‘Do Not Send help’ by Anna Clair

Like ‘The Landlady’, this piece expertly walks the tightrope, revealing itself to you as you read. It’s hard not to think of this whenever some poor soul is paraded in front of the TV cameras to say how everything is alright, really. And that alone might merit its place, as a story that sticks with me.

I loved it when I first read it, voting for its inclusion. But I loved it all the more when I heard it read out live (brilliantly, by Jennifer Tan). Because pitch this one wrong, and it wouldn’t work. Because the conceit, here, is that someone is reading words written for them, reading them in as neutral manner as you could with a gun being held to your head, and still managing to rebel, to pass on a message the writers of the speech expressly didn’t want to be passed on. (“Do NOT send help…”) And if that isn’t genius level writing–and acting–I’m really not sure what is.

Performed at Liars’ League, 2011 and available to read and listen to here

‘Frankenstein’s Monster is Drunk, and the Sheep Have All Jumped the Fences’ by Owen Booth

Owen Booth has had a number of brilliant stories at Liars’ League, but sometimes his epic flights of fantasy require more than two thousand words, such as ‘The Giantess, Bathsheba’, and this piece, winner of the Moth Prize, 2020 and recently turned into a very entertaining four-actor play. As with other stories by Booth, it has both a great title and a real emotional payoff. There’s an embarrassment of talent here, hiding so much heft in what might first appear almost as whimsical as that title. Read it, and shed a tear.

Winner of the Moth Prize, 2020 and published in The Moth 42 Autumn 2020. Also available to read in The Irish Times, here

‘How a Body likes her Breakfast’ by Cathy Browne

It’s obvious to me, and became even more obvious as I compiled this personal anthology and so made it obvious to you, that I don’t really read widely enough. I could blame the publishing industry. I could blame my semi-advanced age (things have got better, perhaps… slowly). But really I must blame myself, and my personal taste. I tend to stumble upon short story collections and anthologies rather than seek them out, often finding them in second-hand book shops, and the bias encoded therein, plus the even larger bias of the more distant past when I first began consuming them, means that white, dead men predominate, especially in the first half of this personal anthology.

So, I’ll readily admit, I went on the hunt for a new story for this anthology, to try, in some small way, to address the imbalance. I picked another book off my TBR shelf, ‘The Penguin Book of International Women’s Stories’. I’m only two-thirds through, and they’re all perfectly good stories. But, with the possible exception of Mary Flanagan’s ‘Cream Sauce’, I don’t think they’ll stick with me, and that, ultimately, has been what my personal anthology is all about.

And then I remembered this short story, another from Liars’ League. For the past six years they’ve run an annual Women and Girl’s theme, stories by women, read by women. A story about a victim of abuse might normally make me rather annoyed, not because it’s not a terrible thing, it is, but because it starts depressing and ends depressing, and you want to scream at them to ‘get out, RUN!’, but they oh so very rarely hear you. I’m afraid I’ve read enough of them that don’t do anything particularly new, except to remind us of an unpalatable reality. Which, for me, a lover of speculative fiction, isn’t what floats my short story boat.

But in this story by Cathy Browne, tables, improbably, are turned. And in a way that isn’t overly fantastical, though it obviously is. Despite the bleakness of the scenario, it’s funny. Empowering, which is a strange thing to say when the victim is dead (to begin with). It brings to mind Hallie Rubenhold’s ‘The Five’–telling the untold story of Jack the Ripper’s long misunderstood victims. Because no-one should just be a statistic, and because the least you can do is get their favourite breakfast right.

So there it is, my twelve. Whether in style or in content, and whether I came across them a year ago or forty, they linger in a way that truly makes them personal. For me they stand the test of time, echoing down the ages and never quite going out of fashion, and what better criteria can there be for something that might take you no more than a dozen minutes to read?

Performed at Liars’ League, 2021 and available to read and listen to here

Introduction

When Jonathan invited me to write for Personal Anthology my first impulse was to protest that I don’t read short stories. A quick glance at my bookshelves proves this is a bald-faced lie, but an interesting one. Why the resistance?

Thinking about Grace Paley cracked it for me. Paley is one of my chosen ancestors, a writer whose existence makes my own work possible. She is also, of course, famous for her short stories (and hospitable remarks). They are stories I’ve swallowed whole, stories whose ethos, music, and rhythms I’ve fully internalized, extending and revolving them in my mind, misremembering, embroidering, retelling, and living alongside them until, it seems, I no longer think of them as short stories. What are they instead? A world I visit. The sound of my own Jewishness. A guiding myth. Parables. A series of gestures contained in my body. Memories that live alongside all my other memories. (Stories that live alongside all my other stories.)

So here are twelve short stories (including a mini-anthology of Paley stories) that live in that fully internalized space in my head. They are not the only or even the best stories I have read, but an honest attempt* at excavating what stuck with me whether I wanted it to or not. The resulting list reflects the whiteness and boomer-centric bias of my Gen X era American education. I have been reading to disrupt those biases ever since but clearly I have more work to do.

*With one exception: I’m sorry, I just cannot include Amy Hempel’s ‘In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.’ Due to its inescapable presence in the late 1980s, it will be in my head for the rest of my days, and you know what? In spite of its brilliance and my sense that it is an ur-text for many other grief books including Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, I am sick of having it there. Begone sad primate.

‘Harrison Bergeron’ by Kurt Vonnegut

Is this story any good? Heck if I know. It was assigned reading in seventh grade and it’s been in my head ever since. Revisiting it for the first time in decades to write this I find it broad, a little weird—the hero is a good six years younger than makes sense—and startlingly prescient: the parents in the story watch a terrible personal tragedy unfold on TV but the father is unable to remember what has happened and why he is crying because a device implanted in his brain constantly interrupts his train of thought. (Do you need to check your phone? I’ll wait.) The premise of the story, that people with talent, strength or intelligence are punished in ways designed to bring them down to the lowest common denominator in the name of “equality,” strikes me as peculiarly Midwestern and a little Fountainheadish around the edges now, but when I first read it I was a loudmouth fourteen-year-old Jewish bookworm in Boise, Idaho who was regularly bullied for “using big words.” It’s not hard to see why it struck a chord.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1961. Collected in Welcome to the Monkey House, Delacorte, 1968

‘To Room Nineteen’ by Doris Lessing

I first read this story, and The Golden Notebook, when I was in my early twenties. Re-reading it now I see most of it must have flown over my head. Certainly, I did not remember its analysis of an upper class intellectual mid-20th Century English marriage. But Susan’s craving for Room 19, the nothing that she did there, and the absolute necessity of that solitude—a life and death necessity—have been with me continually for more than thirty years now. Perhaps it was the first time I saw my own deep need to be alone on the page and began to understand the stakes of my refusal—already clear—to pursue Susan’s kind of life.

First published in A Man and Two Women, MacGibbon and Kee, 1963. Widely anthologized and available in the collection To Room Nineteen, Flamingo, 2002

‘The Balloon’ by Donald Barthelme

I came to ‘The Balloon’ blessedly ignorant of Barthelme and his status—I think my father pulled it down for me from the shelf where all his college books lived. It’s a New York City fairytale. An elaborate metaphor for longing and desire. A gentle satire of certain forms of installation art and their critics. A loving evocation of city residents and their adaptability. The balloon, though packed away at the end of the story, goes on living in my daydreams and I have often retreated into its soft curves and colors (“muted heavy grays and browns for the most part, contrasting with walnut and soft yellows”) when the world overwhelms me.

First published in The New Yorker on April 8, 1966, and still available to read there. Collected in Sixty Stories, Penguin, 1993. Also in the mini Penguin Modern Classic Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, 2011

‘The Garden Party’ by Katherine Mansfield

It is impossible for me to think about Mrs. Dalloway without also thinking of ‘The Garden Party’ which should be recommendation enough. Mansfield’s story, like Woolf’s novel, is about death in the middle of a party, but instead of Clarissa and her middle-aged memories and longings we have Mansfield’s child protagonist Laura hovering between the worlds of childhood and adulthood, innocence and knowledge, life and death, wealth and poverty, witness, and denial. Written in prose like dappled sunlight and deep shadow.

First published in 1922 as a three-part serial in the Westminster Gazette and later collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories, Alfred A Knopf, Inc and widely anthologized and available, including at Project Gutenberg

‘I Stand Here Ironing’ by Tillie Olsen

“I stand here ironing and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.”

Olsen gives us everything in the first line: the never-ending work of poverty and motherhood, the single, unpartnered I, the impossibility of explaining, the impossibility of giving what is needed, the never-ending continued attempt to give it anyway. “I Stand Here Ironing” is a mother’s agonized internal monologue in response to a well-meaning social worker’s questions about her oldest daughter. How to gather the threads of history, circumstance and harm that distorted her daughter’s life? How to explain what she could have been, might still be? It’s the way the daughter shines darkly from within this lament that breaks my heart wide open. Both social worker and mother have seen “her rare gift for comedy on the stage that rouses laughter outof the audience so dear they applaud and applaud and do not want to let her go.”

First published in Pacific Spectator, in February 1956. Collected in Tell Me a Riddle, Dell Publishing, 1956

‘The Debutante’ by Leonora Carrington

“It was to escape from the world that I found myself each day at the zoo. The beast I knew best was a young hyena. She knew me too. She was extremely intelligent; I taught her French and in return she taught me her language. We spent many pleasant hours in this way.”

Carrington was twenty when she wrote “The Debutante.”  I think of her living with Max Ernst—more than twice her age and married—in a village in Southern France in an old farmhouse bought with money cadged from her mother but registered only in his name, World War II already a threatening cloud on the horizon. I think of her painting alongside an already well-established artist and then slipping away to write these fierce, strange, little stories, making worlds only she could see. I was twenty-three when I bought the then new 1993 Virago edition of Carrington’s stories and read this feral, bloody, wildly funny story about disturbingly entitled rebellion (the poor maid!). I’ve been writing towards it ever since. 

Originally written in 1937. Possibly published in French in a small magazine—Carrington’s publication history is complex! Collected in The Seventh Horse and Other Tales, Plume, 1988. Republished with an introduction by Marina Warner by Virago in 1993. Now available in The Debutante and Other Stories, Silver Press, 2017 and The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, Dorothy, 2017

‘I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like’ by Noy Holland

Woooo! Technically this story is too new to me. There was supposed to be something else here. But don’t we deserve a shot of pure joy? I walk around reciting lines, humming them, like it’s a song not a story. It might be a song, not a story. I can’t stop singing it.

Collected in I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like: New and Selected Stories, Counterpoint Press, 2017

‘Wants’ by Grace Paley

“Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years so I felt justified.” A woman runs into her ex-husband on the way to return two Wharton novels that have been overdue for eighteen years. (She checks them out again after paying the fine because she read them so long ago.) They reminisce a little. “But as for you,” the ex says, “it’s too late. You’ll always want nothing.”

He had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment.

And she sits back down on the library steps to consider her wants. That’s it. That’s the whole story. But contained within it are a few lifetimes, a critique of state bureaucracies, a philosophy of breakfast, self-acceptance, change, continuance, and several more unforgettable lines.

Collected in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974

‘Conversation with My Father’ by Grace Paley

Ars poetica in the form of an argument, one I’ve often had with myself. “I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” says the narrator’s father from his hospital bed, “the kind de Maupassant wrote, or Chekov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and write down what happened to them next.” And so she tries, and (according to her father) fails, due to jokes and a too firm commitment to the possibility of change. “Tragedy!” he shouts in the final lines, “When will you look it in the face?” (I sometimes walk around my house saying this to myself, but it makes me laugh so the narrator wins after all.)

Collected in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974