‘The Red-haired Girl’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

Set in 1882, this story tells of four young artists, impecunious and idealistic, who set out to paint ‘en plein air’ in a French fishing port, previously unvisited but chosen hopefully. They are British but have studied in Paris under an uncongenial tutor called Bonvin. The port, when they arrive, proves unsuitable in every way, with the result that three of them end up painting each other indoors, while the fourth, Hackett, lodging at the grim sounding Hotel du Port, manages to persuade the waitress serving him, the ‘red-haired girl’, to act as his model.

Penelope Fitzgerald had the virtue of conveying much while saying little. Perhaps only a female writer could describe her female character as “built for hard use and hard wear”, while mentioning the intrusive effect of her “rump” in the room of limited space in which Hackett, sitting alone, is served his fish-based meals.

Hackett is pompous and patronising but, we are given to understand, not unkind. He would like his model to wear a red shawl, but such a thing is beyond her means. She can only pose in her lunch break, and frustrates him further by insisting on doing crochet while he sketches and paints. Previously silent, she takes to muttering resentfully and at length during the sittings. Subsequently Bonvin pays an unexpected visit to the port, only to criticize Hackett’s efforts in devastating terms. Then the red-headed girl disappears, and Hackett is left to seek a reason.

Greater minds than mine have drawn firm conclusions about the ending of this story, but Fitzgerald is too subtle, some might say too perverse, to deal in clean endings. Which leaves me speculating. Also destined, I’m sure, to return to it again and again.

First published in the Times Literary Supplement, 1998 and then in the collection The Means of Escape, Flamingo – Harper Collins, 2000

‘Helium’ by David Bevan

I first came across David Bevan’s fiction via two chapbooks, The Bull, and The Golden Frog, both published by Nightjar press. I was struck by the finesse of the writing, what first appeared to be social realism morphing by degree into something more uncanny. Bevan’s prose was quiet but also vivid. I was keen to read more, and when chance arose, I did.

It is noticeable how deeply Bevan contextualises his characters. They are indivisible from their environment, moulded by it, constantly and subtly interacting with what surrounds them. In this respect his descriptions of landscape and his characters’ part in it are as sensitive and telling as any I’ve read. Individual and habitat oscillate between foreground and background, together forming the narrative.

This characteristic is evident in ‘Helium’. A man is taking his Sunday walk alone. He knows the surrounding moorland and farmland intimately. He is avoidant of anyone he might meet. His past is very much with him – everything he passes reminds him of it. He remembers the harshness of his childhood, and the inhibitions it has left him with. He remembers his one relationship with a woman, and the way forces inside caused him to sabotage it. Preoccupied by these thoughts, and their weight of regret, he approaches a reservoir and sees what appears to be a figure in distress. He determines not to circumvent it, as would be his inclination, but to investigate and, if need be, help. And that is all discretion allows me to tell you, except that the ending is as exquisitely drawn as the narrative preceding it.

There is an unobtrusive lyricism in Bevan’s prose. It suits his subject matter perfectly. His characters are hewn from personal histories that are sparingly drawn, but deeply formative. There is an element of fate in who they are, and what they have become. Bevan is very much his own writer but, if Thomas Hardy was writing today, I suspect he might write a bit like this.

Published online in Fictive Dream 2024 and then in Best British Short Stories 2025, ed. Nicholas Royle, Salt Publishing; available to read here

‘Three Old Men’ by George Mackay Brown

A friend of a friend, speaking with great affection, once mentioned that she knew George Mackay Brown. Living on Orkney, she published a small journal, and on occasion George would tread a wayward path from his home to her office, neglecting none of the public houses in between, incurring local opprobrium en route. I often imagined that journey, then came across this story. Serendipity…

An old man leaves his house on a dark winter night. Snow is starting. He is somewhat bemused to find himself doing this. As the weather thickens, he is joined by another, known to him by long acquaintance. They walk arm in arm with no light to guide them. They make conversation, they share memories, somewhat baffled by the situation in which they find themselves. As the snow deepens and the sky turns to a blizzard, they encounter a third old man, out with his fiddle. He knows not why. He takes an arm, joins them, and they stumble together, amiable and seemingly directionless. For a moment the sky clears and is lit by a single star. Then darkness engulfs them again and they shamble on in snow become too deep for footprints, bumping into fences and posts they were unable to apprehend, until they recognise the sound of their local inn. A youngster appears and seems to be leading them towards it, but as they draw near they find themselves instead being taken to the stable behind, where they perceive a tiny glimmer of light.

And that’s all – I’ve almost given it away. Except that this is a story of the most luminous beauty, impossible to recreate in language other than its own. Please find your way to it. Imagine you’re amongst the Magi.

Published in The Tablet, 1991, then in the collection George Mackay Brown, Winter Tales, London: John Murray Ltd, 1995, subsequently in The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Penguin Random House UK, 2015

Introduction

At first I thought of choosing the shortest stories I could, and some of those remain in the list below, but in the end I broadened my thinking as some stories kept pushing their way in. I did briefly wonder, after completing the list, why I don’t have any classic short story writers here – no Chekhov, Borges, Mansfield etc – and I think it’s because although I do love their stories, they don’t feel like they’re mine. The ones I’ve chosen do.

‘Bruce Calls from Mulholland’ by Bret Easton Ellis

I bought Ellis’s book The Informers in hardback when I was on holiday, and nowhere did the blurb say it was a collection of stories, so I read it as a novel. This was both difficult – it’s not a novel – and easy – Ellis’s characters are interchangeable, so it just felt even more dissociated than his other books, but not different in substance. And when I found it was actually a collection of stories, I was disappointed. All that work I put in! ‘Bruce Calls from Mulholland’ is the opening chapter – sorry, first story – and it’s just bog-standard Ellis: stoned and sunburned, written with the blank deadness that I didn’t realise, until I read Joan Didion’s fiction, was a straight lift from Joan Didion’s fiction. It is probably not a great story in its own right – but that’s not how I read it anyway.

First published in The Informers, Picador, 1994

‘Boil Some Water – Lots of It’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 1939, Fitzgerald’s success as a novelist was in the rear view mirror and he was working in Hollywood, groping for scraps as a freelance writer. At the weekends, he dashed off stories about Pat Hobby, a freelance writer groping for scraps in Hollywood. They were written purely for the money (“Will you wire me if you like it”) but they show how Fitzgerald’s facility meant he could never really turn out a dud, even with the left hand. In this story, Pat is doing rewrites on a script and can only think of one line to add – the title of the story – so decides to do a little research over lunch to help inspire him. Chaos and reversals ensue. It’s a tight little gem of comedy, written in the final year of Fitzgerald’s short life.

First published in Esquire, March 1940, where it can be read online, and subsequently in The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vol.3 : The Pat Hobby Stories, Penguin Classics, 1986, and The Collected Short Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000

‘Stock’ by Cynan Jones

“I write twelve pages to get one page, and I cut all the time,” Beryl Bainbridge once said. Cynan Jones is of similar mind: his most famous novel The Dig went from 90,000 words to 30,000 in one cut. His novels have been getting shorter and shorter, and now he has, well, cut out the middleman and just published a collection of stories. Stock is one of the best, a masterpiece of spring-wound tension that’s so pared-back it reads as simultaneously clear and abstract. It’s about a rural community on the edge of change, and the lengths people will go to to stop that change. To say more would spoil a story driven by the gaps left for the reader, but Stock has stuck with me more than any other new story I read this year. To return to Bainbridge: “Unless a writer is superb, I don’t think it’s enough just to go wuffling on.” Jones is superb, but he still doesn’t wuffle.

First published as a standalone story by Nightjar Press in 2023, and subsequently in the collection Pulse, Granta, 2025

‘Reunion’ by John Cheever

Probably the shortest great story I’ve read, at three pages top to tail. It’s about – as the opening and closing lines tell us – the last time a boy saw his father. The father is appalling in a comic way, and the story is rich in horrible dialogue that might even have been as much fun to write as it is to read. (I read it aloud to my son recently, though I think I enjoyed the experience more than he did. Another bad father.) But also the story and the central character of the father exemplify Cheever’s own dual nature – his need for respectability and his desire to subvert – which gives the story an undertow of deep poignancy, below the undoubted entertainment and horror value.

First published in the New Yorker, 20 Oct 1962, where it can be read online, and subsequently in the collection The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, Gollancz, 1965, and The Stories of John Cheever, Cape, 1979

‘The English Understand Wool’ by Helen DeWitt

DeWitt, depending who you ask, is somewhere between an underrated genius and a universal taste, but she doesn’t publish new work very often. This – OK, a novella more than a story; who’s counting? – is an exquisite self-contained world, led by our narrator Marguerite. Wealthy but fallen on hard times, she is required to write her life story, which we are reading. Her poise and orientation toward the world are visible when she is asked to write more about her feelings: “Perhaps there were people who would like to hear about feelings, but I did not think that they were people I would want to know.” The purity and intensity of DeWitt’s prose is a wonder, and the story will have you referring to certain things as “mauvais ton” for weeks afterwards.

First published as a standalone story in the New Directions Storybook ND series, 2022

‘Marching Songs’ by Keith Ridgway

In 2012 I became a pest on social media by talking about Keith Ridgway’s novel Hawthorn & Child too much. As one Irish writer – whom I blocked – observed, you’d think I had written the thing myself. Hawthorn & Child is a novel made of loosely connected stories – “a shattered novel in a bag”, Ridgway called it – and Marching Songsis one of the stories. It’s narrated by a man who is clearly not right in the head, who disappears down YouTube rabbit holes toward radical thinking in a way that seems even more familiar now than it did then. But what I love about the story is the poetry of the narrator’s cracked and freewheeling voice, which manages to be idiosyncratic without striking false notes. There are lines in it that hang around in my own head a dozen years later, which is as good a measure of its success as any.

First published in Granta 120, June 2012, where it can be read online, and as part of the novel Hawthorn & Child, Granta, 2012

‘The Choc-Ice Woman’ by Mary Costello

Costello’s stories are generally rigorous, austere, unconsoling – stylistically, the sort of thing I gravitate toward very easily. Her latest collection Barcelona is mostly stories of pain distilled into precise prose. But this, the longest and perhaps best story in the book, is a bit different. It’s more expansive in both story and style, about a woman whose husband has a sex addiction. She “loathes people with big appetites”, which is probably connected to those qualities in Costello’s stories I mentioned earlier. But it also has unexpected comedy, and the feel of a writer stretching herself in different ways – so it feels both more traditional than Costello’s other work, but also excitingly new because it’s unlike that work. It’s a complete thing.

First published in the New Yorker, 9 Oct 2023 where it can be read online, and as part of the collection Barcelona, Canongate, 2024

‘The First Seven Years’ by Bernard Malamud

The collection that this story comes from – The Magic Barrel – seems to me as coherent and artful a portrait of Jewish-American life in the last century as Dubliners was for its own era and place. In the story, Feld is a shoemaker (many of Malamud’s characters are small businessmen, often heading for penury) whose “old and ugly” assistant Sobel wants to marry Feld’s daughter Miriam, much to our man’s horror. “Then he realised that what he called ugly was not Sobel but Miriam’s life if she married him. He felt for his daughter a strange and gripping sorrow, as if she were already Sobel’s bride, the wife, after all, of a shoemaker, and had in her life no more than her mother had had.” Malamud’s stories are not out-and-out funny, but there’s an energy in the language that is akin to the energy of comedy, so I always read them with a big smile on my face, even when terrible things are happening.

First published in the Partisan Review, Sep-Oct 1950, and subsequently in the collection The Magic Barrel, 1958. Can be read online here

‘Foundry House’ by Brian Friel

Here in Northern Ireland, where he was born, Brian Friel has a huge and justified reputation as a playwright, but I didn’t even know he started out writing short stories until Penguin issued a selection of them earlier this year. It’s not so surprising, really – the efficiency of setting up narrative in a story and in a play must be connected skills. This is the best story in the new selection; it’s a bit less twinkly-eyed and Frank O’Connor-esque than some of the others, and it concerns the daughter of an Irish household who has moved to Rhodesia (as it then was), and how that affects everyone. It’s set largely in one room – the playwright flexing – and the characters, the details, the gestures, are all perfectly pitched; it’s sad and funny; it made me wish Friel hadn’t given up prose.

First published in the New Yorker, 11 Nov 1961, where it can be read online, and collected in The Saucer of Larks, Victor Gollancz, 1962, and in Stories of Ireland, Penguin, 2025

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff

I’m sorry to be the seventh person to choose this Wolff story – he has written other great stories – but it really is a corker. It’s the story of a book critic, Anders, who can’t keep his trap shut during an armed robbery and gets shot in the head as a result. And I loved it when I first read it 30 years ago, but I love it even more now that I too am a book critic and can take Anders’s story in part as a warning on the corrosive qualities of cynicism. Most of all though, it really is the exquisite, surprising, last scene and closing lines that tip this story into the pantheon of greats. How does he do it? And more to the point – since Wolff hasn’t published an all-new collection of stories since the one this one appeared in 30 years ago – why doesn’t he do it a bit more?

First published in the New Yorker, 18 Sep 1995, where it can be read online, and collected in The Night in Question, Bloomsbury, 1995) and subsequently in Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, Bloomsbury, 2008