‘Civilization and its Discontents’ by Helen Garner

A man and a woman; a hotel room in a foreign city; an affair maybe at an end, certainly winding down; a flight home; a reunion with an adult child. In some ways nothing much happens in this story, but in the neat witticisms the lovers exchange – because it’s too late for the big conversations – and the touching banter between mother and son, as well as the careful shapelessness with which Helen Garner allows it to unspool, one thing after another, it flows like life. I vividly remember reading this story over breakfast in St Kilda, Melbourne, putting the book down on the table and having that rare thought that arrives as a complete sentence: “That’s how you do it.” Garner’s stories are close and intimate: they are a friend who sits down beside you, slightly overfills a wine glass for each of you and says, “You won’t believe what he did next.” But it might be the self-ironising smirk of its title that makes this story so great.

Collected in Postcards from Surfers, McPhee-Gribble/Penguin, 1985

‘The Last Mohican’ by Bernard Malamud

I love when a writer falls for their own character and brings them back in multiple short stories. Here’s the debut of Fidelman, a “self-confessed failure as a painter” who arrives in Rome to work on a monograph on Giotto. Almost immediately, he’s targeted by Susskind, a Jewish-Italian scrounger who wangles a few bucks from the scholar – although not the “spare suit” he hopes for as he eyes Fidelman’s suitcase. This first encounter is not to be their last, and Fidelman’s project is about to go very far wrong. The two are intractable opposites, as signified in their initial exchange, in which Fidelman’s lofty false modesty (“He coughed a little … ‘I’ve given a great deal of time and study to his [Giotto’s] work’”) is brought low by Susskind’s ambiguous but wonderfully skewering response: “‘So I know him too.’” Fidelman is the classic Malamud mensch who, believing himself well-meaning, is about to discover the limits to his good humour; Susskind is his mirror image, his tormentor, but maybe also his conscience, and his educator. When Fidelman’s briefcase, containing the invaluable first chapter of his manuscript, goes missing, he immediately suspects the several times denied Susskind and, abandoning his wallowing in classical history, pursues his quarry through signifiers of a much more recent history: the ghetto, its synagogue, Rome’s Jewish cemetery. What the two men reach is not an accord or mutual respect, maybe not even an understanding, but something more complex and nuanced, a kind of merging.

First published in the Paris Review, 1958 and  collected in The Magic Barrel, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1958 and The Stories of Bernard Malamud, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983

‘Nachman from Los Angeles’ by Leonard Michaels

Leonard Michaels is what they call “a writers’ writer”, by which I mean that I only know of two other people who’ve read him, both of them fellow authors, and one of them only because I pressed a copy of Michaels’s Nachman Stories into his hands myself. Like Malamud’s Fidelman, Nachman is a character who recurs in multiple stories – a somewhat unworldly academic whom his creator drops into a succession of ethical and moral dilemmas to see what happens. Despite his insistence that he wants nothing more than to “do mathematics”, “problems so difficult that [he] sometimes cried”, Nachman is just as capable of significant moral equivocation as those around him, of allowing himself to be manipulated, and of tying himself in entertainingly hypocritical knots. In ‘Nachman from Los Angeles’ the mathematician recalls a time two decades earlier when he was prevailed upon to write a college paper on Bergsonian metaphysics – not his forte – for Prince Ali Massid, a very wealthy, very charming overseas student who is not merely handsome, Nachman notices, but “perfect”. Despite recognising that it is not “strictly correct to write a paper for someone else”, Nachman collects the books he’ll need, begins the required reading, even comes to enjoy the unfamiliar material – and then stalls. As the deadline approaches, Ali showers the mathematicians with gifts, bribes, beseeches him, sends his cheerleader girlfriend to Nachman’s apartment in a wretched attempt at entrapment – but Nachman is stuck because he has put himself in the impossible position of contravening a moral code he only tells himself he possesses. He cannot write the paper and compromise himself; nor can he definitively back out of the agreement he made with Ali and show himself to be dishonourable. What to do? To write the paper or not? Twenty years on, he is still turning the question over in his mind.

First published in The New Yorker, January 2001 and available to read here; collected in The Collected Stories, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007 and The Nachman Stories, Daunt Books, 2017

‘Adela’s House’ by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell

The less Mariana Enriquez tells you, the worse things get. For all the monsters, cannibals and ghosts in Things We Lost in the Fire, her first book to be translated into English, I think ‘Adela’s House’ is its most disturbing story – the tale of three children, two of them siblings, drawn to a mysterious house, where doors open onto impossible rooms and from which none of them will emerge unscathed, if at all. The story is full of detail, but its secret weapon is, well, keeping secrets: the titular Adela – a “suburban princess” living in an “enormous English chalet tucked into [a] grey neighbourhood” in an underprivileged part of Buenos Aires – has lost an arm, for reasons she is never quite able to explain; she and the narrator’s brother watch horror movies then relate their plots to the narrator, plots she does not relay to the reader. When the three children visit that dilapidated, creepy, buzzing house and the truly inexplicable strikes, it’s the very absence of information and comprehensibility that is so terrifying: absence with form and appetite, taking a bite from the world. Revisiting this story, I realised it’s one of the seeds of Enríquez’s maximalist horror novel Our Share of Night, forming almost an extra layer of the uncanny, a ghost story that haunts itself.

Collected in Things We Lost in the Fire, Portobello, 2017

‘The Quietest Man’ by Molly Antopol

Learning that his daughter has written an Off-Broadway play about their family, Tomás Novak’s response is ambivalent, to say the least: “I knew any good parent would be thrilled. And I wanted to be.” Fearing how he may be depicted, dissected, in Katka’s play, Tomás turns the lens on himself in anticipation, castigating himself as a remote or aloof father, a bad husband, even – as he recalls his youth as a dissident writer in Prague, and the four-day interrogation where he refuses to sell out his fellow dissidents – as a traitor. His unease only grows after he arranges for Katka to visit him in the small college town where he now lives: uninterested in the childish activities he proposes, taciturn to the point of monosyllabic, she seems to him to have become something powerful and unknowable, who is preparing to air his darkest secrets in public. This remarkable story takes two turns: one I find deeply moving, as Katka finally reveals what her play will say about her tormented, self-doubting father; the other – which clinches it as a classic for me – a far stranger twist that transforms the reader’s understanding of how Tomás accounts for himself.

First published by One Story, March 2010; collected in The UnAmericans, Picador, 2014

‘Drinking Coffee Elsewhere’ by Z.Z. Packer

This is a deeply satisfying story about a deeply frustrating, and frustrated, central character. Dina has arrived at Yale University from a background of some privation and with something of a chip on her shoulder. In an early class, she and her classmates are asked to nominate an inanimate object they relate to and Dina, in the kind of fully conscious, fully self-destructive moment that will characterise her behaviour in this story, chooses a revolver. Dina’s problem is that she is unable to work out what story to tell about herself, and bitterly opposed to the stories anybody else tries to tell about her, particularly a gender questioning student she grows close to yet remains aloof from, for reasons she (characteristically) can’t articulate, though the reader will have their suspicions. It’s sometimes said that good stories are timeless, but this story unmistakably originates in the America of the early 2000s, both in its depiction of an academic world on the brink of a fall, and in the language the students use to talk about themselves and one another (“Her name was Heidi, although she said she wanted people to call her Henrik. ‘That’s a guy’s name,’ I said. ‘What do you want? A sex change?’”). Yet Dina’s situation is familiar and universal: she’s the outsider who yearns to belong but fearing this might mean losing her sense of self, cleaves to – maybe even invents – what sets her apart.

First published in The New Yorker, June 11 2000, and available to read here. Collected in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Riverhead Books, 2003

‘Human Development’ by Anthony Veasna So

Another campus story, this time set in the slightly panicky aimlessness of post-graduation. The narrator of ‘Human Development’, from the only collection published by the late Anthony Veasna So, and also named Anthony, is a Stanford graduate who has grown jaded of being the only Cambodian American in any room, and of the expectation from others that he represent a country, a culture, a whole people. On a hookup app he meets Ben, his equal and opposite, a Cambodian American who’s as extroverted, cheerful and driven as Anthony is gloomy and rudderless. Where he sees his minority background as an impediment, Ben – a developer with an idea for an app based around identity politics that is both silly and chilling – thinks the pair and their associate Vinny can use it as a status symbol, even monetise it. There’s so much here about academia (Anthony teaches a humanities course that gives the story its title and, for all his pessimism, genuinely feels Moby-Dick can be a guide to life for “rich kids with fake Adderall prescriptions”), fitting in and standing out, queer identities, and the way that having all of life available to you – the endless scrolling screen of the hookup app – can be as inhibiting and trapping as being starved of opportunity. I rather enjoy a discursive, character-driven story where plot isn’t a priority, and ‘Human Development’ unfurls easily, casually, conversationally, painfully, in a way that always leaves me wanting more.

Collected in Afterparties, Atlantic, 2021

‘A Little Like Light’ by A. L. Kennedy

For about a year I’ve had a line stuck in my head that I knew must come from an A.L. Kennedy story because it’s so painful and so wry, so unmistakably her; including one of her stories here was a given, and as I was going through various candidates, I stumbled on the source of it. ‘A Little Like Light’ is the story of John Edward, a (this is quintessential Kennedy) sexually frustrated school janitor and self-taught close-up magician navigating what could be, might become, may never turn into an affair with one of the schoolteachers. Kennedy never judges her protagonists – John is self-flagellating enough – but simply relates, an empath wielding a scalpel, every minute shift in the non-couple’s relationship and the progress of John’s own self-loathing. Towards the end, as he realises the affair will never come to anything, almost relishing the understanding, we get his wonderful, gutting revelation: “This is love. This terrible feeling. This knowing I would rather see her than be content.” No wonder it stuck with me. It takes the top off my head, every time.

Collected in Indelible Acts, Jonathan Cape, 2002

‘Evie’ by Sarah Hall

I realise on looking through this list that few of the stories I’ve selected have a plot twist of the kind that, growing up, it was impressed on me a good short story ought to have (it’s probably hard to teach a child about a gradual dawning realisation or a shift in perspective that casts previous details in a new light). “Evie” is an exception: a brilliant and alarming narrative that builds and builds before a devastating revelation transforms it into an entirely different kind of story. It starts small, with the narrator startled when his wife, the titular Evie, scoffs a bar of chocolate despite not having much of a sweet tooth. Gradually, Evie’s appetites intensify and expand, and soon she is exhibiting wilder hungers. Seeming to pick up her husband’s mild, almost genial sense of marital frustration, she begins behaving in ways that eerily reflect, even anticipate, his idle sexual fantasies. What begins as a kind of wish-fulfilment for her husband – the wife as wanton – becomes ever more dangerous. Unnerving, too, is the growing sense that even this “good man”, who’s on the verge of boasting about this change in his circumstances, thinks on some level of Evie as property to be commodified. Desire itself, personified, is overtaking the characters, warping them into new shapes … and then the twist comes. The wonderful tension here is between the storyline’s almost outrageous eroticism – how far is Evie going to go? How implicated is a reader titillated by the frank and graphic descriptions of Evie’s suddenly boundless sexuality? – and Hall’s always meticulous writing, her precise sentences and alertness to detail.

First published in The Sunday Times, July 2013, and available to read here; collected in Madame Zero, Faber, 2017; also in Sex and Death, ed. Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs, Faber, 2017

‘Sixteen Straws’ by The Drones

Not a story, but an epic reworking of an Australian folk song, “Moreton Bay”, reimagined by now defunct Melbourne four-piece The Drones. The originating ballad describes the brutal conditions of a New South Wales penal station overseen by a historical figure, the vicious “commandant” Patrick Logan. The Drones extend and expand this into a saga of the terrible bargain struck by the prisoners on the chain gang as they seek to escape their imprisonment by any means possible. Over acoustic guitar and ghostly mouth organ, Gareth Liddiard’s gaunt, swampy croak – right up close to the microphone, intimate and terrible – adds harrowing novelistic detail, such as an aside about the prison camp’s “chief flogger” who rinses “his lash in a bucket / Then drinks the remains”. When the prisoners form a scheme to cut short their sentences, things go from bad to worse: there comes murder, flames, gunfire, death and catastrophe. Lyrically it’s magnificent, sonically it puts my hair on end. It’s so wide-open yet constrictive, so fierce and desolate yet beautiful – so Australian – and it ends on an unforgettable cliffhanger.

From the album Gala Mill, Shock/ATP Recordings, 2006

‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley

“I met a traveller from an antique land,” starts the narrator. What is being offered to the reader in the course of this short (just fourteen lines) story? Person, setting, incident, mood; a precise choice of whittled-down language and detail; a particular way of considering, isolating, describing something, so that a moment in text resonates out through time and space and over “the lone and level sands.” These seem to me to be pertinent aspects of a short story; that’s what Shelley’s doing, entirely successfully, here. I think this one through in my mind when I wake up in the night, and it calms my heartbeat, sends me off to sleep.

First published in The Examiner, January 1818. Collected in Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; With Other Poems, C. and J. Ollier, 1819, and Selected Poems and Prose, Penguin Classics, 2017. Available online here

‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A man trying to go to a wedding meets another man. It’s the ancient Mariner, who collars the Guest and proceeds to tell him an absolutely cracking story. Then what happened – Death and a thousand thousand crawly things came out playing ghostly dice? Hold off unhand me greybeard loon, too right. The events are memorable, and the language lovely: “The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out: / At one stride comes the dark;” (though I notice with interest that this verse is an improvement, added in to later editions).

I like the way it foreshadows Melville’s 1851 Moby-Dick, too, with a sailor who has encountered a white creature seeing his ship go down with all companions into a whirlpool, while he alone bobs up to tell the tale. And the Mariner’s story demonstrates the power of storytelling: the Guest misses the ceremony; he’s been educated, informed and entertained; he ends up “A sadder and a wiser man.” If the Mariner’s adventure can wreak that on the Wedding-Guest, what might it do to us readers, too? A good story broadcasts or expands, on and on; it has an afterlife, as though radioactive.

Included in Lyrical Ballads, J. and A. Arch, 1798 and The Complete Poems, Penguin Classics, 1997. Available online here

‘Introduction’ by Alan Garner

This is an intro written nearly forty years later for a reissue of Garner’s own 1973 novel Red Shift. It’s also a story, in a personal vein, in which Garner investigates the process of creativity, describing how ideas, memories, and events pile up then tug at your sleeve. He’s explaining how he came to write the book, and it involves a meeting with a neighbour: “A descendant of an old Mow Cop family told me a story she’d heard from her grandmother, who could neither read nor write.” But she had retained the oral tradition that some Spanish slaves, being marched north to build a wall, escaped and established a dark-haired community in Cheshire. Garner is “startled” to realise that this old, local folk tale is a version of the story of the Legion of the 9th, lost to Roman history in 120 AD.

He describes this meeting as an illustration of how he works, gathering scraps of stories, repeating and reworking them. And though he lights on the final line very early on in the process, he then has to “leave it and let the rest of the story write me.” Garner is a very distinctive writer. I wouldn’t say I even like his stories, not most of them, (though his retelling of the Russian ‘Bash Tchelik’ is fabulous) but they are completely haunting; they don’t let you go.

First published in the NYRB reissue of Garner’s own 1973 novel Red Shift, 2011