‘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

‘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