‘The Mud Below’ by Annie Proulx

If I could recommend every story in Close Range, a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, I would. Proulx is a writer who belongs to the Wyoming prairies and this story of Diamond Felts, a rodeo rider with a desolate past and a proclivity for violent sexual assault, is a bleak, honest look at life on the edges of rural America.

“The shock of the violent motion, the lightning shifts of balance, the feeling of power as though he were the bull and not the rider, even the fright, fulfilled some greedy physical hunger in him he hadn’t known was there.”

First published in The New Yorker, 1998, available here. Collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Scribner, 1999

‘Sucking Stones’ by Hanif Kureishi

This story is an uncomfortable read for aspiring writers. An established author befriends Marcia, a woman desperate to be published. Marcia feels her own life is small and her terrible hope that the friendship will turn to literary success is palpable in the text.

“She didn’t see how to go on. She did sometimes feel like this, although it was more ominous now. She had been writing for ten years and had never given up hope.”

Published in Midnight All Day, Faber & Faber,1999, and then in Collected Stories, Faber, 2011

‘The Dragon Danced at Midnight’ by Ray Bradbury

This is an absurd tale of Willis Hornbeck Jr, the operator of a film projector who, when drunk, mixes reels up to accidentally create acclaimed avant-garde cinema. The prose is also deeply funny and captures some truths about art, creativity and the inexplicable sources of genius.

“And there in the projection-room window above, a shadow loomed with wide-sprung eyes. The projectionist, bottle in numbed hand, gasped down upon our revelry”

First published with the title ‘The Year the Glop Monster Won the Golden Lion at Cannes’ in Cavalier, 1966. Collected in One More for the Road, William Morrow, 2002

‘In the Air’ by A. S. Byatt

Mrs Sugden, a retired teacher, lives on her own with her dog. She is lonely, addicted to television and constantly terrified of being attacked and raped by a stranger. Her fear of men governs her days and in particular a queasy exchange with a young, sarcastic man she meets when walking her dog. Her instincts tell her he is no good, yet she is forced to interact with him to help a fellow pensioner.

“She knew it was irrational, though there was logic in it, to feel better indoors. There were women who had found men waiting for them in the dark when they came home, women who had been followed and then pushed in quickly from behind, women whose windows or barred doors had been contemptuously shattered.”

Published in Sugar and Other Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1987

‘Munro Country’ by Cheryl Strayed

This is the only nonfiction piece on my list, an essay more than a short story. I’m bending the rules because much of it is about a short story, ‘The House with the Horse and the Blue Canoe’, which Strayed wrote when she was 24. She won a prize with it and sent it off to Alice Munro, the great writer, who she’d admired for years. The essay is about what happens next and about how art inspires longing.

“Her mother had died young too, and she haunts the pages of Munro’s stories the way my own mother began to haunt mine. I read Munro through my sorrow, rereading certain stories and scenes over and over again, memorizing particular sentences.”

Published in The Missouri Review, June 2009, available here

‘Family Furnishings’ by Alice Munro

Strayed led me to Munro, whose portrayals of dreamy and isolated, somewhat cold and ambitious women were ideal for my undergraduate years.

This particular story is about a girl coming of age in rural Ontario, dissatisfied with her provincial roots and fascinated by a cousin of her father’s, Alfrida. Alfrida has left for the big city, though that departure has come with the disillusionment that many of Munro’s women suffer. There is a momentum to this story, a sense that there is something to be worked out, that keeps the reader going until the end, where the concluding shock is delivered with grace. But it’s also about the ruthlessness it takes to write about your family.

“If you have something to tell that will stagger someone, and you’ve told it, and it has done so, there has to be a balmy moment of power.”

Published in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, McClelland & Stewart, 2001, and collected in New Selected Stories, 2011, and Family Furnishings, Knopf, 2014

‘Mrs Sen’s’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

How can I compose a list of short stories and not have Lahiri on it? If you exist in a particular ethnic and class niche – that is to say someone raised in the West, of bookish bent, whose family left India long ago – reading Lahiri is inevitable. And this story is something of a classic, from her debut prizewinning collection. Lahiri shows us Mrs Sen, an academic’s wife who babysits a young American boy, Eliot. Mrs Sen is seen through Eliot’s eyes when he goes to her house after school. The child is the only witness to Mrs Sen’s repressed desperation, her homesickness and her frustration with the lack of Indian home comforts in her new life.

“‘They think I live the life of a queen, Eliot.’ She looked around the blank walls of the room. ‘They think I press buttons and the house is clean. They think I live in a palace.’”

Published in Interpreter of Maladies, Flamingo, 2000

‘Miss Lora’ by Junot Diaz

In 1985 Yunior becomes hopelessly infatuated with Miss Lora, an older woman who lives near him and teaches at a nearby school. He is sixteen. They begin a sexual relationship and later she becomes a teacher at his school. Yunior is bogged down in the grief of his brother’s death and unable to see the relationship for what it is.

“Miss Lora touched you, and you suddenly looked up and noticed how large her eyes were in her thin face, how long her lashes were, how one iris had more bronze in it than the other.”

First published in The New Yorker, 2012. Available here. Collected in This Is How You Lose Her, Penguin, 2012

‘Paradise’ by Edna O’Brien

A young woman goes abroad to a sunny, beautiful location with her much older, much more sophisticated lover. He is wealthy, urbane and keen that she should learn to swim. Her days revolve around the pool and trying to negotiate this relationship – the older man seems sometimes affectionate but sometimes withholds the love she feels she needs. There is pressure and sex and above all else, the pool.

“They would know her predecessors. They would compare her minutely, her appearance, her accent the way he behaved with her. They would know better than she how important she was to him, if it were serious or just a passing notion.”

Published in The Love Object, Jonathan Cape, 1968

‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ray visits his university friends Emily and Charlie and is given an unusual and demeaning task. Charlie pleads with him to hang about with Emily while he’s away for a few days, convinced that the marriage depends on Emily comparing the hapless Ray unfavourably to her partner.

“It wasn’t a particularly fierce action: I didn’t even tear the page. I’d simply closed my fist on it in a single motion, and the next second I was in control again but of course by then, it was too late.”

Published in Nocturnes, Faber & Faber, 2009

‘A Christmas Memory’ by Truman Capote

I read this story most Christmases, it’s the one constant festive tradition I have. The story of the young boy Buddy and his child-like but elderly relative Sook is drawn from Capote’s own itinerant childhood. Sook and Buddy are impoverished and under the thumb of other, strict family members but manage to keep some wonder in their lives. It is a gem of the form.

“Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.”

First published in Mademoiselle in 1956. Available here. Collected in A Christmas Memory, Penguin Classics, 2020

Introduction

The task of compiling a Personal Anthology is, of course, impossible. I’ve sometimes daydreamed about what I would choose if I were ever invited onto Desert Island Discs, a programme I’ve always found fascinating in what it either reveals or knowingly conceals about its subjects’ predilections. And then realised that I own several thousand albums, and picking just eight tracks is like being asked to save the lives of a minibus-worth of the citizens from the population of a sprawling city.

Choosing the contents of The Personal Anthology is – apart from the thankful lack of bloodshed – little different. There’s a library’s worth of stories not included here and, although it’s surely a heresy for a literary festival organiser in 2024, I’ve abandoned any thought of curating against any list of boxes that must be ticked. These are simply the stories that most immediately sprung to mind when I asked myself ‘What are the stories that have stayed with me and linger in the memory the longest?’ These may not even be the stories I would call ‘the best’: they have not been picked on technical merit, but they are ones I would be happy to be stranded with in some mythical hellscape with no other reading matter to hand. (My luxury item would, by the way, be a piano. I am a guitar player who longs to be a pianist, and isolation would give me the practice time. I could, after all, write in the sand with a stick and let the tides be a merciful copyeditor.)

‘The Melbourne Train’ by William J. Mitchell

This first choice should, perhaps, be disallowed on a category basis. it’s not a short story: it’s an essay, or a snatch of autobiography. Or maybe that modish thing, creative non-fiction. It’s also glorious, so I’m including it. It’s one of several delightful pieces in Sherry Turkle’s curated collation where a wide range of people – scientists, musicians, designers and many more – write about something (or, more accurately, some thing) with a special meaning to them. A cello, an old car, ballet slippers, an early synthesiser. For William Mitchell, that object is rather larger. It’s a steam train.

Mitchell spent his earliest years in “a lonely flyspeck on the absurdly empty map of the Australian interior”, where the Melbourne to Adelaide express thundered through every evening, giving not just a glimpse of another, sophisticated, urbane world but a visible means of one day reaching and participating in it.

Later in life, it was on a train that he realised that he was learning to read, and his love of words grew the trains’ tracks and carriages and gave him a metaphor for thinking about writing (freighting sentences with meaning, shunting words into the right order, and that rhythm – of wheels on tracks or syllables in sentences – is a powerful element of language.)

Even later, after a life lived in major cities, trains are still a powerful evocation for him, although they now evoke the curious child that he once was. The personal joy of this piece for me is that, as a young child myself, I stood by level crossing gates watching the carriages of a branch line trains trundle to and from London, wondering about the lives of the adult strangers I could glimpse in the windows. If trains evoke Mitchell’s childhood for him, his writing evokes mine for me. A beautiful piece of writing, however we classify it.

(It also reminds me of a wonderful line from a Paddy McAloon lyric. Words are trains for travelling past what really has no name.)

Published in Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. Sherry Turkle, MIT Press, 2007

‘Mountain Under the Sea’ by D. W. Wilson

I first encountered this short story when DW (Dave) Wilson read it at The London Short Story Festival in 2015, where it evoked more audience laughter than many others that day. Yet the story is about grief, the difficulties of parenthood and of attempting human communication in a challenging emotional landscape – the impossibility of protecting someone else from the emotional pitfalls of life, even though you can’t stop yourself from trying.

The set-up is simple: a narrating Canadian father, addressing himself in second person, is on a trip to England with his 18-year-old daughter. But she had originally planned to take the trip with her boyfriend, who had since taken his own life. It’s the daughter who found the body. The humour here – which plays out in their interaction, but very much not in the interior life of the father – Is not the main ingredient, the lamb shank for the reader to gnaw on. Rather it’s deployed as the twist of lemon or the pinch of sea salt that heightens the flavour and makes their careful small talk so potent, as we are aware of what they are not saying, not discussing. That the father is aware of all the potential darkness of a human life, but knows that his daughter needs to be spared too keen a reminder just at this point. Knows that he can play to the disdain a teenager will always have for their dumb, ageing Dad, but that his love is both unbreakable and unspoken. (There may be more than one epiphany in this story, but the characters shake them off admirably.) And knows that laughter, playfulness and what the English call ‘banter’ is a previous normality that it would soothe both of them to return to if and when they can.

For such a short piece, it’s a remarkably rich portrait of a parent-child relationship. One of Wilson’s signature strengths as a writer is to show the fragility and apprehension behind gruff masculine exteriors: this is one of his finest examples, although all of his collection Once You Break a Knuckle is well worth reading. With Wilson, there is always a heart beating somewhere under the callouses.

Winner of the 2015 CBC Short Story Prize, and available to read online