‘What (Not) to Do with Your Hands When You Are Nervous’ by Eley Williams

This story takes in Keats’s foreknowledge of his own mortality, the term ‘mortmain’ and the history of the Royal Worcester Parian vase depicting the sculptor’s wife’s hands among other related ideas. It flows forth as a series of frantic disquisitions on seemingly loosely connected things as the narrator is stuck on a Tube carriage underground, growing ever later for her job interview. What I especially enjoy about Williams’s writing is the way she often explodes narrative time, replicating the experience of a mind fizzing with ideas and subterranean connections experiencing consciousness moment by moment. There is also an enjoyably smutty undercurrent as the reader starts to realise why the queer narrator has chosen to fixate on hands in particular, even if she disguises it as serious academic enquiry.

First published in Seen from Here, ed. Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat, Unstable Object, and collected in Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good, 4th Estate, 2024

‘Attrib.’ by Eley Williams

I like this story because it dramatises the lives that we live in the 21^st century while we do our isolated tasks and look at our screens, telling a story where there is plot and tension aplenty but perhaps not in an obvious sense. The story centres on a sound artist creating an installation for a Michelangelo exhibition. It’s written in a fragmented, tangential form that through the obsessively detailed repetition of almost comically specific actions begins to reveal a story behind the narrator, who is creating imaginary worlds in solitude. The tension is created by repetition, wordplay, sound, sensation, and an incredible focus on minutiae that ends up revealing a lot about the narrator. When I first read this collection I remember thinking that it expressed how it felt to be conscious in the opening decades of the 21^st century. I have heard people describe this book as ‘experimental’, but I don’t really like that word, it implies a kind of failure, or a temporary, perhaps unconfident stylistic digression. Eley Williams work is not like that at all, so how to describe this book? Inventive, bold, adventurous, playful, it creates psychological landscapes of a spirit that are unique to Eley Williams.

Collected in Attrib. and Other Stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘Fears and Confessions of an Ortolan Chef’ by Eley Williams

Eley Williams is heavily anthologised here. It’s no surprise. She is a startling, humorous, heart-breaking writer with a unique sentence-level dynamism. Attrib. will surely prove itself a modern classic.

“You once told me that nobody could ever fall in love with a person whose job involved boiling birds in liquor.”

‘Fears and Confessions of an Ortolan Chef’ is an anxious story of judgement, moral blind-spots, and love. The songbird gastronomy is experienced like a hyperviolent film, and the tension brought by this brutal practice constantly tests the fragile bones of a new relationship. As the relationship fractures, it is not only the Ortalan consumption that becomes taboo. As with much of Williams’ writing, the maelstrom of verbosity sharply outlines everything not put into words: the crux of the story.

Collected in Attrib. and other stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘Bulk’ by Eley Williams

This story has been anthologised many times, but still I could not leave it out. The whale as a huge, hefty metaphor for the interplay of humanity with nature and the planet is wielded expertly by Williams in this story. I recommend reading it alongside ‘Fathoms: The World In the Whale’ by Rebecca Giggs, which serves as an elegy for dead whales in general. ‘Bulk’ pays attention to animal otherness in a way which I found to be at once frightening and tender; a soft haze of grief sits over the whole story. Williams is, undoubtedly, a master of linguistic agility, but she also does emotional resonance with unparalleled proficiency.

Collected in Attrib., Influx Books, 2018

‘Bs’ by Eley Williams

A desert island library would need some lighter moments, and this would be a fine choice. The stories in Williams’ debut collection are not merely ‘drunk on prose’: they have swallowed a whole shelf of dictionaries and are now working their way from optic to optic, necking books of proverbs, puns, and rhetorical devices with gay abandon. (Having had the pleasure of twice interviewing the author, her obsession with dictionaries and lexicography would, I hope, make her proud of that description.)

It’s like reading a Dundee cake while drinking a pint of port, and the linguistic fireworks are hard not to enjoy. Like many of her stories, Bs is a riot of possibilities, interrogations, quandaries and definitions, a brain obsessively and almost manically playing word-association with itself – and that ‘with itself’ is important. Many of Williams’ stories focus on misunderstandings or failures of communication (or failure to communicate). Imagine Fawlty Towers if Stephen Fry had taken the helm. The best approach is simply to surrender to the joy of a writer so utterly in love with words and what they can do, but who can leave you smiling at a moment of very human fallibility and tenderness at the same time. Stories can bring you delight as well as broken hearts, after all.

Published in Attrib. and other stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘Alight at the Next’ by Eley Williams

Williams’s writing communicates the same sort of joy in inventing and sharing sentences that makes reading, say, Ali Smith or Hilary Mantel such a delight. Unpredictable thoughts spill out: “my spirit animal is probably a buttered roll” or “For example, we’re missing a snail insisting that he’s in the haulage business.” It captures a moment, as the doors on a District Line train open, accompanied by the semi-drunken rush of thought of our narrator, travelling with someone they hope to invite home. To their own astonishment, as they hesitate to ask, the narrator also reaches out and places a hand on the forehead of man on the platform to prevent him from boarding. In the staggered layout of the text, the thoughts within thoughts, Williams gives us the euphoric, confused, overwhelming feeling of falling for someone, and of doing something completely out of character, trying to control everything in one perfect second, in a place that feels crushingly familiar. I think I’m the third person on here to cite this story, after CD Rose and Naomi Frisby. [In fact the fourth: Joanna Walsh also picked it – Ed.]

First published in 3:am Magazine, 2014, and available to read here. Collected in Attrib., Influx Press, 2017

‘Scrimshaw’ by Eley Williams

The difference between an Eley Williams story and an Asimov one couldn’t be much more extreme. And isn’t that the absolute delight of the short form? Eley’s stories are linguistically playful, they take the idea of a vignette and apply a meandering thought experiment to mere moments in time, moments that stretch to fill entire pages. Often wistful in nature, there’s communication at the heart of many of her stories, and the difficulty of that, especially when the medium is 4am text messages as it is in ‘Scrimshaw’, but I could have picked any of the stories in her wonderful collection, Attrib.

It’s not erudition for the sake of erudition. The wordplay is a definite way of thinking, or perhaps even of notthinking, of avoiding certain thoughts, certain worries. The narrator sets traps for themself, and has to back out of their own cul-de-sacs. It’s very human, a delight to read, and sufficiently original to stand out from any crowd. And totally, utterly different from anything I could ever write.

Shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2020; you can read an extract online here, or listen to the story as recorded by the BBC

‘Smote (Or When I Cannot Kiss You in Front of a Print by Bridget Riley)’ by Eley Williams

I read this story on Durdle Door beach, my back pressed against warm limestone and my bare feet pushed into the pebbles. I had recently fallen in love and everything in my life was shifting. There was nothing to hold onto and it felt destabilising, yet thrilling, to be moving somewhere new. This story captures something of that feeling, while also exploring language, images, art-making and the politics of queer desire. Williams deconstructs narrative using innovative, exciting forms and her writing makes the world of ideas feel expansive.

“and you stark me
and I am strobe-hearted.”

First published in The White Review online, 2015 and collected in Attrib. and Other Stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘Bs’ by Eley Williams

A short love story.

The bird here is anonymous, a “blackbird-slash-thrush-slash-starling-slash-finch”. It sings outside, “toccatas and scherzos and bugled blurts”. Inside, a bee is trapped under a glass, “dink-d’dink-dinking its head against a transparent wall”. It is early morning, the time of half-asleep thoughts “of a euphemism of a metaphor of a ghost”.

Williams takes a single moment and spins a thread of mini-thoughts, turning words – she loves words, comparing ‘larynx’ with ‘syrinx’ (syrinx wins) – and facts – “the bones of a pigeon weigh less than its feathers” – over in her head, indulging a charming, playful flight of fancy. “The bird and the bee could set up, I think, a lovely B&B and serve their guests toast with honey and eggs.”

Collected in Attrib. and other stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘Bulk’ by Eley Williams

There is a heart there big enough for me to lie upon and sleep and not touch the rocks if I curled up with my knees tucked under my jaw.

I like socially observant writers: those with a sharp eye for absurdities, an ear for the fall of different kinds of silence, a feel for the heated cheeks of the unsaid. I like very clever writers too: people who can play with words, tease them and weave them into a seriphed wink. But to find someone who can blend those talents with such gentle compassion for the queer delicacies of the world…well, that’s a rare treat. Enter Eley Williams. Yet with such a wordsmith it’s important not to forget her exquisite imagery. Fighting pelicans in Hyde Park. Boiling birds for haute cuisine. Unfortunate walrus videos.

The beached whale of ‘Bulk’ lies stubborn in my mind. It sits heavy across the entirety of the story, the characters’ thoughts and actions and interactions clambering on and around it. It’s a physical space to anchor the gathering crowd’s fears and foibles. Its silhouette contains overlapping symbolism, and decaying certainties. It is also just too big a thing, an awkward affront, an interruption to the way things are (“do you think we can push it back?”).

To balance a story in, on, and around such a beast should be tricky. Williams makes it look effortless.

First published in Attrib. and other stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘Smote (or When I find I cannot Kiss You In Front of a Print by Bridget Riley)’ by Eley Williams

I am certainly not alone in thinking Eley Williams’ collection Attrib. and Other Stories is phenomenal. In fact, I looked through to see if anyone else had picked her and of course they had, and several had picked this story. But I make no claims to be unique, this story is near-perfect for me and I’m glad I’m not alone. I first read it in her collection, and it has stuck with me since then. When I realised I wanted to include it, I delighted in rereading it. It showcases Williams’ love of language and her insights into what we think of when we pretend we aren’t thinking of anything at all. It is, on the face of it, just the inner dialogue of someone in a gallery with the person they fancy, and who they would like to kiss. Williams hurls at the reader a torrent of language and concludes with the loveliest of lines that read like poetry:

You have leaned in, and have kissed me without even thinking about it
Like it is the easiest thing in the world
and you stark me
and I am strobe-hearted…

It is the only love story in this personal anthology and it is a story that I love.

First published in The White Review online, 2015 and collected in Attrib. and Other Stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘Attrib.’ by Eley Williams

‘Attrib.’ tells the story of a foley artist whose surroundings conspire to interrupt the production of a soundscape intended to glorify Michelangelo’s masterworks. In quirks and quips, it calls out the uneven distribution of power that maintains the effacement of certain populations, raising questions about who gets to name and attribute meaning, who gets to express themselves, and who gets to be recognised as a creator. It also gives a joyful and hilarious demonstration of an artist’s power to disrupt and provoke change.

[Williams’s collection also boasts the startling and beautiful ‘Smote’ (or ‘When I find I cannot kiss you in front of a print by Bridget Riley’). ‘Attrib.’ made the anthology because visual art made a place for it in my mind before the story was written; in 1996, I encountered Foley Artist by Tacita Dean, and discovered what a foley artist is and does.

Many thanks to Sophie Haydock for introducing me to ‘Attrib.’ through The Word Factory Short Story Club.]

Collected in Attrib. and Other Stories, Influx, 2017

‘Smote (or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You In Front Of A Print By Bridget Riley)’ by Eley Williams

The line spacing in this story began for me an experiment with form, still ongoing. The form carries much of the weight of any story, in terms of its ‘meaning’ or ‘message’. The spacing around the word ‘But’ in this story lends the word its but-feeling, to borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein.

First published on The White Review website, April 2015. Collected in Attrib. And Other Stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘Smote’ by Eley Williams

If you haven’t read Eley Williams yet, what are you waiting for? She makes stories out of second-long slivers of time, swooping completely away from everything you think a story should be and landing you somewhere completely new and strange. This story, a telescopic exploration of one genderless narrator’s inability to kiss their lover (also a genderless ‘you’) by a Brigit Riley painting, is a great place to start.

First published on The White Review website, April 2015. Collected in Attrib., Influx Press, 2017