‘Noon Wine’ by Katherine Anne Porter

My sense is that Katherine Anne Porter isn’t as well known in the UK as she deserves to be, and this long story (it’s around fifty pages; Porter herself considered it a short novel) deserves to be regarded as a classic alongside the best of Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty.

‘Noon Wine’ is set on a dairy farm in southern Texas during the 1890s. A mysterious and taciturn Swede arrives looking for work, and ends up staying for many years. His skill and industry transform the farm into a prosperous business, but he never speaks, simply playing the same song over and over on his precious harmonica. There’s a profound sense of menace throughout the story and the end is far more violent and horrendous and sad than you’d even feared.

First published as a short novel by Shuman’s, 1937. Collected in Pale Horse, Pale Rider: The Selected Short Stories, Penguin, 2011

‘Bad Dreams’ by Tessa Hadley

Stupidly, and for no discernable reason, I had thought that I wouldn’t enjoy Tessa Hadley’s short fiction. Then I read this story in the anthology Reverse Engineering II, a collection of seven contemporary stories coupled with author interviews, and I realised I had been mistaken: Tessa Hadley is a masterful story writer. The first half of ‘Bad Dreams’ is in the mind of a young girl, waking at night in her family home after a bad dream. The second half is told from the point of view of her mother who wakes later in the night. I won’t say more but it’s poignant – nay, heartbreaking – stuff. Hadley’s canvas is small but she gives us a whole world. I now intend to read everything Tessa Hadley has ever written.

First published in The New Yorker, 2013 and available to read online here. Collected in Bad Dreams, Vintage, 2018 and also in Reverse Engineering II, Scratch Books, 2022

‘Mrs Świętokrzyskie’s Castle’ by Colette Sensier

Sixty-three-year-old widow Klara Świętokrzyskie works in a hospital, tending to elderly patients. In the evenings, rubbing her sore feet, she plays MagiKingdom, and is transformed into a powerful and beautiful avatar: a peacock-headed creature in metal breastplates and mink fur, strolling around her castle, defeating witches and building up her supply of ammunition.

Klara has two adult children and neither are aware that she is spending real money in this virtual world, or that she has befriended another player, Bernard from Huddersfield, and that they are exchanging daily emails. Klara’s griefs and dreams are handled so delicately and poignantly by Sensier, it’s a story that has never left my heart.

First published in Flamingo Land and Other Stories, Flight Press/Spread the Word, 2015. Collected in Best British Short Stories 2016, ed. Nicholas Royle, Salt Publishing, 2016

‘The Governor’s Ball’ by Ron Carlson

I read this in Ron Carlson Writes a Story, an ingenious book in which Carlson unpacks the writing process of his own story. He leads the reader by the hand as he suggests his thought process while he sets down one sentence after another in the first story draft. The book is funny and wise, and also manages to be both self-deprecating and assured at the same time. It’s also full of great advice, not least when it comes to the need for writerly perseverance: “The writer is the person who stays in the room.”

It was perhaps a bit uncanny to then read the story, ‘The Governor’s Ball’, in its entirety, having read 100 pages about how it was written, but it was deeply satisfying to get to know a story so well. I also felt utterly motivated to write more stories of my own; I just need to stay in the room.

First published in TriQuarterly, Winter 1985. Collected in A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories, WW Norton & Co, 2003, and in Ron Carlson Writes a Story, Graywolf Press, 2007

‘Sawdust’ by Chris Offutt

I have a soft spot for blue collar American stories which I blame on reading too much Raymond Carver when I first started reading short fiction twenty-five years ago. I love straight-talking, hard-drinking, pool-playing, reckless-driving protagonists and I will never love college-educated, over-thinking, emotionally-needy, city-living ones. I want coonhounds and drunk preachers and alligator-hide boots and prose so muscular it can throw its own punches:

“When I was a kid we had a coonhound that got into a skunk, then had the gall to sneak under the porch. He whimpered in the dark and wouldn’t come out. Dad shot him. It didn’t stink less but Dad felt better. He told Mom any dog who didn’t know coon from skunk ought to be killed.”

Ahh, I can practically taste the bourbon just reading this, forgetting I’m a college-educated, over-thinking, emotionally-needy fool. Who doesn’t even know what a coonhound is.

Published in Kentucky Straight, Vintage 1992

‘Lost in the City’ by Edward P. Jones

This is a strange, dreamy, almost hypnotic story that traces a few hours in the middle of the night. A woman receives a phone call at three a.m., informing her that her mother has died. She calls a cab and asks the driver to get her lost in the city. Yet every street he takes her to is full of memories.

Like the cab ride itself, at every turn this story offers something unexpected, and it’s uncompromising in its refusal to meet reader expectations. It’s also full of life and love, and the strange unreality of fresh grief, when we know something has happened but can’t yet feel it to be true.

Published in Lost in the City, Amistad Press; 20th anniversary edition, 2012

‘Dead Confederates’ by Ron Rash

The influence of Chekhov-inspired open endings, giving the impression that the characters continue to live on long after the final word, has been fashionable in short fiction for many decades. So, being contrary by disposition, what I like about this story is that its ending feels like an ending – there’s no sense of events playing out after the final word. Everything that matters is contained within the story and then it’s over. Which isn’t to say that it’s trite or lacking emotional depth, far from it. The main character commits a macabre crime for morally good reasons; he’s a decent man who has fallen into desperate straits. It’s original and brilliant – and then it’s finished. Bliss.

First published in Shenandoah, Fall 2008. Collected in Burning Bright, Canongate Books, 2012

‘The Behavior of the Hawkweeds’ by Andrea Barrett

There are some titles that draw me in immediately and I’m a sucker for this one – it’s so specific, so… vegetal. Andrea Barrett is rather an unusual writer who often writes about the history of science, particularly the nineteenth-century world of natural history. This story is one of my favourites by her, intertwining the story of Gregor Mendel’s experiments with peas, a terrible accident in which a young girl’s grandfather kills a man, and the same girl’s later life as the wife of a rather insufferable genetics lecturer. Scientific ideas are more than just the background to Barrett’s stories; she is deeply knowledgeable about the culture of scientific experiment and the way that human concerns shape what is studied and how, and that the person gets the credit isn’t always the person who deserves it.

First published in The Missouri Review, 1994. Collected in Ship Fever, WW Norton & Co, 1996. Available to read online via Project Muse here

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff

This is the best short story I’ve ever read. There, I’ve said it. I don’t want to give too much away about what happens, but it’s the story of Anders, am embittered literary critic, who was once generous and hopeful. There’s an extraordinary section in which Wolff slows time down, but what’s really remarkable about this story is how he gives us Anders’ entire life and significant relationships in just a few pages. It has the most perfectly placed adjective I can think of – check out that “sullen” four pages in. And the ending – oh my god. A story for anyone who has sometimes wondered whether they love books more than life.

First published in The New Yorker, 1995, and available to read online here. Collected in Our Story Begins, Bloomsbury, 2008

Introduction

The department’s secretary had emailed me a few days before my arrival: there would be a delay to my start date, he informed me, as the outgoing postholder (still living in the accommodation I was due to take) had had to postpone their departure for personal reasons. I wasn’t to worry, he wrote: they had reserved me a room at L’hotel Delle Cento Storie, a few hundred metres from the station—they would do everything they could to hasten the handover of both the role and the apartment and, in the meantime, I was free to use the time to explore and familiarise myself with the city.

The hotel was an unassuming building, set down a narrow side street in an area of the city where the old town met the docklands. At the reception desk, the proprietor could not, initially, find a record of my reservation, but was happy for me to wait in the lobby while he checked his records and made a few calls. He prepared me an aperitif from the bar area at the far end of the room, and gestured to the bookshelves which lined the lobby walls. ‘Be my guest,’ he said, ‘I’m sure the matter won’t take long to resolve.’

‘Seven Floors’ by Dino Buzzati, translated by Judith Landry

Sunlight barely penetrated the hotel’s lobby; a few scattered rays reached the floor in front of the reception desk, with the rest of the room lit by wall and table lamps. The bookshelves ran from floor to ceiling and were lined with paperbacks and pamphlets—some were mass-market copies, some were sturdily bound editions that may once have formed part of home libraries, each worn and well-thumbed, the pages yellowed and frayed.

My perusal of the lobby’s bookshelves was broken as quickly as it had started, by the shudder of the elevator doors. A hotel porter shuffled out, a suitcase in each hand and another under his arm, followed by a frail, older gentleman. The porter heaved the suitcases over to the corner of the room, rushed back to assist his guest (seating him at a table opposite me), then ran to fetch him a glass of water.

The older gentleman was shaking and sweating, while muttering and complaining about something under his breath. My Italian was rusty, but I enquired if everything was okay.

‘They are moving me to the second floor!’ the gentleman wailed. He was delirious; I calmed him and made him take some of the water the porter had brought over. Amid his agitated complaints, I managed to gather his name: Signor Giuseppe Corte.

The hotel porter leant over—small movements in his eyes gesturing towards the older gentleman—and spoke to me in a hushed tone: ‘Sir, I do apologise if any scene has been caused, but we have had to ask all of our guests from the third floor to move to the second floor—only temporarily, you see.’

Mr Corte, however, remained distressed. He was not a hotel guest as such, he told me—he had arrived in the city some weeks ago as a patient of the municipality’s sanatorium—a minor complaint, he assured me, that should have been treated in a matter of days. ‘But the sanatorium was at its capacity,’ he explained, ‘so a room—as well as daily visits from nurses and consultants—was arranged for me here.’

I told Mr Corte I sympathised with the inconvenience, but that I was sure that any other room in the hotel would be just as comfortable, and meet his expectations.

‘Giovanotto, it is not the inconvenience, it is the implication! These few weeks I have been moved from floor to floor, each time without my full consent, each time persuaded by the medical staff that it is only a bureaucratic mistake, or that it will only be temporary—that I should not worry! Each time I have followed the doctors’ advice, yet it is the policy of the sanatorium that…’

‘Signor Corte,’—a voice travelled from the reception desk. A short man with spectacles came towards us—he was accompanied by a woman carrying a black, leather holdall and a small plastic case with a handle. ‘What is all this fuss I hear? I’m sure the manager has assured you this is only an interim relocation.’ The man was evidently a physician—he helped Mr Corte to his feet and towards the elevator.

As the elevator doors closed, Mr Corte—accompanied by the physician and the woman who had just arrived—looked at me, then at the clock above the reception desk, defeat, delirium, and resignation in his eyes.

Published in La Lettura, 1 March 1937, and in English in Catastrophe and Other Stories, Calder and Boyars, 1965

‘The Law of White Spaces’ by Giorgio Pressburger, translated by Piers Spence

I did not see Mr Corte again. (I did notice, however, a day later, a couple of visitors walk briskly through the hotel lobby, one carrying the same leather holdall that the physician’s companion had held.)

I spent the next few mornings walking around the local area: the habour, the docklands, a couple of boulevards lined with cafes and souvenir shops. (The proprietor had by then cleared up the issue with my reservation: the confusion had been over a note in his own illegible handwriting.) I avoided the heat of the afternoons by passing the time in the quiet of the hotel’s lobby-cum-library (through these hours, you could count only a handful of passersthrough—the proprietor, a young bartender setting up for the evening, the occasional guest returning to their room).

Some semblance of life would only return to the bar and lobby area by evening: guests would exit, dressed for dinner reservations elsewhere; businessmen would enter to take a spritz or beer, loosening their ties and placing their briefcases on the floor. The bartender seemed timid: she would never look directly at me, nor speak with the warmth she reserved for (who I assumed were) her more regular patrons.

I did make the acquaintance of one Isaac Rosenwasser one evening: he too was travelling alone (although would only stay one night), and took an interest in my line of work: he knew the institution well, he told me, but had never heard of the department where I would be working.

His attention, like mine, had been drawn to the ramshackle and disorganised collection of books that had accumulated in the hotel’s lobby. A library of the forgotten and leftover, I remarked: discarded holiday reading, copies which have fallen beneath bedside tables—books only noticed as missing when the owner has gone to retrieve them from their cabin luggage as their plane takes flight or, even, weeks later, upon seeing the gap left by the misplaced volume in their own bookcase, only to find there is nothing there where there once had been.

It was as if my comment on memory and forgetfulness had troubled Mr Rosenwasser; he turned the base of his glass on its coaster. ‘The gaps left in a bookcase are an inconvenience, no more than that; the true library of the forgotten and leftover, however, is not of these tomes, but it is what we will all come to be part of.’

He brought the glass to his lips, but didn’t drink. Returning the glass to the coaster, he continued: ‘There is an incredible sadness in the gaps and holes that form in our own minds, gaps we may never realise have appeared—the friends we will eventually forget, that last journey another’s name makes in our minds. That last journey an ion of sodium or potassium makes between two particular cells in the cerebral cortex, the last fragment of a relationship forever lost.’

Before he went upstairs to his room, Mr Rosenwasser made one final remark: ‘Have you noticed, my friend, that the majority of the books in this lobby contain short stories? It is both fitting for an establishment named L’hotel Delle Cento Storie, and apt for a space in which we pass those small pockets of our time waiting.’

Published in La Legge degli Spazi Bianchi, Marietti, 1989, and in English in The Law of White Spaces, Granta, 1992. Available to read online Granta here

‘Philip & Penelope in a Variety of Tenses’ by Iris Smyles

A week or so had now passed; I had heard nothing from the secretary at the department, nothing on when I might begin my role, nothing on when I would be moved from the hotel into the furnished flat I had been promised.

At least a couple of times a day, I would enquire with the proprietor as to whether any messages had been left for me at reception. No, he told me (though I perhaps had reason to doubt this, given the haphazardness of his record keeping). He promised he would pass on any messages, or put any calls through to my room.

It was true what Mr Rosenwasser had said: the majority of the literature in the lobby consisted of short stories (I continued with my assumption, though, that these had been discarded or forgotten by those passing through).

I took a couple of volumes from the shelves, to read in the quiet of the lobby, but neither held my interest. I instead took a sheet of the hotel’s headed notepaper, and began writing.

Dear Penelope

I took the new job I wrote to you about. I don’t know if you’ve written back—the new tenants said they’d forward on any post, but the truth of the matter is you can’t rely on those you’ve never met.

As I was packing I found myself sorting through some old papers. I came across the postcard you’d once sent me: you’d dreamt of me the night before, demonstrating how to separate the yolks from the whites. You never told me if you ever dreamt of flying, or breathing underwater.

I miss you dearly, but when I think of you, I find we’ve shifted another tense. Before, I’d think back to when we telephoned each other, when we said “I love you”. Now, when I think of the old faculty, or hear Charlie Parker on the radio (again), I mouth the words “we used to call each other”; “we would say ‘I love you’”.

I stopped writing there. The truth of the matter was that, after all the time that had come between us, we had shifted another tense, a tense where imagination and memory are near indistinguishable, where we might as well have been characters in books we had once read but since forgotten.

I asked the bartender for a Braulio over ice. She made the drink without speaking nor looking at me, before returning to polishing and replacing glasses behind the bar.

Published in Hotel #4, 2018 and collected in Droll Tales, Turtle Point Press, 2022

‘Story of a Non-existent Story’ by Antonio Tabucchi, translated by Tim Parks

I would later come to learn the history of L’Hotel Delle Cento Storie—a chance encounter with a kitchen hand who worked at the trattoria on the same street. In part through boredom and in part through nerves, I had taken to smoking again (a habit I thought I had left behind); there was a small alcove further down the street, shaded from the sun, where the kitchen hand would also take his breaks.

He was an old man, with calloused hands and a stooped back—he had worked at the trattoria for more than thirty years, he told me. He gestured towards the façade of the hotel. When he had first moved to the city from a nearby village, the hotel had been no more than a large guesthouse—seven storeys high, yes, but no wider or deeper than any of the other buildings down the street. A new owner, though, had acquired the two houses on either side, and later, two of the buildings on the street behind. Later, an adjacent courtyard was bought up, and another section of the hotel was built.

The hotel was run successfully for a number of years, the kitchen hand told me, before—perhaps twenty years ago—it was taken on by a wealthy English businessman who had made his money in publishing (perhaps as a new venture, the kitchen hand speculated, or perhaps a pet project). What had captured this businessman’s imagination, though, was the unique layout of the building: of all the buildings that had been acquired and added to the original guesthouse, not one had ceilings that matched the height of the others—the floors between each building were, as such, staggered at different levels, leading to a network of small staircases between the doorways which had been knocked through each wall—and in some cases, at the points where three or more of the original buildings met, further staircases would come off these staircases to link the floors to each other.

The kitchen hand slapped me on the shoulder, and held onto my arm: ‘It was never meant to be named L’Hotel Delle Cento Storie, you see! The Englishman had been completely taken by the building’s one hundred or so storeys—the floors between floors, the floors between those—but whether through haste, misunderstanding, or careless spelling, the copy that he sent to his translator read one hundred stories!’

‘But why, then, the library of so many books, of so many stories?’ I asked. The kitchen hand finished his cigarette, and threw the butt on the floor: ‘Some say coincidence, some say determinism,’ he replied. ‘I always say that if you write tobacconist above the door, you end up with little choice but to stock tobacco.’

I asked where I might find the Englishman. ‘I’m afraid you won’t,’ said the kitchen hand. ‘All his business interests were built off the back of his publishing, and there are only so many deaths of the novel a publisher can survive. What had happened, as I understand, was that the final straw was a substantial advance paid for a novel never received—the pages, it is rumoured, were thrown to the wind, the author never seen again. The Englishman’s businesses, I heard, collapsed one by one, themselves consigned to the winds of change. The hotel then stood empty for years—a hundred storeys, lost to a story that never existed.’

Published in I volatili del Beato Angelico, Sellerio, 1987, and in English in Vanishing Point, Vintage, 1993