‘Pyramids for Minnesota’ by Thomas M. Disch

A deadpan Q&A about a proposal to build pyramids in Minnesota, subtitled A Serious Proposal.

“Q: Why Minnesota, then? Why not in a desert?

A: There, too, by all means. But, really, why not Minnesota?

Disch claimed that many readers volunteered their services to the project when the story was originally published, and reassured them that this was not a put-on: he really wanted to get together with some like-minded people, and build some pyramids. And, really, why not?

First published in Harper’s Magazine, 1974. Collected in The Man Who Had No Idea, Bantam Books, 1982

‘The Ginger Rogers Sermon’ by Claire Keegan

A kind of gothic fairy tale set in a vivid, sexually charged conjuration of rural Ireland. A pubescent girl refuses to conform to the expected norms of her farming family and its community, precisely evoked by her lively narrative voice. She becomes part of the logging crew helmed by her father, and when she falls for the new lumberjack, a gentle, slow-witted giant, the story takes a turn into darker territory. The girl acts on her fantasies and deliberately seduces him, and he hangs himself, like a noble but innocent Arthurian knight ruined by forbidden love. After the wake, the dance-mad family waltz and reel around the living room with drunken abandon. The girl, either innocently or wilfully refusing to acknowledge her sin, is a willing participant in the bacchanal, and this memorably disturbing story ends exactly on the point before what might be her own fall from grace.

First published in Phoenix Irish Short Stories, Phoenix House, 1997. Collected in Antarctica, Faber & Faber, 1999

‘Snow’ by John Crowley

A cool, meditative story about grief and the fragility of memory. The narrator inherits a key to the facility that stores thousands of hours of footage recorded by an assiduous drone, documenting the life of his late, estranged wife. “I owned once again what I hadn’t known I had lost, hadn’t known what was precious to me,” he says, after viewing a brief scene of the two of them in a hotel room in Ibiza. It unlocks his previously unacknowledged grief and makes him hungry for more, but he soon discovers that there are disappointing lacunae in the drone’s coverage, and serious flaws in the facility’s technology. Although access is supposedly random, most scenes are set in winter, a season the narrator’s wife tried to avoid, and every playback increases the slow, inexorable degradation of the quality of all the stored recordings, manifested as the kind of snow that blights reception in old cathode-ray TVs. Finally, the narrator abandons his search (“I would not stay watching until there was only snow”), and makes peace with his loss and his all-too human memories. At a time when tech bros, too arrogant to recognise their ignorance, are attempting to find digital fixes for the glorious mess of human life, it seems more relevant than ever.

First published in Omni, 1985. Collected in Antiquities, Incunabula Press, 1993, it can also be read here

‘The Great Silence’ by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is one of the most lauded of contemporary SF writers, perhaps best known for ‘The Story of Your Life’, the novella on which the film Arrival was based; his short stories and novellas, collected in two slim volumes, are rigorous and lucid thought experiments, leavened with a profound humanity. This one, written to provide the textual element for a video installation by the visual artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, explores the theory which provides various explanations for Fermi’s paradox: the question of why, given the age and of the Universe and its uncountable number of stars and potentially habitable planets, we have not yet detected any trace of intelligent alien life. In brief, meditative paragraphs it outlines a contact call from a member of a species of parrot native to Puerto Rica (where the Arecibo radio telescope was located until its collapse), pointing out, with poignant humour, that while searching the sky for like-minded intelligence, humans have overlooked the intelligence of parrots, which “are more similar to humans than any extraterrestrial species will be,” and are now threatened with extinction and their own Great Silence. Like all of the best SF, it delivers a fresh perspective on humanity, from our blundering carelessness that stamps out other species to the vaulting ambition that drives the construction of radio telescopes. In its psittancine mirror we see ourselves slant.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May-June 2016. Collected in Exhalation, Knopf, 2019. It can also be read here

‘Nirvana’ by Charles Bukowski, as read by Tom Waits

Accompanied by a softly wheezing organ, Waits’ reading of Bukowski’s uncharacteristically meditative poem about a young man riding on a bus, “cut loose from purpose”, is suitably tender and gruffly sympathetic. When the bus stops at a roadside café the young man experiences a revelatory moment of perfect happiness, feeling that “everything was beautiful there, that it would always stay beautiful.” But despite his vow to stay in that clean, well-lighted place, he follows the other passengers into the bus when it’s time to reboard, and continues on his way. The world we have is too often the world we have failed to escape.

The poem was first published in The Last Night of the Earth Poems, Black Sparrow Press 1992; the audio version is collected on Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, ANTI Records 2006, and can be heard here

‘The Specialist’s Hat’ by Kelly Link

Some ghost stories, especially in the Gothic mode, are remorseless re-enactments of historical violence. Link’s tale turns this convention upside-down and creates playful layers of uncertainty and doubt. A summary would give too much away. Let’s just say that there’s a scholar who lives in what might be a haunted house, but the narrative focuses on his twin daughters rather than his research, and involves their Dead game (a “let’s pretend that they have been playing every day for 274 days now” which allows them to do whatever they want to), a mysterious babysitter who takes care of them while their father meets a woman in the woods, a dead poet and his daughter, and the Specialist’s hat, which hangs in the attic. Like a close-up magician dealing her cards, Link sets out everything in deceptively simple sentences whose contradictions, elisions and ambiguities are puzzles and trapdoors in a game she plays with the reader. Whether or not the twins are really dead, the identity of the babysitter and the nature and provenance of the Specialist and his hat, if the father’s rendezvous is the rehearsal of a past tragedy – all remains teasingly ambiguous to the very end.

First published online in Event Horizon, 1998. Collected in Pretty Monsters, Viking, 2008, it can also be read here

‘The Second Inquisition’ by Joanna Russ

The final story in a sequence of stories and a short novel about the adventures of Alyx, a fierce female mercenary from Ancient Greece who ends up in the future (hers and ours) as a Trans-Temporal Agent. In the drowsy claustrophobia of suburban Chicago in 1925, the narrator, a girl of sixteen and an only child, is caught up in a futuristic conflict after the strange woman staying with her family confides that she’s a time traveller, a rebel (who might be Alyx’s granddaughter) hiding from her enemies in what she calls a dead area. It’s the stuff of pulp SF, featuring enigmatic technology and sudden violence, that’s invigorated by Russ’s spikily sharp prose and critique of what we’ve come to call the patriarchy. And there are hints that, like the future selves Paul encounters when he runs away from home, the visitor and the agents who finally drag her back to the future might be figures in an escapist fantasy. A deftly sustained confusion between the true and the real. “It was almost a pity that she wasn’t there,” the girl muses, after a conversation that acknowledges her importance in the visitor’s plans, and in the end she realises that she has to find her own way of escaping the conventions of her parents and the mundane world: “No more stories.”

First published in Orbit 6, Putnam, 1970. Collected in Joanna Russ: Novels & Stories, Library of America, 2023

Introduction

I was thinking of compiling this list in a Desert Island Discs way, but then sand, salt water, strong light, heat and humidity are not good for books or me. Plus the chances of me being marooned on a desert island are zero. However, the chances of me being marooned (more likely banished) to the garden shed are high. This is my Garden Shed Short Story list.

The short stories chosen feature the following aspects I like to read in a short story. Some may only have one aspect, others several.

Stories with an unusual narrative style, stories that make me think, stories I would want to read again and have a very definite ending. My feet are very firmly planted in the Maugham and Maupassant style of telling tales.

‘The Cold, Cold Box’ by Howard Fast

A decision story.

This was the first short story I read at school that made me realise that short stories could make me think and remain in my mind for days and weeks. And all in a short number of pages. This is the tale that started my lifelong love for short stories. ‘The Cold, Cold Box’ is set in an auditorium at some point in the future where members of a corporation meet every year to discuss company business. As the Chairman of the Board explains:

“At the beginning of our annual meeting — and this is an established procedure, I may say — we deal with a moral and legal point, the question of Mr. Steve Kovac. We undertake this before the reading of the agenda, for we have felt that the question of Mr. Kovac is not a matter of agenda or business, but of conscience. Of our conscience, I must add, and not without humility; for Mr. Kovac is the only secret of this meeting. All else that the Board discusses, votes upon and decides or rejects, will be made public, as you know. But of Mr. Steve Kovac the world knows nothing; and each year in the past, our decision has been that the world should continue to know nothing about Mr. Kovac. Each year in the past, Mr. Kovac has been the object of a cruel and criminal action by the members of this Board. Each year in the past, it has been our decision to repeat this crime.”

The reader finds themselves sitting in this auditorium, in the role of a new member of this corporation. And we all listen as the Chairman outlines the matter. Then a vote has to be taken. Which way would you vote?

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Collected in The Howard Fast Reader, Crown Publishers, 1960 and The Edge of Tomorrow, Bantam Books, 1961

‘Coca Cola’ by Howard Fast

Humour is very personal thing. What one person finds funny, another may not. Some stories may just make you smile, others make you laugh out loud. This story for me falls into the second category.

A humorous story by Fast in his role as a World War Two war correspondent, who finds himself stranded at a scoring hot airbase in the middle of a desert. His one wish is fly out on the next available freight plane. Which just happens to be loaded with empty coca cola bottles. Fast is alarmed to find that once airborne the plane isn’t gaining height, the plane’s doors are missing, the aircrew are a crew of teenagers who are unwilling to jettison the empty bottles due to the paperwork it would cause. Plus,

“I looked at the open doors and then at the sand hills, and then I nodded and asked a foolish question about parachutes.
‘You don’t have one? Well, that’s strange, and it’s against regulations too, but it wouldn’t be much use at this altitude.’”

The situation goes rapidly downhill from there.

First published in he Last Supper and Other Stories, Blue Heron Press, 1955, and collected in The Howard Fast Reader, Crown Publishers, 1960

‘The Index’ by J. G. Ballard

A story told using a very unusual narrative style that is, in the form of an A to Z index.

Part of the story’s opening paragraph tells us:

“Editor’s note. From abundant internal evidence it seems clear that the text printed below is the index to the unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography of a man who may well have been one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century. Yet of his existence nothing is publicly known, although his like and work appear to have exerted a profound influence on the events of the past fifty years. Physician and philosopher, man of action and patron of the arts, sometime claimant to the English throne and founder of a new religion, Henry Rhodes Hamilton [HRH] was evidently the intimate of the greatest men and women of our age.”

For this story the reader is expected to do some work and make decisions. Does the reader work their way through the index A to Z or jump in at any point? Does it make any difference if either choice is chosen? Is there any information deliberately or unintentionally hidden in the index waiting to be discovered? And why did the index compiler add himself to the index?

As indexes go this is a very simple one. For example, no cross references to other entries. Years are not mentioned, only page numbers. A sample entry –

“Gandhi, Mahatma, visited in prison by HRH, 251; discusses Bhagavadgita with HRH, 253; has dhoti washed by HRH, 254; denounces HRH, 256.”

One pattern that does emerge is HRH being warmly welcomed by famous people initially, but he always manages to put his foot in it and the relationship sours, as in the above entry.

If indexes are your thing, you can spend ages teasing out information about HRH and his life. For example, the highest page number I could find was 769. So this isn’t a short biography and suggests the size of the book reflects the size of HRH’s ego.

First published in The Paris Review #118, Spring 1991, and collected in The Complete Short Stories Vol 2, Flamingo, 2001

‘Big Tom Fallon’ by Kit de Waal

Told as a monologue. Bridegroom Tom Fallon speaking from the heart tells his story. Fallon travels to England to live and work, but after a couple of years finds himself back in rural Ireland, blind in both eyes after an altercation with some yobs’ boots. Through quiet determination, Tom’s friends help him to stop brooding and give him the confidence to continue living. All of which leads up to meeting his future wife and his wedding day. A warm, uplifting story, beautifully written and a pleasure to read and re-read.

“Paulie Nolan is another one I have to thank. I don’t know why and I don’t know how he could bear it but when I came out of the asylum, that good man and neighbour came to sit with me every week while my mother went to work.
‘All right, Tommy, boy,’ he used to say. ‘I cannot get a minute’s peace in my own house so you don’t mind if I perch on this chair and read myself the Evening Echo do you?’
I could hear the paper rustling and he’d talk to himself about the football and the hurling, call down fire on the head of Liam Cosgrave and Paddy Donegan and every other politician up in Dublin that knew nothing of the real world as far as he was concerned.
Talking to himself he was, week after week, a right windbag and blabbermouth. No wonder they didn’t want him at home. Yes, you can all laugh now but its’s what I thought. I didn’t realise his kindness to me, as good as any father, better than some.”

First published in Supporting Cast, Penguin, 2020

‘The Sunset’ by François Coppée

A story with no plot or characters, but rather a description of an autumn evening in late nineteenth century Paris. Written by an author who enjoyed writing about the past in his stories. An idler having bought a book from a bookstall by the River Seine, rests awhile at a café with a drink and observes the sunset, whilst noticing that the evening throng of commuters engaged in their own conversations passing by, are not.

“A level light, warm and blazing, raked the scene, making long-drawn shadows on the ground, dazzling the passers till they blinked their eyes, and sparkling on the polished leather of the carriages and the sleek haunches of the horses. Nature, the greatest of artists and the most prodigal of effects, was exhibiting art for art’s sake that evening; she had been careful over that sunset; and our idler,whom chance had brought to look upon the scene, was suddenly carried away with delirious rapture at the calm and radiant splendour that transfigured houses, trees and sky.”

Fortunately, there is a wide variety of short stories to choose from. So it is possible to read a story to match whatever mood a reader might be in. Sometimes I want to read an undemanding atmospheric story and just wallow in comforting prose.

First published in Short Stories v64 #3, December 1906, Doubleday, Page & Co. Collected in Stories by Daudet & Coppée, ed. Arthur Ransome, T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1910

‘Crossover’ by Michael Gilbert

An action-packed, no-nonsense counter-espionage story featuring Mr. Calder, Mr. Behrens and Rasselas, a Persian deerhound.

The Britain’s Counter security service are keen to uncover the M Route, which is used by Russia to spirit defectors and others from Britain, across Europe to Russia. Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens are assigned to track a colleague, a supposedly Russian agent being transported along the route to discover the various staging points. In the excerpt below Mr. Calder is investigating a building.

“As he started to move forward, Rasselas gave out a very soft, rumbling growl. Mr. Calder paused. When nothing happened, he moved again. Rasselas caught his ankle in his teeth. At that moment the ground under Mr. Calder’s hands gave way. At one moment he had his palms on solid earth. The next, his fingers were slithering over the lip of a cavity which had opened in front of him.”

A flash, bang, wallop story. Full of daring-do, lively characters and plot.

First published in Argosy, October 1963. Collected in Game Without Rules, Harper, 1967