‘Gravel’ by Alice Munro

“I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture.”

A remembered life, as Munro reminds us in this exquisite meta-fictional story, bears as much resemblance to the truth as we allow it. From the relative sanctuary of adulthood, the narrator trawls her childhood, a terrain of innocence and naivety, to make sense of a nebulous, tragic event and its attendant guilt. She recalls playing with her older sister and the family dog, moving into a trailer beside a gravel pit with a new step-father, their mother pregnant. A wolf loiters at the edge of the narrative. Beyond this, we are uncertain what to trust, as the fragility of memory blurs into a series of constructs that ponder the nature of storytelling itself.

First published in The New Yorker, June 2011, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Dear Life, McClelland & Stewart Limited, 2012

‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“You wanted to feel disdain, to show it as you brought his order, because white people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same – condescending.”

As with Proulx’s story above, the American Dream again proves a fallacy, or at least prohibitive for some. An unnamed narrator leaves Nigeria for Maine, seeking new opportunity as she stays with an ostensibly helpful uncle who isn’t an uncle, until he abuses her. ‘America is give and take,’ he tells her. Amid the diasporic disorientation a romance ensues, her white boyfriend attentive yet blind to the insidious prejudice or effusiveness that flanks them everywhere. ‘…the nasty ones were too nasty and the nice ones too nice.’ She sends money home, an illusion of success bestowed, but the cultural disconnect is irreconcilable, the death of her father in Lagos luring her home, perhaps forever.

First published in Prospect, June 2004, and available to read here; collected in The Thing Around Your Neck, Fourth Estate, 2009

‘The Dressmaker’s Child’ by William Trevor

“She came out of the blue cottage and ran out at cars.”

The story (and collection) responsible for seducing me to the form, beguiled and astonished as I was by Trevor’s ellipses and obliquity, how less could be so much more (than the bloated novels I was growing weary of). A young Irish mechanic is hired to drive a pair of credulous Spanish tourists on a pilgrimage to a statue, the Virgin of Pouldearg, after they hear rumours – furnished by a man in a bar they buy drinks – of it miraculously weeping. The events that follow chart a forlorn yet poignant course, navigating guilt, self-delusion and penitence, the sheer serendipity of the trials that befall us. Life’s path in Trevor’s stories often alters in a heartbeat, a moment of recklessness, a quiet betrayal. And yet, as here, tragedy can also birth hope. The audacious arc of this piece still astonishes me.

First published in The New Yorker, October 2004, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Cheating at Canasta, Penguin Books, 2007

‘She Murdered Mortal He’ by Sarah Hall

“The ocean wind was strong. Grains of sand stung her arms and face. Her dress fluttered. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps they were not in step.”

I once read someone bemoaning their fortunes in one of the big short story prizes: ‘How it works, basically, is everyone enters and Sarah Hall wins.’ Beneath the cynicism, there was also a grudging respect, acknowledgement that such success was deserved. I often tell my students that the best short story writers are Irish, or American, or African. Canadian. Rarely British. Hall being one of the few exceptions, her deep understanding and execution of the form almost unrivalled.

A quiet story, this, until, as with all the great ones, it isn’t. A couple holidaying on the coast of an unnamed African country, their relationship collapsing, take a break from hostilities and each other, the female narrator fleeing along the beach. A stray dog approaches her, threat and menace palpable. What follows might peter out in mere mortals’ hands, but of course Hall sustains the tension right up to the shocking finish, which is all the more impactful when we realise what has occurred off-stage.

First published in Granta 117, October 2011, and available to read here; collected in The Beautiful Indifference, Faber and Faber, 2012

‘The Edge of the Shoal’ by Cynan Jones

“The water beneath him suddenly aglut, sentinel somehow, with jellyfish.”

Jones’s short novels pulse with a quiet, brooding tension, made tauter by the spare, cadenced prose, which approaches its subject matter obliquely and with great understatement. This story, extracted from one of these books – Cove, presides over a kayaker struck by lightning, battling injuries, fear and the elements, buoyed only by thoughts of his pregnant partner ashore, his late father. Crucially, Jones’s sentences are never mere fact conveyors, but also impact us on an abstract and affective level, the ellipses and shifts in tense and point-of-view mimicking the kayaker’s disorientation and desperation. Time distends and lumbers, skews and stills in this claustrophobic tale of oceanic survival.

First published in The New Yorker, October 2016, and available to subscribers to read here; also available to read at the Guardianonline here. Winner of the BBC National Short Story Prize 2017 and collected in The BBC National Short Story Award 2017, Comma Press, 2016

‘Terroir’ by Graham Mort

“When you drank wine, Gaultier had said, you’re sipping time and weather, the rising and setting sun, even tasting your own mortality.”

An ambitious young enologist is hired by an entitled, largely absent vineyard owner to oversee that season’s harvest, setting in motion a cascading sequence of tragic events. Mort transports us deep into Bordeaux country, its traditions and rhythms, its heady concoction of toil and passion, a pulsing heat that loosens morals and fosters incaution. At its heart is a story of love, lust and revenge, of temptation and consequence. I typically prefer stories less crafted than this, but Mort’s brilliance as both poet and skillful storyteller wins me around.

First published in Terroir, Seren Press, 2015 and available to read online here

‘The Intensive Care Unit’ by J.G. Ballard

“As we undressed and exposed ourselves to each other the screens merged into a last oblivious close-up . . .”

With typical Ballardian prescience, this harrowing dystopian story reveals how contact with other people is restricted to screen-time only (sound familiar?) with humans isolated in their homes in solitary confinement (even the couple’s wedding night takes place apart). We are never told why this separation is necessary – seasoned storytellers know to shun explanatory neatness – but instead witness the aftermath of what occurs when a family (Ballard’s intensive care unit) decides to flout the draconian rules and meet in person. (Oh, how life imitates art.) Bookended by the present tense carnage is the story of how the couple met (via a screen of course), the ensuing domestic bliss and arrival of children (conceived via AID – which we presume to be a version of IVF). Amid the dark humour lie meditations on our desire for physical connection with others and what we become when this is removed.

First published in Myths of the Near Future, Jonathan Cape, 1982; collected in The Complete Stories, Vol 2, Fourth Estate, 2014 and  English Short Stories from 1900 to the present, Everyman Classic, 1988

‘Last Night’ by James Salter

“It was in the uterus and had travelled from there to the lungs. In the end, she had accepted it.”

Stories that turn on a singular moment run the risk of appearing gimmicky, like the punchline of a joke, the denouement of a magic trick – briefly thrilling but ultimately facile.  Salter, however, sets up this spectral moment so surgically that the thrill endures, the reader both fascinated and appalled as it plays out. Charged with eroticism, betrayal and cowardice, ‘Last Night’ offers none of its protagonists a redemptive escape lane – if you like emerging from a story with a semblance of hope, this one isn’t for you. Humans, men especially, in Salter’s stories, are deeply flawed and self-destructive.

First published in The New Yorker, November 2011,and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Last Night, Penguin Books, 2005

‘Something that Needs Nothing’ by Miranda July

“We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.”

Short stories aren’t about things; they are the things themselves. Sure, they’re braided with thematic skeins simply by virtue of possessing characters with human sensibilities. But unlike the vast canvases of their flabby cousin, the novel, they tend to revel in artifice, an authoritative geometry of their own. July’s achingly poignant and at times hilarious tale of a complex, often unreciprocated friendship achieves its unifying identity from the vulnerable, compelling narrative voice. It’s a heavily stylised story that transcends its own themes of loneliness, coming-of-age, alienation and sexual identity by having us ache alongside the narrator, accompanying her in the kind of intimate possession all great stories achieve.

First published in the New Yorker, September, 2006 and available to subscribers to read here; collected in No One Belongs Here More Than You, Simon & Schuster, 2007, as well as in My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro, HarperPress/HarperCollins, 2008

Introduction

As a fan of the theories of Carl Jung, I very much appreciate the way Christopher Booker (The Seven Basic Plots) and Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Women Who Run with the Wolves) take a Jungian view on storytelling. In essence, their thesis is that stories are a blueprint for life, showing us the many paths – some more challenging than others – our lives may take when we make certain choices.

Being an editor of anthologies as well as a writer, I agonized over the approach I should take for my own personal anthology, worrying over how to compile the “perfect” list. Of course, though, there is no such thing as “perfect” in literature, there is only “done”, so in the end I went with stories that have, at some time or other, deeply moved me. And when I eventually compiled my list, I saw that all the stories were either about stasis or transformation – two situations in life that are diametrically opposed to one another. I think I’m particularly drawn to these kinds of stories because I view them as a kind of test of my psyche. If placed in the same situation, would I be content to live in a state of stasis? Or would I be psychically strong enough to go on a journey of rebirth? I hope these stories invite you to ask the same of yourself.

‘Static’ by Alison Moore

The title of the story says it all, really. Elderly Wilfred is in an unbearably sad kind of stasis since his wife, Dorothy, is confined to bed due to illness. As he makes her a fresh cup of tea, he considers their long and happy life together, but also the various ways in which he feels he has failed her. Though both are powerless to transcend the awful situation, is there anything Wilfred can do or say that would make a difference?

First published online as a Manchester Writing Competition finalist here. Collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories, Salt Publishing, 2013

‘Touch Me with Your Cold, Hard Fingers’ by Elizabeth Stott

“Tony had been something of a womaniser, but Maureen has changed him.” Or so she thinks. Yet when Maureen discovers an “extraordinarily realistic mannequin” in Tony’s flat, Maureen begins to wonder if he haschanged; if he really has been transformed by her love. A deliciously uncanny tale, I was gripped to the very (disturbing) end.

First published as a chapbook by Nightjar Press, 2013. Collected in Best British Horror, Salt Publishing, 2014

‘The Machine Stops’ by E. M. Forster

First published in 1909, ‘The Machine Stops’ is a scarily prescient foresight of the world in which we live today. The majority of humans in Forster’s dystopia live underground, in individual hexagonal cell-like rooms, and are physically dissociated from each other. Yet they all interact with each other with the help of ‘The Machine’ which provides for all their bodily needs. They spend their days listening to lectures, music, and debating/discussing the latest news, opinions and ideas. Yet for all the proliferation and dissemination of words and ideas, the society, itself, is in stasis. And rapidly disintegrating. A masterly work, ‘The Machine Stops’ is a brilliant example of E.M. Forster’s deep understanding of human nature.

First published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review, November 1909. Collected in The Eternal Moment and Other Stories, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1928; also available as a Penguin Mini Modern Classic, 2011

‘The Interpreter of Maladies’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

In much of ‘The Interpreter of Maladies’, the young Mr and Mrs Das and their three children are confined to a car while Mr Kapasi, their guide, drives them to the Konarak Sun Temple. Bored by the car journey, the static-like travelling, Mr and Mrs Das talk to Mr Kapasi and discover that he has another occupation – he translates for a doctor. Mrs Das, suddenly intrigued by his other job, declares it romantic, causing Mr Kapasi to experience a rush of feelings.

“Her sudden interest in him, an interest she did not express in either her husband or her children, was mildly intoxicating. When Mr Kapasi thought once again about how she had said ‘romantic’, the feeling of intoxication grew.”

Lahiri is a magician-like writer. You think you know where this story is going, but then it veers away, surprising you; leaving you a little in awe of how skilful she is in the art of misdirection and the laying down of clues.

First published in AGNI #47, 1998. Collected in The Interpreter of Maladies, Flamingo, 2000