‘Uncle Phil on TV’ by J. B. Priestley

Writing is always besieged by other media. Sometimes it is strengthened by the attention, and sometimes it isn’t. Radio, film and television replaced the little magazines and journals publishing fiction that preceded them, but broadcasting also rewarded writers who were able to inform, educate and entertain their swelling and highly heterogenous audiences.

More recently the proliferation of crossplatform digital media has seen off newsprint and greatly reduced bookreading. The publishing landscape and the reading public have changed, fundamentally, and artificial intelligence will take both in new directions. The implications for writing, literary fiction and the short story are uncertain, not insignificant, and not all benign. Ask any member of the Writers Guild of America, which is troubled by streaming and ChatGPT and currently on strike.

Check back in half a century. The present may be clearer then.

J. B. Priestley, already a bestselling author, rose to the challenge of radio in the 1930s. A popular storyteller, he was an avuncular voice for democracy, and a champion of communities against a failing establishment. Let The People Sing and Out of the People, those two titles, that pair of texts, were Priestley at his best. Neither high culture nor low but both, the broadbrow, was his stance. During the war his Postscript talks on the wireless, immediately after the news, held the ears of the nation, and rivalled Churchill’s reach. For many writers, including Orwell, Priestley was the elder to emulate or topple, the star to follow or ignore, the success beyond their reach.

For Jolly Jack, as he was fondly known, postwar television was a tougher nut to crack. ‘Uncle Phil on TV’ is one of the earliest appearances of television in fiction. It comes from a moment long before every home had a set. The initial strangeness of the technology, of the flickering flow of entertainment, of unfamiliar programme formats, of what eventually became commonplace pervades the text: “the people were small and not always easy to see and their voices were loud enough for giants, which made it a bit confusing”.

In this spectre-on-the-screen revenge yarn, television becomes a demonic presence in the living room. A family inherits a sum of money after the death of a relative, Uncle Phil, who they didn’t much like. Contributory negligence hastened his end. The legacy is used to purchase a television set. And the set wouldn’t let them forget how they got it.

First published in Lilliput, April 1953, collected in The Other Place, William Heinemann, 1953

‘A Chase (Alighieri’s Dream)’ by Leroi Jones

A black man hurries through a Dantean city, segregated San Francisco in the 1960s. I don’t know what newsreel chickens are. Or wool jails? But he sees them and I’m intrigued.

Parataxis, intense inventive free jazz with words, a Beat beat from Ginsberg’s prose peer, Diane di Prima’s soul mate soul brother, an African American who jives better than Baldwin.

“Faces broke. Charts of age. Worn thru, to see black years. Bones in iron faces. Steel bones. Cages of decay. Cobblestones are wet near the army stores. Beer smells, Saturday.”

Writing in which there’s much more at stake than linguistic play. New intensities, changing subjectivities, black differentiation, burning urgency, streetwise anger. Leroi Jones was rewriting himself and becoming Amiri Baraka. ‘A Chase (Alighieri’s Dream)’ is The Black Nationalist’s Tale, written during the struggle for civil rights in America in which he played an eloquent role.

Voting restrictions, beatings, segregation. That was then. What of now? Today mobs form with modified nooses. Baraka they bellow, with some justification, was misogynist, a racist, homophobic, a voice for violence, an antisemite. He was, but not that alone. Baraka stood up to Uncle Sam, then he resisted corporate capture. Now the danger is cancellation. Which is why his writing should be read and shared.

First published in Tales, Grove Press, 1967 recently republished as Tales, Akashic Books, 2016

‘On Terms’ by Christine Brooke-Rose

A woman, discarded by a lover she stalks, is at once dead and “wearing the semblance of her own body.”

The crescent street in which he lives, from which she watches him, “curves like a giant vampire’s jaw, each house a long and yellow tooth.” It sucks her blood and “drains her of semblant atoms.” The first person narrator knows she is fantasising her death and invisibility. By telling the story she manages her grief. Reiteration, with variation, enables her to remain present for us, to continue narrating, to continue living while dead. Scientific sentences, sometimes paradoxical, are revisited to sustain her, passages often concluding with a pinpoint of death “weighing innumerable tons of heavy nothingness.” In this story, a full stop might be fatal. Medical terms support her, the vampire’s jaw recurs and recurs, and her thoughts return again and again to the unidentified “terms” on which the terminated relationship was based. Terms that she tells us she broke.

She’s a contemporary Job, not entirely innocent, with no court of appeal, grieving in a vacuum of loss, running out words, and then she’s gone.

British late modernism is at its best in Brooke-Rose. This is a story for those who – as measures of value – put puzzlement and the unfamiliar, active reading and empowerment before relatability, recognition and representation. Though it lacks none of the latter.

First published in Go When You See the Green Man Walking, Michael Joseph, 1970, republished by Verbivoracious Press, 2014

‘The Dreams of Papess Joan’ by Sarah Maitland

Sarah Maitland is one of a group of feminist writers that many were challenged and changed by from the 1970s onwards. There were many like her, and it is painful to omit from this selection Michèle Roberts, Michelene Wandor, Kathy Acker and others.

In this story a thirteenth century legend about a female pope who gets pregnant is rendered as a dream book and infused with contemporary disquiet about rape and gender injustice. Papess Joan’s longlasting subterfuge is about to come to an end.

“People are so blind about the improbable. His holiness is sick every morning, faints sometimes in the council, has started to put on weight, weeps when he blesses children, gives charity to poor mothers suddenly, although he never did until a few months ago; But they don’t seem to guess. What will I do with the child? What will I do? What will I do?”

In her fourth dream she resolves to return to England with the child and live communally with women, in a convent. In her last she gives birth and is stoned to death.

Jolas may have accepted it as paramyth. It’s a work that I think Walter Benjamin would have applauded, a flash of recognition across seven hundred years, as if the past and present are being illuminated and connected by the flashbulb of a camera, creating what he called a dialectical image.

But there’s a problem. Does it also forward us a warning about negative identification, one that is contentious today?  Possibly. Consider this from the first dream:

“I said to Meggie ‘I don’t want a husband. I want to be a man.’ And Meggie said, ‘Why Joan? They don’t know ANYTHING. They can’t do anything.’ But I thought I wanted it just the same. I wanted to be anything I wasn’t and I still do; now I am not Joan anymore and cannot find myself, I want, O how I want, to be Joan.”

This happens a lot when you return to stories that in their time were transformative.

First published in Hecate: A Women’s Interdisciplinary Journal, 9, 1983. Collected in Telling Tales, The Journeyman Press, 1983

‘The Lawyer’s Tale’ as told to Stephen Collis

During most summers since 2015 refugees, their supporters, poets and novelists have walked as a group the route of the Canterbury Tales in reverse. The refugees share their stories with the writers while walking, they are written up and shared as the convoy overnights in community halls, after which they are published in collections, of which there are four volumes to date.

It’s a unique collaborative process in which established authors such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ali Smith, Jackie Kay and many others midwife anonymous stories, and refugees gain allies and solidarity in a new literature and location. Some of the narratives are predictable, in terms of lived experience and form. Lorries, pitiless border staff, stark detention centres and moments of injustice and legal limbo figure prominently.

A few collaborations stand out and ‘The Lawyer’s Tale’ as shaped by Stephen Collis is one.

we were in motion
complicating
the empty category
– ‘we’ –  
moving north

His montage of poetry, reportage, reflections on Gericault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa and general disregard for boundaries between genres of writing – an analogue, perhaps, for the project’s aims – sets the bar high for future volunteers.

First published in Refugee Tales, ed. David Herd and Anna Pincus, Comma Press, 2016

‘He Contemplates a Photograph in a Newspaper’ by Gabriel Josipovici

A very short story about an encounter with an image of a woman, and the viewer/narrator’s gradually accruing response.

A close reading of a newspaper photograph in which the young woman stands in a wood, side on, by a large tree. Her hair obscures her features. Sunlight plays on her back. Beauty amid peace and silence, that’s his impression.

He notices the nearest hand is clenched like a fist. And that her heels are a little higher than her toes.

He looks at the leaves beneath her feet. She doesn’t appear to be standing on them, she isn’t standing on them, there’s a gap between her feet and the leaves.

“Suddenly, sickeningly, he understands what it is he is looking at. The woman is not standing at all.”

Sunlight has bleached out the rope. The profusion of hair hides a noose. He reads the caption. It tells him she’s a refugee who hanged herself after Serbian forces stormed Srebrenica.

The photograph, as it turns out, is a record of a body without pain, without pleasure, a corpse.

I have recalled this text during every war since I first read it almost fourteen years ago. So I have recalled and read it often, far too often. Focussed, concise, and tragically perennial.

First published in Heart’s Wings and Other Stories, Carcanet 2010

‘Like a Fever’ by Tim Etchells

The longest unbroken series of similes you are ever likely to come across.

But what it is that has so many likenesses isn’t disclosed.

 “It was like a fever and like seeing a crash in slow motion and like my son never existed. It was like a boxing match and like music I had only ever imagined and like a scary movie when you don’t know where it will end and like I was sedated for 20 years.”

This, and its like, over seven and a half pages. An incantation, arhythmic and never tailing off, never lapsing to monotony. Breathless couplings and troilings and foursomes of cliches and overused sensational phrases.

“And it was like he’d never seen soap or even heard of a bathtub and like the straw that broke a camel’s back and like a maze and like a labyrinth and like a hall of mirrors and like the whole house of cards was collapsing and like she knew she would lose him, even before she met him.

That, by the way, is one of only ten commas in the whole piece.

A telling not a told, a writing not a representation.

I first encountered this story as the script to a remarkable online performance by the author during Covid. ‘Like a Fever’ had a simpler setting then. The word ‘breathtaking’ designated a threat to life.  

Context, as they say, makes a huge difference. This text may be about the pandemic, but it isn’t. It could be about a relationship coming to an end. It might be an advertising copywriter frantically searching for a punchline. It’s an overexcited chain of non-meaning, a critique of vacuous rhetoric, a wake up call to us all.

Published by Nightjar Press, 2020

Introduction

Novellas and short stories are the forms of fiction I love the most—their brevity means that they can come as close to perfection as is possible in prose. This means narrowing choices down to only a dozen is bloody hard. The easiest thing in the world would be to point to any 12 stories by Chekhov or Mansfield or Borges or Trevor and say, ‘Have at it!’, because you couldn’t really go wrong. Instead, though, I’ve tried to pick stories that are mostly less well known, but not too hard or ruinously expensive to find, which is why, for example, you won’t find any of my beloved Hungarian writers here. So, with that throat-clearing out of the way, here we go!

‘The Shooting Gallery’ by Yūko Tsushima, translated by Geraldine Harcourt

Tsushima is a wonder. Almost all of her work has the same starting point: a Japanese woman, divorced or separated from her husband, left pregnant or as a single mother to one or more young children, remote from her own parents. Yet from this she spins what seems like an infinite variety of stories and novels, beautifully written (Harcourt was her usual English-language translator and champion) and full of subtle complexity. In this particular piece, a mother takes her two children to the beach, and things go awry at an amusement stall, but I almost chose it at random: all her work is wonderful.

First published in English in The Shooting Gallery and Other Stories by The Women’s Press, 1984. New edition from New Directions, 1987. You can read the story on the New Directions website here

‘Solidity’ by Greg Egan

In terms of the material of their work, Australian science-fiction writer Greg Egan is almost Tsushima’s exact opposite: he’s fizzing madly with ideas, each of them startling and clever enough for most lesser writers to spin out into 9-book series, whereas he despatches them in a 30-page short story and then moves on to something even weirder and wilder, often grounded in the extreme physics and mathematics he seems to work with professionally (the details of his life, and even his appearance, are something of a mystery). ‘Solidity’ is a case in point: something in reality breaks, and suddenly everybody starts slipping from parallel universe to parallel universe. The only thing that can keep you in the one ‘place’ is somebody else’s constant observation. How do you make a life, and even more impossibly, a functioning society, under these conditions?

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2022, and available to read here; collected in Sleep and the Soul, Greg Egan, 2023

‘All Saints’ Mountain’ by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

Most literary writers who tackle science-fiction stumble badly, either through ignorance (assuming their shopworn ideas are new and exciting) or condescension (also known as Atwood Syndrome). Tokarczuk, whose other work ranges pleasingly all over idea-space, is different. The core idea of this religiously themed science-fiction story has been considered before by writers as unalike as Peter Goldsworthy and Neil Cross, but Tokarczuk gives it her own unique, unsettling spin and does it with wonderful style.

First published in English in Hazlitt, 2019, and available to read here

‘When the Heart Drowns in Its Own Blood’ by Philip Schönthaler, translated by Amanda DeMarco

Termann is a competitive free diver about to attempt a world record. This is the entire focus of his existence in this story, in which motivational language starts to bleed into psychopathy. Published as a tiny, tiny book by a now sadly mothballed German English-language publisher (but still available from them electronically), this is funny and alarming in equal measures.

“Even in the 1960s, doctors conjectured that at a depth of fifty meters a human being would be squashed like a swatted fly. The French physician Dr. Cabarrou carried out experiments with plastic containers—the vessels imploded at a depth of forty-five meters. […] Today, physicians speculate whether the limit lies before or beyond three hundred meters—the blood is redistributed and becomes so heavily concentrated in the center of the body that circulation fails. ‘The heart drowns in its own blood.’”

First published in Readux, 2014

‘Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor’ by Franz Kafka

You are born in Prague 1883, a Jewish German Bohemian in Austria-Hungary. You are lonely, an isolated man. You become a lawyer and an insurance office worker. You want to write, but work consumes all your time. You work in a textile factory, a small tyrant at work and at home. You become a partner in an asbestos factory, but it too takes up all your time. You want companionship without having to have responsibility or empathy. You develop tuberculosis and are forced to take a pension and spend most of your time in sanatoriums. You are dying, but you have time to write. You get your wish. It is a curse. You are shy, you are hilarious, you are a womaniser, you are tormented by your family. Your life is invaded by two celluloid balls, constantly bouncing, which take over your home. You are incredibly sensitive to noise. The noise of the balls haunts you. You produce a series of idiosyncratic masterpieces, many of them unfinished at your death, including this story. You are haunted by duality: the balls, the Mädchen, the apprentices. You will die a couple of decades into the century which, perhaps more than any other writer, you will capture in its bureaucratic, savage, mechanised horror. You are Blumfeld, an Elderly Batchelor. You are Franz Kafka.

First published by Mercy Sohn, 1936; first published in English in The Partisan Review, translated by Philip Horton, 1938, Vol 6 Nos 1 & 2. Collected in Description of a Struggle, Schocken, 1958, and The Complete Short Stories, Penguin, 1983

‘The Index’ by J. G. Ballard

The life of Henry Rhodes Hamilton is too strange and sprawling to be contained in any book, which perhaps is why only the index to his life story survives. Sample entries:

“Avignon, birthplace of HRH, 9-13, childhood holidays, 27; research at Pasteur Institute of Ophthalmology, 101; attempts to restore anti-Papacy, 420-35

“Schweitzer, Albert, receives HRH, 199; performs organ solo for HRH, 201; discusses quest for the historical Jesus with HRH, 203-11; HRH compared to by Leonard Bernstein, 245; expels HRH, 246”

One of Ballard’s funniest and most playful experiments with form, and the sort of thing that makes any writer who encounters it curse themselves for not thinking of it first.

First published in Bananas magazine, 1977. Collected in War Fever, Collins, 1964 and Complete Stories Vol 1, Flamingo, 2001. Also published in The Paris Review, 1991, and available to subscribers to read online here. Also anthologised in That Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the Finest Short Stories Ever Written, ed. David Miller, Head of Zeus, 2014