‘The Axe’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

“Of all the novelists in English of the last quarter-century,” writes Philip Hensher, “she has the most unarguable claim on greatness.” As a Fitzgerald completist, I can’t disagree. It can be hard to convey to anyone who hasn’t read her quite how she achieves this greatness. She can write about desperate things – power and powerlessness, cruelty and betrayal – with a lightness of touch and a deftness of exposition that prove oddly exhilarating. There’s a luminous sense of a hinterland to her people and their behaviour, such that even peripheral characters, in the instant that they claim our attention, wholly convince us of their quiddity. Penelope Fitzgerald wrote few short stories: her one collection, The Means of Escape, was published posthumously. I’ve selected ‘The Axe’ for the simple reason that it’s one of the few ghost stories to have given me a frisson since I fell for the genre as a teenager. (Fitzgerald was good at ghosts: see the M. R. James pastiche in her novel The Gate of Angels and an alarming poltergeist in The Bookshop.) Part of the effectiveness of ‘The Axe’ lies in its dingy, everyday setting. It has psychological and emotional truth. It’s one of the most memorable iterations of her recurrent theme, as defined by her biographer Hermione Lee: “the courage of those who are born defeated and the weakness of the strong.” The story takes the form of a letter addressed by a junior manager to his superior concerning the professional fate of his clerical assistant, W.S. Singlebury, whose sacking he has been charged with. The context in which this letter is being composed is revealed in the final paragraph. It’s a creepy ending to a story whose long-term resonance in the imagination depends not so much on the supernatural as on our glimpse of a narrow and endurable life made intolerable by callous authority.

First published in The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories, Jonathan Cape, London, 1975. Collected in The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald, Flamingo, London, 2000

‘My Dear Palestrina’ by Bernard MacLaverty

I met Bernard MacLaverty when he was the guest of honour at a literary festival in Kikinda, Serbia, in the spring of 2011. I found him kindly and genial, without a trace of literary hauteur. Most writers, in my experience, are decent sorts; though martinets and snobs exist, generally the qualities of the person inform the qualities of the writing. Reading MacLaverty, you are in the company of a decent human who is giving of the best of himself. I have been moved by all of his novels and many of his short stories, even as I’ve taken aesthetic pleasure in his shrewd, limpid style. “His prose is invisible,” wrote one critic for The Observer, “free of tricks, as though it was your own thoughts.” ‘My Dear Palestrina’ is the story of Danny, a musically gifted boy from a working-class family who is sent to have piano lessons with Miss Schwartz, a Jewish Polish refugee living in 1950s Ulster. Miss Schwartz is one culturally peripheral character in this society; a socialist blacksmith whom Danny befriends is another. The outsider outlooks of these misfits – one living for music, the other for social justice – begin to set Danny on a path to alienation from his home culture and its assumptions. He is drawn to Miss Schwartz and her sensibility, her valiant yet failing efforts to keep despair and, later, disease from annihilating her. At the same time, the religious and political tensions that will shortly to the Troubles are bubbling under the surface. Can music and art protect us from the pain of exile, or shield us from our self-destructive urges? This is a sad and painful coming-of-age story that packs a novel’s worth of material and themes into thirty pages. MacLaverty himself adapted it for a 1980 television play – such are the riches it contains.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 1980. First published in A Time to Dance by Bernard MacLaverty, Jonathan Cape, London, 1982

‘Next Term We’ll Mash You’ by Penelope Lively

The short stories assembled in Penelope Lively’s Pack of Cards (1986) constitute, for my money, one of the strongest single author collections out there. Lively is one of those rare authors who has, over a long career, bridged the gap between literary ambition and popular appeal. This, alongside the middle-class, domestic settings of most of her fiction, has tended to put her work, in critical minds, in the company of the likes of Joanna Trollope and Rosamund Pilcher. No shade on those two, but I think this undersells Penelope Lively. At her best, she is a technically exemplary writer: I have used this short story with creative students to demonstrate perspective, withholding and revealing, and adjectival and adverbial word selection. ‘Next Term We Will Mash You’ is exactly the slice of life, moment in time variant of the short form that I described in relation to Chekhov. We are taken to a specific day, a specific place, with backstories unexposed but hinted at, as a small boy is taken by his parents to visit the boarding school to which he will be consigned in the near future. The narrative moves from one character perspective to another (the bluff and insensitive father, the mother assessing the class indicators in the headmaster’s study, evaluating him and his wife). It’s the perspective of the child that haunts the memory after reading. His partial understanding, his already half-cauterised sensibility that, we know, will be further blunted once he enters the casual cruelty of the boarding school environment. Lively delineates all this with admirable economy; her word choice is nearly faultless (just once, when the headmaster rests – this is the 1970s – his hand on the boy’s head and we are told ‘it was as though he had but to clench his fingers to crush the skull’, does she overegg the pudding). In just over four pages, Penelope Lively skewers an entire class and culture, leaving us with its latest impending victim, sitting in the car home, ‘his face haggard with anticipation’.

First published in Nothing Missing but the Samovar by Penelope Lively, William Heinemann, London, 1978. Reissued in Pack of Cards, Stories 1978-1986 by Penelope Lively, William Heineman, London, 1986

‘John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ by Angela Carter

Everyone knows, or at least has heard of, Angela Carter’s postmodernist interrogation of fairy tales and the Gothic in The Bloody Chamber. I haven’t selected from that book. My choice isn’t the best short story Carter wrote, but it remains the first of hers that I read and it was a creatively liberating experience. ‘John’s Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ revealed to me, in my early twenties, that the short story can be pretty much anything you want to make it. It can encompass all genres but it can also borrow from, or cannibalise, other forms, from the screenplay to the essay. Carter takes the plot of the Jacobean tragedy by John Ford and imagines it reconfigured as an American Western by a later John Ford, the filmmaker. The result is a taste of a cinematic project that never was… and never would have been. (What Hollywood studio would have backed a story about murderous incest?) Carter intersperses straight prose narrative with excerpts from the original play and fragments of the fictional screenplay. This collage strategy might have an alienating effect on the reader, yet I find the story, at least until its denouement, surprisingly affecting. Postmodernism can offer ways into story as well as exposing story’s artifice. Carter liked to get under the skin of popular genres, from fairy tale to American Gothic. Her imagination was fed by books and films, as ours tend to be. But her writing is never bloodless. And she proves that, contrary to the cliché, you don’t have to confine yourself, as a writer, to ‘what you know’. For what you have read, watched, or imagined, are also known, and portals to the imagination.

First published in Granta 25, Autumn 1988. Collected in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders by Angela Carter, Chatto & Windus, London, 1993, and again in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1995

‘Lost Journey’ by A. L. Barker

Not to be confused with A. L. Kennedy or Pat Barker, A. L. Barker was one of those authors who can find consolation for mediocre sales in the admiration of their peers. Auberon Waugh and Rebecca West both considered her exceptional. She published eleven novels, one of which earned her a place on the 1969 Booker shortlist, yet she was also a prolific writer of short stories. Many of these engage with horror and the supernatural. Though far from callous towards her characters, she tends to view them and their motives with scepticism. In ‘Lost Journey’, her young narrator falls for the sexy sidekick of a seemingly demented and impossibly ancient woman, Gerda Charles, who claims to the cousin of Queen Elizabeth I’s favourite, Robert Dudley. Like the ‘strange stories’ of her contemporary, Robert Aickman, ‘Lost Journey’ follows a hapless protagonist drawn by erotic yearnings to the edge of disaster. But there is more overt comedy here than in Aickman, as the supernatural and the everyday converge. A.L. Barker liked to think of her shorty stories as ‘dark explosions’, and this is one of the best of them.

First published in Element of Doubt, Vintage, London, 1992. Reissued as a standalone title by Galley Beggar, Norwich, 2014

‘Sometimes You Think You Are Alone’ by Alison Moore

Sometimes you think no fiction can unnerve you. You have, after all, been in this game for some time. As a writer, as a reader, you know the ropes and the tropes. A sinister tale could really haunt you when you were a child but now the thrill is gone. Just occasionally, however, and this very rarely, a story can still crawl under your skin. Your tedious impulse to anticipate a twist, to look for the card up the author’s sleeve, is not always up to the ingenuity, or the technical skill, of a really effective writer. Alison Moore is one of these. Her stories are lean, polished – perhaps you should say whetted – and disquieting. This particular piece makes very skilful use of the second person narrative. At first, you assume that you, the reader, are being invited imaginatively into the action. This is what those choose-your-adventure books in the eighties did. (‘You meet a goblin holding a bag of gold. Do you speak to the goblin? Go to page 73. Do you cut off its head and steal the gold? Go to page 102.’) But this is not what’s going on here. Gradually, you realise that there is a narrator who is also an antagonist. As you get deeper into the intrigue, you come to understand the significance of what you have already read. Small details and episodes come into new focus. You are in terrible peril, and for some time you have had no inkling of it… The second person point-of-view is hard to sustain unless you, the writer, have a very good technical reason to use it. Alison Moore has a very good reason. Which is also a very nasty reason. You have read this story in writing workshop, and it’s quite a thrill to watch the class as the penny drops. Is it a profound work of literature? Perhaps not. Has it etched itself into your memory? Most certainly. And that is why it sits at the end of your personal anthology.

First published in The Screaming Book of Horror, Screaming Dreams Press, 2012. Collected in The Pre-War House and other stories by Alison Moore, Salt Publishing, Norwich, 2013

‘Stone Quarry’ by Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane is my favorite writer and I reread his work often. He has been called a grounded visionary who writes mystic fictions. His prose is virtuosic, with grammatically precise, beautifully constructed, yet oftentimes complex sentences that may require rereading. Merve Emre has praised the “technicity” of his writing. In discussing his work, Murnane has said, “behind a simple seeming image can lie a dense network of meaning.” He talks about a “country on the far side of fiction”, whose “setting is place after place in the invisible world”. This “invisible world”, which can be equated with our mind, contains a “richly detailed map of an immense landscape.” There are many dichotomies at play in his work: visible vs invisible; actual vs. possible; communication vs silence; presence vs absence.

These all come into play in ‘Stone Quarry’ and any attempt at unearthing the import of this story will be but a feeble effort. I can but only offer some brief glints of light as I have discerned them. It is about a most unusual writing workshop, the amusingly named Waldo school, whose avowed purpose is to communicate the seriousness of writing fiction. Participants are not allowed to talk to each other; communication is done by exchanging fiction they have written during the day. Writing is destroyed at the end of the workshop, suggesting that when we write it is primarily for ourselves. An amusing scene which should resonate with every writer is of a participant still revising his work as he is preparing to throw it in the bonfire. As in many of Murnane’s stories there is also an unapproachable, inaccessible woman.

For me, the essence of the story is about the solitary nature of reading and writing. My favorite quote about writing comes from this story. “A writer’s precious resource is the belief that he or she is the solitary witness to an inexhaustible profusion of images from which one might read all the wisdom of the world.” The narrator senses that he must approach the actual obliquely, looking inward into the solitude of the self to become a “starer into the fog” and a “mutterer of the names of islands on the wrong side of the country”. It might then be the case that words might be found where “the invisible was on the point of becoming visible”.

First published in Meanjin, 1986, and available to read here. Collected in Stream System: Collected Stories of Gerald Murnane, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018

‘Billie Holiday’ by Elizabeth Hardwick

This is the first piece I ever read by Elizabeth Hardwick. I had seen her touted as one of the great essayists and knew she had a hand in founding NYRB. I was amazed at the expressiveness of the writing and have since read most of her essays. Sentence after sentence was a marvel of prose with evocative descriptions, startling adjectives, and surprising metaphors; it is the kind of prose that has seemingly been lost in most contemporary writing, perhaps due to an unwillingness to invest time in what she has referred to elsewhere as “the cold hardship of writing”. Is this a short story, is it an essay, or is it memoir? A slightly revised version appears as a section in her novel Sleepless Nights, and I think of it as a short story, where certain factual events have been embellished.

The narrator lives in a hotel, which is surrounded by “futile shops” selling “incurious curiosities”. She begins to frequent jazz clubs with her roommate where she encounters the “stately, sinister” Billie Holiday, with her “splendid archaic head dragged up from the Aegean” and her air of “luminous destruction”. “Here was a woman who had never been a Christian”. Her erstwhile trumpeter and lover with his lovely face, “looked like a sacrifice impaled on the stalk of his head”, and his brother, her gofer, was a “hectic Hermes, working in Hades”. Ultimately, the defining characteristic of Billie Holiday was style, her “retrieval from darkness of pure style.” I periodically reread Hardwick’s essay ‘The Art of the Essay’, a paradigm itself of essay writing, to revivify my own writing. In this latter essay, Hardwick ends it by stating that the most important aspect of an essay, which also applies to short stories, is “the soloist’s personal signature flowing through the text.” Few writers can match Hardwick’s personal signature.

First published in the New York Review of Books, March 1976, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in The Red Thread: Twenty Years of NYRB Classics, A Selection, edited by Edwin Frank, New York Review Books, 2019

‘Black Venus’ by Angela Carter

Here are phrases from the opening paragraph. “Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart……Soft twists of mist invade the alleys, rise up from the slow river like exhalations of an exhausted spirit.” What immediately attracted me to Angela Carter was the language, the lush vitality of her painterly prose, Proustian in its polyphony with surprising metaphors and vivid imagery. ‘Black Venus’ is about Jeanne Duval, the courtesan mistress of Baudelaire, his mistress-of mistresses, with whom he had a tumultuous on-off relationship. She was his muse for several of the poems in Flowers of Evil, the one central to this story being ‘La Serpent Qui Danse’. In the central scene she dances naked for Baudelaire in his apartment evoking the seamier side of the Belle Époque. Then, later, ‘Venus lies on the bed, waiting for a wind to rise’, as Carter conjures images of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Interspersed with scenes from Baudelaire’s apartment, Carter reimagines her early years prior to her arrival in Paris and then her final syphilis-ridden days after she suffered a stroke. But, oh, the language! If only I could write like that.

First published in Black Venus, Chatto & Windus, 1985; collected in Burning Your Boats: The Collected Stories, Penguin, 1996

‘Oscar’ by Djuna Barnes

When I first read Djuna Barnes’ masterpiece Nightwood, my intrigue and fascination was coupled with bemusement. I did not really understand nor could hope to explain what I had just read. Reading her recently published book of short stories, I Am Alien to Life, allowed me to begin to perceive certain recurring themes. Foremost among the pleasures of reading Barnes is her idiosyncratic use of language. In his introduction to Nightwood, T.S. Eliot praises her “great achievement of style and the beauty of phrasing”, while Merve Emre in her introduction to these stories praises the “strange beauty” of her expressive writing.

In ‘Oscar”, Emma is a twice-married widow raising her teenage son, Oscar. She vacillates between two male suitors, Strausmann, “filled with German lust”, who could “turn the country, with a single gesture, into a brothel”, and Kahn, who has “an odor about him of the rather recent cult of the terribly good”. The terribly good do not have much currency in Djuna’s world. As she writes elsewhere, to be undefiled is a “terrible virtue”. The themes of “Oscar” exemplify those present in these stories of alienation, as their characters, such as Emma and Kahn, cleave to life in a state of melancholy and dire expectancy, longing for meaning and beauty. Emma bemoans her life as she grapples with feelings of hopeless estrangement from an unintelligible world.. “What are we all doing here? I must know, I must know.” She longs for “soul-making” in the sense of Keats. In fact, the essential question in these stories is how one to make one’s mark in the world. What if one’s life has been false, “a little abyss from which I shall crawl, laughing at the evil of my own limitations”? The unexpected conclusion of the story comes as a startling surprise to the reader.

First published in A Book, Boni and Liveright, 1923; collected in I am Alien to Life, edited and with a foreword by Merve Emre, McNally Editions, 2024

‘The Book of Sand’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley

The phrase mystic fictions immediately brings to mind Jorge Luis Borges. On the subject of infinity, Jorge Luis Borges opined, “there is one concept that corrupts and deranges the others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited domain is Ethics; I refer to the Infinite.” He went on to say it would take him seven years of metaphysical, theological, and mathematical study to begin to broach the topic. Borges was conversant with mathematics, certainly being familiar with Cantor’s set theory, as he named ‘The Aleph’ after Cantor’s transfinite numbers. He reviewed a mathematics book, in which he amusingly referred to the “mildly obscene” Möbius strip. (The Möbius strip was the inspiration for a story ‘The Disk’ about a one-sided coin.)

As a mathematician, I have always enjoyed his stories regarding the infinite. Most famous of these are ‘The Library of Babel’ and ‘The Aleph’. Less well-known, but a particular favorite of mine, is ‘The Book of Sand’. Four short pages encapsulate the magic of Borges’ fictions. A mysterious man shows up at the door of the narrator, a collector of rare books, with a book containing an infinite number of pages. Upon reading a page in this Book of Books and then closing it, one will never encounter that page again. The pages are like grains of sand and are metonymic of the moments in our lives, which can never be recaptured except through the vagaries of memory. Our narrator acquires the book and becomes obsessed with it. Soon he realizes, echoing the quote from Borges, that it is monstrous. “I felt it was a nightmare thing, an obscene thing, and that it defiled and corrupted reality.” It always gave me pleasure to show students that if this Book of Sand had countably many infinite, infinitely thin pages, then it can be proven that if you held it vertically and looked at the spine, you would not see it, since it would have what is called measure 0.

First published in Spanish in El libro de arena in 1975; first published in English in a translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in The New Yorker, 1977; now available in Collected Fictions, Penguin Books, 1998

‘Reincarnation’ by Cristina Rivera Garza

E.M. Forster wrote in his commonplace book “only things seen sideways sink deep.” This quote is very apposite to the fiction of Cristina Rivera Garza. She recently won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction; however, it is her fiction that is strangely engrossing and compelling, albeit unsettling and mysterious. In the midst of her novel Death Takes Me, Rivera Garza writes: “What is really happening? This the novel cannot know.” I like her experimentation: Death Takes Me is an unusual hybrid of genres. Her introduction to this book of short stories was very illuminating, particularly her notion of the reader as an accomplice or co-conspirator. Using the metaphor of buildings, she says that if a novel can be thought of as a house, a short story is akin to a room or a habitation. The final section of the collection, Diminitus, experiments with the very short form, and as can be gleaned from the Latin, the “habitations” are very small spaces, perhaps the corner of a room.

‘Reincarnation’ comprises approximately seventy isolated sentences; there are no paragraphs. It is about a couple whose two-year-old son has died and their bereavement has led to estrangement, if not anger. Language is never a handmaiden to the narrative in Rivera Garza’s writing. She uses the word affliction to describe the state of the couple. “The affliction could be heard in the ringing of her heels on the marble floor. The affliction is a matter of excess of order.” Sentences about the couple are intercalated with interjections by the narrator making pronouncements not only on the couple’s situation, but also general observations about the human condition, as well as the role of language. “The crime is a place to which you have to return. Language is like that. The same can be said about accidental death.” The nature of the exposition behooves the reader to become an accomplice in creating meaning for the story.

Available in New and Selected Stories, Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2022

‘Out’ by Samanta Schweblin

When I first read about Samanta Schweblin, my impression was that her stories might not necessarily be my cup of tea, so to speak. Literary creepiness at times verging into horror were among some of the descriptions. Nonetheless, I reconsidered. Nobelist J.M. Coetzee has succinctly captured much of her appeal. “Tales of somber humor, full of characters who slide into the cracks or fall through holes into alternate realities.” I began with Seven Empty Houses and was surprised by how compelling I found the lapidary precision of her prose; the writing is austere, but not one word is wasted as the narrative is propelled forward and after a page or two is difficult to put down. Her stories are filled with what Anne Carson has called the metaphysical silence between the words. I have since read all her work and eagerly await her next book.

‘Out’ begins with a woman coming out of the shower, standing in front of her husband wanting to say something, seemingly in atonement for a misdeed, but the words will not come out. It remains a mystery. “I have to say it, I tell myself, because it is part of the punishment I now have coming. I have to say it, I repeat to myself, but it’s an impossible command.’” Things are clearly amiss and she abruptly walks out of the house with wet hair, naked under her bathrobe, and in slippers. In the elevator she meets a man who announces his wife will kill him if he goes home. He is clearly from a different social class, perhaps a janitor or electrician, or so she surmises. As the woman is walking along the street aimlessly, the man from the elevator drives by and she gets in the car. He refers to himself as an escapist, amusingly so, as he fixes fire escapes. Yet, is she not in fact the escapist, escaping from her life and uncomfortable relationship with her husband? The story, as with many of the others, is pregnant with possibilities, dread, and foreboding. What are the man’s intentions? Why is she doing this? What will be the denouement? Part of the appeal of her work is the subversion of expectations.

Published online in English translation on Bookanista, and available to read here; also in Seven Empty Houses, Riverhead Press, 2002

‘Before the Law’ and ‘The Imperial Message’ by Franz Kafka

Albert Einstein has said, “Kafka is too much for the human mind to grasp”. There are many fascinating short stories that lend themselves to a myriad of interpretations, stories such as ‘The Metamorphosis’, ‘The Country Doctor’, and ‘The Burrow’. However, many of his main themes and concerns appear in condensed albeit recondite form in his short parables, in particular in ‘Before the Law’ and ‘The Imperial Message’. To quote the definition, a parable is a short allegorical story designed to teach some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson. What exactly are the truths and moral lessons that Kafka is imparting in these two brief works? ‘Before the Law’ is a scant two pages and ‘The Imperial Message’ is barely one.

In ‘Before the Law’, a man from the country arrives before the Law and prays for admittance from a gatekeeper, who replies that admittance is possible, but not at this time. The man thinks that “the Law should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone.” Years go by and the man sits there waiting for admittance. As he nears death, he asks a final question. How is it that he is the only one seeking admittance to the Law? The reply is, “no one else could ever be admitted since this gate is only for you. I am going to shut it now.” This very brief story suggests a myriad of questions, the first being what exactly is the Law? Are we speaking in terms of religion? Is it God? Or, does it represent our society? Our parents? The government? What else might it represent? Other questions then immediately insinuate themselves. Are we always before some version of the Law? What does the doorkeeper/gateway represent?

What does it mean to be “outside” as opposed to “inside”? Is it not only about admittance, but also acceptance, as well as the idea of permission? Do we always strive for something that is beyond us, forever inaccessible, like the Castle is for K, in Kafka’s last unfinished book? We do live in a world of prohibitions and restrictions, where the concept of permission is central. We never understand why admittance is so important to the man. For whatever reason, and most likely he does not understand it himself, he seems to have wasted his life hoping to pass through the gate. The French literary critic Hélène offers some interesting perspectives. She suggests “the law cannot be defined.” “The law is in the man, so how can he enter the law?” The law represents a divided desire in the man, since he desperately wants but needs permission.

In ‘The Imperial Message”, a dying Emperor entrusts a message to a messenger intended for a man who awaits, “the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun.” The parable is addressed to this man. However, due to insurmountable obstacles, the messenger is unable to reach him. The story ends with the enigmatic rejoinder to the waiting man. “But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.”

In what sense are the parables similar? Perhaps knowledge and salvation are possible, and we can try to approach them, as long as we understand we will never reach them. It may be the case that the Emperor’s wisdom lies within him in the same sense that the law is within the man. This brings to mind a quote from Gerald Murnane. “Everything is possible except, of course, the actual.”

(It should be noted that there is a longer version of ‘Before the Law’ with much more detailed philosophical discussion between the man and the gatekeeper, but I prefer this gnomic version.)

in The Complete Short Stories and Parables, Quality paperback Book Club, New York, 1983