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Table of Contents
www.headofzeus.com
in memory of Deborah Rogers
CONTENTS
* * *
Welcome Page
Main Text
Introduction
Anon.
The Book of Jonah
Miguel de Cervantes
The Deceitful Marriage
The Brothers Grimm
The Children of Hameln
Edgar Allan Poe
The Tell-Tale Heart
Nikolai Gogol
The Nose
Charles Dickens
The Signal-Man
Gustave Flaubert
A Simple Heart
Kate Chopin
Desiree’s Baby
Guy de Maupassant
The Horla
Joseph Conrad
The Lagoon
George Gissing
Fleet-Footed Hester
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A Scandal in Bohemia
Knut Hamsun
A Lecture Tour
J.M. Barrie
Cree Queery and Mysy Drolly
Anton Chekhov
The Lady with the Dog
O. Henry
The Cop and the Anthem
Edith Wharton
The Other Two
M.R. James
“Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”
Rudyard Kipling
Mary Postgate
Henry Lawson
The Loaded Dog
Ivan Bunin
A Cold Autumn
Saki
Sredni Vashtar
Willa Cather
Consequences
G.K. Chesterton
The Three Horsemen
W. Somerset Maugham
Robert Walser
A Little Ramble
P.G. Wodehouse
Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend
Stefan Zweig
Forgotten Dreams
Virginia Woolf
Solid Objects
James Joyce
Eveline
Franz Kafka
A Hunger Artist
Isak Dinesen
The Ring
D.H. Lawrence
The Rocking-Horse Winner
Katherine Mansfield
A Married Man’s Story
Richmal Crompton
The Fall of the Idol
Isaac Babel
My First Fee
Aesop
The Hare and the Tortoise
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Babylon Revisited
Jorge Luis Borges
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
Elizabeth Bowen
Sunday Afternoon
Sean O’Faolain
How to Write a Short Story
V.S. Pritchett
A Family Man
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Gimpel the Fool
Frank O’Connor
Guests of the Nation
Hans Christian Andersen
The Red Shoes
William Maxwell
Love
Eudora Welty
Petrified Man
John Cheever
The Swimmer
Elizabeth Taylor
The Blush
Delmore Schwartz
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
Angus Wilson
Raspberry Jam
Bernard Malamud
The Last Mohican
Roald Dahl
Parson’s Pleasure
Penelope Fitzgerald
The Red-Haired Girl
Shirley Jackson
The Lottery
Muriel Spark
The Executor
Clarice Lispector
The Smallest Woman in the World
Mavis Gallant
The Wedding Ring
Flannery O’Connor
A Good Man is Hard to Find
Stephen Crane
The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
Frank Tuohy
Live Bait
Cynthia Ozick
The Pagan Rabbi
William Trevor
Broken Homes
J.G. Ballard
Dream Cargoes
Alice Munro
The Children Stay
Julia O’Faolain
Under the Rose
John McGahern
The Wine Breath
Edith Pearlman
ToyFolk
Anita Desai
Private Tuition by Mr Bose
Thomas Pynchon
Entropy
Raymond Carver
Errand
Georgina Hammick
The Dying Room
Angela Carter
Lizzie’s Tiger
Bernard MacLaverty
At the Beach
Peter Carey
Report on the Shadow Industry
Gita Mehta
The Teacher’s Story
Shena Mackay
Radio Gannet
Julian Barnes
Marriage Lines
Ian McEwan
Solid Geometry
Denis Johnson
Emergency
Martin Amis
Let Me Count the Times
Nguyen Huy Thiep
Cun
Kate Atkinson
Unseen Translation
Hanif Kureishi
D’accord, Baby
Tim Parks
The Tangling Point
The Cold Outside
Colm Toíbín
Summer of ’38
Lorrie Moore
Two Boys
Tim Winton
Boner McPharlin’s Moll
George Saunders
The Wavemaker Falters
A.M. Homes
A Real Doll
Joanne Harris
The Toymaker and his Wife
Keith Ridgway
Marching Songs
Nicola Barker
Mixed Breeding
James Bradley
Beauty’s Sister
Siddhartha Deb
Nothing Visible
Anthony Doerr
The Deep
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Thing Around Your Neck
Extended Copyright
J.G. Ballard
The Index
About this Book
About the Editor
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
GLIMPSING WHO WE ARE
* * *
Tell me what you want, and I shall tell you who you are.
Anton Chekhov
A Dreary Story (1889)
Any anthology is a weird, wonky wonder: the one you hold in your hands is no different. Are all the short stories selected here really the “finest”? Who says – and why, let alone how?
There are several things to be stated at the outset: (1) choosing one hundred stories and stating they are the “finest” is an excellent way to start a discussion; (2) the form itself, the short story, exemplifies some of the finest writing that isn’t poetry, that couldn’t be a novel and (3) we are all aggravatingly, hopelessly, usefully, desperately subjective. Finally (4) the task is, frankly, impossible. How can anyone select a hundred short stories above the hundreds of thousands that sit beside them? Describing the process of judging a literary prize (for a novel), the British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald wrote in 1998:
It’s always the same, you make up your mind to remain calm, dispassionate and civilised. And then
as the meetings go on, you become increasingly heated and quarrelsome. The book I wanted to win… didn’t win, and I felt like weeping. And everyone complained, as they always do, that the judges must have lost their wits anyway.
Selecting the stories included here has had a similar feel. I’ve tried to remain dispassionate, searching for the finest, ending up being wholly and, I’d argue, usefully, passionate. I have spent weeks, then months, quarrelling with myself (and others) and, now there is a result, some will complain I’ve not included a or y, or h or z or given due attention to the burgeoning literary genre or scene in delete as appropriate. There are stories originally written in Hebrew, Spanish, French, Norwegian, Danish, Yiddish, Russian, German, Vietnamese, Japanese, and written in English from most continents, but it will be said there could be more Commonwealth writing here, that there is not enough science fiction, there’s too much Russian, Irish and American and not enough Indian writing; that I have neglected gay, ghost (or gay ghost) stories, or crime fiction – and some of that is true, and not true, but I suspect each of those genres could hold a selection of over one hundred stories within their categories. We know that these days, whatever happens, someone will be there to complain, but this is a quality exercise, not a quota project. All I can say is that the experience of selecting the stories here has been blackly exhilarating, perhaps a little bit like it might be to appear on the literary equivalent of Desert Island Discs – my fate now has to be being told I’ve missed out authors whose names begin with X, Y, Z and the whole of the rest of the alphabet and, just, got it wrong, caused vast offence and – well, the list is as endless as this book could have been.
Philip Roth might – just – be a useful, if ignorant, ally here. He has written superb novels but is not a fine short story writer (according to me). In American Pastoral (1997) he wrote:
The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.
What I have attempted to do is not get things right, but to reflect as many genres, as many moods, as many voices as I can curate, to show that a short story can do pretty much anything – tell the tale, untell the tale told, hide the teller; make you laugh, make you cry, show a world, be political, play and work and expand what fiction can do, and so on and so forth – as can any novel but, as a short story is already a distillation, it gives the writer a far harder task to achieve everything, not just any thing. Every thing in this book is as good as it can get.
It turns out, also, the choices made are personal, but they have to be: each of our reactions to any author is: most of our reading is reading what others have read before. The book is ordered by chronological date of birth of the author, as that seemed easiest. I have attempted to spread the notion of “finest” throughout the story of the “short story,” as that should show how the world has changed since a man wrote how another could live in a fish (very magical realist) to how we simply look at one another when things go wrong (Cheever).
Given my own stipulations, I am still irritated by what I have not been able to include, for simple reasons of space, as much as I am surprised by who is not in the book – the novelists I admire who, for me, write better novels than stories (like Roth, or George Eliot, Shirley Hazzard, Graham Greene, John Updike, Evelyn Waugh) and who seem rarely to have written a short story (Anita Brookner, Robertson Davies, Alan Hollinghurst, Brian Moore), or the stories that were on their way to becoming novels (Raymond Chandler, Michael Cunningham, Evelyn Waugh) – the sort of short stories that read like five-finger exercises on a keyboard meant to be turned into a symphony.
Sometimes it is good to see a novelist as a novelist and realize short stories are for others, that they are – to use one of my most steady friend’s best words – “beyond.” The genre seems to be, for example, beyond V.S. Naipaul.
I hope the stories collected here reflect what writing is about: life, and its complications. The short story can be the most surprising form of fiction because it offers a magnitude of tellings. One or two pages can do it (Saki, Walser, Beckett). So can many more (Carter, Pritchett). So can a series of questions, or answers, or footnotes (Ballard, Lydia Davis). Writers tell us how hard a short story is to get right: they are not wrong. One story included here was published originally on Twitter, which shows what you can do with as few words as you wish – FOR SALE: BABY’S SHOES. NEVER WORN.1
When Carver was twenty-seven, “back in 1966,” he found he was
having trouble concentrating my attention on long narrative fiction. For a time I experienced difficulty in trying to read it as well as in attempting to write it. My attention span had gone out on me; I no longer had the patience to try to write novels. It’s an involved story, too tedious to talk about here. But I know it has much to do now with why I write poems and short stories. Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on.
I had to look that last bit up, as I’d recalled the quote as a similarly snappy “Get in, get out, as quickly as you can.”2 Carver was a useful influence on my reading, as were those just before him, and his peers – but I had grown up with Saki being read to me at school, and then Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected manipulating my adolescence, on television. At the same time, in my teens, each school-day morning when I opened my bedroom curtains, I could gaze on where Somerset Maugham’s ashes had been interred.3 One Christmas holiday, after he’d just won the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature, and when I was nearly seventeen and stricken with some glandular thing, I asked my mother if she could buy anything by Gabriel García Márquez, and she came back from the WHSmith in Burgess Hill with the whole sodding lot reissued by Picador just to shut me up (which it did: I began reading his short stories, Innocent Eréndira).4 I remember, very vividly, nipping out of school with £1.25 to buy Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites – short stories that seemed to me then, and still do now, to allow any writer to explore what can be done – and to which the answer is: almost anything.
At some stage I also realized writing can work at its most sublime when it does less. Carver admired one of the writers I hold most dear, V.S. Pritchett. Leo Carey, writing recently in The New Yorker noted of Pritchett that:
When he died, in 1997, the BBC ran an old documentary in which an actor read some of the stories (I can still remember how brilliantly he read “The Oedipus Complex”) and Pritchett himself was interviewed. After a reading of a story that ends almost in medias res, the interviewer asked, “And we don’t know what’s going to happen next?” Pritchett said, “Yes. People don’t know what’s going to happen next in their lives, so we don’t either.”
In Carver’s words, Pritchett’s
definition of a short story is “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.” Notice the “glimpse” part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we’re lucky – that word again – have even further ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer’s task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He’ll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things – like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right they can hit all the notes.
For exactly half my life I have been lucky enough to hear writers hitting the right notes by working at a literary agency. The first story I placed was by Lorrie Moore (“Community Life”), the second was the last story by Angela Carter. I’ve come to work for Nicola Barker, John Burns
ide, Magnus Mills and Cynthia Ozick but also came to read for pleasure Muriel Spark, Denis Johnson, Shirley Hazzard, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Richard Yates, Lydia Davis, and Jhumpa Lahiri. I remember standing to hear John McGahern read from his Collected Stories at Waterstones, Charing Cross Road, and peeing beside Joseph O’Connor in the urinals at the Purcell Rooms immediately after he had held an audience spell-bound with his story “True Believers” (not, sadly, included here for reasons of space) – not the moment to introduce yourself, or say anything, much.
Together with the reading I was doing by people who were alive, I tried to check myself, my taste: retain quality control – so, whilst I had Pritchett, I kept reading Chekhov, and in my mid-thirties, I discovered Joseph Conrad. Conrad is a great writer, but none of his novels are truly great: his short fiction is almost better than the baggy brilliance of Nostromo, or the clenched splendour of Under Western Eyes – “The Return”, Heart of Darkness, “The Secret Sharer” or The Shadow Line count, but are all too long for inclusion here.5 Conrad also wrote this, which is why the volume you have has the title it does: