‘Orientation’ by Ben Pester

Pester is one of contemporary literature’s great surrealists. His work pokes holes in our understanding of reality, challenging us to explore the darkness of the human psyche via the interminably banal. It’s also really funny. ‘Orientation’ is the first story in Am I in the Right Place?, another jealous rage / throw-at-wall collection from Boiler House circa the pandemic and uses office jargon, powerpoint formatting to tell a story in which a character (you) is being given an induction on their first day at a new job. Pester uses the second person throughout, conjuring an air of acute claustrophobia between the reader (for it is we who are being oriented) and Graham, an entirely ordinary yet deeply unsettling colleague who is in charge of your onboarding. In typical Pester fashion, things escalate to a hysterical fever pitch taking a spatially and temporally away from the office, back in time into a memory, before Graham waves us vaguely away.

Collected in Am I in the Right Place? Boiler House Press, 2020. Also in Granta, here

‘Boca Ratan’ by Lauren Groff

Climate anxiety is a very real phenomenon, and this was the first time I had seen it actualises in a contemporary short story. Unlike the imagined future landscapes conjured by Nazdam and Jamieson, Groff holds us in an alarming present. Much of her short fiction focuses on her adopted home of Florida, and in this case the very real threat to the state of rising sea-levels. We meet a narrator who is plagued with anxiety about the impending environmental crisis, coming to terms with her grief at the realisation that she is powerless to stop it.

Collected in Warmer Collection, Amazon Original, 2018

‘Bulk’ by Eley Williams

This story has been anthologised many times, but still I could not leave it out. The whale as a huge, hefty metaphor for the interplay of humanity with nature and the planet is wielded expertly by Williams in this story. I recommend reading it alongside ‘Fathoms: The World In the Whale’ by Rebecca Giggs, which serves as an elegy for dead whales in general. ‘Bulk’ pays attention to animal otherness in a way which I found to be at once frightening and tender; a soft haze of grief sits over the whole story. Williams is, undoubtedly, a master of linguistic agility, but she also does emotional resonance with unparalleled proficiency.

Collected in Attrib., Influx Books, 2018

‘Eleven Sons’ by Franz Kafka

I am, regrettably, a Kafka fan. I know what this says about me, but I can’t help it. I am a particular fan of his extremely slight, barely there at all stories, which function as oddly-shaped parables. One of these is Eleven Sons, which Kafka wrote as a means of expressing frustration with a pile of unfinished stories. The ‘sons’ are the pieces of writing he is grappling with, and the form of the story follows a description of each in turn. There is a freshness to this format, in lots of ways it’s deeply antithetical to what is apparently necessary for narrative prose fiction: the story has no plot, no setting, it relies entirely on the narrator’s reporting of these characters, who are not even really characters at all, but metaphors. The boldness of Kafka’s minimalism here is addictive; I wanted to see how far I could push the envelope in the same direction.

Written between 1914 and 1917. In 1919, it appeared in Ein Landarzt: Kleine Erzählungen (A Country Doctor)

‘Biophile’ by Ruby Cowling

When I first read Ruby Cowling’s collection ‘This Paradise’, I almost threw the book across the room in a jealous rage. This beautiful, erudite and formally inventive book is weird and lush, tender and dark. I return to it again and again. Biophile is about an emotionally avoidant and sexually frustrated videogame designer called Danni who likes to bury herself in the ground. This is my favourite sort of character to write; complex, deeply sad, but irreverent and defiant nonetheless. I try to bring something of Danni into the women in my collection.

First published in The White Review, April 2014. Collected in This Paradise, Boiler House Press, 2020. You can read it here

‘Roy Spivey’ by Miranda July

Roy Spivey is not his real name, because the narrator has obscured it by rearranging the letters. She has done this because Roy is a married Hollywood actor, and she wants to protect his identity. The story follows the narrator and Roy on a plane journey, during which they have a brief but intense romantic encounter. The piece is hypnagogic and sexy; a half-daydream that we’ve all had about [insert actors name here] while dozing off on a plane. July leaves a hole where a man should be in this story, thus inviting the reader to fill it with whatever their own fantasy might be. In that sense, and in the sense that this is a story about unadulterated (if short lived) pleasure is what makes it one of the most transgressively generous short stories I’ve ever come across.

First published in The New Yorker, June 2007. Read it here

‘Good Solid Obliterating Fuck’ by Anna Wood

Following from July’s imagined encounter with celebrity, Wood’s narrator here meets a handsome man, who might be Marcel Proust, on a train. The story is told through their conversation, a technique I love to both read and write. The sleepiness of their dialogue precipitates an indulgent, intimate tension. They talk about love and sex tenderly, humorously, but don’t ever touch. It’s an extremely sensual piece of writing, in which the narrator appears to check in with us about how delightful the moment is: “I didn’t know then and I haven’t learned since,” she says, “what to do with something unexpected and precious.” Pleasurable tension is elusive but addictive, Wood, like July, masters it perfectly here.

Collected in Yes Yes More More, Indigo Press, 2021

‘Future Perfect / Nothing Arizona’ by Rosie Šnadjr

Anarchic, chaotic and vulnerable, this collection is one that I turn to again and again, whenever I need reminding of the infinite possibilities of prose fiction. In this story, a protagonist with the same name as the author spins us through space and time, the prose is dense, unctuous and lush (“The round moon highlights exalted phrases and, above, the fronds of a buckled coconut tree hush.”) but the delivery is exhilaratingly uncontrolled at times and the story is all the better for it.

Collected in The Hypocritical Reader, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018

‘Flyfishing’ by Bonnie Nazdam and Dale Jamieson

Nazdam and Jamieson, a fiction writer and philosopher, collaborated in 2015 to consider how to write about love and life in the late anthropocene. Flyfishing is a story of a father and daughter on a fishing trip in an homogenised mountain region where technology has either replaced or enhanced the wildlife and surroundings. The story is set at an unspecified time in the future, and plays with the idea of wilderness-as-leisure facility. Under the surface throughout is this idea of the shifting baseline; the notion that one generations’ norms will differ greatly from the next, and how this impacts on the natural world.

Collected in Love in the Anthropocene, OR Books, 2015. An excerpt available here

‘Logarithm’ by Irenosen Okojie

Pushing the boundaries to breaking point is one of the many things I greatly admire in Okojie’s writing. She writes like no one else; distorting genres and defying convention in a way which is intimidatingly courageous. A story’s place within a collection is a vital element of consideration when writing. What comes first and last is important. ‘Logarithm’ opens this wildly original collection, and consists of a brutally short stream of sentences, each of which present an object. There is a gothic attention to the domestic and the bodily in these sentences that almost all begin with ‘Here is…’. This repetition becomes like a mantra, that almost disappears into nothing as the story reaches a crescendo and then breaks its own pattern with a chilling question: ‘But where is the baby’. Everything is just out of reach in this piece; it’s deeply unsettling, and put me (deliciously, thrillingly) on the back foot as I pushed through into the collection.

Collected in Nudibranch, Dialogue Books, 2019

Introduction

What constitutes a short story? Edgar Allan Poe famously said a short story was one that could be read at a single sitting, but that addresses only the length, and maybe has less to say about what constitutes a story that can be told successfully in a short form, though perhaps this strays into ‘what makes a good short story’ territory. While you need ideas for a novel, you need an idea for a short story. One of the first (long) short stories I thought of for this anthology was E.M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’, for which I have a great admiration—arising in part, admittedly, from the surprise at finding that someone whose work had led to the Merchant and Ivory frock-fest that was A Room with a View could produce this near-apocalyptic, technocratic dystopian tale, too. I left it out not because it was over twelve thousand words (The Dead is longer) but because it had too many ideas. A short story succeeds when it chooses an idea of the right proportion to be resolved within a limited narrative space.

This anthology is, I think, exploratory, in that my choices seem to reflect stories that hang together not only because I like them (though that word ‘like’ is immediately haunted by those I like just as well or are by authors I like even more than these ones, and are not included) but because there is something about them that added a little more to my understanding of what short stories could, if not should, deliver. It is a way of totalising my ideas about short stories, perhaps each of the dozen contains an ingredient of some Jungian archetype of short story.

‘The Dead’ by James Joyce

The final story in Joyce’s Dubliners collection, ‘The Dead’ is perfectly proportioned. The plot is uncomplicated: at an annual party held by two sisters in their home on the quays of the River Liffey, their favourite nephew Gabriel Conroy attends with his wife Gretta. There is music, dancing, food, politics, and attempts to make Freddie Malins appear less inebriated than is the case. Towards the end, Gretta overhears another guest singing, and the profound effect this has on her in turn profoundly affects Gabriel.

It is set in 1904, on 6^th January, the Feast of the Epiphany. The significance of the date is sometimes noted because of epiphany’s secondary meaning as ‘a moment of great realisation’, and a key moment in the story is Gabriel’s realisation of a truth about his relationship to his wife. Another significance could be drawn without too much violence. In Ireland, the Epiphany is known also as Oíche Nollaig na mBan, Women’s Christmas, traditionally being a day on which women did not perform any domestic duties. The tenor of Gabriel’s evening is repeatedly disrupted by women. Firstly, he mismanages his interaction with the maid, Lily, and retreats awkwardly, almost fleeing. Then he is put out of countenance by fellow-guest Molly Ivors’ antagonistic querying of his political views. Finally, and catastrophically, he is disrupted by Gretta’s distraction after she hears the song, The Lass of Aughrim and by her later explanation of her reaction.

It is a story not only where the living are troubled by the dead, but where nostalgia is troubled by its reenactments. The story is set ten years in the past, and the Morkan sisters’ party is a tradition that has traditions: their nephew Gabriel always carves the goose, Freddie Malins always turns up drunk, Julia Morkan’s fading voice is admired out of respect for what it, and she, used to be. Throughout the evening, Gabriel is uneasy with his rôle in this; he worries that his speech will be pedantic, that he will let his aunts down in some way, he cannot cope with anyone who goes ‘off-script’, as Lily and Molly do. The traditions of the party, established long ago, appear familiar and festive, but the demands of their continued maintenance intrude upon the present, foreshadowing Gabriel’s final haunting by the dead of someone else’s past. The ideas and reflections raised are profound though not dramatic, and achieve an immensely satisfactory resolution in the expansion of Gabriel’s melancholy but accepting final thoughts.

First published in the collection Dubliners, Grant Richards London, 1914. Being out of copyright, it is available on-line at Project Gutenberg here

‘The Key’ by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, translated by Cló Iar-Chonnacht

My love for bureaucratic Gothic (which makes its way into my own work) may be the result of having spent so many years in the archives and among the records of public services. I fully expected Kafka, or maybe Ligotti’s ‘The Nightmare Network’, one of his “tales of corporate horror”, to be included in this anthology, but I plumped for ‘The Key’ instead. Part of my secondary school education included—as a mandatory subject—literature in Irish language. With the exception of the epic mythological narrative of Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s pursuit of his fleeing betrothed and her lover, I hated all of the prose (possibly unfairly, a result of my own linguistic limitations). Máirtín Ó Cadhain, or Flann O’Brien, would have been a welcome relief, and I might even have continued reading Irish.

Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906–1970) was a language and political activist, whose work Seán Ó Tuama (late Professor of Irish Literature in University College Cork) compared to both Joyce and Beckett. Ó Cadhain produced, in the Connemara dialect of Irish, a wonderfully absurd novel featuring lively and sometimes scurrilous conversations (in “rough, earthy, salty speech”) between the buried dead. He also produced several collections of short stories, re-collected recently in an English translation. One of these, An tSraith ar Lár/The Mown Swath (1948), includes ‘The Key’. The plot of the story is straightforward: it concerns a junior civil servant, J, who is a paperkeeper, “the most responsible and difficult job in the Civil Service” (which Ó Cadhain called “a paperocracy”). His hated boss goes on holidays for two weeks, leaving J. in charge of the eponymous key which brings at once an intoxicating rush of power, and a state of near-panic over how he is to keep the key safe. What it does not bring, ultimately, is the ability to open the door.

Like Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial, the protagonist, J, is a timorous and resentful cog in the bloated machinery of the administration. He is neither likeable nor engaging: his inner monologue is mostly complaints about his wife (who he calls his “Old One”, adding an inadvertent hint of Lovecraft to the proceedings) and his boss, his crippling uncertainty about the appropriate action, his mysterious itch. There is a numbing tedium, reminiscent of Kafka’s The Castle, about J’s inevitably advancing fate, and he is ultimately overwhelmed by the bureaucratic processes. Unlike Ó Cadhain’s earlier stories, ‘The Key’ is satirical more than empathic; whereas the protagonists of Ó Cadhain’s rural stories were shaped and restricted by their difficult environment, J is to some degree culpable in his own situation. In parallel with his anxieties about being trapped, both physically and psychologically, J’s musings introduce a mischievous absurdity of the story, which is the perceived agency of the administrative files themselves: “it was hard to believe the files weren’t alive, or like tinned cans of flesh and blood,” a sort of Gothic expression of bureaucratic resistentialism.

First published in An tSraith ar Lár in 1967, and in English in The Quick and the Dead, translated by Cló Iar-Chonnacht [West Connacht Press], Yale University Press 2021. Ó Cadhain’s sole novel Cré an Cille (1949) has been translated as The Dirty Dust (Alan Titley, Yale University Press, 2015) and as Graveyard Clay, trans. Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson, Yale University Press, 2016

‘Like Mother Used to Make’ by Shirley Jackson

This was first published in a collection with the more famous ‘The Lottery’, and to my mind is more indicative of Jackson’s usual style: that of a deep-seated, but creeping rather than overt, weirdness that leaks into everyday life. It also features the recurring character, James Harris, which appeals to my taste for closed worlds.

The story concerns a man who is inviting his neighbour to dinner. David is very conscious of his material surroundings. He takes a very active pleasure in the appearance of his apartment, “the most comfortable home he had ever had,” and over his successes in finding exactly the furnishings he wanted. There are some things he still wants, and he has had to choose between getting a particular kind of vase, and continuing to buy the silverware he has “[g]radually, tenderly” been buying. He is troubled by the falling plaster in his bedroom that “no power on earth” could make less noticeable, but his concern is easily balanced by the comforts and reassurances of his “warm, fine home.” His less-organised neighbour, Marcia, is to be his guest for dinner. The exact nature of their relationship is not exactly clear; he has a key to her apartment for practical reasons (like letting in the laundry-man) and she has none to his, but when he leaves a note for her, he signs it ‘D’, suggesting long familiarity. Her apartment very nearly distresses him because it is so untidy.

Marcia, when she arrives, is disruptive in every way—loud, late, informal, wearing a dirty coat, and calling him “Davie”—but he enjoys her great appreciation of his home, the dinner, and the table-settings. She seems to show signs of coveting aspects of David’s approach to life—“Someone should teach me, I guess”—and then the fatal disruption happens.

Jackson excels in a sort of inevitable terribleness that dominates on arrival, so that characters have just registered the reality when it is too late to do anything about it. Sometimes (as in ‘Pillar of Salt’) it is their environment that turns against them, but here it is people who shift without warning and inexorably from the background to the foreground. Marcia’s colleague, James Harris, calls to see her, and she invites him into David’s home. Instantly, David’s possession of his home is undermined by the very means by which he created its security and comfort, and through which he expresses not only his personality, but his agency. Within a few apparently innocuous lines of social chit-chat, this agency is excised, and David’s position echoes that of Mrs Hart in ‘Men with Their Big Shoes’, who “realized with a sudden unalterable conviction that she was lost”.

Published in The Lottery and Other Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1949; now in a Penguin Modern Classics edition, 2009