‘The Story of Mats Israelson’ by Julian Barnes

During the time I worked as a therapist, one philosophical issue that kept presenting was the conundrum between determinism and free will. How much are we owned by our circumstances, and to what extent if any can we break loose? In the space of twenty-three pages, Julian Barnes, a writer I revere, explores this dilemma with all the precision and humanity you might expect from such a profound chronicler of the human spirit.

The story is set in a small industrial town in nineteenth century Sweden. The community is self-enclosed, inward looking and stiflingly conventional. Standards of propriety are rigid and enforced by prying and gossip. In this unpromising setting two people, both, by their own admission, unimaginative and in many respects unremarkable, fall deeply and unexpectedly in love. They are each married to other people. As Scott Fitzgerald once remarked, there is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and Barnes tells their story with a simplicity of style that both reflects the tone of their inner turmoil and belies the minute subtleties he manages to tease out in their conflicted situation. It’s intensely clever writing in which all the cleverness is hidden, so that what remains is the tragedy of ordinary lives offered a glimpse of the heavens, but predestined to be nothing other than ordinary.

Strangely, Barnes’s short stories seem rarely to find their way into anthologies. Can’t think why.

Published in The Lemon Table,Jonathan Cape, 2004

‘St Francis Treads the Stones of Hoy’ by David Rose

I’m not religious, but has anyone, anywhere, quite managed to shed a Catholic upbringing? Speaking personally the residue I’m left with, apart from the guilt, is a Pavlovian obsession with medieval saints. Consequently, when fortune led me to a story titled ‘St Francis Treads the Stones of Hoy’, written by David Rose, man of letters and vast but modestly deployed erudition, I was there.

And what a luminous tale it is. It seems unlikely that Francis actually went to Hoy. I can’t find evidence. The only biography I’ve read, by G.K. Chesterton, contained remarkably little biographical information. But records suggest he certainly preached a sermon to birds, no shortage of which exist on Hoy. The scene is set.

Francis, it would appear, is seeking a challenge. He is by now experienced in avian-related oratory, having already converted the birds of Umbria. He alights on Hoy. Prepares himself. Seeks the right spot on which to pour forth. Checks the direction of the wind. The birds grow, not silent, but quiet and uniform in their expectation. They pulse simultaneously. Francis begins.

Though new to those in attendance, his words are not original. He has used them on many occasions. Perhaps the birds begin to sense this, as at some point they become a little restless. But a puffin remains intrigued. It steps forward attentively. It releases the fish it was holding in its beak.

As someone who also wrote a scene in which a wild bird laid a fish before a human, only to be accused of going woo-woo, I would like to point something out here. Wild animals, circs allowing, take their prey to places where they feel safe, and are programmed to keep a firm grip on it. This is Rose’s subtlety. The puffin leaves its fish on the ground, near Francis, and only retrieves them once he has gone.

Sermon given, Francis feels euphoric, the euphoria gently fading as the burden of his life, with all its previous discord, re-enters his thoughts. By the time he boards the ferry he is weary.

The story, which is framed in a musical motif, ends with two sentences of transcendent beauty. They could belong to a poem. They get me every time.

Published in Confingo Magazine, Autumn 2023, by Confingo Publishing

‘Blind Water Pass’ by Anna Metcalfe

Granny Bud lives alone in a mountainous region, one assumes in some part of China. She is visited each summer by her city-dwelling granddaughter Lily, who loves her and who lost her mother when young. Granny Bud was once a farmhand, then a mother, and is now a herbalist and spirit guide. Hers has become a liminal existence, veering between the mundane and the etheric, increasingly the latter. Her more worldly granddaughter spends her summer days on the nearby Blind Water Pass, the higher of two mountain treks frequented by tourists on pilgrimage. Here she earns a small amount of money collecting and recycling bottles they discard, and a larger amount from tips earned by feeding them bogus aphorisms, ostensibly ancient, but actually made up by herself. She passes her tip money to Granny Bud, pretending it is the legitimately earned part of her wages. She is attentive to her grandmother and, despite her youth and otherness, deeply attuned to her way of life.

The lower trek, formerly existing above a peaceful river, was damaged irretrievably, then closed, when the river was dammed into a reservoir. Blind Water Pass is itself threatened by the construction of a funicular railway. Granny Bud’s spirits, long in retreat at these industrial goings-on, are finally disturbed into extinction, and at this point the story ends.

Metcalfe’s prose is artfully simple. The apparent plainness of her description belies the metaphors beneath. The juxtaposition of guile and gullibility, the erosion of tradition by commerce, and the modern mind in search of things lost, are all drawn sparingly and unemphatically by a master storyteller who, one suspects, conveys exactly what she means to.

Published in the collection of that title by JM Originals, an imprint of John Murray publishers, 2016

‘Celia’ by Graham Mort

I was blessed to discover Graham Mort’s stories when they began to appear in Fictive Dream, an online journal that has come to mean much to me over the years. Immediately I was drawn to the voice, the economy, the understatement, the quiet poetic sensibility. Upon research I discovered that Mort is in fact a distinguished poet. No surprise.

In this story which, despite its brevity and unhurriedness, spans most of two lives, we meet Celia and Stefan. We meet them first when just married, living in a cramped bedsit. Celia is performing her morning wash as Stefan looks on, struggling to believe his luck. Prior to this they first encounter one another in a pub in Camden. Stefan we’re subsequently told, is Polish, Celia Irish. We learn these details at the author’s leisure. A gentle slipping back and forward in time typifies the narrative as it unfolds. It hovers, offers snapshots, blossoms into longer description, then contracts again.

You could call Celia a love story, but perhaps it’s more a story about living together, sharing lives, and what can happen to love at close quarters over a long period. Nothing special occurs, even Stefan’s ‘mistake’ is mundane when seen from the outside. Two boys are born and in time each produce a grandchild. Celia and Stefan, separately, grow distant from their Catholic faith. Eventually Celia tends Stefan as he is dying, and then is left with the life they have lived, with the lasting effect of a crucial happening, with a sense of things beyond words.

And that’s all. But a plain description belies the involving quality of this story, its profundity, its existential scope, its beauty. There’s true craft behind the apparent simplicity of Mort’s prose. He varies his sentences to great effect. The way he builds imagery is painterly.

I’ve read this story a number of times now, and on each reading it goes deeper, says more, asks further questions. It won’t leave me alone.

Published online in Fictive Dream, 2025 and available to read here

‘The Fly’ by Katherine Mansfield

Written in three weeks in a Paris hotel when Mansfield was desperately ill, ‘The Fly’ is a story about death, the anticipation of death, and the challenge of survival in its aftermath. It’s a tiny story that contains three distinct frames, in each of which time has a different dimension.

In the first, Woodifield, an elderly ex-employee, a stroke survivor, very frail, revisits his former boss in his plush office. We are given to understand that this is a frequent occurrence, and both a trial to the boss but also an opportunity for self-congratulation, and the expression of small acts of kindness. He is older but in good health, well-to-do, and the apparent master of his circumstances.

Towards the end of some inconsequential chat, Woodifield mentions in passing that his daughters had visited his son’s war grave in Belgium, which happens to lie near the grave of his boss’s son. He leaves soon after.

Now alone, and devastated by this unforeseen turn of events, the boss locks his office and sets himself to weep, his only means of catharsis. Tears, however, won’t come, and he is forced to remember his son and intended heir, in all the vividness of his youth and promise.

In the final scene he is distracted from his grief when a fly drops into the inkpot on his desk. He watches as it torturously crawls out and cleans itself, before saturating it again, not once, but three times. In doing so he enters several conflicting mood states, each characterised by dissociation.

The brilliance of this story lies in Mansfield’s piercing acuity, her control of time as an experiential phenomenon, and her masterful brevity. Is the story about the implacable burden of memory? Or about the illusion of certainty in a manifestly precarious world? Or does it suggest that the true realisation of cruelty must rest in its final outcome? The reader is left to seek a hypothesis.

First published in The Nation and Athenaeum in 1922 then in the collection The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories, Constable and Company 1923; it’s available to read here

‘The Conversion of William Kirkwood’ by John McGahern

I’m not pedantic about how prose should be written, although in that respect I sometimes feel in a minority: some of the dictums I come across online remind me of those schoolteachers whose hearts could only allow them to find merit in one style of writing. Having said that, I do look on John McGahern as some sort of exemplar in the craft of the short story.

A contemporary review of Housman’s poetic style comes to mind: “the sort of hard writing that makes easy reading”. So it is with McGahern. Clear, fluent, uncluttered – if you hadn’t tried yourself you might think there was nothing to it. Except that when you do try you quickly understand what a Herculean task it is to distil perception and expression to that level of refinement.

‘The Conversion of William Kirkwood’ is one of a pair of stories, its predecessor being ‘Eddie Mac’. If you’d read the latter you would know that William and his father, living a gentle and cerebral life amidst Catholics in a large Protestant estate, have been abruptly deprived or their cattle by said Eddie Mac. Also left behind was Annie May Moran, pregnant by Mac, who had served the Kirkwoods since the age of fourteen.

Subject to derision for their gullibility, it would not occur to William and his father to abandon Annie May, or Lucy, the child she subsequently bears, and they are henceforth incorporated into the household and treated like family. When William’s father dies, the remaining three live harmoniously together, with Lucy becoming devoted to a man who treats her as a daughter.

Now two things occur. War begins and, though Ireland is neutral, local defence forces are convened. William signs up and, by the long-held seniority of his family name, augmented by an unforeseeable emergence of military instincts, is made a captain. His new status is resented, then begrudgingly admired.

Alongside this, while helping Lucy with her homework, he grows fascinated by the Catholic catechism that is part of her studies, so much so that he attends the local presbytery for instruction, and in due course converts. This turn of events does much to alleviate the historic distance between the Kirkwood household and the surrounding community. Though still unmarried at forty-five, his refined manners and distinguished bearing attract interest from local women.

And there I will leave it. Perhaps you can see the dilemma that awaits him, alas fated to remain unresolved within the scope of this story. Maybe it’s this that has made me read it ten or more times. Or maybe it’s McGahern’s gorgeous prose, utter command of his characters, and deep instinct for the human spirit. How I wish he’d written a sequel.

First published in The New Yorker in 1982, then in the collection High Ground, Faber and Faber, 1985

‘The Red-haired Girl’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

Set in 1882, this story tells of four young artists, impecunious and idealistic, who set out to paint ‘en plein air’ in a French fishing port, previously unvisited but chosen hopefully. They are British but have studied in Paris under an uncongenial tutor called Bonvin. The port, when they arrive, proves unsuitable in every way, with the result that three of them end up painting each other indoors, while the fourth, Hackett, lodging at the grim sounding Hotel du Port, manages to persuade the waitress serving him, the ‘red-haired girl’, to act as his model.

Penelope Fitzgerald had the virtue of conveying much while saying little. Perhaps only a female writer could describe her female character as “built for hard use and hard wear”, while mentioning the intrusive effect of her “rump” in the room of limited space in which Hackett, sitting alone, is served his fish-based meals.

Hackett is pompous and patronising but, we are given to understand, not unkind. He would like his model to wear a red shawl, but such a thing is beyond her means. She can only pose in her lunch break, and frustrates him further by insisting on doing crochet while he sketches and paints. Previously silent, she takes to muttering resentfully and at length during the sittings. Subsequently Bonvin pays an unexpected visit to the port, only to criticize Hackett’s efforts in devastating terms. Then the red-headed girl disappears, and Hackett is left to seek a reason.

Greater minds than mine have drawn firm conclusions about the ending of this story, but Fitzgerald is too subtle, some might say too perverse, to deal in clean endings. Which leaves me speculating. Also destined, I’m sure, to return to it again and again.

First published in the Times Literary Supplement, 1998 and then in the collection The Means of Escape, Flamingo – Harper Collins, 2000

‘Helium’ by David Bevan

I first came across David Bevan’s fiction via two chapbooks, The Bull, and The Golden Frog, both published by Nightjar press. I was struck by the finesse of the writing, what first appeared to be social realism morphing by degree into something more uncanny. Bevan’s prose was quiet but also vivid. I was keen to read more, and when chance arose, I did.

It is noticeable how deeply Bevan contextualises his characters. They are indivisible from their environment, moulded by it, constantly and subtly interacting with what surrounds them. In this respect his descriptions of landscape and his characters’ part in it are as sensitive and telling as any I’ve read. Individual and habitat oscillate between foreground and background, together forming the narrative.

This characteristic is evident in ‘Helium’. A man is taking his Sunday walk alone. He knows the surrounding moorland and farmland intimately. He is avoidant of anyone he might meet. His past is very much with him – everything he passes reminds him of it. He remembers the harshness of his childhood, and the inhibitions it has left him with. He remembers his one relationship with a woman, and the way forces inside caused him to sabotage it. Preoccupied by these thoughts, and their weight of regret, he approaches a reservoir and sees what appears to be a figure in distress. He determines not to circumvent it, as would be his inclination, but to investigate and, if need be, help. And that is all discretion allows me to tell you, except that the ending is as exquisitely drawn as the narrative preceding it.

There is an unobtrusive lyricism in Bevan’s prose. It suits his subject matter perfectly. His characters are hewn from personal histories that are sparingly drawn, but deeply formative. There is an element of fate in who they are, and what they have become. Bevan is very much his own writer but, if Thomas Hardy was writing today, I suspect he might write a bit like this.

Published online in Fictive Dream 2024 and then in Best British Short Stories 2025, ed. Nicholas Royle, Salt Publishing; available to read here

‘Three Old Men’ by George Mackay Brown

A friend of a friend, speaking with great affection, once mentioned that she knew George Mackay Brown. Living on Orkney, she published a small journal, and on occasion George would tread a wayward path from his home to her office, neglecting none of the public houses in between, incurring local opprobrium en route. I often imagined that journey, then came across this story. Serendipity…

An old man leaves his house on a dark winter night. Snow is starting. He is somewhat bemused to find himself doing this. As the weather thickens, he is joined by another, known to him by long acquaintance. They walk arm in arm with no light to guide them. They make conversation, they share memories, somewhat baffled by the situation in which they find themselves. As the snow deepens and the sky turns to a blizzard, they encounter a third old man, out with his fiddle. He knows not why. He takes an arm, joins them, and they stumble together, amiable and seemingly directionless. For a moment the sky clears and is lit by a single star. Then darkness engulfs them again and they shamble on in snow become too deep for footprints, bumping into fences and posts they were unable to apprehend, until they recognise the sound of their local inn. A youngster appears and seems to be leading them towards it, but as they draw near they find themselves instead being taken to the stable behind, where they perceive a tiny glimmer of light.

And that’s all – I’ve almost given it away. Except that this is a story of the most luminous beauty, impossible to recreate in language other than its own. Please find your way to it. Imagine you’re amongst the Magi.

Published in The Tablet, 1991, then in the collection George Mackay Brown, Winter Tales, London: John Murray Ltd, 1995, subsequently in The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Penguin Random House UK, 2015

Introduction

At first I thought of choosing the shortest stories I could, and some of those remain in the list below, but in the end I broadened my thinking as some stories kept pushing their way in. I did briefly wonder, after completing the list, why I don’t have any classic short story writers here – no Chekhov, Borges, Mansfield etc – and I think it’s because although I do love their stories, they don’t feel like they’re mine. The ones I’ve chosen do.

‘Bruce Calls from Mulholland’ by Bret Easton Ellis

I bought Ellis’s book The Informers in hardback when I was on holiday, and nowhere did the blurb say it was a collection of stories, so I read it as a novel. This was both difficult – it’s not a novel – and easy – Ellis’s characters are interchangeable, so it just felt even more dissociated than his other books, but not different in substance. And when I found it was actually a collection of stories, I was disappointed. All that work I put in! ‘Bruce Calls from Mulholland’ is the opening chapter – sorry, first story – and it’s just bog-standard Ellis: stoned and sunburned, written with the blank deadness that I didn’t realise, until I read Joan Didion’s fiction, was a straight lift from Joan Didion’s fiction. It is probably not a great story in its own right – but that’s not how I read it anyway.

First published in The Informers, Picador, 1994

‘Boil Some Water – Lots of It’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 1939, Fitzgerald’s success as a novelist was in the rear view mirror and he was working in Hollywood, groping for scraps as a freelance writer. At the weekends, he dashed off stories about Pat Hobby, a freelance writer groping for scraps in Hollywood. They were written purely for the money (“Will you wire me if you like it”) but they show how Fitzgerald’s facility meant he could never really turn out a dud, even with the left hand. In this story, Pat is doing rewrites on a script and can only think of one line to add – the title of the story – so decides to do a little research over lunch to help inspire him. Chaos and reversals ensue. It’s a tight little gem of comedy, written in the final year of Fitzgerald’s short life.

First published in Esquire, March 1940, where it can be read online, and subsequently in The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vol.3 : The Pat Hobby Stories, Penguin Classics, 1986, and The Collected Short Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000

‘Stock’ by Cynan Jones

“I write twelve pages to get one page, and I cut all the time,” Beryl Bainbridge once said. Cynan Jones is of similar mind: his most famous novel The Dig went from 90,000 words to 30,000 in one cut. His novels have been getting shorter and shorter, and now he has, well, cut out the middleman and just published a collection of stories. Stock is one of the best, a masterpiece of spring-wound tension that’s so pared-back it reads as simultaneously clear and abstract. It’s about a rural community on the edge of change, and the lengths people will go to to stop that change. To say more would spoil a story driven by the gaps left for the reader, but Stock has stuck with me more than any other new story I read this year. To return to Bainbridge: “Unless a writer is superb, I don’t think it’s enough just to go wuffling on.” Jones is superb, but he still doesn’t wuffle.

First published as a standalone story by Nightjar Press in 2023, and subsequently in the collection Pulse, Granta, 2025

‘Reunion’ by John Cheever

Probably the shortest great story I’ve read, at three pages top to tail. It’s about – as the opening and closing lines tell us – the last time a boy saw his father. The father is appalling in a comic way, and the story is rich in horrible dialogue that might even have been as much fun to write as it is to read. (I read it aloud to my son recently, though I think I enjoyed the experience more than he did. Another bad father.) But also the story and the central character of the father exemplify Cheever’s own dual nature – his need for respectability and his desire to subvert – which gives the story an undertow of deep poignancy, below the undoubted entertainment and horror value.

First published in the New Yorker, 20 Oct 1962, where it can be read online, and subsequently in the collection The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, Gollancz, 1965, and The Stories of John Cheever, Cape, 1979