‘From Far Around They Saw Us Burn’ by Alice Jolly

‘From Far Away …’ is closely based on real events, a fire at St Joseph’s Orphanage in Cavan, the Irish Free State in 1943. Here, as elsewhere, Jolly seems drawn to characters whose voices have been erased or cannot be heard. There’s a paradox then in the form of the story which is so polyvocal. Everyone in the town has something to say about what happened, and there is all manner of details about fire hoses, keys and fire escapes, who saw and did what, which belong to the register of the legal enquiry. A narrative of attempted rescue is interlaced with a collective ‘we’ – a group of girls trapped in an upstairs dormitory as the fire advances. The tension is desperate, but long after reading this story, you wonder about their voices and the plane from which they speak.

First published in The Best Short Stories 2021: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jenny Minto Quigley, Anchor Books, 2021. Collected in From Far Around They Saw Us Burn, Unbound, 2023

‘So Late in the Day’ by Claire Keegan

Cathal, the main character and perspective in the story is a man you might have met but wouldn’t want to know. The combination of his symptomatically revelatory actions and unwillingness to reflect or follow difficult thoughts makes for the most brilliantly uncomfortable reading. Developing over a single afternoon and evening, the story switches between a recent past when Cathal starts a relationship with an Anglo-French woman, Simone, and a lonely present. Something has gone drastically wrong but there’s a tension in its progression that feels disproportionate to the content.

As he tries to work out and avoid what happened, we accumulate “evidence”: his criticism of the “lazy” women he sees in Vermeer paintings, the recurring anger about the six Euros he spent on cherries, his irritation at the space her stuff takes up when she moves in. There are funny if jaw-dropping details and spare, normalised moments of horror but, as always with Keegan, the individual always leads to the systemic and institutional.

First published in French as a stand-alone story, ‘Misogynie’ and translated from the English by Jacqueline Odin. Published in English in The New Yorker, February 2022, and then as a stand-alone story by Faber, 2023. Listen to Keegan reading the story here.

‘Quaestio Di Centauris’ by Primo Levi, translated by Jenny McPhee

The Latin title (‘On the question of Centaurs’) mimics a learned treatise and promises a narrative of classification, what is a centaur? We are told of the centaur’s extraordinary physiognomy, exhausting eating habits and mythical origins, which substitute the dull two-by-two of Noah’s ark with a period of wild desire, fecundity and mixing of all kinds. But Trachi, the centaur in the story, exists in a recognisable, non-magical world where he is constrained and nearly invisible. He is owned by the narrator’s father and lives in a stable, though he has human friends who value his wisdom. As the narrative unfolds, we realise that this is a story about the terrible violence of classification. It may well be the most beautiful story I’ve ever read.

First published in Italian in Storie Naturali, 1966. Published in English in The New Yorker in 2015. Collected in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories edited by Jhumpa Lahiri. Listen to Lahiri reading the story here

‘Mario the Magician’ by Thomas Mann, translated from the German by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter

Is it a novella or a short story? For the purposes of this list, definitely a short story and one which has everything, including a terrifying magic show. The narrator is a father on holiday from Vienna with his wife and two young children at a coastal resort in Southern Italy. His attention and anxieties are the familiar ones of the tourist. He wants his family to have a wonderful time, but a series of unpleasant incidents occur leave them uncomfortable and dissatisfied. They are not allowed to eat on the terrace, they are forced to move hotel, and their young daughter is upbraided for her behaviour. The incidents appear unconnected but are part of a social and political logic: nationalist, exclusionary, judgemental. This is Italy in the late 1920s, some years into the Fascist era. The second half of the story takes places on a single evening when the narrator and his family go to a magic show hoping for a different, lighter mood. The reader suspects that things will take a darker turn but not the ugly, amorphous form the turn will take.

First published in German as a novella in 1929. First published in English by Martin Secker, 1930. Collected in Mario and the Magician and Other Stories, Vintage, 2000

‘The Man without a Temperament’ by Katherine Mansfield

I read Katherine Mansfield and this story obsessively when I was looking after my mum in the year before her death. I had, still have, the idea of a writing a collection of essays about this one story, drawing on my many readings. The setting is brilliant: a long stay hotel in the South of France where nearly everyone is on special diets. The gossipy, fussy clientele are nearly all displaced by illness or the aftermath of the First World War. It’s about the complicated dynamic between carer and cared-for, though in this case it’s a married couple, not a child and their parent. And we see nearly everything from the carer’s point of view. Robert’s wife Jinnie could be dying – it isn’t certain – but what Jinnie knows or thinks about this is not the focus of the story, though it scratches at the door wanting to come in. Just how resentful Robert may be is revealed by his shocking final word in the story, but it’s not conclusive. The setting and minor characters contribute actively to the psychological dynamic between husband and wife. Robert is devoted and punctilious but also distracted and resentful and Mansfield’s representation of conventional masculinity being undermined is just brilliant.

First published in Art and Letters, Spring 2020, then collected in Bliss and Other Stories Constable, 1920. Now widely available, including in the Selected Stories, Oxford World Classics, 2008

‘The Assignment’ by Saadat Hasan Manto, translated by Khalid Hasan

Manto is probably most famous among English readers for his story ‘Toba Tek Singh’, when Partition come for the inmates of a Lahore asylum. It’s a fabulous story and you should definitely read it, but I decided on a different one here, ‘The Assignment’. It’s my most directly personal choice, as my father was one of millions who fled their homes in fear of their lives in August 1947.

Over the years, my dad told many stories about how he, his sisters and parents left India and travelled by train to Lahore in what was about to become Pakistan, where they claimed the empty house of a family fleeing the other way. But I don’t think I ever got the full version, or whether he could have told it. The figures will always be disputed but more than twelve million Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus became refugees and at least a million were murdered in intercommunal violence. Muslims attacked Sikhs and Hindus, Hindus and Sikhs attacked Muslims. Many were attacked as they fled. Trains arrived at their destinations with every passenger murdered. Manto wrote compulsively about the multi-formed violence of Partition and many of his stories, sketches and fragments, some just a few sentences long, are collected in Mottled Dawn. ‘The Assignment’ is set in Amritsar, my dad’s home city:

“Beginning with isolated incidents of stabbing, it had now developed into full-scale communal violence, with no holds barred. Even home-made bombs were being used.

The general view in Amritsar was that the riots could not last long …”

The gap between the first paragraph and the second is what the whole story is about. The cool, documentary narration never breaks down but the general gives way to a particular household, a retired (Muslim) judge, his seventeen-year-old daughter, Sughra, younger son and elderly servant. While their Muslim neighbours decamp to a Muslim neighbourhood (still believing the danger to be temporary), the father insists they stay put, but when Sughra goes up onto the roof, she sees ‘too many fires in too many places’. It soon becomes clear that they are prisoners in their home. Order breaks down, but tradition and the rule of the young by the old do not. The old judge is sure that the customary will be restored. His daughter knows that something irreversible has occurred. Both are right and the consequences are tragic.

First published in Urdu in Yazid, 1951 as ‘Gurmukh Singh Ki Wasiyat’ (The Last Will of Gurmukh Singh). First published in English as ‘The Assignment’ and collected in Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition, Penguin Modern Classics, 2011

‘The Dead Girls’ Class Trip’ by Anna Seghers, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo

This is probably my favourite short story of all time – for now. It was written by Seghers when she was in Mexico after fleeing Nazi Germany and Europe in 1941. From the start, the female narrator is confused and disoriented, recovering or suffering from an unspecified illness akin to the narrator of Poe’s famous ‘The Man of the Crowd’. The hot, bleached Mexican setting constructs (or makes possible) a time-slip mirage where she is transported back to the Germany of her childhood and a class trip she took along the Rhine, where she is reunited with two of her dearest school friends. As in a dream or nightmare, her vision keeps opening into different spaces, a café by the waterside, the quay where they watch a boat of boys arrive. This nostalgic drive is seductive for narrator and reader, details of hairstyles, of one classmate pouring milk, or two others dressing the chair of a favourite teacher with flowers. But the narrator’s return is weighed down with what is to come. She knows the precise futures of everyone she encounters and is compelled to record their fates. Seghers has both narrator and reader hovering between times in ways that remind me of Sebald’s temporal vertigos.

First published in German in 1946. Collected in The Dead Girls’ Class Trip: Selected Stories, NYRB Classics, 2021

Introduction

Having been a keen reader and writer of short stories for thirty years, I find myself quite unable to produce a list of the twelve best. Possibly I could manage this several times over, if I set up particular categories: best science fiction, best horror, best naturalism, and so on. But how do you compare J.G. Ballard to Claire Keegan, or Ursula K. Le Guin to David Constantine? How, more importantly, do you choose between them if it’s the very diversity of the form that most appeals to you? Chewing my pencil over this, I decided to change tack. I read a lot of short stories and often enjoy them (I’m easily pleased), but most of the time I can’t remember much about them a few months later. Perhaps my criterion for selecting a personal anthology ought to rely on memorability: on choosing stories that, for one reason or another, have made a lasting impression on me. Most writers want to leave a dent in the reader’s mind; here are twelve stories that have done that with mine.

‘In The Ravine’ by Anton Chekhov

George Saunders, in A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, his extended study of how Russian short stories work, makes a watertight case for Anton Chekhov’s genius within the form. Saunders chooses for his title piece a story that encapsulates one variant on the literary story: the slice-of-life or epiphany narrative, built around a small cast and taking place in a concentrated unit of time. Such stories (Raymond Carver is perhaps the modern master) allow a moment to speak for a human life or personality. Often these moments incorporate a choice or decision, a pivot in someone’s life journey. My Chekhov selection does something quite different. ‘In the Ravine’ is novelistic in scope, a portrayal of provincial life built around a grasping, sentimental family of shopkeepers. There are multiple characters, but the essence of the narrative concerns itself with two daughters-in-law. One of them, the innocent and kindly Lipa, suffers abominably; the other, Aksinya, murderously take power. Beyond the shop, there is a highly polluting factory, a drunken and despairing peasantry, and a general atmosphere of hopelessness. There are episodes within episodes that could, in themselves, furnish a story. Even minor characters have inner lives and longings, however impoverished. Yet inarticulacy and a kind of ethical bewilderment stunt the lives of everyone in the village. Kindness and fellow feeling exist, but they are largely ineffectual before the avarice, corruption and selfishness in which everyone seems mired. When the story was published in 1900, it shocked the reading public, and with good reason: the fate of Lipa’s new baby is one of the most harrowing things you are likely to encounter. As the socialist journalist Vladimir Posse wrote in a letter to Chekhov: ‘What a merciless, cruel revelation. Nothing theatrical, but the effect is immense, all-pervading, and continues to grow long after the story has been read.’

First published in the January 1900 issue of the Russian literary magazine Zhizn. English language translation by Constance Garnett first published in The Wife and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov, Chatto and Windus, London, 1918. Widely collected thereafter, including in In the Ravine & Other Stories, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2019

’They’ by Rudyard Kipling

However unfashionable or ‘problematic’ he may be, Kipling remains one of the great exponents of the short story. He was more than a writer of empire: he could turn his hand to psychological naturalism, historical fiction, supernatural fantasy and satire. Having started life in India, he considered England “the most marvellous of all foreign countries that I have been in”, and it’s this outsider’s perspective that allowed him to find spiritual magic in the rural Sussex where he made his home. ’They’ is a ghost story of sorts, in which a motorist stumbles on a blind woman who appears to offer a refuge to the spirits of lost children. Or rather, her house and garden do. Kipling wrote several stories about the ‘soul of a place’, how it may have good or unhappy colours. He was no less haunted than his characters when he wrote ’They’, for he was mourning the loss of his young daughter, Josephine, who had died in 1899. The narrator is charmed by the unseen, laughing, affectionate children in the garden, and it’s only late in the story that he realises that they are not what he assumed. Kipling, at least in his later stories, is a subtle writer who asks some effort of his readers. That effort is well rewarded with ’They’. Admirers of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets may recognise the source for some of its famous imagery:

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
– T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’

First published in August 1904 in Scribners Magazine. Collected in Traffics and Discoveries by Rudyard Kipling, Macmillan & Co., London, October 1904

‘Sredni Vashtar’ by Saki

In the 1980s, I attended a preparatory school in Surrey. We learned Ancient Greek and played rugby bare kneed in the snow. We also had story time, when old Mr Lovelock would read to us. Understanding his audience, he gave us M. R. James ghost stories and Grendel slaughtering men in the mead hall. But the story that made the greatest impression on me was by the humourist Hector Hugh Munro, better known as Saki. (Like Kipling, Munro was born in the Raj – Burma rather than Bombay. He enlisted as a private in 1914 and was killed at Beaumont Hamel two years later.) Saki’s stories take place in, and satirise, Edwardian high society. He reads like an arch and acid uncle to P.G. Wodehouse. ‘Sredni Vashtar’ is perhaps atypical in that it doesn’t feature a wit lampooning the country house set. It has, instead, Conradin, a sickly boy living with an overbearing cousin, Mrs De Ropp, who seems intent on draining her charge’s life of hope and joy. Like a later master of the macabre short, Roald Dahl, Saki understands the fantasies of oppressed children. Sredni Vashtar is the name Conradin gives to a polecat-ferret that he keeps and secretly worships in the garden shed, alongside a beloved pet hen. When Mrs De Ropp discovers the pet hen and sells it, Conradin asks his captive deity for a favour: “Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.” What follows is intensely dark, a victory of the imagination over sanctimonious oppression, with one of the most satisfying final paragraphs in fiction.

First published in May 1910 in The Westminster Gazette. Collected in The Chronicles of Clovis, John Lane, London, 1911 and widely thereafter

‘Daughters of the Late Colonel’ by Katherine Mansfield

You find all the modern literary virtues in the stories of Katherine Mansfield: brevity and concision, acute psychological insight matched with subtlety of expression. She died a century ago, yet the manner of her writing – its weighted ironies, its poise – makes it feel as fresh today as when it was published. Mansfield left behind letters and journals in which she lamented her inability to write novels; I wonder if a lifetime in longform fiction would have produced as valuable a body of work. Virginia Woolf, who rather disliked her, confessed that “I was jealous of her writing… the only writing I have ever been jealous of.” ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ is a study in decaying gentility and arrested development, as we join three spinsters (it takes us time to understand that they are not as young as their talk and behaviour suggests) in the days after the death of the patriarch. Their resolute girlishness, even as middle age lengthens their odds of marriage or change, protects them psychologically from their financial troubles even as it worsens them. This is a poignant character study that exemplifies the ‘show don’t tell’ dictum of creative writing workshops. How skilfully Mansfield skims into the perspectives of her characters, even as she dwells, elsewhere, on the surface where our imagination must do the interpretive work. Few writers choose their words with such precision. Consider this moment, where their contemptuous servant brings the sisters dessert:

And proud young Kate […] came in to see what the old tabbies wanted now. She snatched away their plates of mock something or other and slapped down a white, terrified blancmange.
‘Jam, please, Kate,’ said Josephine kindly.
Kate knelt and burst open the sideboard, lifted the lid of the jam-pot, saw it was empty, put it on the table, and stalked off.
‘I’m afraid it’s empty,’ said Nurse Andrews a moment later […]
Constantia looked dubious. ‘We can’t disturb Kate again,’ she said softly.

First published in the London Mercury, May 1921. Collected in The Garden Party and other stories by Katharine Mansfield, Constable & Co., London, 1922, and widely thereafter

‘First Love’ by Samuel Beckett

In his sly and funny critical study, Beckett’s Dying Words (1993), Christopher Ricks draws our attention to a key feature of Beckett’s existential and linguistic vision: exhaustion. This isn’t just the exhaustion of his increasingly decrepit characters, but the exhaustion of language, the way it drags along the dead weight of cliché and hackneyed phrases. Beckett is our great zombie fiction writer, only his zombie is language itself. This makes him the diametrical opposite of the mad scientist of literary prose, James Joyce, whom he served as amanuensis in the thirties. Beckett’s first two novels are heavily influenced by Joyce. In order to replace his mentor’s exuberance with lethargy, and profusion with scarcity, Beckett took the drastic decision to write in French. He imposed constraints on himself. And it was in French that he created his best fiction: several short stories and the novel trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable). Beckett’s short story ‘First Love’, originally written in French towards the end of the war, wasn’t published until the 1970s, by which time Beckett’s valedictory manner had desiccated to a knotty and rather tedious minimalism. Unlike those late works, ‘First Love’ is intensely entertaining, a low comedy of failure, inertia and bewilderment. Its title makes you expect a touching coming-of-age stake in the manner of, say, Turgenev. But love, to Beckett’s narrator, is as remote a prospect as regular employment.

First published as Premier Amour by Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1970. First published in English, translated by the author, by Calder and Boyars, London, 1973

‘Witch’ by George Mackay Brown

What Alasdair Gray was to Glasgow, George Mackay Brown was to Orkney: a tutelary creative spirit. He lived most of his life in Stromness. ‘Orkney,’ he claimed, ‘is a small green world in itself,’ and his imaginative engagement with this world spans centuries. He can write about modern crofters in one story and about their Viking forebears in another, as if what happens now and what happened in the distant past are equally newsworthy. There is a poetic compression and simplicity to his prose that harkens back to the Orkneyinga Saga. (The same is even more true for his poetry, which rises from the same source as his fiction: verse narratives that encompass all generations.) I’ve chosen ‘Witch’, from Mackay Brown’s first story collection, because it exemplifies the qualities listed above. It’s a masterful instance of historical fiction: a genre we tend to associate more with the novel than the short form. In what reads like a contemporaneous account – officially dispassionate, yet contextually indignant – we follow the fate of Marian Isbister, a servant girl accused of witchcraft. Mackay Brown dwells on the surface of gestures and speech, inviting us to interpret the action and its injustices. This is fiction as act of restorative justice. If you haven’t read any George Mackay Brown, Polygon Books have issued a Selected Stories that would add lustre to your bookshelves.

First published in A Calendar of Love by George Mackay Brown, The Hogarth Press, 1967