctor Brodie’s Report, Dutton, 1972, and Collected Fictions, Viking, 1998/Penguin, 2000, where it is translated by Andrew Hurley. Read it online at the New Yorker here; or hear it read by Paul Theroux here

‘Our Lady of the Quarry’ by Mariana Enríquez, tr. Megan McDowell

This story is unusual in that it’s told in the first-person plural: we. A group of teenage girls hang out with a slightly older girl, Sylvia, whom they both admire and hate. “If we discovered a new drug she had already overdosed on the same substance. If we discovered a band we liked, she had already got over her fandom of the same group.” When Sylvia takes up with a young man they all fancy it becomes a horror story, a kind of Argentine Carrie. Enríquez is brilliant at evoking the inchoate power of adolescent female sexuality.

First published in English in The New Yorker, December 2020, available to read here. Collected in the UK in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Granta 2021

‘The Husband Stitch’ by Carmen Maria Machado

I’m not the first to pick this story, nor will I be the last. It’s earthy and visceral, sometimes sweet, sometimes horrific, written in an incantatory first-person voice that pauses every now and then to instruct the reader on how to achieve the right sound effects or what pitch of voice to use when reading aloud. The narrator tells us that as a little girl she was sure she saw bloody toes for sale in the supermarket: “As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world only observed by a single set of eyes. As a girl, I consented to his account of the story.”

First published online in Granta in 2014 and available to read here. Collected in Her Body And Other Parties, Graywolf/Serpent’s Tail, 2019

‘Be a Woman, Be Yourself, Be Miserable’ by Sheila Heti

Strictly speaking, this is a novel extract rather than a short story, but this section – the letter B – was published online as a self-contained piece so I think it counts. Drawn from more than ten years of diary entries, Heti’s novel is a compilation of sentences from different times cut up and re-arranged in alphabetical order (via an excel spreadsheet, her publishers tell us). The writing veers from lofty reflections on morality and art to comments about buying orange juice or enjoying pierogis. There are snippets about relationships with several different men, which frustrates the impulse to find a single narrative thread, and yet there is definitely a shape here. The piece begins with short, snappy exhortations: “Be impeccable with your word. Be miserable about the world.” Towards the end it’s more about growing old and dying. It feels mysterious. Not everyone can pull this kind of thing off, but I think Heti does.

First published in the UK as part of Alphabetical Diaries, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Feb 2024. Available to read online at Electric Literature here

‘The Twelfth of Never’ by Gurnaik Johal

Unlike most narratives this one isn’t linked by characters or setting. It skips through time from one year to the next, beginning in 1741 and ending in 2020. Each snippet of the story is very brief. We hardly have time to get to know these people, before we are hurtling onwards through decades to the next fragment. The story begins with a butcher’s wife and ends with an old song discovered on Spotify. Like a puzzle, you can’t help searching for a pattern, a connecting thread. In the end you realise it’s about music. It’s the scale of the narrative that stays with you in the end.

First published in We Move, Serpent’s Tail, 2022

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff

This story has been picked by several other anthologists, but I can’t leave it out because it’s such a great example of how to use both showing AND telling. To begin with it seems as if we’re in a close-third-person narrative, following Anders, a burned out and cynical literary critic as he stands in a queue at his local bank. In the middle of the story there is a crisis that shouldn’t come as a surprise but does, and at this point the story makes an extraordinary switch, and we realise that we’re in the hands of a highly skilled omniscient narrator. Wolff describes the trajectory of the bullet through the soft tissue of the brain and at the same time takes us on a rapid tour through Anders’ life by listing all the significant emotional moments he has forgotten.

First published in The New Yorker, September 1995 and available to read here; collected in The Night in Question, Knopf / Picador, 1996

‘Stories I Can’t Tell Anyone I Know’ by Bhanu Kapil

This story is only three pages long, a collection of eight enigmatic mini narratives. Here are some examples of the way some of them begin: “A young woman lives alone on an island. […] There’s a reason she chooses to live this way.” “A man approaches a girl of about twelve as she’s waiting for the school bus.” “A nineteen-year-old man falls in love with a man who lives as a woman.” The title does a lot of heavy lifting: right from the start we know that these stories cannot be freely shared. Nothing is overtly spelled out but there is a strong undertow of pain, regret and shame. Indirectly, the writer describes her community by telling us what people around her do not want to hear about.

First published in Prototype 5, reprinted in Best British Short Stories 2024, Salt, 2024

‘Beginning End’ by Jessica Soffer

My final choice is an incredibly short story, just 725 words, that first opened my eyes to the power of telling. Moving between three modes of address – you, I and we – it takes the reader flying through many decades of a relationship between an unnamed man and woman. Each paragraph narrates a new phase in their lives: “We got a place. We read a lot. We rescued a dog. You worked at a shelter. I was a terrible handyman. My father called friends. We moved to the city.” The key to its brilliance is the way the writer strings together statements that conjure concrete images in the reader’s mind, so that the story is almost like flicking though a photo album. That, for me, is the secret of all good writing, whether you’re showing or telling.

First published online in 2009 as one of Granta magazine’s New Voices and free to read here

Introduction (or, Help!)

Gary Raymond told me about Jonathan Gibbs’s e-bulletin / website project whereby guests offer notes on a dozen short stories at their whim. In the Brixton Review of Books (brb he he) Jonathan says it’s a literary parlour game that’s now been played by over 250 ppl (over 3,000 short story offerings!)! Offerings, says Jonathan, are best when aesthetic excellence is weighed up with personal significance: yeah! Dream! But Hard! Jumping to dream-edit desk rapidly to realise my own A Personal Anthology, fear and excitement panged. Chill out, baby. I tend to identify myself to others as somebody who isn’t a literary person (hideous inferiority complex display), but this activity triggered (happily) in my brain a life-time actually of tale-appreciation I’d seemingly convinced myself to forget about. Hooray. 

Jonathan says you can do A Personal Anthology many ways; mine is simply select recent favourites AT PRESENT. After some deliberation I’ve stuck quite close to an up-tight definition of what a short story is (according to Google a story with a fully developed theme but significantly shorter and less elaborate than a novel), mainly to limit free-association crazie. A crisp-packet can be a short story! But c’mon, it’s no longer era Marcel Duchamp. Initially I’d included more classics, but wouldn’t you have rather read Anton Chekhov or Fyodor Dostoyevsky when they were actually doing it prior to the Posthumous Collection? Hot word. I did check out A Personal Anthology’s archive to see what has or hasn’t been mentioned and am sad to not add new entries for Angela Carter or Leonora Carrington. Yet, this is a heart-felt curation that feels right currently (Jonathan says go with your heart).

I’m doing a PhD on so-called literary psychogeographies at the moment. While blissfully liberating myself from that parameter in making this A Personal Anthology, a theme of spatial politics and human affect is I think at least abit reflected in my choices. It coulda been a far more concentrated batch as such though, just to let you know! On that matter, if you happen to know any short stories particularly attuned to the contested notion of psychogeography, plîs will you get in touch? I’m on a Literature Wales x Disability Arts Cymru programme this November-to-March to develop short story skillz in those-ish realms, and desire bites.

Somebody should make a baker’s dozen for A Personal Anthology if you are a baker-writer?! I am not so didn’t think I could legitimately give myself an extra one, but wanted to!

‘The Guest’ by Mira Mattar

Ma Bibliotèque published Yes, I Am A Destroyer (2020) to beguiled claps, debut book of Jordanian-Palestinian poet and fiction writer Mira Mattar blurbed by Sharon Kivland and Lisa Robertson as oscillating between lucidity and dissociation, demonic and angelic, maniacal and generous, & accidentally elegant in prosing the bad city with refusal of subjection and anarchical vigour. I snapped it up lately and am yet to read, but in the meantime found ‘The Guest’, Mira Mattar’s 2012 short story in Mute Magazine (find more at wwws of 3:AM Magazine and Makhtin). It is an unnerving vignette of a humanity-bereftness in a hospitality setting, opening with a ghoulish-green-pixel’d graphic of luxury-yacht espace intérior ~ the ensuing locus. “CL”, “head stewardess” who subversively embroiders subtle “CL” initials onto her standard white work gloves, prepares a room for “the guest” judged to have packed in surveillance anticipation. Still, she cannot avoid feeling “Stupid. All her things have betrayed and humiliated her” (gross razors toothpaste-tubes price-tags) and that she’s missed the mark (“But though she had located her smartest most casual smart-casual clothes, the guest still somehow got it wrong”). After vapid on-board dinner where “the guest” and others are unable to speak, only emiting “a common word like ‘iPhone’ or ‘tiramisu’” intermittently, “the guest” the next morning following an alienating breakfast tries to teach language to mysterious “the child” who will only write “X” or “0”. At night “the guest” sleeps naked next to the empty body-form of her clean-pressed jammies in foetus position. Pristine, cruel, empty, negligent, faux-functional. Free Palestine (read Mira Mattar on starvation as a tool of genocide in Gaza via culinary magazine Vittlesand see also arablit.org and gazapassages.com).

At Mute Magazine since 2012 and online here

‘Interior Bunch Concerns’ by Ed Garland

Ed Garland was described by our mutual-friend Laura Phillips as a beautiful writer and it is t r u e ! His short story ‘Yeah Not Bad’ (feat. medicality fuck-ups, kale attack, toxic labour, et cetera) arrived at The Stinging Fly online in 2023, then ‘Interior Bunch Concerns’ in The Stinging Fly’s summer print-issue the very next annum. I’d had the privilege of Going About with Ed Garland while ‘Interior Bunch Concerns’ was in draft mode for example on magic Bristolian barge-cafés and in wooden hôtel-lounge milieus. ‘Interior Bunch Concerns’ is the premonitory title of a fraught-living-set-ups and fraught-bodies tale, all scrunched up and bleugh. A nameless narrator and his “top-notch companion” wanna live in “Marseille!” and make a “durable baby” there, so get lodgers toward accruing the wealth required to do so, supplementing their incomes from yucky occupations (socio-economic hoops Ed Garland terms “lucrative ordeals”). Exact not-yet-Marseille location is unknown, but the “slate-grey couch” where the couple sit daily with laptop-braised legs makes me wonder if it’s at least somewhere in Mid-Wales where Ed Garland and I both live at the time of writing. The “two sunburned cherubs” who emit rosy-cheek smile emojis and own a weird silver spaniel are fucking eerie and bring unbearable domestic uncomfortability ~ the end to its temporary endurance climaxes with a spoiler I will not reveal here. Still, the fight for Marseille’s not over! Dark yet Optimistic, Zesty. Every word is BIG. Get excited because Ed Garland is writing a NOVEL at the moment (it’s not a secret) utilising his immaculate attention to auditory (and otherwise) terrestrial details. Go!!!

Published in The Stinging Fly, Issue 50 Volume Two, May 2024

‘The Mouse’ by Anaïs Nin

On the sparkli nu T5 TrawsCymru Electric Bws to Aberaeron one day Ed Garland and I were discussing Anaïs Nin’s infamous diaries and private life. I became desperate to read her fiction but she was not in Gwisgo Bookworm when we got there nor in Ystwyth Books back in Aberystwyth so I sent off for a Penguin Twentieth Century Classics version (originally published by Anaïs Nin’s own Gemor Press kl) of Under A Glass Bell (1944) it has that pale aquamarine-coloured framing around a monochrome image of a lady behind a lace curtain which I find calming. ‘The Mouse’, short story No. 2 in the collection, struck me as the most tender, upsetting, and insurgent parable of solidarity. It begins: “The Mouse and I lived on a houseboat anchored near Notre Dame where the Seine curved endlessly like veins around the island heart of Paris”. “The Mouse” is explicitly “a woman” who dresses fluffily and has become chronically frightened, never finishing the Bretagne folk songs she sings while performing household tasks or obtaining soap or cheese groceries, hyper-vigilantly forever thinking “danger or punishment” is just round the corner. Sad. Anaïs Nin’s “I” wants to help, but Mouse is so scared that “Before every act of friendliness she was suspcious, uneasy”. Sadder! Mouse’s anxious figuration of a water-fountain catalyses her (more-or-less inevitable) trapping due to horrendously messed-up hegemonic culture. If Mouse had only been able to trust “I” ~ kind, assertive, eloquent, honest, considered (psychoanalytic healthy ego metaphor?) ~ all could have been so different. A potentially tragic ending is left unfinished, though: rooting for you, Mouse! A Spar JAM DONUTS receipt was my bookmark.

Part of Under A Glass Bell first published by Gemor Press 1944, various editions thereafter and also available online here

‘Come and Pick Me Up Immediately’ by Claire Carroll

Claire Carroll and I met some years ago at a PhD-funding soirée. Claire Carroll’s thesis is on Surrealist literary legacies and mine is on Situationist literary legacies. Shortly after our meeting, PROTOTYPE 5 (yearly assembly of texts by Prototype Publishing) arrived at my flat and Claire Carroll’s ‘A Sun is Only a Shipwreck Insofar as a Woman’s Body Resembles It’ was in there, an outstanding imaginary anecdote involving André Breton to which I was strongly compelled to write a fan-girl response. But that was a while ago; since then, Claire Carroll has released a whole tome of short stories with Scratch Books ~ The Unreliable Nature Writer (2024). It’s all wickedly wry in tone though somehow still soft and of vulnerability. ‘Come and Pick Me Up Immediately’ documents a female protagonist (I t h i n k “The Unreliable Nature Writer” who appears through an eponymous series of bamboozling contemporary episodes?) dealing with a Very Needy & Conventionally Attractive Man (her drunk manager). “Can you call me? There’s something urgent I need. […] I NEED YOU TO TAKE ME TO A WOODLAND STREAM” – his txt – kicks it off. So many eyes are rolling; Claire Carroll is excellent at ffs-vibe interpersonal drama. Basically, she (obligatorily) drives him (very perfumed) out of town across “sick, burnt ochre” landscape to the pined-for woodland stream, and he is underappreciative but wireless-contact-payment-taps them a post-quest ice-cream each. I read ‘Come And Pick Me Up Immediately’ on, appropriately I thought, Marylbone High Street.

Part of The Unreliable Nature Writer, Scratch Books 2024

‘If YES’ by Ben Pester

I was in London because it was Claire Carroll’s book launch at The Social W1W 7JD me and my friend Jess Payn attended together. We met Joshua Jones of (more short stories) Local Fires (2023) and did not m e e t Ben Pester but heard him read from his Boiler-House-Press-published (also short stories) Am I in the Right Place? (2021). Another of his stories, in the rooms of e-existent Hotel (2017-22), that is * so funny * I’d fell upon earlier is ‘If YES’, a short egg story. It seems a great many great writers have been obsessed with eggs at some point in their careers has anyone else noticed this? ‘If YES’ is an office gambol framed in a user-satisfaction feedback form by Ben Pester. A Large Egg is surprise-delivered at the work-place to which “Ben” (main character) and colleagues are “deeply attracted”. Its proximity mystically effects an “instant Alpha brainwave state” causing powerful primal-corporate cameraderie and, ultimately, business (“start-up”) productivity. Of course, there is an oviparous in the egg and I was l-o-l-ing at the strength of the tension-building (snort-worthy single line paragraphs) Ben Pester achieves re speculation over what will be inside the oeuf. Things of course get dreadful and I say a real Oh no reading ‘If YES’ it’s so eggishly palpable. Commerce dialect looms massive as our cultish capacities under late-late-late-stage Capitalismo are so well allegoried. See also Seven Rooms: Assorted materials from a Paper Hotel (2023), Hotel-on-web’s paper component.

Within the rooms of Hotel online here, Tenement Press & Prototype 2017-22