‘Empty Air’ by Richard Smyth

Let’s take a moment here to appreciate the work of all the literary magazines that tirelessly publish and promote short stories and which are more often than not a labour of love. Structo has for some years been one of the best, but it seems to have been on hiatus since 2023. Hopefully that won’t be a permanent state of affairs because it has introduced me to several excellent contemporary short story writers, including Richard Smyth. In ‘Empty Air’, a man spends his spare moments climbing various buildings around a city trying to set the clocks to the correct time. In teasing out the reasons for this, Smyth beautifully marries his narrator’s inner and outer lives. It’s a brilliant evocation of loss, isolation and loneliness.

Published in Structo #16, Autumn/Winter 2016; read online here

‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley

“. . . not for nothing am I the great-grandson of that Ts’ui Pen who was the governor of Yunan province and who renounced all temporal power in order to write a novel containing more characters than the Hung Lu Meng and construct a labyrinth in which all men would lose their way . . .”

I know I’m not the first to choose Borges in A Personal Anthology and I doubt I’ll be the last. I thought about not including him for fear of duplicating what others have said, but the fact is that his work has excited and influenced me more than any other writer. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ is a story that begins like a John Buchan spy tale but becomes a dizzying but equally thrilling contemplation of time and infinite pathways. Reading him for the first time in my late teens I was struck by the way he opened up whole new possibilities for writing beyond the social realism that I was used to reading at that time. The fact that I then spent most of my twenties trying and failing to emulate his style is of course not his fault.

First published 1941; collected in Collected Fictions, Allen Lane 1999

‘Relief’ by Peter Ho Davies

Peter Ho Davies was named as one of Granta’s Best British Young Novelists in 2003, but he built his early career on short stories. ‘Relief’ was included in his debut collection, The Ugliest House in the World.

Claire Keegan has said that “a short story begins after what happens happens”. I’ve never been entirely sure what that means, but Davies’ story is perhaps a good illustration, in that it features two famous historical people a while after the event for which they are renowned. Lieutenants Bromhead and Chard are enjoying dinner in the mess tent in Natal, South Africa in the spring of 1889. Three months have passed since their defence of the British mission station at Rorke’s Drift, in which around a hundred men held off an army of five thousand Zulu warriors. Davies isn’t interested in glorifying the British soldiers’ exploits, though: Bromhead and Chard’s retelling of the event is interrupted by a bout of flatulence suffered by another soldier at the mess table. There’s broad humour here, but the story becomes a compelling examination of embarrassment, compassion and different kinds of bravery.

First published in The Paris Review Issue 141, Winter 1996 – subscribers can read it online here; collected in The Ugliest House in the World, Granta, 1997

‘Eastmouth’ by Alison Moore

A young woman travels with her boyfriend to his parents’ house in a seaside resort. She gets a warm welcome, but insists she isn’t intending to stay long. As the days pass, she feels increasingly uneasy – about her boyfriend, his parents, the town and the locals. Will she ever leave?

At first glance, there is nothing unusual about this seaside town and even by the end it’s hard to put your finger on what exactly is wrong about the place, but Moore plants subtle details – for instance the rust that comes away on the young’s woman’s palms when she grips the promenade rail – that gradually build to a climax. There’s no blood or gore, no jump scares, but the creeping sense of dread is even more powerful.

First published in The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, Spectral Press, 2014. Collected in Eastmouth and Other Stories, Salt 2022

‘Elite: The Dark Wheel’ by Robert Holdstock

This story is a bit of an outlier, as it was first published as a booklet to accompany a computer game release. It was probably the first ‘grown-up’ short story I ever read.

Elite is a space exploration game that came out in 1984, initially for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. I was 14 back then and my twin brother and I became totally hooked on the game. God knows how many hours we spent together playing it. Robert Holdstock became a bit of an obsession of mine too: his stunning novel Mythago Wood, published that same year, remains one of my all-time favourites.

My brother passed away in 2022. At the funeral, I spoke about our shared love of the game as teenagers. Afterwards, one of his friends wrote to say that they still played Elite (it has been adapted for modern consoles) and that players could give names to space stations in the game’s universe. They had named one after my brother. So somewhere out there in cyberspace is a fictional space station carrying my brother’s name. One day I will play Elite again and go in search of it and imagine that he and I are 14 again, wasting too much time but not really wasting it.

Published by Acornsoft Ltd, 1984

Introduction

Many moons ago I used to be an astronomer, and spent much of my professional life classifying images of galaxies. Was a particular galaxy a Seyfert 1 or a Seyfert 2? Was it radio loud, or radio quiet? But nothing was ever easily identifiable; every category had its exceptions that blurred boundaries. In time I realised that the intended aim of classifying actually created the blurring. All this is a (very) roundabout way of justifying my choices here. Several undeniably echt short stories, yes, but also a prose poem and some essays, as well as hybrids and autofiction.

The literary marketplace is keen to sell us the next big thing. There’s an emphasis on the new, the latest, the just-discovered, the debuts. But for me reading is rereading, just as the most important part of writing is rewriting, and a story often comes alive during the nth rereading, when I feel I both know and don’t know it. And as with literature, scientific discoveries and breakthroughs get all the headlines, but they only becomes ‘real’ if they can be repeated.

So, in random order:

‘Iron’ by Primo Levi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal

This is a stand-alone chapter in Levi’s autobiographical mosaic of fact and fiction as told through the chemical elements he has worked with. ‘Iron’ describes his attempt to identify an unknown chemical substance when he was a student in Fascist Italy, and moves from there to a poignant study of a fellow student who became a resistance fighter, and whose ‘iron’ moral strength inspired Levi. The Periodic Table was chosen by the Royal Institution in 2006 as ‘the best science book ever’.

First published in The Periodic Table, Schocken Books, 1984

‘Pause’ by Mary Ruefle

I could have made up this entire list with selections of Mary Ruefle’s work. This piece on her experience of the menopause starts with an image of a ‘cryalog’, recording just how often she cried during one month. “Anyone who has periods is a girl. You know this is true and it is very funny to you”. Yes, so funny and so, so true…

First published online in Granta, and included in My Private Property, Wave Books, 2016

‘On Being The Right Size’ by J. B. S. Haldane

What biophysical laws determine the most effective size for a given species?

“The most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. In a large textbook of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is larger than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the hare, though some grudging admissions are made in the case of the mouse and the whale.”

Haldane was a pioneering geneticist who thought nothing of experimenting on himself and who wrote prolifically, not only about science but also about society (he was a committed Marxist and contributed regular columns to the Daily Workernewspaper). Come to his writing for the science and stay for the crisp, clear writing reminiscent of George Orwell (and not only because of the leftwing politics) and the humour.

First published in Possible Worlds and Other Essays, Chatto and Windus, 1927 and available online at Faded Page

‘The Tribute’ by Jane Gardam

I’ve adored Jane Gardam’s writing, ever since I read her novel A Long Way from Verona when I was the same age as the just-teenaged protagonist. (When I fan-girled her at Edinburgh Book Festival several years ago she admitted this novel was autobiographical and I fell in love with her.) ‘The Tribute’ is pure comedy-tragedy, a lunch with three genteel upper-class English women who think they are honouring the memory of their former nanny Dench. These remnants of the Empire are, of course, monsters. But they get their come-uppance…

First published in The Sidmouth Letters, Abacus, 1980, and also dramatised for TV in the Tales of the Unexpected in 1983

‘The Means of Escape’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

This was Fitzgerald’s only short story collection, perhaps she’s better known as a novelist and biographer. But what a collection! This story is set in 19th century Van Diemen’s Land (present day Tasmania); Alice Godley is a young woman living with her family near a penal colony who encounters an escaped convict. Fitzgerald’s genius at evoking specific times and places is fully in evidence here, and it has a perfectly earned twist at the end.

First published in The Means of Escape, Flamingo, 2000

‘Errand’ by Raymond Carver

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

The Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi in The Mabinogion, translated by Sioned Davies

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