‘Sandpiper’ by Ahdaf Soueif

‘Sandpiper’ is a lyrical beauty, written in the first person, that draws you in immediately, with detail of the sea, the beach the narrator is sitting on and her thoughts on the love for her husband that has been fading each summer, a beautiful marker of time.

This collection of short stories was one of the first I read as an expatriate of twenty years, but never in Egypt, alas. I can identify closely with the settings and the stories. I met and befriended so many people of different cultural identities. There are important questions raised in the collection – of who are you, where do you belong, where is home, questions that are often asked and not always answered. And the answers can change over time.

I basked in the sense of place, cultural evocation and multiple layers of each story.

First published in I Think of You, Bloomsbury 2007

‘What the Ax Forgets, the Tree Remembers’ by Edith Pearlman

I got the measure of Pearlman as a writer in the opening of this story.

“Thorns and palm oil and two full back matriarchs, each with the heels of her hands on the young girl’s shoulders as if kneading recalcitrant dough. Someone forces the knees apart.”

She’s describing female circumcision, genital mutilation. Pearlman has the eye of a journalist, looking for the angle. Go straight in. Get to the point. Yet, she can change gears in the story. We get to know Gabrielle, the ‘”concierge extraordinary” and a little of her backstory. Short, sharp sentences that give us Gabrielle in morsels but I feel I know her.

Pearlman reminds me of Elizabeth Taylor with her skilful dance between POVs, freighted sentences that convey the humanity and lack of humanity in each character.  

“The hysterectomy was without complications. And now, flat as a book below her waist, dry as linen between her legs, she felt pity for the Africans’ dripping wounds…well curiosity, at any rate.”

Small, deft phrasing that expands our knowledge and experience of the story.

First published in Ecotone, Fall 2012, and collected in Honeydew, John Murray, 2015

‘The Cost of Living’ by Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant, another Canadian writer, is the first writer I encountered where her short stories teemed with characters and different settings around the world. On courses, you’re told as a short story writer that it is better to have fewer characters. Space is tight. I say, just enjoy these stories as a reader and a trip around post war Europe.

Despite the generational difference, I identified strongly with the lives of expatriates in the stories. They made me think of my parents, expatriates too, living away from ‘home’ and getting to grips with a new culture, a new way of living with people who are thrown together by circumstance.

The collection was inspiring to me as a writer. I enjoyed travelling the world from Montreal to Manhattan, but Paris seems to anchor the collection. In Ultramarine, my short story collection, I have done the same – eleven stories, eleven different countries, anchored in the world. I think it can work.

First published in The New Yorker, February 1962, and collected in The Cost of Living: Early and Collected Stories, Bloomsbury, 2009

‘Picking Worms’ by Souvankham Thammavongsa

Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in a refugee camp, to Laotian parents, and raised in Toronto. ‘Picking Worms’ is from her debut short story collection, which is infused with stories about loneliness, alienation, the hierarchies that beset an immigrant family trying to find their place in a new society. It brings a contemporary lens to the immigrant story as well as authenticity. I admire the political edge, the social commentary and the humour.

At times, ‘Picking Worms’ was an excruciating read. It must have been the worms, which I generally like. The story typifies the grunt work that immigrants often have to undertake.

First published in How to Pronounce Knife, Bloomsbury 2020

‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ by Ambrose Bierce

This was one of the first short stories I read, as part of a short story writing course. It is a fascinating story in a number of ways, particularly for its narrative structure. I even tried to map it out on paper – how it ebbs between the past, the imagination of the protagonist Peyton Farquhar, a Southern plantation owner who is about to be hanged by Union soldiers for attempting to sabotage a railroad bridge, and the present.

As a reader, we are catapulted into the immediate moment where Farquhar stands on the edge of Owl Creek Bridge with a noose around his neck. What a beginning. This is when time slows down and we become part of his inner world, as he imagines himself escaping from his captors and returning to his family. I wanted him to escape.

At the end, having been lulled into thinking he had escaped, he hasn’t. He’s already dead. The rug is pulled from under our feet. It’s a brilliant showcase of how Bierce plays so plausibly and confidently with the perception of time and reality. I read it as an anti-war story as well.

First published in The San Francisco Examiner, 1890. Collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, ELG Steele, 1891. Available to read online at Project Gutenberg

‘Butcher’s Perfume’ by Sarah Hall

What an opening to a short story: “Later, when I knew her better, Manda told me how she’d beaten two girls at once outside the Crane-makers Arms in Carlisle.” There’s more, much more. Manda Slessor comes from a family where violence is a way of life. Violence underpins each sentence, language taken from the animal world to describe the human world.

I was worried and smiling, all at the same time, as a reader. There’s no messing with Manda, I thought. The writing is overpowering, unique, but similar to Mantel with its original turn of phrase and local dialect. Hall takes you into the guts of the character.

‘Butcher’s Perfume’ is gripping, filled with tension (great use of short sentences) and unsettling. It’s brilliant to be in the world of ‘Butcher’s Perfume’, but I was glad to leave it too.  

First published in The Beautiful Indifference, Faber and Faber, 2011

‘Cheri’ by Jo Ann Beard

I’m new to Jo Ann Beard and so glad to have discovered the American essayist. She’s a compassionate, empathic, clear sighted writer of ‘Cheri’, a novella, that tells the story of the final few weeks of a woman dying of cancer. It’s beautiful. When I finished reading it, I read it again. It is clinical, stark. The imagery of being under ice that links the beginning and the end is haunting.

“She breathes slowly in the narrow pocket of air, and the children in their bright skates congregate above her head. She lingers there for a moment, her cheek pressed against the underside of the ice, a hand reaches down and pushes her under.”

I recommend ‘Cheri’, always with the caveat that you might cry. It feels all too real. It is.

First published in the US as ‘Undertaker, Please Drive Slow’ in Am I Blue? in Tin House, issue no. 12, summer 2002, and as ‘Cheri’ in Festival Days, Little, Brown, 2021. Published as a standalone novella in the UK by Serpent’s Tail, 2023

‘Escape from Spiderhead’ by George Saunders 

If you get to the end of this selection, you’ll notice that the many of the following pieces all coalesce around a subtheme, which is that they are fave stories from fave collections. The former were very hard to extract from the latter, so I wanted to mention each story as a choice in and of itself but also a synecdoche for the collections that they are contained within. ‘Escape From Spiderhead’ is a seminal piece from a seminal collection (please ignore the offensively underwhelming Netflix movie adaptation from 2022). The story is set in a luxurious high security drug testing facility, with characters that are infused with different drugs which influence their emotional states and behaviour. The story is unctuously satisfying in its playfulness with language. The real-time internal monologues of the main character, Jeff, that track his emotional modulation, are somehow at once tender and deeply unsettling. The merging of the familiar yet contrasting languages of bureaucratic big-tech and awkward interpersonal intimacy is both hilarious and very sad, but it’s the ending of the story, where this clipped, emotional sterility breaks out into descriptions of the garden surrounding the Spiderhead compound, that does it for me.

First published in The New Yorker, December 2010. Collected in Tenth of December, Random House, 2013. You can access it here

 ‘Library’ by Ali Smith

A collection’s order is like its connective tissue. As a writer compiling one, you can choose whether your stories coalesce thematically, visually, formally or otherwise. Ali Smith’s Public Library departs from the form of a short story collection altogether in an episodic auto-fictional piece that runs through the book. This series, of which ‘Library’ is first, circles around real life moments and conversations that the writer has had relating to public libraries. This vignette sees Smith and her editor walk into a private members club in a building that may once have been a library. The story ends quickly, with many questions hanging in the air, but the piece alludes to the notions of municipal space – especially the public-private dichotomy – which is a recurring theme throughout the collection. I have always admired the tightrope walk between fiction and non-fiction in Smith’s work, but the idea of an episodic piece that draws everything back to a central line to be something I needed to incorporate my own practice. 

Collected in Public Library and Other Stories, Penguin 2015

‘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)