‘The Carpenter Kushakov’ by Daniil Kharms, translated by Matvei Yankelevich

Kharms is here because he is a wonder but also to refute those evil Amazon and marketing-department algorithms that assume I have a single-track mind and that if I like one kind of writer I cannot possibly like a completely different species of writer.

The carpenter Kushakov goes out to buy some glue and slips on the pavement and busts his head. Goes to a drugstore and buys a bandage and tapes up his head. Goes out again and slips and busts his nose. Buys a bandage and tapes up his nose. Goes out again and slips and busts his cheek. Buys a bandage and tapes up his cheek. Goes out again and slips and busts his chin. Buys a bandage and … Back home no one recognises him and they lock the door. “The carpenter Kushakov stood awhile on the landing, spat and went outside.”

Around the time I first read this story my near-neighbour slipped on an icy pavement and put out his hand to break his fall and broke his wrist. And the next day he slipped again and put out the arm that was not in plaster and broke his other wrist. Kushakov reminds me of the old lady who swallowed a fly – and then spider to catch fly, and then bird to catch spider, and then cat to catch bird … Eventually, horse to catch cow. “She’s dead, of course.” Kharms’s blend of absurd logic and structural repetition and violence surely appeals to children. I’m going to read Daniil Kharms to my grandchildren.

Published in Today I Wrote Nothing, The Overlook Press, 2009; online version here

‘Last Evenings on Earth’ by Roberto Bolaño

B, “who is inclined to melancholy (or so he likes to think)”, and his father drive from Mexico City to Acapulco for a holiday. B is aged 22 and is reading an anthology of French surrealist poets translated into Spanish. They stay in an almost empty hotel; they sleep, eat, order beers, stroll on the beach, drive around, watch TV, even have a little adventure (their hired boat capsizes) – time passing “in a placid sort of daze that B’s father associates with ‘The Idea of the Holiday’ (B can’t tell whether his father is serious or pulling his leg)”. Eventually, of course, the mood turns “and an icy phase begins, a phase which appears to be normal but is ruled by deities of ice (who do not, however, offer any relief from the heat that reigns in Acapulco)”. The story ends a split second before violence hits the page. Much of the story depends on the banal but watching Bolaño trying to write dull and failing dismally is one of life’s pleasures.

First published in The New Yorker, 2005, and available online to subscribers; in Last Evenings on Earth, translated by Chris Andrews, Harvill Secker, 2007; Vintage paperback, 2008

‘Rose’ by Guy de Maupassant, translated by H. N. P. Sloman

I have read very little Maupassant. I understand this story to be a seriously odd record of male perception of female desire.

Margot and Simone ride in a landau along the Rue d’Antibes in Cannes on the evening of a festival in which men and women hurl bouquets of flowers, then instruct their coachman to drive out to a nearby bay – tranquillity, bliss, “but there’s just one thing lacking”. “A little love, you mean?” “Yes.”

For Margot, not to be loved, “even if only by a dog”, would be intolerable. Simone is more picky: she’d rather not be loved at all than by – for example – the coach driver. Margot insists that to be loved by a servant is amusing, and recounts the story of the maid she hired four years previously, Rose: a tall, thin, shy girl, skilled dressmaker, genius as a hairdresser. Rose dressed and undressed Margot, and “after my bath she rubbed and massaged me, while I dozed on my sofa”. But then a police inspector arrived and “they took my maid away” in handcuffs: Rose was a man, an escaped rapist and murderer. Margot claims that she felt no anger at having been deceived, and no shame at having been “handled and touched by this man”, but rather “a deep sense of humiliation as a woman” – because, as I understand it, Rose, a rapist, had rejected her as a sexual being.

A final oddity. I’m pretty sure Maupassant has got the women out of sync at the end, and that in the final paragraph it’s Simone and not Margot who is staring at the brass buttons on the coachman’s livery. Am I wrong? If I’m right, why has no one else noticed?

First published in 1884; variously collected, included in Boule de Suif and Other Stories, Penguin, 1946

Gauging a barrel by Piero della Francesca

Going off piste. I like stories that infiltrate or mimic other forms: letters, recipes, inventories, instruction manuals. Here is a found story, both exact and mysterious in its dependence on another way of interpreting the world, in the form of instructions for calculating how much wine your barrel can hold. I like the deadpan tension between the absurd precision of the fractions and the deceptively random nature of the sequential instructions. I like the fact that the author is also the painter of The Nativity and The Baptism of Christ in London’s National Gallery: sublime brushwork and mathematical competence were not entirely separate skills, and Piero could assume the same mathematical knowledge from his lay-educated literate audience. And because I conceive of maths as a (very beautiful) language unto itself, reading this passage is like reading a story in translation. A braccio is an obsolete Italian unit of measurement based on the length of the human arm.

Published in Trattato d’abaco, c.1460; quoted in English translation in Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Oxford University Press, 1972

‘Summer Day’ by Ivan Bunin, translated by Graham Hettlinger

Going short: a dozen lines. “And all day a bootmaker sitting barefoot on a rotting bench near a tumbledown shack, his belt unbuckled and his long shirt hanging loose, the sun beating down on his shaggy head. He sits there killing time with a red dog.” “Shake!” But the dog doesn’t know that command. Eventually the dog “lifts one paw uncertainly, drops it back to the ground”, and gets hit in the face for its pains.

Published in Sunstroke: Selected Stories of Ivan Bunin, Ivan R. Dee Inc., 2002

‘Summer Night’ by Elizabeth Bowen

Going longer. I found this story when, during the time I wrote under the pen name Jack Robinson, I went looking for my family in fiction. There are male Robinsons in fiction by Fielding, Henry James, Conrad, Kafka, Céline, Muriel Spark, Gerald Brenan, Sherwood Anderson, Chris Petit; in films by Patrick Keiller; in poems by Weldon Kees and Simon Armitage; and yes, they share distinctive family traits. ‘Obdurate’ comes to mind. ‘Imperturbable’ is one of the first adjectives applied to Bowen’s Robinson, a factory manager in a small town in Ireland, separated from his wife and children. “When Robinson showed up, late, at the tennis club, his manner with women was easy and teasing, but abstract and perfectly automatic. From this had probably come the legend that he liked women ‘only in one way’.”

A woman drives fast through hilly countryside at sunset to spend the night with Robinson, her lover. Robinson has guests, a deaf woman and her loopy brother, who stay beyond their welcome and are leaving just as the woman arrives. In fact the whole story seems intent on crowding out the lovers – pages are occupied by the woman’s husband, and her two children, and Aunt Fran – and when, finally, the lovers are alone everything is awkward, neither of them knows how to behave. There’s a war on: “You cannot look at the sky without seeing the shadow, the men destroying each other.” The only people who come out of this well are the deaf woman and Vivie, one of the woman’s children: “One arbitrary line only divided this child from the animal: all her senses stood up, wanting to run the night.”

I did think about choosing the scene – around 20 pages – in Bowen’s The House in Parisset in the garden of an emptied-out house in Twickenham on an idle, warm afternoon at the end of April: Karen, Max and Naomi lying under a cherry tree in blossom, silences and drifting talk (“What I say would often be right if I meant something else”), hands touching on the grass. In my mind it’s a scene that swims free of its context, of what comes before and what after, to become a complete short story in itself; many novels contain such episodes.

Published in Look at All the Roses, Jonathan Cape, 1941; collected in The Collected Stories, Vintage, 1999

‘Dancing’ by James Buchan

I need a story in here from one of the late 20th-century white males who peddled white male lust and privilege in gorgeous bespoke sentences and who for a time had me in thrall: James Kennaway, James Salter, Alfred Hayes … I’m choosing ‘Dancing’ by James Buchan, about whom Michael Hofmann once declared: “I don’t believe this country has a better writer to offer.” ‘Dancing’ is the third in a series of stories that make up Slide, a book that (says the blurb) “calmly records the moral demolition of an Englishman”. The opening: “My first foreign posting was in Kuwait, where I went in 1979 as Press and Information Secretary at the Embassy”: booze, sex, death, cover-ups, tribal loyalty. The closing:

‘Dance,’ Gay shouted. ‘Dance, cunts.’

She was falling. Her hair swept a Persian rug. Her eyes were wide open, looking past me or at nothing at all. I felt my balance go. I hit the chess table, and felt it sway and teeter over. The bronze horse danced. Picture lights. Mouths agape. Blue stripes. A burst of sparks. Black shoes. Kurt Axel.

Published in Slide, Heinemann, 1991; Minerva paperback, 1992

‘The Taking of Elżbieta’ by Ryszard Kapuściński

Grace Paley, Isak Dinesen, Alejandro Zambra and Etgar Keret are knocking at the front door … But I left the back door open and this one, which I happened to be reading at the time of making this list, snuck in. Nobody Leaves is a collection of Kapuściński’s early domestic reportage in post-Stalinist but still Communist Poland, bulletins from a place that, as the translator notes in the introduction, “was, from our perspective today, as ‘exotic’ as any of the Third World countries he covered”. Fact, but it reads as fiction. Elżbieta was born in late 1939; her father was imprisoned by the Germans, her mother dug beets (“the soil that beets grow in is heavy soil”); after the war her father suffered two heart attacks and couldn’t work, her mother sold the medicines she was given for her tuberculosis “so that I could give Elżbieta what she needed”. The girl becomes a schoolteacher but instead of going to university she enters a convent: “At Elżbieta’s home it was cold, the pot was empty, and her mother lay there spitting clots. At the nuns’ it was warm and they fed her well.” The mother travels to the convent and is rebuffed; writes to her daughter and the letter is not delivered; writes to the Primate of Poland and is told “we advise you to keep quiet”. The narrator: “It strikes me that this is not bad advice … I also think that centuries of experience have gone into this reply.” The narrator visits Elżbieta – “we were kneeling in the snow, under a low sky, with an iron grille between us” – and is asked what he has brought for her. “I really don’t know. Perhaps only your mother’s scream.”

For more Polish reportage-as-story, see Hanna Krall, The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories (translated by Madeline G. Levine, Other Press, 2005).

Published in Nobody Leaves, translated by William R. Brand, Penguin Classics, 2017

‘Love, Death & Trousers’ by Laura Francis and Alexander Masters

Curated transcription. The curator here is Alexander Masters, author of A Discarded Life, based on 148 diaries found in a skip in Cambridge in 2001. The diary-writer was Laura Francis, live-in companion and servant for an elderly professor. Masters on Francis: “Laura could be an excellent diarist but frequently wasn’t … Her writing is repetitive, self-obsessed, confused, and two millimeters high.” But: “Even when the diaries are agonizingly tedious, you want to go on reading them because they are true. There’s none of the story-teller’s fraudulent scene-setting, character development, points of conflict, concluding resolution. You are peering in on a real woman who thinks she is alone – a woman in the final stages of tedium. She is writing about being human: the arbitrariness, the impotence, the fog.”

For The Paris Review, Masters arranged selected diary entries on specific subjects into ‘found stories’. The trousers one is hilarious. Some entries from another selection:

Various dates, 1959:

E said I’m very small, not interested in the world.

E said she didn’t believe in any of my gifts, not even writing.

E said I am stupid.

E said my song-capacity nothing, just a manifestation of the sexual impulse, like the singing of the birds.

July 23rd: Sat with the flickering lights in the leaves of trees playing in the hall, and thought thoughts that weren’t thoughts.

Aug: A desperate need for E; if E would have nothing more to do with me, I’d have nothing more to live for – would go ‘off my rocker’, or commit suicide. Almost feel I HATE E.

Published in The Paris Review, Summer 2017; available online to subscribers

‘Itinerary’ by Lucia Berlin

“I was leaving Chile for college in New Mexico. It was the going alone that was so glamorous. Dark glasses and high heels.” And it’s her first plane trip. There are stop-offs, at each of which her father has arranged for someone to meet her. Lima: Ingeborg, long tan legs, a large colour photograph of her father wearing “a rose-colored shirt that I had never seen before”. Panama: Mrs Kirby, canasta in “the pale silence of the American sector”. Miami: aunt Martha, grotesquely fat, “I clung to her, sank into her and her smell of Jergens lotion, Johnson’s baby powder”. Albuquerque: “The air was clean and cold in New Mexico. No one met me.” Pride, excitement, vulnerability, “so much I did not see or understand, and now it is too late”.

Where has Lucia Berlin been all my life? She was published by small presses in the 1980s and by Black Sparrow Press from 1990 and she died in 2004 and it took until 2015 for a big publisher, and then critics and reviewers, to wake up and take notice. She is sharp, quick (but alert to everything going on in the room), funny, unafraid, generous. (All things which contemporary mainstream publishing is not: I have no doubt there are other Lucia Berlins out there still waiting for the readers they deserve.) Of course she wrote short stories: there were too many other things going on in her life to sit down at a desk for the time it takes to write a novel.

Published in Evening in Paradise, Picador, 2018

Introduction

I believe that anthologies are, in and of themselves, a type of story. Poor anthologies are bitty; a playlist and not an album. It doesn’t matter how good the individual bits are; a proper anthology should have something to say as a curated composition.

That said, I’m too British at this point to make an anthology with a theme of ‘me’. Instead, I’ve chosen twelve stories that I think are remarkable for showcasing the power and potential of short fiction. They’re all clever and insightful and highly entertaining, as many good stories are. But the best short stories use the medium to do something novel (pun intended); to provide a perspective that is perfectly suited for the exact length and depth of the format.

‘The Old-Maid Aunt’ by Mary Wilkins Freeman

Mary Wilkins Freeman is a (sadly overlooked) turn-of-the-century author and fierce feminist writer, much admired by her peers. The Whole Family was the brainchild of novelist William Dean Howells; a ‘collaborative’ with a dozen authors (including Henry James) all telling interconnected short stories about a single family, and centred around the engagement of Peggy and Harry. Freeman is given the second chapter, but took exception to the description of her character in Howells’ set-up and proceeded to turn the frumpy ‘maiden aunt’ into a sexual dynamo who flirts with her niece’s fiancé and ultimately torpedoes the relationship entirely. The remaining ten authors have to pick up the pieces after the “explosion of a bombshell” (the editor’s words) as Freeman fiercely defended her decision to liberate her character.

The story of the story is fascinating, but even without context, Freeman’s contribution is simply excellent work. Freeman not only showcases a new perspective, but changes the entire narrative around her. By subverting expectations, she transforms Aunt Elizabeth from an insipid wallflower to an intriguing, admirable woman who threatens to steal the spotlight entirely. (So much so that she’s quickly packed off to New York by the book’s other contributors!)

First published in Harper’s Bazaar, 1907. Collected in The Whole Family, Harper & Brothers, 1908. Read it online here

‘The Wonderful Old Gentleman’ by Dorothy Parker

Including Parker feels like a cliché, and I can’t imagine she’d appreciate that, but – she’s inescapable. Parker’s inarguably one of the finest stylists of short form writing – poems, reviews, and, of course, short stories.

‘The Wonderful Old Gentleman’ is Parker at her very best. It is set in a family’s hideously stifling sitting room, while the clan’s elderly patriarch is dying in a bedroom upstairs. As Parker can be, it is merciless from the opening lines:

“If the Bains had striven for years, they could have been no more successful in making their living-room into a small but admirably complete museum of objects suggesting strain, discomfort, or the tomb. Yet they had never even tried for the effect.”

As the story unfolds, we learn about the “old gentleman’s” oppressive presence, and the emotional and physical wear and tear he’s inflicted on the family. But is that enough to merit their hypocrisy as they sit, blandly exchanging platitudes as they wait for his death? This story is – like ‘A Telephone Call’ – torturous, as Parker conveys a crushing anxiety. Line by line, Parker’s one of the most cunningly quotable writers imaginable. But it is her ability to inflict emotion on the reader that makes her stories more than cruel caricature. We’re laughing at her characters, but somehow we feel the pain of being laughed at as well.

First published in Pictorial Review, January 1926. Collected in Complete Stories, Penguin, 1995

‘Beyond the Black River’ by Robert E. Howard

Like most of Howard’s stories, the theme here is the tension between civilisation and barbarism – and, in this instance, the latter triumphs. Howard’s most famous creation, Conan, finds himself is involved through happenstance – he’s hanging out in the the area, and gets caught up in the conflict between a handful of pioneers and a burgeoning horde of ‘Picts’. A barbarian himself (obvs), Conan sees the settlers’ efforts to bring order to chaos as futile – and he’s right, as the story ends tragically.

‘Beyond the Black River’ takes the unusual approach of making Conan the secondary character. The Spy Who Loved Me approach provides a different point of view to what is initially established as a conventional pulp adventure. Balthus, an ordinary man, is the true protagonist of the story. As a pioneer, he’s trying (and ultimately failing) to build something, but is trapped between inexorable, destructive forces. Conan himself is undeniably impressive, yet his triumphs are, ultimately, meaningless – if not outright destructive.

The barbarian is, to both Balthus and to the reader, a legendary, superhuman figure. But in this story, Conan’s presented less as a man and more of a natural force; he’s not a person, he’s a plot point. Howard’s ability to deconstruct his own literary creation earns this story a place on my list. It is an excellent adventure in and of itself, but when taken in the context of the greater mythos, it is an absolute triumph.

First published in Weird Tales, May 1935. Collected in The Complete Chronicles of Conan, Gollancz, 2016. Read it online here