‘The Loudest Voice’ by Grace Paley

Chosen by Alanna Schubach

Shirley Abramowitz is a girl who knows how to project. Her booming voice grates on her mother, the grocer, the whole block of her New York City neighborhood, but at school, it’s treasured by Mr. Hilton, who is overseeing the Christmas play. Shirley is conscripted to narrate the production, despite knowing very little about the holiday. That she and her mostly Jewish classmates are performing the story of Christ’s birth stirs up a range of opinions among their parents—debate and argument being central, after all, to Jewish-American culture. Shirley’s mother laments that their family “came to a new country a long time ago to run away from tyrants” only for their children to “learn a lot of lies.” But her father sees Christmas as their holiday now, too: “What belongs to history,” he says, “belongs to all men.”

Like all great Christmas stories, ‘The Loudest Voice’ is full of warmth and good humor. Take, for instance, its hilariously defamiliarized rendering of the nativity:

It was a long story and it was a sad story. I carefully pronounced all the words about my lonesome childhood, while little Eddie Braunstein wandered upstage and down with his shepherd’s stick, looking for sheep. I brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated. Eddie was too small for that and Mart Groff took his place, wearing his father’s prayer shawl. I announced twelve friends, and half the boys in the fourth grade gathered round Marty, who stood on an orange crate while my voice harangued.”

There’s poignancy, too, in how Shirley recounts this particular Christmas from a great distance, as an adult looking back, full of gratitude for her family’s attempts to understand their new world.

In my opinion, the best way to experience the story is to listen to Paley read it herself—ideally on Christmas morning.

First published in The Little Disturbances of Man, Doubleday, 1959 and can now be found in The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, FSG, 2007. * Alanna Schubach’s novel, The Nobodies, is out now. You can read her other contributions to A Personal Anthology here.

‘Walking Out’ by David Quammen

Chosen by Jason Jackson

Walking Out is not a Christmas story — it’s set in November — but it is resolutely a winter story. The first snow doesn’t arrive until a third of the way in, but by then the situation is already bad. The snow only makes it worse.

The air of the meadow teemed with white.
‘If it stops soon, we’re fine,’ said his father
It continued.

There is a subgenre of American shorts stories about boys and their fathers going hunting, and ‘Walking Out’ is one of the best. As is often the case in these stories, we’re seeing things through the boy’s eyes, and as the hunting trip descends into chaos, what we feel most keenly is the difficult relationship the two share, the hard distance between them.

I know nothing about hunting, but I know fathers, and I know sons: I have both, and am also both myself. I’ve never met a grizzly bear, I’ve never fired a gun, and I’ve never waded eight miles through snowdrifts carrying the impossible weight of an unimaginable future on my shoulders. But I know what it’s like to love, what it’s like to be loved.

In the end, this a simple story about a father, his son, and an accident in the snow.

And love, of course.

Always that.

First published in Blood Line: Stories of Fathers and Sons, Johnson Books, 1987. Collected in American Short Story Masterpieces, Random House, 1987). * Jason Jackson writes short fiction and takes photographs. Originally from the north east of England, he lives in the sourth west. His twitter is @jj_fiction.

‘Santaland Diaries’ by David Sedaris

Chosen by Drew Gummerson

David Sedaris’s ‘Santaland Diaries’ is every writer’s dream. Before it appeared on National Public Radio in 1992 Sedaris was relatively unknown, hanging out in IHOP every night, doing dead end jobs. ‘Santaland Diaries’ was his first big break. It became (almost) their most requested show and Sedaris’s distinctive voice was launched on the world.

I am a thirty-three year old man applying for a job as an elf.

Sedaris touched me not only because of his apparent failure in life – I’d worked in a factory putting cream eggs in boxes, on a production line for junk mail, folding and inserting tissues into little plastic bags to be given away free, quality checking Damart clothing (does each item have the correct number of sequins? In the right place?) – but also because he was gay and funny. I’d grown up during the time of Section 28. Gay literature was either hidden or, when it was available, ALL the characters would get AIDS and die.

The overall cutest elf is a fella from Queens called Ritchie. His elf name is Snowball… Yesterday Snowball and I worked as Santa elves and I got excited when he started saying things like ‘I’d follow you to Santa’s house any day Crumpet.’”

Here was a gay man talking about fancying other men. It was political and not. And that what I’ve always tried to be in my writing. Change the world by being yourself. And, hopefully, making people laugh at the same time.

Years later I wrote my own Christmas elf, department store, Santa story. It has yet to make me famous but writing ‘Troy and Me’ I felt a little of Sedaris in me. And that made me happy.

First read on NPR’s Morning Edition on December 23, 1992. Collected in Barrel Fever, Little, Brown, 1994, and Holidays on Ice, Little, Brown, 1997. You can hear the author read it here. * Drew Gummerson is the writer of The Lodger, Me and Mickie James and Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel. His work has appeared on BBC R4. He is a Lambda Award finalist, winner of the Leicestershire Short Story Prize.

Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter

Chosen by Anna Wood

I first read Rock Crystal, by 19th-century Bohemian writer Adalbert Stifter, a few years ago after I learned it was an influence on Thomas Mann. Now I re-read it for pleasure and also to try to work out how he does it. (I still don’t know how he does it.) In my edition, the whole first page is a tender clear-eyed appreciation of midwinter festivals and steady community, lovely long sentences of snow-crusted boughs and low winter sun, a bit like Proust if he was more robust and cheerier (in the author picture of Stifter he looks a bit like Les Dawson). Then a neighbourly, very slightly gossipy tour of our home village, Gschaid, and surrounding ice, pines, paths, meadows and glaciers turns into a deeply felt adventure for a young brother and sister visiting their doting grandma in the next valley. And, it is Christmas Eve – Holy Night. The simple-as-snow plot emerges almost without you noticing, like a train setting off very very gently while you’re busy in a daydream. All this in an extremely beautiful 1945 translation by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore which, to drop another beloved name, is like having WG Sebald telling you a bedtime story. And when it ends, it echoes and the echo does not stop.

(Now, if it’s not too crass and with zero vested interest, I’d like to point out that Pushkin Press have a gorgeous standalone edition for ten quid which has ‘perfect little Christmas present’ written all over it.)

First published in German as Bergkristall in 1845. First published in English by Lee M. Hollander in 1914. The translation by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore is available from Pushkin Press, 2001, and NYRB Classics, 2008. Anna Wood is author of the short story collection Yes Yes More More, Indigo Press, 2021.

‘Dracula’s Guest’ by Bram Stoker

Chosen by Mike Shallcross

There is something oddly Christmassy about Dracula. It might be the cold and darkness of Bram Stoker’s imagined Transylvania, the reminder of loss, or the sense of it being a thwarted journey to find the way home. But Christmas for me doesn’t feel complete without the Count, whether through a rewatch of the classy 1970s BBC dramatization or a burst of Hammer schlock.

The posthumously published Stoker story Dracula’s Guest is usually presented as a prequel to the novel proper, and is widely believed to have been an excised first chapter. But really it feels like a moodboard for the main event. Certainly many of its tropes are assembled here: the inscrutable innkeeper; the superstitious coachman who will travel no further; the necropolitan fairyland that exists outside the towns and cities; the ever-present wolves… in short the sort of Mitteleuropean orientalism that informs our notions of the gothic to this day.

The plot, such as it is, concerns an unnamed Englishman (presumed to be Jonathan Harker, but more wilful and reckless that the conformist, lawyerly character of the novel) who ignores the warnings of his guides and sets out to visit a deserted village on Walpurgis night. On the way he encounters an unseasonal blizzard, the spectre of a beautiful woman “with rounded cheeks and red lips” (in homage to Sheridan le Fanu’s more elegant and sexier vampire novel Carmilla), and finally a ghostly wolf who saves the Englishman from the elements.

As a Christmas ghost story, it is a little fleeting. But there is a pleasing chilling dreaminess to the Englishman’s journey to the cursed village, and the pay-off of the telegram which awaits him upon his return to the inn is quite delicious. Think of it as a bracing shot compared to the richer lingering claret of an MR James or Walter de la Mare. ”The dead travel fast” as the story says, but the journey can still be memorable.

First published in Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories, Routledge, 1914. Widely collected, and available to read here. Mike Shallcross is an editor and publisher specialising in healthcare by day, and a connoisseur of all things gothic by night. He has written for a number of publications including The Wire, GQ, Men’s Health and the Quietus.

‘Master and Man’ by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude

Chosen by Hannah Piekarz

This is the perfect winter story – a horse-driven sledge ride through a snow blizzard, snug under layers of thick fur coats. The master, Vasili Andreevich, sets off during holiday festivities in order to get ahead with his business affairs, taking his man, peasant Nikita along for the trip. Little is spoken between them, other than discussion of where they think they are and the best way forwards. We’re treated to a moment-by-moment journey along icy tracks in fading light, as they double-back on themselves, twice. It evokes being lost in a landscape, decision-making and the endurance to continue until you encounter way markers to navigate yourself back onto the map. While the plot resembles most of my own rambles into the countryside, it is also an allegory of the speculative educated landowner versus the learnt intuition and sobriety of his worker. When the men are entirely lost, they are simultaneously isolated yet free. The cool crisp atmosphere sharpens the delivery of the story where the moral is found deep, blanketed under soft snow and warm insulation. These pages offer a restorative hug to your soul.

First published 1895. Collected in Master and Man and Other Stories, Penguin, 1977. Read it here. Hannah Piekarz writes science and for the screen, continuing the search for the universal in the specific (works in retail).

Introduction

The invitation to choose twelve short stories immediately triggers a questioning of the genre itself, and its limits. I have tried to choose examples of the not-exactly, the unintentional, the could-have-been or might-be. But some acknowledged instances of the genre creep into my list, usually through some relation – of similarity, derivation, anticipation or reversal – to a selected pseudo-story.

A short story is not always short, though Penelope Lively found that was the fixed conviction of those signed up to her workshop, who declared that it is a piece of prose three thousand words long, no more and no less. But it is indeed typically in prose; it encompasses one action; has fictional human protagonists; is not purely philosophical and certainly not a chunk of history; is self-contained; and is a comparatively modern invention – a classical myth, a Hellenistic romance, is not a short story. Most of my picks break one or other of these rules.

‘This is Not a Story’ by Denis Diderot, translated by P. N. Furbank

The first is Denis Diderot’s ‘Ceci n’est pas un conte’. Although in one sense it succeeds in nullifying its own title, ‘Ceci n’est pas un conte’ does come short of the definition of a short story on a number of counts. It is not one tale but two contrasting tales with a scene-setting scenario that is part of neither. It opens with the narrator stating that in any scenario of story-telling, there must be a listener or interlocutor. Diderot (narrator) then stages a conversation with the one who is about to be his audience, concerning the reception of a story supposedly just heard by both of them. Only then does he launch into his twinned stories of a cruel woman and a good man, followed by one about a cruel man and a good woman. The listener frequently interrupts, and seems to know as much or more than the narrator about the characters, and to disagree with the narrator’s assessment of the rights and wrongs of their actions. Some of the characters are in fact historical persons. Diderot is rather staging the telling of short stories than actually telling one. His aim is to disturb and complicate both the form (which hardly existed) and the anticipated reader reaction.

First published 1798, ed. Jacques-André Naigeon, translated as ‘This is not a story’ in This is Not a Story and Other Stories, OUP, 1993

Chapter 26 of Part 1 of ‘Life: A User’s Manual’ by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos

The second is an extract from a long book, therefore not a self-contained traditional short story. It is Chapter 26 of Part 1 of Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi. Slyly, Perec gives his book the subtitle ‘romans’, which should mean ‘novels’; but the narration of the lives (or episodes from the lives) of the many inhabitants of a single Parisian block of flats approximates to a series of short stories, though the same characters can come round more than once, forming a kind of syncopated short story for each.

Bartlebooth, an Englishman, has his own short story. Chapter 26 opens with a description of the ‘anti-chamber’ of Bartlebooth’s apartment, followed by short descriptions of the three servants who await his orders there. Then there is a little labyrinth motif in the text, followed by an exposition of how Bartlebooth spends his life. Bartlebooth employs an artist neighbour, Valène, to teach him the art of water-colour painting. It transpires that the former’s life-plan is to achieve perfection in a restricted sphere: to ‘seize, describe, plumb’ a portion of the world by means of painting marine landscapes – all the same size and at a fixed rate of production over twenty years. He sends them back to a craftsman, Winckler, who lived (past tense because he is dead by chapter 26) in the same building. (The protagonist of the whole book is in one sense the building itself.) Winckler was tasked with turning the paintings into puzzles of 750 pieces each, which Bartlebooth on his return was to spend the next twenty years reassembling – at the same fixed rate. The pictures would then be returned each to its original site of production and plunged into a solvent to remove the paint, leaving a virgin piece of Whatman (what [is] man?) paper.

This project results from Bartlebooth’s answer to his own question as to what he wanted to do with his life, which is “Nothing”. The saving grace of this grim attempt to control time, space and action in the service of nihilism is that, at the end of the whole book, Bartlebooth is found dead in his chair in his apartment, with a last piece of (the last?) puzzle in his hand. The space in the almost completed puzzle is that of an X: but the piece in the dead man’s hand is W-shaped. (W for Perec signifies his lost childhood.) Lethal perfectionism foiled! Turning back to the first chapter, on Winckler’s death long ago, we remember that Winckler had planned a “longue vengeance” . . . Clearly, Bartlebooth is the direct descendant of . . .

First published by Hachette, 1978. Translated by David Bellos as Life A User’s Manual, Harvill Press, 1987, rprt. Harper-Collins, 1992, and Vintage, 1996

‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ by Herman Melville

Bartleby’s determined, heroic nihilism, his consistent answer to his work, his employer and to life, “I would prefer not to”, are too well known to require further exposition. The book is incontrovertibly a long short story. It is, though, almost too philosophical to count, the pushing of an obsessive idea beyond the bounds of credibility.

First published in Putnam’s Magazine, November-December 1853, and collected in The Piazza Tales, Dix & Edwards, 1856. Now widely available, including in Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories, Penguin Classics. Available online at Project Gutenberg

‘The Tailor of Gloucester’ by Beatrix Potter

My fourth choice is The Tailor of Gloucester, by Beatrix Potter. Yes, it is a children’s tale – Potter’s dedication to a child called Freda references fairy tales. Potter claims in the same dedication that the story is true – in part. It is about animals as much as humans, Simpkin the cat being the protagonist, whose moral growth (his longue vengeance is finally abandoned) is the turning-point of the story. But I cannot resist including it, for it is also a story for adults, and it is so beautifully written that it seems to me to exemplify the ideal rhythms of the greatest English prose.

“In the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets – when gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta – there lived a tailor in Gloucester.” Compare: “What Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture” (Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial. 1658). Potter’s prose is almost poetry. “‘No breadth at all, and cut on the cross; it is no breadth at all; tippets for mice and ribbons for mobs! for mice!’ said the tailor of Gloucester.”

The story relates the near-downfall of the tailor, who must finish making a beautiful waistcoat for the Mayor of Gloucester’s wedding, but lacks “one single skein of cherry-coloured twisted silk” for the one-and-twenty button-holes. The tragic refrain “No more twist!” runs through the tale. Simpkin the cat is sent out on Christmas eve to buy some provisions and the twist. But while he is out, the tailor hears tapping noises, and frees little mice from under the tea-cups in which Simpkin had imprisoned them with a view to eating them later. On his return, Simpkin takes his revenge by hiding the vital skein of cherry-coloured silk in the teapot. The mice shame Simpkin with their Christmas eve songs, and their chorus of “No more twist!” Repentant, he hands over the twist to the tailor – too late! it seems, for the tailor is too ill to make one-and-twenty button-holes. But the little mice, in gratitude (it took me a long time, as a child, to deduce this) work all night to embroider the button-holes, all but one, to which they pin a tiny note, ‘NO MORE TWIST’. The tailor has the strength to make the last button-hole: the waistcoat is finished in time. The twist is his W, and this time it fits. I think The Tailor of Gloucester is my W.

First published by Frederick Warne, 1901

‘Love, and a Question’ by Robert Frost

Fifthly: Some of Robert Frost’s poems, especially those from North of Boston (1914), are in effect short stories. ‘The death of the hired man’ is a prime example, though the lines “Home is the place where, when you have to go there/ They have to take you in” are assuredly better in poetry than they could ever be in prose. ‘The ax-helve’, from a different volume, New Hampshire (1923) is another good candidate. It does not build to any dramatic conclusion, just quietly finishes, with the French immigrant craftsman completing the task of making a new axe helve for the poet; yet it is perfectly rounded as an event, filling an evening. But counter-intuitively, I would choose an earlier poem, ‘Love, and a question’ from A Boy’s Will (1913) as my Frost short story. It is only four stanzas long, each of eight lines. It is a very short story ending on a question that reverberates well beyond the poem’s end.

A bridegroom is asked for hospitality by a stranger on his wedding night. The cottage in which the groom and his bride are awaiting nightfall is isolated; winter is coming on. The groom would normally be generous, but –

whether or not a man was asked
to mar the love of two
by harboring woe in the bridal house,
the bridegroom wished he knew.

First published in A Boy’s Will, David Nutt, 1913. Available to read online here

From ‘Piano’ by Jean Echenoz, translated by Mark Polizotto

The reason I think my sixth choice should have been a short story is that though it forms part of a novel, the rest of the novel is completely unmemorable, whereas this extract is striking, complete in itself, a dramatic whole. It is Jean Echenoz’s Au Piano. Two men are walking in the Parc Monceau in Paris. One is very smartly dressed. “He is going to die a violent death in twenty-two days’ time”, we are told, and though we are also told that that is not what he is afraid of, the impression builds that he is under the threat of immediate death or disaster. He is under the thumb of his smaller, scruffier companion, who is under the command, it seems, of a third man who is not present. The protagonist, Max, is refused permission to have a drink by his minder, who relies for compliance on the mere threat of a phone call to the absent third.

The minder steers his ‘victim’ (protégé?) past the statues in the park, studiously avoiding those representing composers. Max vomits twice with fear, and is again refused permission for a drink at a bar as they leave the park. Suddenly, they are ‘here’ – at building number 252. They make their way through hallways, passages, doorways and into a dark space. Is Max about to be assaulted? There is the noise of a swell or a crowd. And suddenly, the minder shoves Max through a curtain, the swell surges into a tempest, and “there it was – the piano”. The terrible Steinway is what Max has been viscerally dreading all this while. He is a concert pianist plagued by the most extreme stage-fright. He takes his seat in front of the fifty-two monstrous teeth, the conductor waves his baton, and they are off into the Second Concerto in F-minor, Op. 21, by Frédéric Chopin.

First published in Le Piano, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2003. English translation, Piano, published byVintage Press, 2005

The episode of Paolo and Francesca by Dante Alighieri

The seventh choice is too early, too poetic, too perfect ever to count as a short story. But I should love to someone to write it again in a kind of continuing mise en abyme. It is Dante’s episode of Paolo and Francesca in the Inferno (V. 70-138). Francesca was married off to Gianciotto, but fell in love with her husband’s brother Paolo. (The story was so well known that Dante skimps on all the details that might have extenuated the lovers.) When the character Dante asks the lovers what sin has put them there in hell, buffeted by the winds that hardly ever lull, Francesca tells him how irresistible love brought them together. They were reading together one day the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere, adulterous lovers lured and betrayed by Gallehault – Galeotto. Their eyes met once or twice over the book; their colour came and went. But when they reached the line about the smile that called forth the fatal kiss, Paolo kissed Francesca on the mouth. “Galeotto fu ’l libro, e chi lo scrisse.” “The book was a Gallehault, as was its writer.”

Already two stages of betrayal have taken place – the writer (the author of the Arthurian tale) and the book are both seducers. In a further stage, Paolo seduces Francesca by means of the reading, though she is complicit too: “That day we read no further in it”. I should like to read a story about a professor of Italian reading this passage of Dante to a susceptible female student, and their falling into one another’s arms.

First published in 1472.