‘The Willowdale Handcar’ by Edward Gorey

Something in the task of creating the Personal Anthology has drawn me towards early stories I encountered. I’ve been reading Edward Gorey’s work pretty much since I could read: do they count as stories? Certainly his tales are short in length, but illustrations make them more difficult to characterise, as they’re as much (if not more) integral to the stories than the words. And though they were mostly published in stand-alone hardbacks, I encountered most of them through the Amphigorey collections. While there are individual standouts (a favourite of mine is The Deranged Cousins), Gorey’s works are best experienced together, a full immersion into his irreverent, high-Gothic and high camp world.

In ‘The Willowdale Handcar’, three friends find an abandoned handcar and leave their lives behind for a life on the tracks. Non-sequitur encounters and tragedy just-hinted-at ensue, in typical Gorey fashion. But there’s a deep melancholy that courses through the story, and it’s stuck with me mostly because when I first read it, I didn’t understand it, and the way in which I didn’t understand frightened me. There is still something intriguing to me about this quite juvenile way of experiencing fiction, the fear and lure of something you don’t yet understand but feel you might in the future. Of course, I now realise I only don’t understand ‘The Willowdale Handcar’ in the way that I’m supposed to: but that unease is so valuable while you still have it.

Published by Bobbs Merrill, 1962. Collected in Amphigorey, Perigee Books, 2004)

‘Living on the Box’ by Penelope Gilliatt

Penelope Gilliatt shows no reverence for the artist-as-isolated from society, and holds back no acerbity here in her portrait of a nature poet so out of touch with everyday life that he refuses to waste his breath speaking, not even to his wife. Keeping her in silence and isolated in the countryside, he gets on with The Work while she composes notes (as concise as possible) that are never perfect enough to give to him.

I read Penelope Gilliatt’s collection, What’s It Like Out?, at the same time that I read Edna O’Brien’s A Scandalous Woman and Françoise Sagan’s Silken Eyes; while I remember the atmosphere of the latter two collections viscerally, I have only fleeting details of the stories themselves: a hat, an airport, a tower, a car. In contrast, I remember nothing about the rest of Gilliatt’s collection apart from this story. For years, I thought the poet of the story was a real figure, and the documentary which frames the story, one which I’d actually seen:

“‘They’ll be here all day. They’re sure to want the poet’s wife,’ he said tartly. ‘You can tell them how much you love the work, can’t you?’ He always spoke about his poetry as ‘the work’; it was this sort of dispassion that so excited the BBC.”

First published in The New Yorker, December 1966 and available to read here. Collected in What’s It Like Out? Secker & Warburg, 1968; also available from Virago Modern Classics, 1990)

‘Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU’ by Carmen Maria Machado

‘Especially Heinous’ is another story which satisfies my desire to be convinced of alternative realities. Or, if not alternative realities, then at least real fictions in our reality. Here, Machado details twelve seasons and 272 episodes of an alternative Law & Order, one which may be closer to the X Files than the source material, in which supernatural occurrences are de rigueur. Stabler and Benson contend with ghosts with bells for eyes, doppelgangers, and exorcist priests, and each of the 272 summaries is a Lydia Davis-esque short story in its own right.

““The Third Guy”: Stabler never told Benson about his little brother. But he also never told her about his older brother, which was more acceptable, because he didn’t know about him, either.”

At 16,000 words long, whether it counts as a short story or a novella is up to the reader to decide. The episodic summary form, however, compels ‘Especially Heinous’ not to miss a word. Perhaps long short stories are more interesting to writer-readers than lay-readers, but I’ve always been struck by the boldness, the audacity, of the long short story. It’s incredibly freeing as an artist; if you can rewrite an entire long running TV series and make it compelling, anything is possible.

Published in Her Body And Other Parties, Serpent’s Tail, 2019. Also available online in The American Reader

‘The Flimsies’ by Eve Babitz

Like Gilliatt’s nature poet, Babitz’s boyfriend in ‘The Flimsies’ is a soap actor who is obsessed with his career. “Have you finished your piece?” he asks her. “Practically,” she replies. “Work on something else then. When you’re down, you should always work.” Work, he says, “really is the most important thing for people like us… For anybody. But mainly for people like us.”

A quarter of my picks constitute material that would not traditionally be called short stories, and ‘The Flimsies’ is one of them. I love the lazy flow of this story, the meandering yet concise narrative Babitz gives to this very clearly interim relationship between people who fall together only because they both work in an industry many don’t understand. ‘The Flimsies’ are the summary versions of the soap scripts, compiled by the writers to outline dramas before they’re fleshed out, and notoriously, the medium through which soap actors learn of their characters’ fates. Does it matter that the relationship Babitz is narrating is one which she actually experienced? I don’t think so.

Published in Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. by Eve Babitz, Knopf, 1977l also available from New York Review of Books, 2016

‘The Promised Land’ by D.K. Broster

Ellen has been saving for a trip to Florence for a lifetime, partly to satisfy a never-realised desire to travel and see art, and partly to escape her bullying companion Caroline. Caroline strongarms Ellen into accompanying her on the trip, and proceeds to ruin the magic of the holiday with her overly sensible advice and complaints about certain sights being overhyped. Whether it’s through bloodlust, a kind of haunting or madness is never clear; but one night, Ellen is pushed to breaking point, and Caroline falls victim to a silk scarf round her neck. Broster sketches the violence of the scene with an elliptical impressionism:

“You can pull and pull at an artificial silk scarf. It stretches, but it does not break, even when you have your knee, your whole body, straining against the side of the bed for better purchase.”

Before the murder, we see Caroline through Ellen’s eyes, as a hateful bully sucking joy from the trip. But afterwards, when Ellen finally gets to enjoy her trip as she always wanted it, we see a new side to Ellen. She is spiteful, and relishes her chance to be cruel when she can. Broster delves into a certain kind of complicated friendship that exists between women, and was perhaps even more common in the past; one of single women pushed together more by circumstance than any love for each other, and where every slight and harsh word is begrudgingly stored for a future argument. While it’s nesting among a (broadly speaking) supernatural collection, it’s easy to ascribe Ellen’s act to something beyond herself; but Broster keeps it beautifully grounded, never allowing Ellen’s emotions to be anything but human.

First published in A Fire of Driftwood by D.K. Broster; William Heinemann, 1932. Collected in From the Abyss. Weird Fiction, 1907-1945, by D.K. Broster, Handheld Press, 2022

‘Chloé in the Afternoon’, written and directed Éric Rohmer

Some films are short stories. Other films are novels. Some still are plays, and others are albums. Occasionally films may also be paintings. This is nothing to do with the source material, and everything to do with the execution, the ambience. Éric Rohmer’s first film series, Six Moral Tales, was destined to be a short story collection until Rohmer realised that what he had written were not actually short stories at all, but films.

Six Moral Tales is, arguably, about as perfect and classical as a short story collection can be, with each film both distinct and tying into an overall theme and mood. At the heart of each is a man struggling with fidelity. (Interestingly, Rohmer’s future films tended to focus more on female points of view.) ‘Chloé in the Afternoon’ is not my favourite of the six, and it also feels less literary than its predecessors in the series. But watch the scene where the protagonist, about to finally succumb to Chloe’s advances, suddenly runs away, which we view via an overhead shot of a staircase. It’s the perfect short story ending, one many of us chase after.

Released 1972

‘Abortion, A Love Story’ by Nicole Flattery

Much as some films are short stories, some short stories can be films, or plays, or paintings, or all three. While ‘Abortion, A Love Story’ isn’t only a play, it pulls off the unbelievable (even after you’ve read it) task of incorporating an unperformable play (which is nevertheless still a play) into the flow of the story.

Natasha and Lucy are two dissociated, anarchic students with no respect for the college systems and even less for their theatre studies classmates. Lucy reads Natasha’s email and writes a play for them both to star in. Natasha rewrites and improves it, and agrees. The play they stage celebrates and rips on everything from their respective abortions to the history of women on the Irish page and stage. It’s 77 pages long and every one of them is a bizarre and utterly sincere joy. It really is the kind of story you have to read to believe how masterfully, and naturally, it works.

Published in Show Them a Good Time by Nicole Flattery. The Stinging Fly, 2019

‘In the Dead of Truffle Season’ by Patricia Highsmith

Highsmith’s collection, An Animal-Lover’s Guide to Beastly Murder, is predominantly narrated by animals taking their sweet revenge on some deserving human. The humans are all odious, and the animals Ripley-esque in their desire to right wrongs and (more importantly) perceived slights. The animals are just as prickly as Highsmith’s humans are, and it makes for a collection which is delightfully unhinged.

When authors begin to write dialogue in animal noises, I’ve usually considered it to be a sign to stop reading (the main culprits here are Enid Blyton and late Agatha Christie, and it’s usually dogs.) Highsmith’s truffle-hunting pig Samson carries out conversations which appear on the page like this:

“Oink!—oink oink!”
“Whuff-f!”
“Hwon-nk!”

And

“‘Hwun-nf!—Ha-wun-nf! Umpf!’ Samson had found a good cache and he knew it.”

Highsmith, I will always contend, is a very funny writer who too often worked against rather than with her own off-kilter humour. Each em-dash and italicisation here is lovingly placed. I’m not sorry we didn’t get a longer-form version of the pig-conversations, but how many other writers would commit to the pageantry of this?

Published in An Animal-Lover’s Guide to Beastly Murder, Heinemann, 1975; also available from Norton, 2002

‘Peter and Jane’ by Niamh Prior

I like a short story with a structural thorn in its side, some kind of constraint. Peter and Jane, formerly of the Ladybird series teaching children how to read, are now grown up, and living adult lives with precarity, depression, loneliness, and grief. The only words Prior uses in the story are from the list of 300 which Ladybird compiled, the 300 most commonly used words in spoken English.

“‘Do It To Me One More Time’ was on and I had nothing on. All at once the man I work for was under the bed. It looked to me like a game, so I put my hand on my privates and said, ‘Come back up here. I’m so wet, I’m so wet for you!’ Then I saw that his Mrs had walked in. ‘It is not what it looks like, Dear,’ he said from under the bed. Well, that was fun. How could it not be what it looked like?”

In her author’s note accompanying the story, Prior explains some of the challenges of using this form:

“For instance, the only emotion is love—there is no happy or sad. No feel or feeling. There is black, white, blue, red, green, and that’s it. No yellow. Nor does the word colour exist. Numbers are limited from one to five. Though there is man and woman, there are men but no women.”

Perhaps it’s this omission that gives the story such a deep melancholy, the omission along with the jarring naivety of the voices. The Keywords predetermined Peter and Jane’s fate, and as Prior says, “It’s no wonder they got so messed up.”

First published in The Stinging Fly, 2021

‘55 Miles to the Gas Pump’ by Annie Proulx

My final choice is another short-short story, to balance out my two long picks. Residing in its collection just before ‘Brokeback Mountain’, ‘55 Miles to the Gas Pump’ is a snippy reflection on what makes us tell stories in the first place. A grisly murder scene is interrupted before it really gets started, with a chilling quip that functions as something halfway between an explanation and a warning:

“When you live a long way out you make your own fun.”

Published in Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx, Fourth Estate, 1999

‘A Room of One’s Own’ by Virginia Woolf

When I was at university in London, someone discovered that Virginia Woolf had attended the ladies’ department that was attached to the institution, before women were allowed to participate in traditional academia. We were taken to an archive to see the list of courses that had been offered to women at the time. I marvelled at the curls of Woolf’s name written in her own hand, registering her interest in bicycle lessons.

The university claimed Woolf as their own, naming a building after her and displaying a picture of her outside of the main entrance. This felt insincere to me, as the doors of the university had not actually opened to her, on account of her gender. I was a young woman in the future, where things were different. I was the first person in my family to pass through the doors of a university, yet I didn’t feel as if I was fully able to enter. The university was elite and I felt dirty and cheap. There were many kinds of people who were not given permission to pass through those doors and I felt that acutely as I sat on the wall beneath the picture of Woolf, smoking a cigarette, clutching at being cool.

I threw myself into the hard, fast city, trying to outrun my beginnings. I read Woolf for the first time and her dense, psychological prose unravelled a tight knot inside of me. When I found ‘A Room of One’s Own’ I knew that was what I needed. I had given up the place I came from in pursuit of freedom and there wasn’t anywhere in the world that felt like it belonged to me.

I have lived in many rooms since then (21 and counting) and the necessity of a space in the world that feels like my own, an anchor from which to write, has become increasingly important. Yet, rooms aren’t always physical spaces. These stories have functioned as places for me to inhabit, too. I have passed through each of these rooms at different times in my life; they opened their doors and offered me safety, refuge, or a push elsewhere when I needed it.

First published by Hogarth Press, September 1929, and widely available today

‘A Better Way to Live’ by Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy’s short stories are controlled and precise, while retaining a surreal, dream-like quality. I continue to learn so much from her use of symbols; an object, person or animal in her work often holds multiple layers of meaning. She returns to them again and again, showing them to the reader from different angles, holding them up to the light to illuminate their contradictions.

‘A Better Way to Live’ is one of my favourite short stories because it demonstrates Levy’s skill with such finesse. It explores family, relationships, place, identity, yearning and what it means to want more for yourself, all within nine pages. Many of Levy’s characters are searching for the right way to live, or a for a life that feels true and authentic, while also accepting that they have made choices which have led them down particular paths. The protagonist’s mother tells him, “Be sure to enjoy language, experiment with ways of talking, be exuberant even when you don’t feel like it because language can make your world a better way to live.”

First published in Black Vodka by Deborah Levy, And Other Stories, 2013

My Life in a Column by Tracey Emin

During my time at university, I went to see a retrospective of Tracey Emin’s work called ‘Love is What You Want’ at the Hayward Gallery. I didn’t know much about her beforehand, only that she did what she wanted and caused a stir, which was the kind of woman I wanted to be. As I walked around the gallery, looking at her searing neons, appliquéd blankets and trembling monoprints, my connection to her work felt immediate and visceral. It was the first time I’d seen art that felt as though it was speaking directly to me. I didn’t know that it was possible to tell the story of your own life like that; to take the hurt and the dreams caught beneath your skin and make them visible. Tracey pulled her shame from her mouth like a thread of light and hung it on the gallery walls for everyone to see.

I bought a book-length collection of the column she wrote for the Independent from 2005-2009 from the gallery bookshop. She described dancing by the jukebox in her favourite East-End pub, and in a curious twist of fate, I ended up working there. The landlady had nurtured young artists in the 90s, when they set up studios in old Shoreditch buildings, and she and Tracey remained good friends.

In her columns, Emin writes about whatever is happening in her life; the art she is making, her dreams, her friends, heartbreak, ruminations on time and people she has lost. My favourite pieces are the ones in which she writes a version of London that I recognise. We lived worlds apart and yet our lives occasionally intersected on certain streets and in the pub. We knew and loved some of the same people. It is possible to pick one of her pieces at random and gain access to her world, but the collection as a whole forms a record of a woman at a specific point in time, marrying her life and artistic career. The columns helped guide me towards my own path, and so it feels difficult to choose one in isolation.

Working at the pub was a heady, exhausting time in my life; I did long shifts and navigated the landlady’s unpredictable moods. Tracey and her friends were not always kind to me, and I felt hurt by her disinterest, because her work spoke to me so intimately. Yet, the proximity to art and glamour felt like worlds away from the place I had come from, and the pub became the first home I made on my own terms, in the life I was building for myself, which was the life that I wanted. It could be cruel and difficult, but I was happy to pay that cost to spend my days around people who had built their own lives too.

Rizzoli International, 2011. Her column for the Independent is available online here

‘Joy’ by Zadie Smith

In this essay, Zadie Smith makes a distinction between joy and pleasure, in a bid to understand what we mean when we talk about joy. She defines it as, “the strange admixture of terror, pain and delight.” To Smith, pleasure is something that makes us feel good in a simple way, whereas joy depends on risk, or a proximity to pain. She quotes the writer Julian Barnes, who received a letter of condolence from a friend, who told him, “It hurts just as much as it is worth”. It is an essay which feels true and an urgent prompt to consider your own pleasures and joys and work out why they matter to you.

First published in The New York Review of Books, 2013 and collected in Feel Free, Hamish Hamilton, 2018. Available online here