‘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

Actions I perform that I believe are short stories, that brief syncope

When I release the control on a tape measure or retractable dog lead and the cord or metal tongue slams itself back into its sheath with mortal velocity, when I get a real flow going while slicing vegetables and the knife doesn’t leave the cutting board, when I clean the windows with old newspaper and with each swipe I soften its crinkles to mush while staring at the tree outside which begins to seem brighter, when I say a brief prayer for someone running for the bus, when I call my little brother but hang up before he can finish saying ‘hello’ and then repeat this several times, cackling, until he begins to decline my calls, when I hear my neighbour switch his light off at the end of the day, when I close the window so I cannot hear my neighbour’s conversation, when I blow a kiss as a goodbye to my friend and ask myself where I picked up that awful habit, when I plunge a fresh pot of coffee, when I smile at a child who does not smile back, when I serve a bowl of pasta, when I take the first bite, when I begin to resent the lilies in the vase because they reek of piss.

Introduction

A simple working definition, the simplest. Short, so it can be read in one sitting, perhaps on a train, between calls, in a bath or a bar. Stories of note, any narrative text experienced with a particular intensity when it was first read, which has lingered and not let one go, and to which I return.

Sometimes it’s not clear why a story stands out over time. The fact one returns to it means there is juice remaining, there are questions outstanding, or a reappraisal is called for as our ways of living, of reading and writing, unfold and change.

‘Book of Job’ by Anon

A boy, ten years of age, cocks an air rifle. He squints along the barrel, aiming at a sheep. Do it and you’ll think Job lucky roars a voice from the hedge, the farmer’s voice. The boy runs. He knows the tale well and flees the farmer’s wrath to come.

The Book of Job is the short story to which I most frequently return. I’ve lived with and through it since childhood. God and the devil bet on whether Job’s loyalty to the former is instrumental, and based on self-interest alone. If his wealth and health and family are taken from him, will he lose faith?

Job’s response has nothing to do with patience. He has committed no crime and objects to the unjust way in which he is being treated. Job is a voice of protest. He takes his complaint to the highest court of appeal. “I cannot keep quiet: in my anguish of spirit I shall speak, in my bitterness of soul I shall complain.” He challenges omnipotent injustice face to face.

The Book of Job casts about for the cause of human suffering, asks what our response should be, hits upon a limit to human understanding, and shapes a way of writing about it, breeding poetry from prose. It has prompted many other texts and reflections – from Milton to Thomas Hobbes, to Thomas Hardy and Kafka, from Liberation theologian Gustavo Giuttierez to the late Italian autonomist Toni Negri. Long may it continue to do so.

First published as a handwritten papyrus scroll sometime between 700 BCE and 400 BCE, much translated and anthologised in editions of The Bible, and available to read in the 1599 Geneva version here

‘The Miller’s Tale’ by Geoffrey Chaucer

No story is an island. Chaucer doesn’t provide us with an omnibus of unconnected pilgrim’s tales. In his telling of their imagined telling, he describes how the stories are listened to and received, heard in a context, and are questioned and countered and called out.

The Canterbury Tales vary stylistically, and by genre, and are in robust dialogue with each other. They draw on the vernacular, on scholarship, on jokes and on European sources, the latter of which may or may not be known to their imagined auditors and actual readers. This canonical sequence of tales is in fact a contestation, structuring the pecking order of its performers, and undermining it at the same time.

The bawdy and hilarious Miller’s Tale, in which a husband is cuckolded and the seducer gets his comeuppance from a rival, is a wonderfully improbable deceit in which the husband is persuaded into a barrel suspended in the loft, while buttocks are bared at dark windows. It is a searing rebuttal of the idea of aristocratic chivalry, the subject of the opening tale told by a questionable Knight, who is put firmly in his place, namely knocked from it. There’s little the reader can rely on. Having concluded his story, the miller is then humiliated in the Reeve’s tale, from which courtly love and extramarital affection are pointedly absent. Meanings and values are highly unstable and nobody’s safe in their saddle.

The Canterbury Tales have no particular direction of travel, whatever the title suggests. The convoy fails to reach its destination. Far from providing a solid foundation for a national literature, this unfinished collection, and the apology from Chaucer which accompanies it, is a sloping and slippery platform of hazard for readers and writers. And that’s been a good thing. We must think on our toes or our arses expose.

First circulated as handwritten manuscripts from 1380, first printed in 1476 by William Caxton, and available to read here

‘Kings in Exile’ by Aleksander Wat, translated by Lillian Vallee

Aleksander Wat’s writing was remarkably ambitious. He sought to undermine the order of literature and politics throughout Europe. A former Dadaist, he held Polish literature in contempt.

‘Kings in Exile’ imagines an impossible history well worth thinking about. A Congress of dethroned European Kings sets up a republic on a vacant volcanic island in the Indian Ocean, which is then cut off for centuries. History goes into reverse. The Isle of Kings quickly reverts to absolutism, declines into war and poverty, and becomes feudal. In the year 2431 a black professor leads a scientific expedition to the rediscovered island. From an airship the predominantly black team observes a battle between two white and hairy barbarian chiefs.

I favour writing that probes the unpredictable turbulence of history, and the curious ideas which it generates, over writing – valuable as it is – about the occasional, or comings of age, the lyrical or fleeting. Looking back on the collection in which this story appears, Wat said it was a warning against totalitarianism and “a confrontation of all humanity’s basic ideas – morality, religion, even love.” He went on to be a leading communist intellectual before being imprisoned in the Soviet Union and breaking with Stalinism. Or vice versa.

This collection first appeared when I was working for Charter 88, the constitutional reform campaign, just before we held a major conference on the future of the monarchy. Outside the academy the moments are rare when reading for pleasure, for a speaking engagement, and for the day job converge.

First published in Polish in Bezrobotny Lucyfer, Hoesick Warsaw, 1927, and in English in Lucifer Unemployed, Northwestern University Press, 1990

‘Arrival of the Hallamoor’ by Eugene Jolas

During the interwar years Eugene Jolas championed the modernist writing of Joyce and Doblin and Beckett and Schwitters. As editor of the journal Transition, he actively confronted literary nemeses – “the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism” – which still mire much narrative fiction.

Jolas believed the short story would be succeeded by the paramyth, “a kind of epic wonder tale giving an organic synthesis of the individual and universal unconscious, the dream, the daydream, the mystic vision.” The paramyth might evolve, he thought, into a “phantasmagoric mixture of the poem in prose, the popular tale of folklore, the psychograph, the essay, the myth, the saga, the humoresque.” The new form would birth a new syntax: “The language of the paramyth will be logomantic, a kind of music, a mirror of a four dimensional universe.”

He provided a dozen examples, one from Kafka, others from names long forgotten, a few by himself. During one of these , ‘Arrival of the Hallamoor’ three readers are executed in the British Library.

“I tatterambled around London,” he writes.” I was no longer I… I was an arboreal mammal with a long muzzle and a dark fur that tinklepalpitated with the percussions from the streetnoises. My eyes were discs sunglinting hugely. My paws were knife protuberances.” As he arrives in the old reading room:

“Suddenly I felt hungergrip. With a hop and a grunt I was on a large Oxford Dictionary that stood on a rotating desk. I began to tear pages from the volume. The letters L and N were soon in my muzzle, and I felt relieved as I avidchewed the pages.”

The years of Transition were a watershed moment, suggesting and permitting new directions for writing. Did we explore them all, might we still?

First published in Transition 23, July 1935

‘The Greatest Story in the World’ by Henry Treece

A young man, in a time of war, is setting out to write the greatest story in the world. For four pages the author lists – with irony? – what the novice must overlook and forget if he’s to get underway, from “The gap toothed window high above his head, empty of glass as a poet’s hand of pence” to a fish glue factory “acrid as a jackal’s dream.”

The new writer fails once. “Who am I to make or break a world,” he asks himself, terrified. But on he goes. He fails twice. “There is no story in me,” he laments, “there is no story in the world of men. For the world is only a living graveyard, the crafty antechamber to death. The only story is pain…” At this point the reader will have realised Treece is not drafting a student primer with a happy ending. The story that matters will never be written, he concludes: “It is only the dead who can write the words of gold: and their pens are dry.”

He’s overstating his case. No doubt he knows it. But in a few pages enduring questions about meaning and making, selection, ethics, motivation, application, and modes of writing are raised.

The New Apocalyptics were a mythologised group of wartime poets, essayists and short story writers of which Treece was a leading member and editor. They drew variously on surrealism, neo-romanticism, anarchism, Christian iconography, myth and extreme day-to-day wartime experiences. They typed in a blacked out and blitzed corridor between the modernism of the Transition years and the comic and sometimes angry realism of the fifties.

After the war Treece made a fresh start, becoming a highly successful writer of historical fiction for children. The Children’s Crusade, Viking’s Dawn and, above all, Man with a Sword – about a local resistance hero, Hereward the Wake – were how I learnt to read.

Long disregarded and slighted, the wartime poetry of the apocalyptics has recently been anthologised to great acclaim. Their short stories should be too.

First published in The White Horseman: Prose and Verse of the New Apocalypse, ed. G. F. Hendry and Henry Treece, Routledge, 1941, and collected in I Cannot Go Hunting Tomorrow, Grey Walls Press, 1946

‘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