‘Letter to a Young Lady in Paris’ by Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn

“Andrea, I didn’t want to come live in your apartment on Suipacha. Not so much because of the bunnies, but rather that it offends me to intrude on a compact order, built even to the finest nets of air, networks that in your environment conserve the music in the lavender, the heavy fluff of the powder puff in the talcum, the play between the violin and the viola in Ravel’s quartet.”

I can’t tell you what this story is really about – beauty, anxiety, overwhelm perhaps – but I can tell you that, literally, it is about a translator who moves into an apartment and begins vomiting more rabbits than he usually does. It is incredible. 

First published in English in Blow-Up and Other Stories, Pantheon 1967; also in Bestiary, Vintage Classics, 2020. For another translation online, see here

‘Poison Plants’ by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

“Then I found myself at the edge of an open field that sloped gently above me – a field covered with boxlike objects. I reached out to touch the nearest one: a refrigerator.”

Some of my favourite novels (Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives; Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child) and some of my favourite story collections (Bennett’s Pond; Corin’s One Hundred Apocalypses) are not really novels or story collections at all, but a secret third thing – a shattered mosaic. When it exists within a constellation like this, a single short story accumulates a depth of meaning that defies the form’s slightness. Ogawa’s Revenge works in this way: an image – a carrot, say – gathers an uncanny power over the course of the book, such that by the time it appears in the final story, ‘Poison Plants’, just the mention of the vegetable is chilling. Another analogy for Revenge might be San Jose’s Winchester Mystery House: a testament to death and madness where architecture defies logic and a trap door is never far away. 

Collected in Revenge, Vintage, 2013

‘Me, Rory and Aurora’ by Jonas Eika, translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg

“I was sucking on her nipples and could have sworn some milk came out, just a few drops. Just a second of that body-warm, sugary, a little oniony, a-little-too-soon liquid in my mouth”

I bought Jonas Eika’s After the Sun because of the title and the cover and because Lolli Editions had published The Employees by Olga Ravn. When I began reading, I didn’t understand it – I still don’t – but I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. ‘Me, Rory and Aurora’, a story about a fucked-up throuple-cum-Oedipal triangle existing at the margins, is sad and strange and sexy. The final sequence, in which the narrator enters a complex housing the “Newly Dead: warm, breathing, urinating”, is astonishing.

Published in After the Sun, Lolli Editions 2021, and available to read online at Granta, here

‘Barbarians’ by Lucy Corin

During the first lockdown, I carried Lucy Corin’s book One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses around with me like some kind of survival manual. I read it front to back and back to front. I read individual stories over and over and over again or I opened the book at random and stared at a page. Corin transforms our shattered experiences of living in the end times into comedy and tragedy and poetry. Her language is so weird, so jagged, so precise. I could choose almost any of the one-hundred-and-three apocalypse stories that make up the book but I will choose this one, because it begins with this sentence: “It was exciting about the economy because the economy deserved it”.

First published online at McSweeney’s, 2013, and available to read here, and collected in One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, McSweeney’s, 2016

‘A Love Story’ by Cathy Sweeney

“There once was a woman who loved her husband’s cock so much she began taking it to work in her lunchbox.”

All of Sweeney’s trademarks are on show in this one-page story: the almost flippant treatment of time, the arch comedy, concern with the mystery and disappointment of marriage. I could read it every day and still laugh at “the French dish called chicken-in-wine.” Proof that among the many things a short story can be, a dick joke is one of them.

Collected in Modern Times, Stinging Fly Press, 2020

‘Rhinoceros’ by Camilla Grudova

“It was inside the couch that I found the beef can, after removing the cushions and cleaning underneath because the couch sometimes gave off an odd smell. The can had a white animal on it, called a beef. Nicholas became terribly excited.”

The obvious stand-out in Camilla Grudova’s first collection is ‘Waxy’, but it is ‘Rhinoceros’ I think about the most, maybe because I read it around the same time as John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? A tin of meat. An empty zoo. A “pink lump” without mouth or eyes or hands but “alive”, emerging out of the protagonist as she lies in a bathtub. Something unnameable happens when Grudova places these images together. Her world is so peculiar yet familiar (to my mind, very English – strange, considering she is a Canadian living in Scotland), and I love being inside it even as it makes me feel a bit sick. 

Collected in The Doll’s Alphabet, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017

‘Derland’ by Kathryn Scanlan

“Uncle Dick – he was always unbuckling. He unbuckled all across this great land of ours. Eventually he headed south of the border to continue his life’s work, and was never heard from again.”

I love a short story collection you can treat like an album of pop songs: play it again and again, allow it to become part of the texture of your daily life, find your own personal bangers. Kathryn Scanlan’s The Dominant Album is one of those. Sharp, sharp sentences, stories that turn on a dime, and such artful use of the em dash.

Collected in The Dominant Animal, Daunt Books 2020

‘Voyage in the Dark’ by Claire-Louise Bennett

“Oh, but we were only little girls, little girls, there on the cusp of individuation, not little girls for long.”

The short story as prose poem, piece of music, perfect object. There are few writers living today that burrow underneath memory and consciousness and language like Claire-Louise Bennett.

Published in Pond, Stinging Fly Press/Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015

‘My Life is a Joke’ by Sheila Heti

“Could I have a glass of water, please? Where is my water? I am parched and I am dead.”

The short story as stand-up routine, as ‘Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?’ joke. A lecture delivered from beyond the grave. I must confess to mixed feelings about Heti’s recent work – Pure Colour was too sweet for me – but the early hits speak for themselves. Here, Heti’s philosophical comedy is literally grounded: the “salt and soil and sweat and worms and seedlings” and “those little Styrofoam balls”. When I think of this story I think of those little Styrofoam balls.

First published in The New Yorker, 2015 and available to read here

‘Carlos Ramirez Hoffman’ by Roberto Bolaño translated by Chris Andrews

“Look after yourself, Bolaño, he said, and off he went.”

Short story as encyclopaedia entry and nightmare of fascism. Bolaño spends most of Nazi Literatures in the Americas in an objective third person as he documents the lives and works of various fictional fascist writers – football hooligan poet brothers, a novelist who spells out LONG LIVE HITLER using the first letters of each chapter, a Texan who edits the Aryan Brotherhood’s literary journal from within prison  – but the final section moves into first person. After the intoxication of the previous pages, things sober up. The jokes stop. Bolaño himself is enlisted in a quest to find a murderous, sky-writing Nazi pilot poet (who will reappear in the novel Distant Star), against the backdrop of Pinochet’s brutal coup. The final line, when Bolaño is told to look after himself, calmly underlines the terror in the world that Bolaño has witnessed. With the obsession of someone not really being listened to, Bolaño told us again and again of the inextricability of literature and evil. I mean it, he tells us here, I’m not just making it up.

From Nazi Literatures in the Americas, Picador, 2010

Introduction

When choosing twelve short stories for this selection, I opted for the principle of pleasure – twelve stories that I’ve enjoyed so thoroughly they made me glad to be alive. Last autumn I ran a short story writing course and decided to read a story every day for three months in order to immerse myself in the form. I enjoyed myself so much I’m still doing it – I even write the title and author down in a nerdy little notebook. Some of the following stories are recent discoveries, others have been favourites for many years.

‘The Agony of Leaves’ by Mahesh Rao

This is a story to squirm your way through. The narrator is a revolting creature, lecherously observing his daughter-in-law whilst insisting on his own good character:

“It has never been my habit to move with prostitutes or other women of that type. Not even once have I made a lewd remark to a lady or suggested some dubious act to anyone other than my wife.”

Yes, he doth protest too much. In some ways very little happens other than a lot of unpleasant looking and self-justification, but the story is a masterclass in dramatic irony and the final scene is a tragi-comic farce that has you pitying and despising the narrator in equal measure. A beautifully judged character study to put you off your tea.

First published in The Baffler in slightly different form, 2013, available here. Collected in One Point Two Billion, Daunt Books, 2015

‘Good Voice’ by Ali Smith

Ali Smith is such a humane and inventive writer, I’m utterly in awe of her. In this unusual story there’s only one character ‘on stage’ as it were, albeit a character who’s in conversation with her dead dad. There’s also is no plot as such, but there’s a richly imagined conversation in which the protagonist and her father consider history, memory and – as the title suggests – voice. There are song lyrics – from Gracie Fields to Culture Club – as well as snippets of poetry – and the story is a wonderful celebration of the human voice.

Published in Public Library and Other Stories, Penguin, 2015

‘Bees’ by Hannah Stevens

All the stories in Stevens’ debut collection, In Their Absence, explore different aspects of the idea of what it means to go missing. Many of the stories are very short – just a paragraph or two – but they’re all exquisitely written and full of emotional nuance.

‘Bees’ is full of tension which Stevens skillfully builds, lets you down with a sigh of relief, before ratcheting it up to 11 in the final paragraph. ‘Bees’ describes every harried parent’s ultimate nightmare, but it’s utterly unpredictable and, astonishingly, full of beauty.

Published in In Their Absence, Roman Books, 2020