Writers, critics and others dream-edit a personal anthology of their favourite short stories
“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
“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
“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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
A Personal Anthology 