‘The WHITES ONLY Bench’ by Ivan Vladislavić

A playful, clever, and witty writer, Vladislavić’s writing of the 1980s and 1990s closely chronicles the emergence of post-apartheid South Africa, and plays close attention to the country’s urban spaces. The WHITES ONLY Bench (his capitals) comes from a collection whose original title is particularly telling: Propaganda by Monuments.

Set in a museum, we learn through the wittily-conveyed horror of some of the staff that the example of the titular bench of which they had been so initially proud – featuring so prominently in a press photograph (captured, of course, in black and white) – is a fake, created in their own workshop as ‘the real thing’ had proved so hard to find.

What follows is a satire of bureaucracy and of urges to be ‘correct’ and ‘authentic’, a reminder that cities are palimpsests where histories are continually overwritten, and an exploration of the horribly complicated nature of ‘truth’.  Under the wit, there is true horror: as well as the day-to-day cruelties of the now defeated apartheid, the story also takes in the victims of the Soweto Riots. The objects that remind us of the past have not entirely lost their potency, even if their meanings have grown more complex. Not as playful with form as some of Vladislavić’s work, the story is perhaps an accessible entry point for those unfamiliar with his writing (they should purchase The Restless Supermarket immediately), and one that may delight lovers of Kafka and Terry Gilliam in equal measure.

Published in Propaganda by Monuments, D Philip, 1996

‘The Examination’ by Ryan O’Neill

Another playful writer, and one who is happy to get very ‘meta’ with the reader. The collection from which it comes includes a story composed of fictional book reviews, a fictional memoir compiled as an author’s account of their own bibliography, a story about (and written on) a malfunctioning typewriter, and many such conceits. What is impressive about them is how well they work: we are not simply admiring the literary equivalent of a dog riding a unicycle.

I could have chosen several stories here, but my first choice is The Examination. If this were a flash fiction – and it’s only slightly too long to qualify – it would be called a hermit crab flash: a story snuck into a different verbal form. Here, in the format of a Rwandan English Examination Answer Sheet, we see a young man’s examination answers that – while they conform to the chosen form – tell a heartbreaking personal story. We learn, for example, that he has the eight-letter word section of a Scrabble dictionary carried with him for five years in refugee camps. “There are so many of these words like LOVINGLY, MERCIFUL and OPTIMISM, and my father’s name, INNOCENT. There is also GENOCIDE.”

What is hinted at in that answer is revealed in the response to a Composition question, describing “A wedding you once intended”, where the full personal horror of civil war between rival tribes unfolds. Yet, in a coda to an earlier question, the story ends with the young man refusing to abandon the innocence and optimism he found in his Scrabble dictionary. O’Neill’s cleverness in the construction of this story is, by now, entirely beyond the point.

Published in The Weight of a Human Heart, Black Inc., 2012

‘Bs’ by Eley Williams

A desert island library would need some lighter moments, and this would be a fine choice. The stories in Williams’ debut collection are not merely ‘drunk on prose’: they have swallowed a whole shelf of dictionaries and are now working their way from optic to optic, necking books of proverbs, puns, and rhetorical devices with gay abandon. (Having had the pleasure of twice interviewing the author, her obsession with dictionaries and lexicography would, I hope, make her proud of that description.)

It’s like reading a Dundee cake while drinking a pint of port, and the linguistic fireworks are hard not to enjoy. Like many of her stories, Bs is a riot of possibilities, interrogations, quandaries and definitions, a brain obsessively and almost manically playing word-association with itself – and that ‘with itself’ is important. Many of Williams’ stories focus on misunderstandings or failures of communication (or failure to communicate). Imagine Fawlty Towers if Stephen Fry had taken the helm. The best approach is simply to surrender to the joy of a writer so utterly in love with words and what they can do, but who can leave you smiling at a moment of very human fallibility and tenderness at the same time. Stories can bring you delight as well as broken hearts, after all.

Published in Attrib. and other stories, Influx Press, 2017

The Punchline

In the long day (a full spread of time slopped out and doled by larger forces) there are smaller punctuations — beats and breaks, spasms that portion it all up for me. I’m of an irregular beat so I’m always keeping an eye on my own distraction, that mounting urge to look away, and have a keen sense for the shape of time: how long it takes to do something, how efficient I can be, how many words a story needs. Too many things overstay their welcome – guests, novels, so many smells – and you can only judge this by them crossing the invisible threshold of time you were willing to give. When something is timed just right you can sense it by the mark it leaves behind, how its goodbye leaves you feeling, how much it smarts on your cheek. So it’s all about the set up, the cradling of borrowed attention, the making you look, the keeping you there – and then it’s all about the punchline.

I will spoil nothing, but I promise to describe the feeling.

Here are stories chosen for their endings:

‘Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz’ by George Saunders

There’s a brilliant slime of technology here, in a story about a miserable widow and the commodification of memories. Saunders’ descriptions ooze and the characters are full-hearted and hazy at their edges, bleeding slightly into the world around them and their narrator, who is keen to love but not skilled at it. The ending is a sly wallop — like falling asleep in a bath, only waking up when you slide in too far.

First published in The New Yorker, September 27, 1992. Collected in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Random House, 1996. Read online here

‘The Princess Diana Bit’ by Stewart Lee

Undeniably a short story. Lee plays with the two act structure inherent to comedy by stretching it too far, opening up a chasm between a set up and a punchline to smuggle a load of detritus. Here Lee performs a conversation between a couple on the day of Princess Diana’s death and the spectacular feat of this bit is how much I dislike it and how much I am longing for it to end. I think it’s the particular tone Lee strikes when he performs these two characters – there is something pathetic about them, and fundamentally devoid of humour. When the punchline comes it feels earned by everyone involved.

From Stewart Lee’s Stand-Up Comedian. Watch here

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff

This story ends in its middle, and then it burrows into itself until it ends again. Time warps so pleasantly here and there’s a playful antagonism at play – Wolff’s protagonist is so dislikable his only hope is either being shot or redeemed with some injection of humanity. Both happen. Reading it is some good release.

First published in The New Yorker, September 17, 1995. Read here. Collected in Our Story Begins, Bloomsbury, 2008

‘The Things That Carried Him’ by Chris Jones

Form and craft are very seductive forces, I feel, and I confess I’m still at the stage in life where I am enamoured by journalism that reads like fiction. I just love the convergence of real people and good storytelling. Pieces like this often make me think about our default instinct to narrate chronologically, to replay how time has struck us, and Jones’s essay shows that a human life can be narrated in many directions and it can begin with an ending.

First published in Esquire, May 2008. Read here

‘Sredni Vashtar’ by Saki

and ‘The Way Up to Heaven’ by Roald Dahl (first published in The New Yorker, February 27, 1954. Collected in Kiss Kiss, Knopf 1960)

I will write about these two stories in one because they are completely mingled in my memory – I read both as a child and they taught me that cruelty and death are wonderful and thrilling conclusions when a story winds itself up tight enough. They remind me of the misanthropy I found so essential to childhood, where the world of adults is always telling you what to do and when, and how totally satisfying it was to read about nastiness, how bruising a perfect punchline should be.

First published in The Chronicles of Clovis 1912; collected in Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on TV, Max Reinhardt Ltd 1957; Pan Books 1960. It can be read here

‘The Way Up to Heaven’ by Roald Dahl

and ‘Sredni Vashtar’ by Saki (collected in The Chronicles of Clovis, 1912)

I will write about these two stories in one because they are completely mingled in my memory – I read both as a child and they taught me that cruelty and death are wonderful and thrilling conclusions when a story winds itself up tight enough. They remind me of the misanthropy I found so essential to childhood, where the world of adults is always telling you what to do and when, and how totally satisfying it was to read about nastiness, how bruising a perfect punchline should be.

First published in The New Yorker, February 27, 1954. Collected in Kiss Kiss, Knopf, 1960

‘What I Was Told by the Woman at Shepherd’s Bush Station Last Week’ by the Woman at Shepherd’s Bush

A strange little lady in a hat that said GO, seemingly overwhelmed by the need to share her life with someone, turned to me and began our impromptu exchange with ‘the roof of my house fell in and it is mess everywhere’ and I thought for a split second of the time I spent working in a school and how children would tell me about their lives with a lack of social lead up that always left me pleasantly surprised and, admittedly, relieved, because I often find the pleasantries of adulthood taxing, so I turned to her and said ‘was it mould or something? damp?’ and she said she didn’t know but it was awful, dust everywhere, so probably not mould, and even her dog is sick now, ‘can you imagine I have to wear a mask at home? so much dust. the dog sniffles, she is…’ and then she gave me a stellar impression of the dog and I said something consoling and then she said ‘so that is why I have this’ and then pointed to the inner corner of her right eye, which was bloodshot, presumably irritated by the dust, and I said ‘I see, that’s terrible’ and she nodded and the exchange was finished, having entered my life with neither a beginning nor really an end, so it’s spilled into the rest of my life and I keep telling people about it and each time someone laughs about it I feel closer to having resolved its presence in my life

First told to me on February 27, 2024 in Shepherd’s Bush, London

‘Emergency Stop’ by Armstrong and Miller

There are three fundamental things I love about short stories: their brevity is a perfect and easily consumed escape, they are made for sharing with others and starting conversation, and they make me think about form. This sketch by Armstrong and Miller is 35 seconds long and when I was a teenager it ticked every one of those boxes.

From The Armstrong and Miller Show, first shown in 2006 on BBC One. Watch here

‘Cathedral’ by Raymond Carver

I’ve buried this story deep in my anthology here, but it’s actually the story that gave me the idea to create a collection around endings. Carver’s narrator is a belligerent and unsympathetic character and in some ways seems infected by his thinking, like his notions and resentments are permanently germinating under the surface. His reluctance to look past himself means the reader has to read through his murk, and in the process of the story he is disassembled slowly, until it ends with a sudden light, a release of breath.

First published in the Atlantic Monthly, in 1981. Collected in Cathedral, Knopf 1983. Read here