‘Broccoli’ by Maeve Brennan

This is a rather short short story, not much more than a page, and by some counts not really a story, being a personal anecdote. None of which matters, as the seemingly inconsequential account about the smallest of private failures takes on, fills with, rings with echoes of one’s own moments of lesser or greater failure.

First published in The New Yorker, 3 November 1963, and available to subscribers to read here; reprinted in The Long-Winded Lady Notes from The New Yorker, Boston: Mariner Books, 1998, Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016 and Peninsula Press, 2024, with an introduction by Sinéad Gleeson

‘Speed the Plough’ by Mary Butts

An early story by Mary Butts, about a shell-shocked conscript in the first world war, a mismatch both with the army and the normative assumptions of doctors and authorities, sent to recuperate by working on a dairy farm. The crude physicality of milking begins to sicken him—”There was a difference in nature between that winking, pearling flow and the pale decency of a Lyons’ tea jug”—and in the end he contrives to return to his job as a London couturier. Aesthetics, popular culture, gender, culture, nature and artifice, all interrogated and dramatised brilliantly.

First published in The Dial, 71 as ‘Speed the Plow’; reprinted in Speed the Plough and other stories, Chapman and Hall, 1923; in Natalie Blondel (ed.) With and Without Buttons and other stories, Carcanet Press, 1991; and in The Complete Stories, McPherson, 2014

‘Handel’ by Lydia Davis

I’m fond of this story (another very short one, less than a page) partly because I’m extremely keen on Handel’s music and, like the annoying husband in the story, I listen to it a lot of the time. The undecorated narration and the matter-of-fact but surreal conclusion is productively disturbing. Like a number of Lydia’s stories, this one is very short, very formal, and very much larger than it looks.

First published in Little Star, reprinted in Can’t and Won’t, Hamish Hamilton, 2014

‘The Singing Man’ by Fielding Dawson

This is possibly my favourite short story ever, perfect narrative control beside (and necessary to contain) an almost voluptuous love of the sheer exuberant presence of a delivery man in the street the narrator comes to enjoy the existence of, as he pushes a hand truck through the crowds, occasionally lifting his voice in a song. Not that he can sing well—he forgets the words, can’t hit the high notes, and embarrasses the passers-by—but an absolute social grace is what Dawson’s writing creates in this unembarrassed, inclusive, brilliant vision of city life.

From The Man Who Changed Overnight and other stories & dreams 1970-1974, Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1976

‘The Vanishing Princess or The Origins of Cubism’ by Jenny Diski

An apparently simple story, like a fairy story, but with complex, recursive thinking about ontology and desire. It’s shot through with ironic distance, and the distinctive Diski note of apparent objectivity masking implied feeling. (I have to add here that I was married to Jenny Diski, so have a special fondness for her writing, but that’s not the only reason for including this story.)

First published in the New Statesman, reprinted in The Vanishing Princess, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995

‘The Gannets’ by Anna Kavan

Nobody equals Anna Kavan in evoking states of powerlessness, puzzlement, lostness, uncertainty, and paranoia, and in seeing through the eyes of people in those states of mind. I might have chosen any of the stories from this volume, the title story itself, or ‘The Blackout’ or ‘All Kinds of Grief Shall Arrive’, or ‘Now I Know Where My Place Is’ but I chose this one, because of an apparent inconsequentiality which sits uncomfortably with the unexplained scene of cruelty the narrator witnesses. Kavan’s stories are often thinking about cruelty, both casual and deliberate, and it’s extraordinary how much she manages to imply in this two-page story. It suggests interesting comparison with Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’, with Lord of the Fliesand with A.L. Barker’s observations of childhood.

First published in I am Lazarus, Jonathan Cape, 1945, and reprinted in Machines in the Head: Selected Short Writing, ed. by Victoria Walker, Peter Owen, 2019

‘The Tournament’ by William Sansom

This isn’t entirely successful, not as outstanding as other stories of his like ‘The Wall’, but it is an interesting attempt to write a political allegory using a future setting and a familiar trope, with a description of spectacle being used for political purposes, loudspeaker commentary subtly (at first) sowing propaganda, and a finale in which sport (of a sort) tips over into war, rules abandoned. It owes something perhaps to the novels of Rex Warner, and is one of the reasons people sometimes evoked Kafka as a comparison for Sansom’s writing. A period piece, in a way, but an interesting one, and I’ve never been quite able to get it out of my mind.

First published in English Story, Third Series, 1942; reprinted in Reginald Moore and Woodrow Wyatt eds., Stories of the Forties, Vol. I, Nicholson & Watson, 1945

‘”Dear Ailie”’ by Malachi Whitaker

Another brilliant writer from the nineteen thirties. Almost any of her short stories would have done, but this one is particularly and resonantly poignant, full of misunderstandings, fears, circumstantial misconnections, in fact all the ingredients of comedy except a happy ending.

First published in Five for Silverm Jonathan Cape, 1932

‘The Door in the Wall’ by H.G. Wells

A paradigmatic story about a lost Eden, a magical realm the central narrator stumbles on at the age of five when he goes through a mysterious door in a wall a few streets from his London home. Later opportunities to revisit it are passed over for more mundane urgencies, but latterly he becomes obsessed with finding it again, with tragic consequences. The story is hedged about with Wellsian scepticism in the frame narrative, but doubt never quite leads to complete disbelief. For all the familiar Edwardian male clubland setting, the story has a haunting quality that draws on unconscious memory and unconscious desire.

First published in the Daily Chronicle, 1906, collected and reprinted frequently since. Available to read online here

‘The Ground Hostess’ by Francis Wyndham

There is a long tradition of playing with the gap between fiction and reality, and the short story form has proved very adept at summoning ghosts and creating weird narratives. In this more light-hearted story, Francis Wyndham takes an existing strand and provides an original and  satisfying twist on it. What makes it remarkable though, beyond the narrative, is the perfectly judged, perfectly characterised style.

First published in the London Review of Books, 1 April 1983; reprinted in Mrs Henderson and other stories, Jonathan Cape 1985

‘Longshore Drift’ by Julia Armfield

Julia Armfield’s ‘Longshore Drift’ is bookended by basking sharks: “prehistoric things, nightmare-mouthed and harmless”. The sharks serve as an oddly innocent and disappointing presence in the gloomy summer of the story, lingering below the surface, ignored by holidaymakers, swimmers, and paddleboarders. 

This unconsummated threat perfectly mirrors the malaise, boredom, and underwhelm of Alice and Min’s summer, in which they fail to sell ice creams from a van, and the “afternoon is only an attempt at itself – fretful greyness, minnow stink of gutweed”. Min is confident, with bleached hair, a pierced nose, and a sales technique that relies on flirting with local boys and handing out Cornettos free of charge. Alice is reserved, a “clever girl” whose mother worries about her. Alice is disinterested in boys and friendships with other girls in her year. 

This sets up Alice and Min’s painful and uneven journey through adolescence into adulthood, which we see in brief: Min wants to sneak into clubs and kiss boys; Alice has convinced herself she isn’t gay, and follows Min everywhere, sometimes begrudgingly. When Min befriends a group of teenage boys and dubs her friend ‘Savoury Alice’ to her ‘Sweet Minerva’, the tensions between the two are laid bare, and Alice begins to think about Min more carefully, slowly, without knowing what it is she wants to do or say.

Armfield’s British seaside is littered with ice cream wrappers, discarded tennis balls, cigarette butts, chewing gum. This grubbiness is offset by the incredible tactility of the world when the girls are together – electric shocks from polyester shorts, a crunching and rumbling skirt, Min’s hair a “glowstick candle in the dark”, the way Min holds Alice’s wrist or loops her fingers over Alice’s. When Alice enters the sea, she is submerged and is nudged by one of the basking sharks, suddenly afraid she can see right down to its heart. When Min pulls her back up, there’s a sense that what is out there for Alice might seem frightening, but it is calling to her, anyway. 

First published in Granta 148, August 2019, and available to read here. Picked by Jenna Clake. Jenna is the author of two poetry collections, Fortune Cookie (Eyewear) and Museum of Ice Cream (Bloodaxe), and a novel, Disturbance (Trapeze). Her poetry criticism has appeared in Poetry London, The Poetry School and The Poetry Review and she lectures in Creative Writing at Teesside University.

‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ by J. G. Ballard

“All summer the cloud-sculptors would come from Vermilion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West.”

Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Rich and warm and rhythmic, full of magnificent views and invitingly avant-garde vacationeers. Vermilion Sands, last – as in terminal, as in only remaining – resort of the super-rich, the ultra-self-regarding, the mega-disaffected: a summer escape of endless beaches but no seas, sonic statues*, operatic flora, lakes of fused glass, and viciously bored people.

‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ is a tale of bitter love, climatic revenge, and ephemeral installation art, told by the jaded but still (mostly) gallant Major Parker, retired air force pilot and reluctant beachcomber, who finds himself running an oddball sky-bound performance art troupe with professional lounge lizard Van Eyck, failed portraitist Nolan, and manic dwarf Petit Manuel, all four of them drawn into the celebrity maelstrom that is Leonora Chanel (a type of retro-futuristic Paris Kardashian, if you will). To summarise would be to ruin, but if that gorgeously cadenced opening smacks of radiant Monaco sublime, then the ending is perfectly pitched Death Valley tragi-farce.

“We had entered an inflamed landscape. Half a mile away the angular cornices of the summer house jutted into the vivid air as if distorted by some faulty junction of time and space.”

Which certainly nails the undertow of every summer resort holiday I’ve ever had.

Ballard inverts science-fictional technique. An example: for the first two-thirds of the story, Leonora Chanel is described as having “jewelled eyes”, and because this is Ballardian SF, and because Vermilion Sands is a super-rich hi-technotopia, you naturally enough take it literally: she has body-mods, diamond eyeballs, or emerald, maybe topaz, whatever, but anyway actual bionic gemstone eyeballs! A literal sfnal eyeball-kick! Cool as. And then, in a brief prelude of surface slippage before the finale’s carnival of destruction, Leonora has a hissy fit, and Ballard shows you it’s all for show. Just like summer, when all you can really rely on is the cold winter depth of a human heart.

Ballard said of his imagined desert resort (a far cry from his native Shepperton) that it was a place where he would be happy to live. But then he also said that it “has more than its full share of dreams and illusions, fears and fantasies,” and that “it celebrates the neglected virtues of the glossy, lurid and bizarre.” So of course it’s a place where the great writer of surrealistic interiority would want to live. He’d have had enormous fun sipping coffee on a terrace and watching the slow-quick-slow entropy waltz circling around him.

He wrote a suite of nine stories set there, of which ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ was the eighth written (in 1967, so it’s the same age as me, which is one small reason why it’s my favourite), but it fronts the collected edition, and thereby sets the tone: lush and decadent surface detail, a Riviera of the imagination: louche, decaying, and dangerous underneath. The Vermilion Sands suite (not an accidental term) may be Ballard’s most flamboyantly surrealistic tales. They’re certainly, to me, his most straightforwardly enjoyable — perfect beach reading for people who aren’t, in fact, that keen on beaches.

(*There are at least four very different, yet oddly similar, prog-ambient type music tracks named for this story, all by different bands. It’s just that kind of story.)

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1967. Collected in Vermilion Sands, Berkley Books, 1971, now Vintage, 2016; and in The Complete Short Stories, Volume Two, Harper Perennial, 2006. Picked by Robert Cook. Robert is Anglo-Irish, a registered nurse, and a writer. He lives in Brisbane, Australia.

‘Dr H. A. Moynihan’ by Lucia Berlin

A young girl is expelled from school for striking a nun and forced to spend every day of her summer vacation working in her grandfather’s dental office. Despite his alcoholism and the filth of his working environment, he makes the best set of false teeth in all of Texas in his workshop, a place of pure horror, where the intensely visceral climactic scene unfolds. With her spare, unsentimental prose, Berlin normalises the trauma the grandfather puts his granddaughter through, even tempering it with the darkly comic image of the child hitting the wrong lever and “the chair spinning him around, spattering circles of blood on the floor”. 

Minor characters such as the Mexican and Syrian neighbourhood children the narrator isn’t allowed to play with, Jim, the black elevator man in the building where her grandfather’s sign “I Don’t Work for Negroes” hangs, and Mamie dying amid “the stench and the flies” speak to us, through their silence, of the poverty and racism of working-class 1940s/50s America. 

Published in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015. Picked by Hazel Norbury. Hazel is currently completing her MA in Creative Writing at City, University of London, and finalising the draft of her first novel Turkish Mosaic.

‘The Sound of Summer Running’ by Ray Bradbury

This is my coming-of-age story – not for the protagonist, who remains bursting with youthful innocence at the end, but for me. I raised myself on a diet of genre fiction during my early teens, devouring detectives and aliens. Purchasing a second-hand copy of Dandelion Wine, expecting carny ringmasters and living tattoos, and discovering instead that a tale doesn’t require a mystery waiting to be solved. Something as gossamer as capturing ‘that summer feeling’ can enthral. 

‘The Sound of Summer Running’ places us inside the imagination of Douglas, a world where magic realism is not a necessity, since in his head he can run like a fox or a rabbit — as a fox or rabbit, he becomes the wind. The point of the story is not how he solves his dilemma in yearning for new running shoes. It’s to awaken again that feeling of childhood freedom, where one’s imagination placed no limits on the world.

I was barely older than Douglas when I first read it. A few years back, I found myself the probable age of the store-keeper, living on a small roadless island in Hong Kong, carting the weekly shop from the mainland over hills. The next day, my feet always throbbing, I conceded deck shoes were inadequate, regardless of my fashion sensibilities. In the mall, gently rocking back and forth in my first ever pair of trainers, Douglas’s words returned like a warm summer breeze…”Royal Crown Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Tennis Shoes: LIKE MENTHOL ON YOUR FEET!”

First published, as ‘Summer in the Air’, in the Saturday Evening Post, February 18 1956; incorporated into Dandelion Wine, Doubleday, 1957. Picked by Julian Baker. Julian writes the Consume and Enjoy Substack every week, and has done other stuff in the past.