L’enfant et les sortilèges by Colette, with music by Maurice Ravel

This will only confirm how unspeakable I was as a nipper. This short French opera about a mischievous boy who smashes up his bedroom and hurts nearby animals, then learns his lesson when the objects come to life and the animals start talking (think Where the Wild Things Are meets Disney’s Beauty and The Beast) absolutely fascinated me at about the same time I was enjoying Bobby Brewster stories. My parents had an LP which featured Colette’s short libretto in French (with bits of English sprinkled around too) and even though I didn’t speak any of the language I used to follow the text while the record played because I found the sound mixture of words and music quite haunting. Sometimes I just looked at the words without playing the music. Strange little boy.

Monte Carlo, 1925

‘The Verger’ by W. Somerset Maugham

I came to this initially via a 1950 film compilation of three of Maugham’s short stories called Trio, starring James Hayter in the title role as the verger of St Peter’s, Neville Square, ousted because he is illiterate, but who finds (as many of us do) that redundancy is actually not always such a terrible thing.

First published in Cosmopolitans, Heinemann, 1936. Read it via the British Council here

‘The Purity of the Turf’ by P. G. Wodehouse

This would be my Desert Island short story if I could only take one of the dozen. I can’t see how this account of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster betting on the races, especially the girls’ egg and spoon, at a local village fete could be bettered. It’s just perfect.

First published in The Strand Magazine, July 1922. Collected in The Inimitable Jeeves, Herbert Jenkins, 1923

‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ by anon/Gawain poet

Another slightly rule-bending choice but while it’s a poem I’d also argue that it’s as much of a short story as Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale et al, and written at exactly the same time in the 14th Century. I half-heartedly collect versions/translations of Gawain’s encounter with the eponymous Christmas visitor to King Arthur’s court and his later tribulations with a seductive noblewoman. There’s something to be said for most ‘translations’ but Simon Armitage’s recent effort (Faber & Faber, 2009) is particularly good, though I would also urge readers to have at least a bit of a bash at the original too.

First printed edition Syr Gawayne: A Collection of Ancient Romance-Poems by Scottish and English Authors Relating to That Celebrated Knight of the Round Table, The Bannatyne Club, 1839

‘Crisp New Bills for Mr Teagle’ by Frank Sullivan

A heartwarming Christmas story about a chap who discovers how much people appreciate him when he tries to give them presents. Simple and affecting. Sullivan was one of the Algonquin Round Table circle.

First published in The New Yorker, December 14, 1935 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in A Christmas Treasury, edited by Jack Newcombe, Viking Press, 1982

‘Pontoon Boat’ by Garrison Keillor

For my money, Keillor is unsurpassed as a performer of short stories, as well as the writer of them. I’ve loved his gentle but superb Lake Wobegon tales since I first heard them as an impressionable sixth former on Radio 4’s A Book at Bedtime slot in 1986, and he is the only author whose entire oeuvre I have bought (even though some of it is a bit ropey, I have to admit). One of the highlights of my life was asking him a question at one of his London performances in the mid-1990s. In ‘Pontoon Boat’, the local bar proprietor and proud boat owner Wally takes a delegation of Lutheran ministers out onto the town’s lake in his new vessel. Things go a bit wrong – but, this being Lake Wobegon, only a bit.

First published in Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories, Viking Penguin, 1987

‘The Man Who Would Be King’ by Rudyard Kipling

Two 19th Century British adventurers (and Freemasons) in India decide to head to Afghanistan and set themselves up as regional monarchs. Kingsley Amis described it as “grossly overrated”, but as always he was wrong – this is proper swashbuckling Boys’ Own stuff with a clear message about the morality and sustainability of British colonialism. There’s a cracking 1975 movie version of it starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery.

First published in The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales, AH Wheeler & Co, 1888. Available at The Kipling Society, here

‘Black Caesar’s’ by John Williams

Earlier this year I published a book called My Year of Reading Welshly for which I spent a year reading lots of books by Welsh authors and about Wales. One of the delights was coming across the engaging and witty Five Pubs…, a series of interlinked-ish short stories about Cardiff’s somewhat criminal Butetown underbelly. This first story, in which local gangster Kenny Ibadulla attempts to turn part of his nightclub into a Nation of Islam mosque, is a superb opener.

From Five Pubs, Two Bars, and a Nightclub, Bloomsbury, 1999

Introduction

I recently stopped reviewing books. After more than thirty years writing for various publications, I felt that I’d run out of things to say. So I was a bit hesitant to offer up this anthology, in case it felt too much like reviewing. Once I got started, though, I found I had quite a lot to say about short fiction. I’ve tried to pick stories that mean something to me personally, that have influenced my own writing or thoughts, or that have lodged themselves in my mind for one reason or another. They are in no particular order.

In all those years of journalism, I was rarely commissioned to review a collection of short stories – an indictment of the way the publishing industry and the media undervalue the form. I believe that things are slowly changing, that there is a whole ecosystem of writers, readers and publishers who do value short stories, and A Personal Anthology is a very welcome part of that. Long may it continue.

‘The Fix’ by Percival Everett

Influx Press brought the American writer Percival Everett to wider recognition in the UK by republishing much of his work, including the brilliant short story collection Damned If I Do. They are one of several independent publishers who deserve a great deal of credit for championing short stories.

In ‘The Fix’, sandwich shop owner Douglas Langley rescues a man named Sherman Olney from a beating. He takes Sherman in and Sherman offers to fix Douglas’ fridge then his plumbing. Soon Sherman is fixing everything – a foot massager, a toy car, a razor. Word soon gets around the neighbourhood and Sherman is bombarded with requests. Then he brings a woman back to life. Everett’s story is a perfect example of George Saunders’ dictum about short fiction: “always be escalating”. I love how this story, which begins in a downbeat, fairly ordinary way, takes on a mythic, parable-like quality. Sherman becomes a Christ-like figure, but like Christ his gift threatens his downfall.

First published in New York Stories; collected in Damned If I Do, Influx Press, 2021

‘A Partial List of the Saved’ by Danielle McLaughlin

Being Various, edited by Lucy Caldwell, is an excellent anthology of recent Irish writing. I could have picked several of the stories, including Kit de Waal’s ‘May the Best Man Win’ or ‘Mikey Mullholland’ by Wendy Erskine, but Danielle McLaughlin’s story is the one I keep returning to. It won the Sunday Times/Audible Short Story Award in 2019. A man flies back from the United States to his native Northern Ireland for his dad’s eightieth birthday. He invites his ex-wife to go with him because he hasn’t told his father about their divorce. His sister, who has been looking after their dad, is at her wits’ end. Meanwhile the old man appears to be in a relationship with the housekeeper. McLaughlin imbues this messed-up family dynamic with humour, tension and underlying resentment and love. A visit to the Titanic museum in Belfast and a sighting of a memorial to four men who died during the War of Independence place the drama into wider contexts in this beautifully restrained story.

Published in Being Various, edited by Lucy Caldwell, Faber, 2019; read online here

‘Paymon’s Trio’ by Colette de Curzon

The story of how this came to be published is a tale in itself. Colette de Curzon wrote it in 1949 when she was 22, but because she didn’t know anything about the publishing world, she put away in a folder until her daughter found it 67 years later. She lived long enough to see it published as a chapbook by Nightjar Press in 2017 before passing away in March the following year.

Nightjar Press specialise in publishing stories that editor Nicholas Royle describes as having “something of the uncanny or the gothic or the dark, strange, weird, wonderful” about them. ‘Paymon’s Trio’ is a perfect example: a musician buys a mysterious black book from a second-hand stall and finds tucked into it a piece of music that may or may not be demonic. The music is for a trio – a pianist, a violinist and a cellist – and there is a growing sense of doom as the narrator gathers two friends and they settle to play the three parts.

First published by Nightjar Press, 2017; republished in Best British Short Stories, edited by Nicholas Royle, Salt, 2018

‘The Cast’ by Nicholas Royle

Speaking of Nicholas Royle, I’ve read more stories either written, published or anthologised by him than by anyone else. A staunch advocate of the short story, he has done as much as anyone to promote the form in this country. I’ve greatly enjoyed his most recent collections, the trilogy London Gothic, Manchester Uncanny and Paris Fantastique (Confingo) but I’ll go with this earlier story, included in his collection Mortality and first published in 1992. It’s a tale of love, betrayal and football – all of which are guaranteed to pique my interest – but what I admire most about it is the way Royle blends realism and surrealism – the cast of the title is something completely unexpected. The image of a goalkeeper frozen in mid-air as he makes the save of his life is one that has lodged in my brain for years. It was an early lesson for me in how the short story can be the perfect vehicle for seeing reality at a slant, for encompassing the bizarre.

First published in Interzone #63, 1992; collected in Mortality, Serpent’s Tail 2006

‘The Two-Body Problem’ by Ruby Cowling

Another thing that the short story does really well is experiment with different forms. But the best stories don’t merely use unusual forms for the sake of it – they marry the form to the content. Ruby Cowling’s story, from her collection This Paradise, has two narrators and their texts are laid out side by side on the page. So far so interesting, but it’s only when we learn that the two narrators are twins that the story starts to take on added significance. Their different stories echo and fight each other, come together and part as the twins navigate their way through childhood and adolescence and into adulthood.

First published in I Am Because You Are, Freight Books, 2015; collected in This Paradise, Boiler House Press, 2019