Writers, critics and others dream-edit a personal anthology of their favourite short stories
The last story in his last collection, and very much concerned with death. This story, based on the death of Chekhov and its immediate aftermath, segues seamlessly from fact to fiction; you just cannot see the join. I’m endlessly intrigued by the way that something made-up can shed light on the real world.
First published in 1987 in The New Yorker, and available to subscribers to read here; included in Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988
Another story of metamorphosis, of shape-shifting. A woman who is made from flowers to please a man, and who is subsequently unfaithful to him. Of course she has to be punished for her transgression, and is transformed from flowers to an owl. This was the inspiration for Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, but the original 12th Century Welsh tale fascinates in the way the characters’ motivations are both accessible to us and utterly strange in its account of magic, and compression of time and place.
Oxford University Press, 2007
Holub was an immunologist as well as a poet and essayist. This account of how he has to deal with the messy consequences of his neighbour shooting a muskrat is both lyrical and laconic, fusing an empathy for the dying animal with a wonderment at just how complex the passage from life to death can be:
“The blood wasn’t just that unpleasant stuff that under proper and normal conditions belonged inside the muskrat. It was the muskrat’s secret life forced out. This puddle of red sea was, in fact, a vestige of an ancient Silurian sea… In any case, the muskrat was cast ashore from its own little red sea. Billions of red blood cells were coagulating and disintegrating, their hemoglobin molecules puzzled as to how and where to pass their four molecules of oxygen.”
First published in Science, 1986, and included in Shedding Life: Disease, Politics and Other Human Conditions, Milkweed Editions, 1997
Denis Noble developed the first mathematical model of the heart in 1960, and MacLeod’s masterpiece weaves together a dramatised account of his early work with his own heart surgery in old age, and the dreaded ‘info-dump’ about the relevant science is skilfully avoided. The story was originally published in Litmus, an anthology of specially commissioned stories all featuring scientific discoveries (Comma Press have published several such anthologies), and here it’s paired with an essay by Noble himself. Macleod’s interest in D. H. Lawrence is apparent too, the 1960 trial of the UK publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover plays a role in this story, foreshadowing her 2021 novel Tenderness.
First published in Litmus, Comma Press, 2011 and shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2011
“Every water has a right place to be, but that place is in motion. You have to keep finding it, keep having it find you. Your movement sinks into and out of it with each stroke. You can fail it with each stroke. What does that mean, fail it.”
The narrator muses on her relationship with water and swimming, and her relationship with a man who draws chalk foxes on the pavement. In this piece the foxes, unlike people, do not fail.
First published online in The New Yorker, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Wrong Norma, Jonathan Cape, 2024
Hermann encounters her former psychoanalyst in her home city of Berlin, and decides to follow him into a bar. This action triggers a spooling out of thoughts and memories about friends, their families, their pasts.
Hermann is celebrated in Germany, but not as well known in Anglophone literature compared to her contemporaries Jenny Erpenbeck and Julie Zeh, all of whom are included in the so-called Fräuleinwunder (“girl wonder”) group of women writers. The feminist slogan “The personal is political” is also true of relationships in Germany, so often affected by the collective trauma of the past. Even today the silence surrounding that trauma can be hard to break, but Hermann shows us how writing can be brought to bear on it.
First published in Granta: Deutschland, 2023 and online here
For a short story to lure me in, I need one thing: great voice. If your narrator and/or character doesn’t have a unique or bizarre voice, I’m back to Netflix or staring at my neighbour across the road arguing with his bins. A convincing voice is, of course, tied up naturally with character, and character tumbles along neatly with plot, and plot is a close mate of pacing… so it begins for me with a solid grip on voice, ending in that last satisfying fork of risotto. Sometimes, in the pursuit of superior smarts, writers forget to actually spin a story, to entertain. Don’t flaunt your medial prefrontal cortex and disregard the notion of the big fat lie. That’s what fiction is after all. Short stories genuinely excite me and I’m happy so many people are committed to writing them. Here’s some of my favourites.
Voice and character intertwine to stably showcase instability in the barmiest way. “Had it not been for my new bedroom curtains, a lovely design of cornflowers on cream cotton, none of this might have happened.” A blame-game protagonist at odds with the world and devoid of personal boundaries. This story is a brilliant cringe-fest of terrible behaviour, but McDade works hard to get the reader to fall into the empathy trap. She utilises backstory to show some of the character’s more troubling personality developments throughout her working life in offices, and thematically connects those with the present situation unfolding. It makes the story very well-rounded. The pacing is hectic, but there are also plenty of breathers to allow us to recover too. It’s voyeuristic, uncomfortable, and massively comical. The climax is hilarious and the ending, well, it’s very much an anti-resolution but that’s OK. We know enough about the character at this stage to imagine how she’s going to conduct herself in the future, and it’ll never be a sunny day her way. ‘Soul Mate’ is a masterclass in voice, characterisation and pitch-perfect pacing.
First published in The New Yorker, December 1963, and collected in the anthology Let’s Be Alone Together, ed. Declan Meade, Stinging Fly Press, Sep 2008
“We were coming coming back from the pictures with half a packet of sweeties still coming round the corner at the Meadowside with Mary saying she was feart to go up the road herself…” is the first gasping line of this searingly sad and harrowing story spun in a child’s voice. In just five short pages with no full stops, we bear witness to two little kids attempting the journey home after a trip to the cinema, with abject danger on the approach from behind. It makes me genuinely sad reading this, like poring over the details of a news story about a missing woman, or watching a disturbing documentary. The lack of grammar intensifies the tension; the unbearable innocence of a child who’s ‘not quite right’ in the head (perhaps?) and then the last two pages, where words take on a tormenting typography in poetic form. Galloway is a genius at realistic (and phonetic) voices, the ones that are underrepresented in literature, i.e. working class invectives. Her first collection of stories platforming these unfamiliar pitches was published in 1990, a year before Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments and three years before Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. For me she’s the forerunner of the power of slangerature; flinging voice unashamedly onto the page as lived and as it sounds. You’ll be hard pushed to find pointless ‘nodding’ Victoriana in her effortless sentences. Just brilliant.
First published in Where You Find It, Jonathan Cape, 1996, also in Collected Stories, Vintage, 2009
As this shenanigans is called ‘a personal anthology’ and short stories are resolutely about (or connected to) trauma, I wanted to share a story that reflects a shock I got this summer. A friend of forty years – who lived abroad – died suddenly of cardiac arrest and I was talking to her within the same hour she passed. It was such a blow to all of us who knew, loved (and worried about) her and I keep thinking of Bullet in the Brainever since. My dear friend was a medical practitioner and I tortured myself wondering if she knew what was happening in the ten seconds or so before falling unconscious? The slowing down of time, those last frantic flashes and ticks. Here too, inside a lean but taut 1,885 words, a man suffers a bodily trauma he’s no hope of overcoming. Unlike my friend however, he goads the situation into being in the first place. He’s a completely unpleasant character, who happens to be in a bank, in the midst of an aggravated robbery, and he can’t keep his sarcastic gob shut. When the inevitable happens Woolf experiments with time and space, physics and memory, to give us a ‘film of my life’ that’s fairly unforgettable. Incredible idea.
First published in The New Yorker, September 1995 and available to read here; collected in The Night in Question, Knopf / Picador, 1996
Alan is a terrible writer. Let me explain: he introduces you to off-kilter characters, sets them up in (sometimes, not always) outrageous scenarios, then he clears off to leave you with them parasitically teeming in your head. What a shitty thing to do! The narrator in ‘Norma’ has chosen a Bartleby-type job for the summer over fruit picking in France. Constantly penning resignation letters but never sending them, his saving grace is Norma, the canteen lady (who’s previously worked in a strip club: “They really liked my cinnamon buns…”). Her sexual exploits soon take over, and he becomes complicit in her office affairs, acting as alibi. As ‘Norma,’ the short story progresses, our narrator sinks more and more into a funk: gives weekends over to reading books of lists, lets his appearance slide. I don’t do spoilers, but there’s a bit where Norma and the narrator are on a smoke break and she recalls one time she watches an air balloon drifting off into the sky, but doesn’t finish that story…
First published in The Pig’s Back 2, 2022
I’m writing this from a writers’ retreat in France that also doubles-up as a superb cookery school, and while I was looking for something else, I came across Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. An American chef telling Americans how to do it, but on a French bookshelf. Before she became a beloved tv-chef (as played by Meryl Streep), Julia Child was a secret agent of sorts, and ‘invented’ – by doshing various potions into pots – a liquid that repelled sharks from submarines (still in use today!). But also, Child was a frustrated writer (by her own admission) who wanted stories published in The New Yorker, but instead remained a lifelong reader. She fronted a series of radio shows on fiction and food, and it is here I first heard Edna O’Brien’s ‘Violets’, as read by the author herself. There’s not much going on plot-wise (‘well, fuck the plot!’, as Edna once said) – a woman is cooking and preparing her house to receive a “male visitor” – but by god, how exquisite this is. It becomes a Proustian meditation on love.
First published in The New Yorker, 5 November 1979, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories, 1984; the radio show with Julia Child and Edna as guest can be listened to here
Discombobulation, awkwardness, the throng of the crowd, and a terminally annoying interloper. There’s a random guy on a march no-one wants to talk to. He streams in from nowhere (possibly drunk) and doesn’t know what’s going on or why he’s there. He’s the embodiment of the universal asshole asking stupid questions and contributing nothing. “On all sides folk were walking past. They moved quickly. Some were coming so close I felt a draught from their body, going to bang into me. Somebody said, The army are there and they are waiting for us. I shouted, I beg yer pardon! Take yer hand off my arm, cried a man.” He likes to annoy women taking part too. He can’t stop butting in. He’s creepy and ineffectual, hassling people, pulling at elbows. “I could see another couple of people looking at me; they too were suspicious. I shook my head at them, as if I was just seeing them for the first time.” In the end he does what all goons do and follows the tribe into whatever strange hell looms.
First published in The Stinging Fly, Issue 12, Volume 2 and also collected in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, ed. Philip Hensher, Penguin, 2019
It’s not just about a canny dreamer of a fox who learns how to speak ‘Yuman’ by doing a Little Matchstick Girl stunt outside a house not far from his Den… Oh no! It’s also a mind-map of how to tell stories (as in, how to put one together). The word ‘story’ is mentioned 16 times. “One leson I lerned during my nites at that Yuman window was: a gud riter will make the reeder feel as bad as the Yuman does in there Story. Like the riter will make you feel as bad as Sinderela. You will feel sad you cannot go to the danse. And mad you have to sweep. You will feel like biting Stepmother on her Gown. Or, if you are Penokio, you will feel like: I wud rather not be made of wud. I wud rather be made of skin, so my father Jipeta will stop hitting me with a hamer. And so farth.” Saunders like to ‘play’ and through Fox 8’s newfound understanding of how people anthropomorphise, we get to see how ridiculous our approach to life really is. Then there’s our grotesque co-dependency with capitalism, running alongside our complete dislocation from nature. The narrator is funny, naïve, dreamy and cute. But he’s too trusting. His fellow foxes are losing their habitat, there’s no food to be had, everything is changing and dying and when one of his mates meets a brutal end, Fox 8 tries to address humanity. There’s pure wild entrepreneurship to how Saunders dives into his stories, the beauty of his world-building, blatant havoc and he how jumps back out again laughing. “Now, one thing I lerned from Storys is, when something big is about to okur, a riter will go: Then it hapened!” I think Saunders missed a trick through, Fox 8 should’ve talked directly to him at the end.
First published in The Guardian, 21st October, 2017, and in print as a standalone, Fox 8, Bloomsbury, 2018
A Personal Anthology 