‘Ticky Picky Boom Boom’ by Pat Thomson

This is a nostalgic short story for me about not eggs but yams. Mine and my sister’s Mom ‘n’ Dad read to us as kids from books (they also made up genuinely good stories from their heads which we demanded as preference these are things I feel lucky (not Lucky) about). Soma the best wackiest books came from carboot sales (no LRB-franchise Aquila Magazine does the Anarchist Review of Books have a youth arm?). Eleven years ago the Malcom X Elders in Bristol staged ‘Ticky Picky Boom Boom’ alongside other Caribbean folk yarns at acta Theatre. I can’t work out who Pat Thomson is but she * MIGHT * be a badass education academic now? ‘Ticky Picky Boom Boom’ was in The Puffin Book of Five Minute Stories (1998) I remember it strangely often for its totally addictive rhythm. In ‘Ticky Picky Boom Boom’, a hoard of yams keep chasing “Mr Tiger” under the spell of “Ananse the Trickster” (Anansi a folk-spider creative and cunning and wealthy and not very nice). “Mr Tiger” cannot escape the possessed yams even with the help of “Mr Dog”, “Sister Duck”, and “Mr Goat”. Répéter répéter again and again ~

And down the road came the yams and the noise their feet made sounded like this: Ticky Picky Boom Boom

Ticky Picky Boom Boom

Ticky Picky Boom Boom bouf!

The nice guys win though, yay, and all the yams get eaten E a t  t h e  R i c h. It reminds me of J. G. Ballard’s novella Running Wild (1988), where murderous children from posho Pangbourne prevail (but in a kind-of reversal of that plot).

Included in The Puffin Book of Five Minute Stories, Puffin Books, 1998

‘I am no longer baby I want power’ by Roisin Dunnett

Broken Sleep Books sent something gratis and it was Roisin Dunnett’s Animal, Vegetable (2021) containing odd and profound ‘I am no longer baby I want power’ (first of three short stories) split into “Part 1” and “Part 2” based on a meme ~ “I’m baby” ~ involving Gameboy Dream Land’s Kirby which “she” (un-named third-person throughout) identifies with so much it’s like witnessing God. Observing “a fashionable woman with buffalo style trainers on, no socks” (obscurely significant) coming home from dinner with friend, “she” sets the .jpeg as wallpaper and screensaver and feels acutely recognised as helpless adult in company of the “I’m baby” imago. Revelling in Kirby “doctrine”, “she” sleeps whenever she likes, gets drunk lots, melancholically scrolls “garish nail art, mac and cheese and Doritos” on her smart-phone, relies on the care of loving allies. There’s an involute agency to it however: “Kirby’s principal method of battle was the absorption of an enemy’s powers – Kirby would become engorged, like a puffa fish, by their acts of violence, only to vomit the violence, unchanged, back out at them again”. It is all so b a r e. Soon “she” glimpses a screenshot ~ “I’m no longer baby I want power” ~ on Twitter (not X) causing another algorithym-induced relevation; realising she’s been in “Power Saver Mode” after exhausting stints of activism, “she” is back. In “Part 2” there are temporal hops and Roisin Dunnett says lots in un peu expanse (similar themes to Anaïs Nin’s ‘The Mouse’, an apple consumed from a pocket, a new Kirby birthed). I asked Google Is roisin an Irish name and that scary AI Overview feature told me Yes, Róisin is an Irish girl’s name that means little rose. The Rose Garden (2024), Maeve Brennan’s short stories smashed together by Stinging Fly Press came out on Tuesday!

Part of Animal, Vegetable, brought to you à Broken Sleep Books 2021

‘Moonbeam Kisses’ by Leonora Brito

Leonora Brito’s not yet on A Personal Anthology! But she is a major short story writer from Cardiff! Like Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) which I read during English A Level L i t e r a t u r e  &  L o v e classes (applause to legend M. Grainne O’Riordan) Dat’s Love (1995) is named after a song – ‘Dat’s Love’ – not from Ludwig van Beethoven but 20th Century Studios ffilm Carmen Jones (1954) starring Dorothy Dandridge. In a sequence of meditations on the Welsh capital’s Tiger Bay and Docks areas where she grew up, Leonora Brito provides a black feminist-y insight into migrant working-class culture there. In ‘Moonbeam Kisses’ specifically (further citing Nat King Cole’s pleasant chanson) a nine-year-old girl arrives at a nunnery / orphanage the day after the Pope dies, encountering “fat white roses” over stone-lettering entrance and a bat-like nun who asks “‘What is it they call you? What?’”. Harsh. Behind the hostile nun is a statue of Madonna stepping on a snake (I think of Rosa-Johan Uddoh’s taxonomical ‘Black Mary’ in Practice Makes Perfect (2022) a Book Works production). Roses are a complex love symbol, and the nine-year-old girl destroys the nuns’ garden full of them that she had previously served as vinyl-player-slave for, and thus must leave. When Leonora Brito studied Cultural Studies at Cardiff University in the 1980s she wrote an essay on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) what does she opine.

From Dat’s Love and Other Stories, first published by Seren in 1995 and republished by Parthian in 2017

‘He Cleans’ by Valeria Gordeev translated by Imogen Taylor

Writing my A Personal Anthology I did actually scour GRANTA to see what was in there at the moment, which I probs don’t pay enough religious attention to normally. A short story I came upon of special interest was ‘He Cleans’ by Valeria Gordeev translated by Imogen Taylor. Yes, it is an extract from a future novel, but as ‘He Cleans’ has won awards in its own right I thought hey it’s okay to include here? ‘He Cleans’ is about a man who cleans obsessively. Once upon a time I developed terrible Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, suffering warped notions re how to secure sanity part-manifesting as an isolating drive to control bacterial surroundings. Thank GOD this is no longer so it’s such a distressing neurosis I admire those who write about it (swear there was a Shakespeare & Co. podcast with poet on OCD but can’t find it here’s something else!). ‘He Cleans’ begins with the two-word sentence “He cleans”, and continues “Cleans the sink, cleans the plughole, takes out the sink strainer and cleans the underside”. This minutiae activity description extends for some duration. It’s about prevention of harm, seeking safety amid problematic chaos that becomes perceptually multiplied (“the place is crawling with spiders and grease and dust”), which can be difficult to emphathise and be patient with ~ a reaction, for example, is “you exaggerate, she says, ты преувеличиваешь”. There’s talk of cleaning ears ~ the man doesn’t like earbuds which he thinks look like swastikas: “Nazis out!”. The prose’s suitably monotonous, with few paragraph breaks and a claustrophobic ambience. Can a whole novel go on this relentlessly? Intrigued.

First published at GRANTAonline here in 2023, included in forthcoming novel with S. Fischer, 2025

‘Keep Your Miracles To Yourself’ by Zoe Gilbert and Jarred McGinnis

Zoe Gilbert’s and Jarred McGinnis’s ‘Keep Your Miracles To Yourself’ is bizarrely serene I think that’s why I like it, a quietly endearing love story. Scratch Books, run by loveli Tom Conaghan, recently published eight short stories each by two authors ~ Duets (2024). ‘Keep Your Miracles To Yourself’ (no. 2) opens “I leaned over the railing, looking into the green glass of the canal’s water. A mobility scooter and a traffic cone […] lay at the bottom like Pompeii lovers. Beautiful and gross in the way only cities manage honestly”. Hook. Ex-alcoholic narrator Martin nervously anticipates telling wife Jo he’s been fired, especially cos they’ve just had a little bébé (born by emergency caesarean into a “grey island”). He takes a walk. Cue gorish-dead pigeon “Event” then maddo happenings. An agent from firm “Auricle” with nails “black in a style called Stiletto” and “earrings like small chandeliers, which plinked and tinkled” (I wish it said “plinked and tinked”) and a perverse aspiration to eat lead from a special “gold propeller-pencil” forcibly installs a singing mouth into “Chosen One” Martin’s belly, visible thru glass portal abit like Teletubbies. Martin returns after the belly-installation to Jo and “rubbed her back and told her it’s alright; we’ll be alright”. Martin’s belly performs at the South Bank Centre’s Festival Hall (a disaster) and the resulting celebrity means Martin gets his job back and he and Jo live happily ever after, reading bébé to sleep. Triumphant. In the margins I’d scrawled Sophie Ellis-Bexter’s ‘Groove Jet’ (2000) had been playing whilst I was reading it ~ apt !

Second of eight stories in DUETS, Scratch Books 2024

‘Fingal’ by Samuel Beckett

Recently I was at the Samuel Beckett Centre trying to work out whether Samuel Beckett had anything to do with psychogeography in 1950s Rive Gauche Paris. I really like ‘Fingal’ from his earliest throng of short stories More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) (my copy is Grove Press fyi). It’s less formally radical than later collections like Fizzles(1976), but radical nonetheless. All of More Pricks Than Kicks focuses on “Belacqua”, a young fellow named after minor lazy-but-rewarded character woo in Dante’s Divina Comedia (1321). After an initial tale detailing Belacqua’s precisest requirements for constructing a perfect lobster-and-gorgonzola-sandwich, ‘Fingal’ pictures he with “Winnie” who’s “pretty, hot and witty, in that order” (can you believe Samuel Beckett was saying “hot” in this way in the 1930s?!) going outside Dublin on a countryside adventure. Past ruins, burrows, furze, brambles, and slopes to the top of a hill overlooking the county of Fingal, Belacqua feels like a “sad animal” but apparently Winnie’s high-spirited: “‘The Dublin mountains’ she said ‘don’t they look lovely, so dreamy’”. Aah. They talk about “Milan (to rime with villain)” ha ha while they’re up there, “travelled spinster” Belacqua shaming Winnie for her geographical short-comings. “Things were beginning to blow up nasty” between them but then Belacqua and Winnie kiss and “their moods were in accordance” and “things were somehow very pleasant all of a sudden” as they gaze on Portraine Lunatic Aslyum (which Belacqua had thought was a bread factory). They go there and meet Dr. Sholto, with whom Winnie is somehow acquainted, for a drink and chat avoiding a farmer Belacqua worries wants to attack them, then a bike is stolen and then there’s an escape to a pub. It is an Evocative Romp.

From More Pricks Than Kicks, first published by Chatto & Windus 1934, various editions thereafter

‘Tuscan Leather’ by Laura Grace Ford

How regrettable it is that magazines stop ~ Rest-In-Sweet-Peace The White Review! ‘Tuscan Leather’ by Laura Grace Ford is signature-ly bleak. I listened to Ayşegül Savaş on the difficulty of writing fiction that’s happy-without-smug the other day and was heartened it might be possibe; but Laura Grace Ford’s work is often unhappy and * so * far from smug and this too is welcome. “KARA” and “FRANK” make up ‘Tuscan Leather’ as connected narratives. In “KARA”, Kara copes with an abusive boyfriend situation drifting “skittish” East London “the air is cinder toffee and carbon” amid “thirty-story ravines and ziggurat hotels, new expressways and conference centres” and “UK Garage, decelerated Jungle”. Laura Grace Ford is Princess of Ambience I think and also really good at doing getting ready: “I rubbed a circle in the mirror, raced through the ritual: orange lipstick, copper eyeshadow, black kohl”. ‘Tuscan Leather’ is meandery, spatially (weaving evictions demolitions new-builds) and temporally (bad memories everywhere kindled by “chanced-upon street” or “the scent of Tuscan Leather on a stranger’s skin”). Endurance glimmers with sum1 named “Idris”: “our relationship kept us going through the winter, it staved off the dark”. <3. We learn Frank’s someone Kara, who wears a Puffa jacket, once was a care-worker for. Sumptuous writing, melodic through dank dereliction. Sparklers and the frankinsence. Frank, after Kara’s wondered if he’s okay wherever he is, in “FRANK” then reveries Kara gorgeously. Laura Grace Ford’s illustrations are there too – paintings, biro-drawings, watery blue ink. She really gets it  <3.

First published in The White Review No. 30, 2021 and to read online here

A Personal Anthology of Women Unhinged

I’ve always been drawn to women in fiction who don’t always do the right thing. Toni Morrison’s Sula. Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Rochester (and Jean Rhys’s Antoinette Cosway). Shirley Jackson’s Mary Katherine Blackwood. These are women who are making space for themselves in a world that would rather they not exist.

The characters in the short stories I chose for my anthology all make decisions that range from questionable to morally abhorrent. Some are seemingly minor infractions—stealing a shoe from your daughter-in-law’s closet, or buying concert tickets to see a high school fling’s band perform without telling your husband. Others have greater stakes and are less forgivable: donning a Confederate flag bikini, or, well, murder(s).

Good fiction is not a blueprint for ethical living. It asks more questions than it answers. Good fiction delves into character, makes the reader squirm because maybe they see a little bit of their own imperfect self in the protagonist that’s making these unwise choices, or perhaps feel implicated in the societal pressures that are driving the character to act in the way they do. The beauty of fiction is that it allows us to see the world through the eyes of (or at least sit in the metaphorical getaway car next to) these complex, conflicted characters.

After all, how can we expect women to remain “hinged” in a world where our rights to exist are constantly being threatened? Where we are either confined by the male gaze or ignored entirely? The same goes double for women from marginalized identities, who have a whole other set of societal expectations, constraints, and violence to contend with. One can forgive these characters for not always following the rules. But who is doing the forgiving? And who is asking for it? And who is making the rules?

Here are twelve stories—or, rather, eleven short stories and a song—that ask these questions.

‘Ghosts and Empties’ by Lauren Groff

A woman contends with her rage and anxiety by going on walks around her Florida neighborhood. Though the story opens with the narrator proclaiming “I have somehow become a woman who yells,” we never actually see her do so. Instead, we see the neighborhood: a place where there are controlled burns in parks where unhoused people shelter, where cygnets are gobbled up by otters. Under Groff’s keen eye, these descriptions of walks around the neighborhood become a treatise on the transitory, cyclical, and sometimes violent nature of all things, the melancholy that comes with watching change happen before our very eyes.

First published in The New Yorker, July 2015, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Florida, Riverhead, 2018

‘Lost in the City’ by Edward P. Jones

Lydia Walsh, having fallen asleep with a man whose name she can’t recall, wakes up to a phone call at 3 a.m. informing her that her mother has died in her nursing home. Jittery from cocaine, she calls a cab to take her to claim her mother’s body from the nursing home and instead, instructs the driver to get her lost—perhaps an attempt to escape the barrage of memories that could be triggered by the familiar city around her, or to delay the grim task at hand, or maybe both. We’re never really sure, but the uncertainty feels intentional—choreographed by the author to make us, the readers, feel just as uneasy as Lydia does. The driver replies that as a Capitol cab driver, he “ain’t allowed to get lost.” But he drives on anyway, taking Lydia past the D.C. locations she knows so well, plunging her deeper into the memories she’s trying to avoid. Through her attempt to escape the familiar, she only becomes further entrenched in it, lost in her own memories, and though it’s uncomfortable, the reader is along for the ride.

From Lost in the City, William Morrow, 1992

‘The Beast’ by Megan Cummins

I’ve long been fascinated by fiction that deals with deception, and ‘The Beast’ is an excellent example. Beverly buys tickets to see a high school fling in concert without telling her husband. As the story progresses, we learn that her lie is a small one in the scope of the lies that the men in her life have entangled her in. Cummins toys with an enticing will they/won’t they narrative between Beverly and her boss; Beverly and her high school fling. Redemption, however, doesn’t come from finding a man, but in finding freedom from the deceitful men in her life. Cummins isn’t shy about using issues related to healthcare and money to drive the conflicts in her stories, a refreshing dose of realism that feels lacking in a lot of contemporary fiction.

First published in Ninth Letter, Fall/Winter 2016-17 and collected in If the Body Allows It, University of Nebraska Press, 2020. A slightly different version is available to read at CRAFT Literary

‘A Little Burst’ by Elizabeth Strout

I really could have chosen any of the stories in this book, which is a beautiful example of how linked stories can—piece by piece—build a character as vivid and alive as Olive Kitteridge, in a way that simply wouldn’t work in the form of a novel. We all know an Olive; we’ve all been an Olive. The present action in ‘A Little Burst’ takes place entirely in Olive Kitteridge son’s bedroom three hours after his wedding, where Olive has isolated herself to escape the noise of the party and eavesdrop, a slice of blueberry cake concealed in her handbag. Of course, she hears her daughter-in-law dispense with some unkind comments that were not meant for her ears. Of course, being Olive, she takes her own unique form of revenge. There are many reasons a story like this shouldn’t work. Olive is a passive observer, for example, and most of the important scenes in the story are delivered through flashback, but Strout weaves it all together seamlessly with her rich character detail and Olive’s sad, stubborn wisdom.

First published in The New Yorker, June 1998, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Olive Kitteridge, Random House, 2008

‘Bridezilla’ by Kim Fu

The opening line of ‘Bridezilla’ introduces two questions: a marriage proposal, and the possibility of a mysterious sea monster off the shores of the coastal city where Leah, the protagonist, resides. Leah assents to her partner’s lukewarm proposal, but spends the entirety of the wedding planning fretting over her decision. There was a time she imagined a fairytale wedding on a beach, now she’s not so sure. She’s not sure about a lot of things. Her trajectory throughout the story is one of indecision and uncertainty. Reading “Bridezilla,” I became so wrapped up in Leah’s anxiety that I almost forgot about the sea monster, until, well, I didn’t. On its surface, ‘Bridezilla’ is about a woman getting cold feet; but lurking beneath that familiar premise is a chilling fable about the very contemporary anxieties of planning for a future in the midst of impending ecological collapse.

First published in Lesser-Known Monsters of the 21st Century, Tin House, 2022. Also available to read online at Oprah Daily

‘Nemecia’ by Kirstin Valdez Quade

The strength of this story is in the ways it withholds information to keep us grounded in the point of view of a child, in this case Maria, Nemecia’s younger cousin, who both looks up to, fears and is jealous of her older cousin. The fibs that Nemecia tells Maria—that she killed her mother and put her grandfather in a coma—cover up a darker secret that is revealed later in the story. ‘Nemecia’ is a stunning example of how a novel’s-worth of family secrets and complex relationships can be deftly condensed in a couple-dozen pages.

First published in Narrative, and available to read here. Collected in Night at the Fiestas, Norton, 2015, as well as in Best American Short Stories 2013