The 199 Steps by Michel Faber

I read this while I was in Whitby, and it was one of those rare moments where I allowed myself to experience the place and the writing as one. A kind of ghost story, a cunning mystery and a romance, it follows Sian, who joins an archaeological dig in the ruined Abbey, and who uncovers secrets that lead her into all sorts of unexpected danger. The town is entirely integral to the whole story, and the writing has a kind of energy and momentum that suggests Michel Faber was swept up in the place, much as Bram Stoker had been over a century before. His descriptions of running up those precarious stone steps has a kind of exhausting visceral quality that makes you crave your fish and chips even more.

First published by Canongate Books, 2001

‘New Zealand Gets Nuked, Too’ by Douglas Coupland

Among all of the zeitgeisty commentary, slacker chic and cultural insights in Generation X come snappy descriptions of the landscape of post-Reaganite America, which Britain was swift to copy. Is it a novel? Is it linked stories? Yes. One of the tales, ‘New Zealand Gets Nuked, Too’, features some terrific descriptions of the Mojave Desert, where we hear that nuclear scientists once came to get drunk, crash their cars and get eaten by desert rats. Dag, one of the central trio in the book, tells a story of Otis, a man who goes to explore the atomic bomb craters of New Mexico. On his way back Otis spots a landscape of malls. “He was idly thinking about the vast, arrogant block forms of shopping mall architecture and how they make as little visual sense in the landscape as nuclear cooling towers.” He then drives by a new yuppie housing development, equally shocking in coral pink. Otis thinks “‘Hey! These aren’t houses at all – these are malls in disguise.’” It’s a tale told in the flat blankness of slacker style, withheld and arch, and its descriptions of landscapes are informed by Coupland’s other career as a graphic designer, all surfaces and image. And it is no less powerful and moving for that.

First published in Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, St Martin’s Press 1991

‘Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains’ by AL Kennedy

There is a kind of mania in this story. The narrator’s voice appears on one level calm and reasonable, but as the story unfolds it seems a control mechanism for appearance’s sake, and a smokescreen for her loss of agency. The narrator lightly details her husband’s infidelities in a way that becomes increasingly uncomfortable for the reader, but for our masochistic central character life appears to be a series of preordained patterns, and everything seems as important as everything else. Never more so than in her strange obsession about how the trains terminate at Garscadden, the stop before hers, despite how few people ever get off there. She comes to blame the trains for the failure of her marriage, and for almost killing her husband, a kind of chaos theory of relationships.

“I went down, as usual, to stand on the westbound platform, this time in a hard, grey wind, the black twigs and branches over the line, oily and dismal with the damp.”

And she finally drags that oily and dismal world back to her cheating spouse.

First published in Beloit Fiction Journal Vol 5, No. 1, and collected in Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, Polygon, 1990

‘Barn Burning’ by Haruki Murakami, translated by Alfred Birnbaum

Murakami stories are kinetic affairs, events leading to events entirely under their own volition and with little recourse to logic or reality. And that’s why they remain so exciting to read. ‘Barn Burning’ revels in unlikeliness (a student of pantomime; sudden trips to Algiers; regular disappearances), not least when the narrator sets out to find five potential barns near his home in Tokyo for his rich arsonist friend to burn down. He spies them on his morning run, describing their suitability, relative dilapidation and isolation. Here place feels as significant and lightly held as any of these other plot points or motivations, everything on the verge of floating away, like ash from a fire.

First published in The New Yorker, October 1992, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Elephant Vanishes, Vintage, 1993

The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark

Another novella about an abbey! Perhaps I have A Thing. Who else would, in 1974, at the height of the Watergate scandal, have the wit and invention to reimagine Richard Nixon’s downfall as a farce in a convent? It takes the strange supernatural imagination of Muriel Spark to do that. Here a secret has been stolen from a sewing box and the poplars have been bugged, as a nun attempts to steal the election of Abbess from her rival. The allegory works because of the setting, the closed and claustrophobic convent in Crewe, where the eyes of God have been translated into recording devices hidden in the walls throughout the building. The convent is a different kind of White House, a setting simultaneously sober and absurd, making the insane farce within seem ever more extreme.

First published by Macmillan, 1974

‘Modern Buildings in Wessex’ by Ray Newman

Told as a series of gazetteer entries written by Stewart Brayne, a prissy architectural historian touring a number of modernist buildings in Wessex in 1968, this story felt as though it were written just for me. I’m an avid reader of genuine architectural guides from this period, and Newman’s tone is spot on: part Ian Nairnish grumping about ‘cultural poverty’, part Pevsneresque lofty technical detailing. But within that sensible framework a darkly sinister narrative begins to emerge. On his way Brayne is seeking out nine buildings designed by Hungarian émigré Hälmar Pölzig, in a pattern pre-ordained by the architect. En route he lists the artists who produced work for each of these buildings, and after a while you begin to notice a pattern there too, in the dates of their deaths and the openings of the buildings. Soon he – and we – are rattled by “moving shadows that play thrilling tricks on the eyes” and “the dark sense that something of the building followed me down those dark medieval streets”. Like the rest of the collection the story is funny and genuinely chilling in places, stepping back from the obvious in the manner of Robert Aickman and letting your imagination do its worst.

First published in a limited edition pamphlet in 2020. Collected in Municipal Gothic, 2023

‘Arrival at the Zone’ by JG Ballard

These linked micro-tales are the moment we saw the emergence of a new, enduring voice from JG Ballard: no longer just one of a generation of visionary British science fiction writers, but now also a prophet of apocalypse and place, modern technology and pop-culture, violence and dislocation, sex and death. This book would lead on to his not-quite-trilogy of Crash, Concrete Islandand High-Rise, the books that today define his reputation and style. A short 12-line piece from the book, ‘Arrival at the Zone’, perfectly captures the tone.

“They sat in the unfading sunlight on the sloping concrete. The abandoned motorway ran off into the haze, silver firs growing through its sections. Shivering in the cold air, Talbot looked out over this landscape of broken flyovers and crushed underpasses.”

And then, three lines later:

“Against the drab concrete the white fabric of her dress shone with an almost luminescent intensity.”

Within pages we are seeing lurid visions of Monroe, of the Kennedys, of Elizabeth Taylor, in a world of ruined concrete and violence. The effect of these fractured shards is cumulative. The Atrocity Exhibition is the most frightening, dread-drenched book I have read.

First published in The Atrocity Exhibition, Jonathan Cape, 1969

‘Cathedral’ by Raymond Carver

There’s really no point recommending a short story by Raymond Carver to someone on this site, is there? So, assuming you have already read it, the amazing thing about this one for me is the ending. The narrator is trying to describe a Portuguese cathedral to Robert, a blind man, firstly though words, and then by trying to draw it with him. It is a cathedral neither of them knows, and which the narrator has only glimpsed on TV. The result is, of course, tremendously profound in its brevity, a brilliant exploration of how curiously abstract the idea of physical place can be.

First published in Best American Short Stories 1982. Collected in Cathedral, Knopf, 1983

‘Rockpools, Oaks’ by Timothy Thornton

“In brief: the secret of the dream, which he carried around with him now, was that certain words have an extra element to them. This extra element is, perversely, missing. Absent. … It is not written, and it is not sounded.”

‘Rockpools, Oaks’ is a shaggy dog story about language and indescribable things. Two friends, lovers, get drunk and share almost hallucinatory thoughts on the things they can barely describe at the edges of their perceptions. Yet in all of those abstract thoughts comes the real world too, the things they are describing formed of the shadows or imprints or absence of things. What’s so brilliant about this – story? recollection? – is it opening possibilities to the stuff we don’t see around us, a different landscape shifted in a scale we have yet to fathom.

First published on Horses Noise Substack, 2023

Introduction

As others have written in their introductions to this project, before I could begin selecting the stories I chose below, I had to exhaust myself of numerous inquiries about how one should go about doing something like this — specifically, should I worry about those writers and stories I’m invariably leaving out? No such list is complete, it should go without saying, and if you asked this of me a year ago or a year from now there would likely be a different set of stories than those given below. That said, these stories are — today, at this moment in time, at this moment in my life — twelve of my favorites. I have taught most if not all of them at some point in my life, and I return to each of them regularly. (One mark of  great short story, I think, is how often you can return to it and still encounter it, somehow, anew.) I hope some of these stories will be unknown to you, and that you will seek them out. You have my promise that they reward your reading.

‘Health’ by Joy Williams

It would be inconceivable to me to begin any selection of my favorite stories without including ‘Health’, which is my favorite short story by my favorite practitioner of the form — my favorite writer, period — Joy Williams. I first read this story when I was eighteen, after picking up a collection put out by Graywolf in the mid-80s called Short Stories by Women. I remember that I bought it for a few bucks in the basement of the Harvard Book Store. That anthology introduced me to writers like Elizabeth Tallent and Ann Beattie — more on both of them in a moment — but it was Joy’s story, ‘Health’, that most thrilled me. It’s a fairly simple story in which a young girl, Pammy, goes to a spa to get a tan. Something serious and sundering may or may not happen while she’s in the tanning booth. (The ambiguity of the encounter — real? imagined? somehow both? — is one of the most haunting elements of the story’s construction.) She exits the tanning spa a different person; the surface area of her innocence has shrunk, irremediably, irredeemably. This story contains an entire world in it, and it’s only about eight pages. It also has the best cough in all of literature.

First published in Short Stories by Women, Graywolf, 1986, and collected in Escapes, Vintage, 1990 and The Visiting Privilege: New and Selected Stories, Knopf, 2015

‘Ice’ by Elizabeth Tallent

I’m excited by the opportunity to highlight some possibly lesser-known stories in this project, and I’d bet that Elizabeth Tallent’s ‘Ice’ is one that many do not yet know. One can feel saddened by this — one can worry about what gets lost when books go out of print, always one can worry about that — while also reveling in the opportunity to be the one to introduce this story into the life of another. This story was Tallent’s first to be published — in The New Yorker, of all places — and it opens her debut collection, In Constant Flight. The story is about a professional ice skater who’s viciously lonely and full of inchoate longings that come to define and circumscribe her. Its final scene — involving the skater dancing on the ice with a man in a bear costume — is pitch perfect, a marvelous marriage of the absurd, the comic, the cosmic, the surreal, the devastating.

First published in The New Yorker, September 1980, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Tallent’s first collection, In Constant Flight, Knopf, 1983

‘The Burning House’ by Ann Beattie

Speaking of endings, it’s hard to top the ending of this Ann Beattie story. I was assigned this story in an undergraduate literature course by Shannon Derby, and it has remained with me in all of the years that have passed since then, which are a great many years. This is Beattie at her absolute finest. A story overrun with people who are both desperate to be known and horrified by that very same prospect. The characters engage in masking — both figurative and literal — throughout the course of a boozy, smoky evening, and the story ends with the narrator, Amy, in bed with her husband. It’s from this bed that the narrator’s husband delivers a speech that ends the story, and, effectively, his marriage. Beattie leaves us there in that unforgiving wreckage. It’s a speech that Beattie, in an interview with The Paris Review, says readers approach her about more than anything else in her work. The temptation is to reproduce the speech here, but I will refrain from doing so, in the hopes that you’ll seek out the story for yourself.

First published in The New Yorker, and subsequently in Beattie’s collection The Burning House, Random House, 1982

‘At the End of My Life’ by Beth Nugent

Beth Nugent is one of the greatest writers you’ve probably never heard about before this. And it’s easy to understand why: her singular collection of stories, City of Boys, has long been out of print. It was the writer Mary Miller — a short story savant in her own right — who turned me on to Nugent’s collection. I can’t remember now which was the story Mary liked best, but for me, although I love each of the stories in that collection — which is rare, in my experience; there are usually at least one or two skips — it’s ‘At the End of My Life’ that I return to the most often. It’s a story I’ve taught every time I’ve ever taught fiction. I just never tire of it, and none of its magic nor its tragedy ever seem to be drained from it by my constant revisitations. The story anatomizes a significantly fraught relationship between Lizzie, the narrator, and her younger, developmentally challenged brother, Glennie. Lizzie longs to escape her familial predicament, but is waylaid by her love and sense of duty toward Glennie. I find that I’m most drawn to stories where some version of this dynamic is at play; stories that take up questions of obligation, of debt, of what we owe ourselves and one another. Impossible questions, naturally, and this story doesn’t provide anything like an answer. Instead, Nugent leaves us to wonder and wander inside of the place Lizzie is asking these questions from, and she does it in an idiosyncratic, singular style.

First published in City of Boys, Knopf, 1992