‘Journey of a Cage’ by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull

Like the dancer Nijinsky, Krzhizhanovsky was a Russified Pole, and like Nijinsky, beautiful strange and vivid. Living as he did in the Soviet Union, Krzhizhanovksky’s work wasn’t published until 1989, long after his death in 1950. ‘Journey of a Cage’ has something in common with the sad French film Balthazar, in that it tracks the tragic passing of an animal through many human hands, in this story, a grey parrot in a cage.

Written in Russian in the 1920s; First published in English in Unwitting Street, NYRB classics, 2020

‘Star’ by Yukio Mishima, translated by Sam Bett

Authors who committed suicide have a reputation for being gloomy and serious, but in fact it is the opposite, their writing is often the most humorously dark. This story is written from the perspective of a Japanese male celebrity actor having an affair with his older, “dowdy” assistant. It has much to say about our grotesque obsession with fame.

First published in Japanese in Gunzo, November 1960. First published in translation as Star, New Directions/Penguin, 2019

‘The Thing in the Forest’ by A. S. Byatt

A. S. Byatt is one of those rare writers equally powerful as a short story writer and a novelist, both filled with her rich knowledge of culture and history. Her work isn’t very fashionable at the moment, and I think its because we live in an especially anti-art and anti- intellectual moment. Like Angela Carter, she is one I still wish was around to reflect on things. This is a retelling of the Lambton Worm legend set during the blitz of World War Two, when city children were evacuated to the countryside.

Published in The Little Black Book of Stories, Vintage, 2004; also available as a Vintage Digital single, 2011

‘The Red Shoes’ by Hans Christian Andersen

I love Hans Christian Andersen. His stories are part of the cultural subconscious, but he isn’t often read directly. This story, which inspired a Powell and Pressburger film and a Kate Bush album, is particularly dark and terrifying – I don’t think a lot of writers read him or take him seriously because he is from a lower class background.

First published as ‘De røde sko’ in Nye Eventyr. Første Bind. Tredie Samling, Reitzel, 1845. Variously translated, including by Tiina Nunnally in Fairy Tales, Penguin Classics, 2005

‘First Love’ by Samuel Beckett

The British Penguin publication of this calls it a novella, because of the English aversion to short fiction, but this is one of the most perfect short stories. I feel like I am in some sort of strange green belly when reading it. “My sandwich, my banana, taste sweeter when I’m sitting on a tomb,” says the narrator. Whenever I feel like I have forgotten how to write a short story I go back to this one.

First published in French in 1970, and in its English translation by the author by Calder and Boyes, 1973. Now available in First Love and Other Novellas, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000, and The Expelled / The Calmative / The End / First Love, Faber, 2009

‘Sweeney Agonistes’ by T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot has taught me how to write, and more recently, also, how to be a Christian. This unfinished verse play I turn to a lot. Lines like “She’s got her feet in mustard and water,” and “I don’t like eggs; I’ve never liked eggs; and I don’t like life on your crocodile isle.”

First published in the New Criterion, October 1926 and January 1927 and collected as Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama, Faber, 1932. Now available in The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I, Faber, 2015)

Introduction

In one of my selected stories, an unnamed narrator is asked what she’s been reading lately. Her mind goes blank and the present moment is distilled as the author skilfully depicts the multitudinous thoughts that pass in the space between thought and speech. When first asked which stories I’d like to include in my anthology, a dozen rose like a flash – an instinct. The stories were not fully formed but composed of impressions and my memories of reading them: where I’d been, how I’d felt, how, when I’d finished, I glanced away from the page or the screen to see the world slightly anew. There are connective threads in this collection: of representing women’s experience, of the potentiality of form and expression, of the short story and also of art and what they have given to me and my writing over the years.

‘Between Sea and Sky’ by Kirsty Logan

‘Between Sea and Sky’ is concerned with the excavation of a Scottish town’s hidden secrets and underlying truths “except [a mother’s] own truth, of course. The truth of how she got me”. Composed of short narratives split between mother and son’s voices, this potent and dark retelling of ‘The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry’ brims with the affectual aspects of language, staying true to its folk-song origins. In the story’s opening, a mother sings to her baby who is strapped to her chest by a seal-grey sling:

“Oh my darling wee fishie, I won’t let go of you
I cannae hear you speak but I know you love me too
Oh my darling wee fishie, I’ll hold you close to me
I cannae see your eyes, but your love is clear to see”

Shortly after her son’s birth, she continues her work as an osteoarchaeologist, digging up bones that the locals in the town would prefer to keep buried– hidden with unspoken stories under the earth. She and her fatherless son are treated as outsiders, made to feel shame by a community of women who “each think it could be their own husband” she slept with.

I listened to this story within Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold in its audiobook form on a long walk in the local woods. When the narrative switches to her child’s longing to know the origin of his birth, I listened with a quickening heart. A story echoing my own. ‘Between Sea and Sky’ explores motherly love and also a child’s desire to know where they’ve come from. When the child discovers his father, he’s revealed to be a man of the sea, the child himself thus part-selkie. It’s then decided that the boy will spend six months in the water and six months on land, his mother continuing to speak to him in his absence. Though, as the child grows, his yearning to be with his mother throughout the year deepens. At six years old, he feels “apart and incomplete”, knowing the “time for words had passed; I needed actions”. On a stormy night, he leaves the sea to visit her, turning up at her small house by the beach unannounced. I will not say what happened next, but perhaps you can imagine. Logan’s tale crescendos with its raging storm. The border between sea and sky (or water and air) becoming fluid, undefined. When I heard the final lines of this tale, I can remember exactly where I was standing in the woods, the exact shade of light through the trees, the exact way the wind lifted, goosebumps rising like small worlds on my skin.

First published in Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold, Virago, 2020

‘little scratch’ by Rebecca Watson

Winner of the 2018 White Review Short Story Prize, Rebecca Watson’s ‘little scratch’ was unlike anything I’d ever read before. Since, I have adored the innovative writing of authors such as Eimear McBride, Dawn Watson, Louisa Reid, though still, Watson’s rendering of a contemporary modernism feels fresh, engaging, entirely unique. The prose of her story zigzags across the page and columns of text (of thought) appear simultaneously. We are part of the protagonist’s stream of consciousness, or as the author puts it, her “stream of experience”, as we are drawn into the narrator’s “honest present tense”. On the surface, we follow a young woman navigating a world of office hierarchies. She hopes not to draw attention to herself as she leaves her desk, orders lunch and sits hidden “behind the coffee station”. When she’s seen by a colleague and asked what she’s been reading recently, her mind is

“gone,

not a clear head but a blank head, making me question my capacity to think at all (even though I know that questioning my capacity to think is thinking in itself”

I have recently been teaching this story to third-year undergraduates and many have expressed how uncomfortably close the narrative voice can get. As Sarah Hemming writes, we “feel as if we’ve climbed into someone else’s mind and skin”. Watson’s ability to render her protagonist’s interiority is spellbinding, and as the story progresses, we sense that under the surface, something more sinister is going on. After her lunch, she hides in a toilet cubicle to scratch her skin, then reflects on the uncanny stillness of her face in the mirror, then receives an email on “SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN THE WORKPLACE”. The story’s ending powerfully gestures towards but does not speak the trauma lurking beneath.

First published in The White Review, 2018, and available to read online here. The short story was developed into a novel of the same title in 2020, published by Faber

‘Fear’ by Lydia Davis

This short story is a paragraph long and captures Davis’ exceptional minimalist craft. I read it in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis in the summer following my first year at university. Moving from a Northern working-class village to enrol on an English Literature and Creative Writing course in an unfamiliar city, I felt like an imposter. I was close to leaving and returning home to work at a bar that I loved. A bar which held weekly open mics, where people from all walks of life shared stories that felt to me so honest, so far from pretence. I hadn’t really felt connected to the literature studied during the course, but a tutor I admired gave me this text, and as I read, I felt that maybe I could do this writing (and university) thing. Davis’ stories are complex and intelligent, though they are also subtle and highly relatable. Her minute observations on being human in all of its joy, humour and tragedy, are exceptional. In her story, ‘Fear’, a woman runs from her house calling:

“‘Emergency, emergency,’ and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has not been moved to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families, too, to quiet us.”

Events in Davis’ short-short fiction may seem small and inconsequential, though it is within these snapshots that she pulls together those intricate moments that compose our daily lives. Still, when I struggle with my writing, I go back time and time again to this collection feeling similarly seen, understood and whole-heartedly inspired. 

First published in Conjunctions 24, Spring 1995, and available to read online here; collected in Almost No Memory, FSG, 1997. Included in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, FSG/Hamish Hamilton, 2009

‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin

A cold December day. An empty student flat. The light dimming in shadows around me. My impressions of reading ‘Sonny’s Blues’ during my second year of university are still very much alive, the sound of Sonny’s song still distantly playing.

In Baldwin’s controlled and beautiful prose, the emotional impact of this tale of complex brotherly love and loss is amplified. The narrator, the older brother, begins with a shard of ice in his chest where his heart once was. The two brothers have become distant due to their separate ways of dealing with the trauma of their impoverished childhood and their daily lives as young black men in 1950s Harlem. Sadness and oppression permeate this story in its sound and silence. The older brother ‘freezes’ himself as survival, the younger (Sonny) turns to face it – crafting his suffering and failures of communication into his music. We follow the older brother as his icy front begins to thaw with time. He experiences the loss of his daughter and, in feeling this deep grief, he seeks to reconnect with his brother. They argue about how one should live their life, though their words continually fail to say what they mean – this inability drawing thick lines between them. Still, when Sonny invites him to hear his music, the older brother agrees. He enters Sonny’s world and watches as, in the story’s artful crescendo, Sonny plays his blues. He struggles with control initially, but then it pours from him like water.

“Sonny’s finger filled the air with life, his life.”
His brother listens.
His brother hears.
“I understood at last that he could help us be free if we would listen and that we would never be free until we did.”

First published in the Partisan Review, 1957, and widely collected, including in Going to Meet the Man, Dial Press, 1965, which was published as a Penguin Modern Classic in 1991. The story was also published as a Penguin 60 in 1995

‘The Husband Stitch’ by Carmen Maria Machado

Machado’s collection, Her Body & Other Parties, was passed between women I knew over the years – sisters to friends to lovers – to land in my lap. Before reading, I already understood a wisdom had been shared: of how to be a woman of want in a world created by another gender. And of how to put a shape to the intangible fear of being a woman disbelieved.

The first story in this collection, ‘The Husband Stitch’, is part horror, part folk tale, part magical realism – a genre-expanding story that subverts expectations so often considered unchangeable within “our known world”. We follow a narrator’s tale of becoming/unbecoming as she falls in love with a man “she knows she will marry”, as she exerts her deep-rooted sexual desire, as their love deepens, as she becomes pregnant, as she is tricked by those thought she could trust: her doctor her husband, as she bears her son, as she gives herself to her lover without her desire, as she navigates women’s time-old stories of not being believed, as she is betrayed by her husband who cannot bear her having one secret – her green ribbon – being kept from him, who, in the story’s ending, unties this final part of who she is.

“‘Do you want to untie the ribbon?’ I ask him. ‘After these many years, is that what you want from me?’
His face flushes gaily, and then greedily, and he runs his hand up my bare breast and to my bow. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes.’
I do not have to touch him to know that he grows at the thought.
I close my eyes. I remember the boy at the party, the one who kissed me and broke me at that lakeside, who did with me what I wanted. Who gave me a son and helped him grow into a man himself.
‘Then,’ I say, ‘do what you want.'”

First published online in Granta in 2014 and available to read here. Collected in Her Body and Other Parties, Graywolf/Serpent’s Tail, 2019

Sisters by Daisy Johnson

Edgar Allan Poe defines the short story as a literary work capable of being read “in one sitting”. Though Daisy Johnson’s Sisters is a novella, I’m including it in this anthology as I read it on a single stormy evening, fittingly in the North of England. The brevity of this tale adds to its intensity and underscores its gothic horror themes of things being hidden, unknown, not quite as they seem. After closing the book, the story quickly found its way into my dreams. I remember the nightmarish quality of that night. Torrential rain against the skylight in Huddersfield. Memories of the novel flickering in and out of my broken sleep.

I could see the opening scene, the young sisters with their fairy tale names (July and September), sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the back seat of a car “sharing air”. Their single mother driving them up the bone of the country. Oxford to Yorkshire. Escaping an unspoken incident that happened in their school to make a “new start” in the North. Sister July spotting an arrow of light from the sunroof pooling between them, thinking how she and September are so close, it wouldn’t have surprised her if, “slit open, we shared organs… a single heartbeat”. I could see the isolated Settle House in Yorkshire, alive and kaleidoscopic. Shadowy shapes inside resembling bodies, ants shifting behind broken glass, corridors repeating, activity happening “just out of view”. I could see the sisters’ liminal days spent under the blue light of the TV or sharing bathwater or playing make-believe games like September Says – straddling the line between violence, mimicry, love. I remembered the mother always elsewhere, existing like “furniture” in a distant dark room. I remembered the outside blurring in and, with it, a haunting seeping between. July getting caught in the space between the house’s inner and outer walls. September’s disembodied sound, unable to be found. I remembered the change in the air. Time losing its “line”. I remembered the truth of the incident from school coming into view. I could see the sister’s caught breath. The girl-shaped hole. The family’s centre removed.

First published by Jonathan Cape, 2020

‘Colour and Light’ by Sally Rooney

How can we connect with another? How do we relate to ourselves? To what extent can our conversations communicate what we mean, how we feel?

In ‘Colour and Light’, we follow hotel worker Aidan, his business-orientated, hard-to-relate-to brother, Declan, and the mysterious screenwriter, new-to-town, Pauline. Before the present of the story, the boy’s mother has died, a person Aidan deeply related to, “the person on earth who loved him most”. When he thinks of her, “the thought creates a feeling – the thought might be only an abstract idea or memory, but the feeling follows on from it helplessly”. This proximity to her characters’ inner turmoil and complex psychology often draws me into Rooney’s stories. Aidan is self-reflective and hyperaware of how he inhabits the world, of how he sees others and how he is seen; he yearns to understand what things mean and how he can relate to the ‘social’ world of adults and expectations. Meeting Pauline is a hot flash of colour in the grey of his daily existence. People hang on her every word and desire to be with her, while, conversely, he feels utterly alone: “If I dropped dead the only people who would care are the people who would have to cover my shifts”.

Through a series of chance meetings, Aidan and Pauline’s lives intersect. Their conversations are lively, playful and almost reach an honesty that Aidan yearns for. In an interview with The New Yorker, Rooney explains, “I tend to write characters who are roughly as articulate and insightful as I am about what they think and feel. In other words, they are sometimes perceptive but more often crushingly unable to describe or explain what is going on in their lives”. Aidan and Pauline epitomise this idea; the two attempt to voice their similar feelings of alienation and loneliness, but there is a barrier to their intimacy. Their own selves getting in the way. They speak of sex, but it seems this isn’t exactly what they desire; the root, it feels, is connection. Ultimately, they part, and like Aidan, we are left to wonder what it all meant.

First published by The New Yorker, 2019, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Being Various, Faber, 2019