‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan

Here we see a family considered the poor relations with many children, and their better off relatives who are childless. In the depths of poverty, our poor young girl who has a hard life at home, ill-used by her elder sisters. She is sent away to be fostered for a time by the better off relatives. We gather that the father is a louche individual as he drives her there thinking about another woman and being generally unpleasant in the way he talks to his daughter. The girl’s mother and family are Irish-speaking but the father ignores that and speaks English with them. The uncle and aunt are wonderful in the way they greet and look after the girl when she arrives. They get her washed and dressed and when something about her home life comes up, the girl says it’s a secret. Well, the mother tells her gently there are no secrets in this house. The uncle seems quite harsh with the girl when they’re out in the farmyard, shouting at her not to go near a certain place. It’s only when we learn that they lost their only child who fell into the slurry pit and drowned that we understand the father’s concern. The girl loves her new caring uncle and aunt and her life with them. When eventually the father returns to collect his daughter, we are presented with the most enigmatic and heart-rending ending ever. It’s a long story of about 10,000 words and is being marketed like a novel, as is another great long story by the same author, ‘Small Things Like These’, which I could as easily have chosen, also concerning the treatment of children. ‘Foster was made into an Oscar-nominated film, An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) and ‘Small Things Like These’ is also in production in a film starring 2024 Oscar winner Cillian Murphy.  

First published in The New Yorker, 2010, and available to subscribers to read here. Also published in book form by Faber, 2010

‘Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes’ by J. D. Salinger

If ever a spoiler alert was needed, it is now. Because I am going to tell you about this absolutely supreme dialogue story and the unbeatable premise and twist. So avert your eyes now if you don’t want to know. The whole story is about a phone call. On one end, when the phone rings our guy leans across a woman in bed to pick it up. On the other end, it’s his good friend looking for his wife, whom he was expecting home from an event she went to earlier. It’s the same woman who is in the bed. The friends talk and talk and the other guy reminisces about how it was when he courted his wife and recites a short poem he gave her, written in her voice, containing the immortal line, “Pretty mouth and green my eyes”. Anyway, he’s a bit emotional but by the end so he wraps the call up and says something like “You know what, she just walked in.” [From memory.] I don’t think even Chekhov could beat that ending.

First published in The New Yorker, 1951. Collected in Nine Stories, Little, Brown & Co, 1953

‘Shovel Kings’ by Edna O’Brien

Well-known for her novels, Edna O’Brien has also written many wonderful short stories, several of which can be found online in the New Yorker magazine archives, and any would be an excellent choice here. In this story we’re in Kilburn, one of the districts of London where a lot of Irish immigrants settled. Shovel Kings is the story of Rafferty, an exile to whom neither Ireland nor England is home anymore, a not uncommon theme. The story is told by a visitor who is killing time prior to an appointment and goes into the pub the old building labourer frequents. We are immersed in the life and characters of the pub. She gets into conversation with Rafferty when he says something while picking up a newspaper lying nearby. They talk and a life story unfolds, in its fascinating and moving details. Over a series of visits by the narrator to the same pub prior to recurrent appointments, we learn all about Rafferty. Then we learn that he’s gone, returned to his old town in Ireland. But by the end he comes back to Kilburn. It wasn’t the same home he remembered from all those decades ago. The story gives us an insight into the pub culture of Irish labourers on building sites and the loneliness of an exile in old age.

Collected in Saints and Sinners, Faber, 2011. Available on the New York Times website for subscribers to read, here

‘Egg Meat’ by Ivor Cutler

My beloved adopted country of Scotland tends to grow bad poets and ‘storytellers’ like a particularly noxious fungus. When I feel disheartened, I turn to the best Scottish storyteller of all, Ivor Cutler. This strange little story about the mysterious “egg meat” you buy from the ironmonger is heightened by Cutler’s wonderful intonations and Glaswegian accent. Ivor Cutler is a much lesser-known figure than he ought to be.

From the album An Elpee and Two Epees for Free, Decca, 2005

‘God in the Billiard Room’ by Barbara Comyns

This is an excerpt from Barbara Comyns’ Sisters by a River, a novel whose chapters were serialised in Lilliput magazine under the title “the novel nobody will publish”. It’s gloriously plotless, highly descriptive, and with the surrealism every child experiences. In this one God appears as a sort of floating brown paper bag. It is done in a deadpan, factual way and such a wonderful little chapter and it’s taught me to be more fearless and more surreal in my fiction.

First published in Lilliput Magazine, and then included in Sisters by a River, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1947, republished by Virago Press in 2013

‘Who Will Greet you at Home’ by Lesley Nneka Arimah

This beautiful story reminds me of the strange dreams I have while ovulating, the sense of something coming into being or falling apart. In the story, women must choose what material to make their children out of with whatever materials are within their means. When the protagonist Ogechi brings various babies of cotton and paper to her mother, her mother destroys them, saying they are not durable. When I first read it in my twenties, it was so exciting in its originality, and while it still is to me now, recent readings are tinged with sadness as I think of how my own desire to have children has been thwarted by my economic situation and my means.

First published in The New Yorker, October 2015, and available to read here; collected in What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, Riverhead/Tinder, 2017

‘Garden Magic’ by Diane Williams

I am very fortunate that a couple weeks after a horrendous breakup, a friend read this story aloud to me, a reminder of how ridiculous romantic relationships often are. The object of affection is a man named Horace whose “place was tidy and a bit surprising. He showed me his sword cane and his living room features an owl that’s made of poultry feathers.”

First published in The Paris Review 230, Fall 2019, and available for subscribers to read here; collected in How High? – That High, Soho Press, 2022

‘The Springs of Affection’ by Maeve Brennan

The title story of a recent rerelease of Brennan’s work is a beautiful and sad description of one family, and the children who make fun of their illiterate, sentimental father who becomes attached to the pigs he raises for butcher. Maeve Brennan died impoverished in New York in 1993, despite having worked for the New Yorker for many years.

First published in The New Yorker, March 1972, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Christmas Eve, Scribner, 1974; also in The Springs of Affection, Houghton Mifflin, 1997, republished by Peninsula Press, 2023

‘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