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About this Book
About Victoria Hislop
Also by Victoria Hislop
Table of Contents
www.headofzeus.com
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Introduction
LOVE
Katherine Mansfield
A Married Man’s Story
Dorothy Parker
A Telephone Call
Doris Lessing
A Man and Two Women
Doris Lessing
How I Finally Lost My Heart
Margaret Drabble
Faithful Lovers
Angela Carter
Master
Margaret Atwood
The Man from Mars
Angela Carter
The Bloody Chamber
Ellen Gilchrist
1944
Alice Walker
The Lover
Mavis Gallant
Rue de Lille
Carol Shields
Words
Anne Enright
Revenge
Elspeth Davie
Choirmaster
Alison Lurie
Ilse’s House
Alison Lurie
In the Shadow
Jennifer Egan
The Watch Trick
Jeanette Winterson
Atlantic Crossing
Clare Boylan
My Son the Hero
Maggie Gee
The Artist
Colette Paul
Kenny
Rachel Seiffert
Reach
Rachel Seiffert
Field Study
Yiyun Li
Love in the Marketplace
Nadine Gordimer
Mother Tongue
Miranda July
The Shared Patio
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Thing Around Your Neck
Carys Davies
The Redemption of Galen Pike
Alison MacLeod
The Heart of Denis Noble
Emma Donoghue
The Lost Seed
Roshi Fernando
The Turtle
M. J. Hyland
Even Pretty Eyes Commit Crimes
Emma Donoghue
The Gift
Avril Joy
Millie and Bird
LOSS
Katherine Mansfield
The Canary
Elizabeth Bowen
A Walk in the Woods
Dorothy Parker
Sentiment
Shirley Jackson
The Lottery
Flannery O’Connor
The Life You Save May Be Your Own
Elizabeth Taylor
The Blush
Anna Kavan
A Visit
Anna Kavan
Obsessional
Muriel Spark
The First Year of My Life
Ellen Gilchrist
Indignities
Penelope Lively
The Pill-Box
Alice Munro
Miles City, Montana
Carol Shields
Fragility
Margaret Drabble
The Merry Widow
A. M. Homes
The I of It
Marina Warner
The First Time
Nicola Barker
Inside Information
Penelope Fitzgerald
Desideratus
Lorrie Moore
Agnes of Iowa
Hilary Mantel
Curved is the Line of Beauty
Susan Hill
Father, Father
Colette Paul
Renaissance
Yiyun Li
After a Life
Helen Simpson
Sorry?
Helen Simpson
Up at a Villa
Edna O’Brien
Plunder
Edith Pearlman
Aunt Telephone
Emma Donoghue
Vanitas
Alice Munro
Gravel
Alice Munro
The Eye
Carrie Tiffany
Before He Left the Family
Lucy Wood
Diving Belles
THE LIVES OF WOMEN
Willa Cather
Consequences
Virginia Woolf
A Society
Ellen Gilchrist
Generous Pieces
Dorothy Parker
The Waltz
Doris Lessing
Through the Tunnel
Penelope Fitzgerald
The Axe
Margaret Atwood
Betty
Penelope Lively
A World of Her Own
Anita Desai
Sale
Alice Munro
Mischief
Elspeth Davie
Change of Face
Elspeth Davie
A Weight Problem
Penelope Fitzgerald
The Prescription
Alice Walker
How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy.
Penelope Lively
Corruption
A. M. Homes
A Real Doll
A. M. Homes
Yours Truly
Anne Enright
(She Owns) Every Thing
Elizabeth Jolley
Waiting Room (The First)
Jane Gardam
Telegony I: Going into a Dark House
Alison Lurie
Fat People
Nicola Barker
G-String
Nicola Barker
Wesley: Blisters
Jennifer Egan
Emerald City
Muriel Spark
The Snobs
Hilary Mantel
Third Floor Rising
A. S. Byatt
The Thing in the Forest
Maggie Gee
Good People
Ali Smith
The Child
A. L. Kennedy
Story of My Life
Polly Samson
The Man Across the River
Helen Simpson
Ahead of the Pack
Stella Duffy
To Brixton Beach
About this Book
Also by Victoria Hislop
About Victoria Hislop
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
Extended Copyright
Introduction
While gathering the short stories for this anthology, I have read some of the most brilliant and profound pieces of writing that I have ever come across.
The authors in this anthology range from a Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing, to the acknowledged queen of short stories, Alice Munro. There are Man Booker winners, Costa winners and Pulitzer winners. A few were born in the 19th century but the majority are more modern. Several of them are as yet unknown, others are household names, like Virginia Woolf. Many of the most vivid and passionate storytellers are young. And without doubt many of the most powerfully original are contemporary writers.
Apart from the writers all being female, the other guiding factor in the selection is that the stories have been written in English. The stories are varied and I am sure that no single reader will like them all. Perhaps I enjoyed certain stories because they meant something very personal to me. Others I think would be admired by any reader.
I discovered that it is possible for a short story (unlike a novel) to attain something close to perfection. Its brevity can mean that an author has the chance to produce a series of almost perfectly formed sentences, where every carefully chose
n word contributes to its meaning. Occasionally the result is flawless, something a novel can never be.
Readers are allowed to be impatient with short stories. My own patience limit for a novel which I am not hugely enjoying may be three or four chapters. If it has not engaged me by then, it has lost me and is returned to the library or taken to a charity shop. With a short story, three or four pages are the maximum I allow (sometimes they are only five or six pages long in any case). A short story can entice us in without preamble or background information, and for that reason it has no excuse. It must not bore us even for a second.
If a short story has no excuse for being dull, it has even less reason to be bland. As I selected the stories for this anthology, I found myself reading stories that made me laugh out loud, gasp and often weep. If a story did not arouse a strong response in me, then I did not select it. Even if it is elegaic or whimsical, it must still stir something deep in the pit of the stomach or make the heart race.
Some stories had such a strong effect on me that I had to put a collection down and do something different with the rest of my day. I could read nothing else. I needed to ponder it, or possibly read it for a second time. Muriel Spark’s ‘The First Year of My Life’ dazzled me with its brilliance. That was a day when I didn’t need to do anything other than reflect on her wisdom. For different reasons, Alice Munro’s ‘Miles City Montana’ rendered me incapable of continuing to read. She moves seamlessly from a description of a drowned boy’s funeral to an incident on a family outing where we believe that one of the children will drown. Even the relief I felt at the story’s relatively happy conclusion was not enough to lift my mood.
Quite often an anthology is named after the author’s favourite short story, and if that were the case I would read the eponymous story first. More often, there is no particular entry point into an anthology (unless you are happy to read them in the order they appear, something I usually resisted) and in that case, there was no better guide than simply whether the title intrigued me. Who, for example, would not go straight to a story entitled ‘How I Finally Lost My Heart’ (Doris Lessing), ‘A Weight Problem’ (Elspeth Davie), ‘How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy.’ (Alice Walker) or even the intriguingly named: ‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own’ (Flannery O’Connor)?
A short story can be more surreal than many readers might tolerate with a novel and, perhaps, less grounded in reality. Succinctness sometimes allows a writer to explore ideas that may not sustain over a greater length. An example of this is Nicola Barker’s ‘Inside Information’, a shiningly original story told through the voice of an unborn child who is considering the suitability of its soon-to-be mother. Personally, I love the slightly quirky in a short story, but I would probably not be so patient if I had to listen to the voice of a foetus over three hundred pages.
I think the short story can give a writer the opportunity to experiment and to try a style or a voice that they would not use in the novel form, so there is often an element of freshness and surprise for the reader – and perhaps for the writer too.
For me, the stories that make the greatest impact are those that are the most emotional. On a few occasions, when I was reading in the library, I noted curious glances from my neighbours. They gave me sympathetic looks, but tactfully chose to ignore my tears, the context probably reassuring them that I was weeping over the fate of a fictional character rather than some personal catastrophe. Perhaps a few hours later, I would be shaking with suppressed laughter. I think I must have been a very annoying person with whom to share a desk.
I have divided the stories into three categories – Love, Loss and The Lives of Women – but these titles are loose.
Love is, of course, a central preoccupation of literature, but a love story is so often a story of loss, or indeed a story of life. Many of these stories take an amusing and sardonic look at love, so the division, though slightly artificial, is designed to give a reader the chance to read according to her or his mood. Many of them could appear under more than one heading and, I will admit, some stories could probably fit happily into all three categories.
LOVE
Love appears here in all its guises and disguises. As Yiyun Li describes in ‘Love in the Marketplace’: ‘A romance is more than a love story with a man.’
Perhaps maternal love is the most visceral of all loves. At least it felt so the first time I read the phenomenal ‘My Son the Hero’ by Clare Boylan. ‘Reach’ by Rachel Seiffert and ‘The Turtle’ by Roshi Fernando also powerfully evoke the strength of a mother’s love, and ‘Even Pretty Eyes Commit Crimes’ by M. J. Hyland touches beautifully on the love between father and son.
In this section there is the painful poignancy of romantic love in Margaret Drabble’s ‘Faithful Lovers’, love that is more like madness in ‘Master’ by Angela Carter and love that is unrecognised until it is too late in ‘The Man from Mars’ by Margaret Atwood. There is love that for some reason is not meant to be. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about this in ‘The Thing Around your Neck’. There is love as infatuation, short-lived and potentially destructive, in Jennifer Egan’s ‘The Watch Trick’, and the making of love, sometimes kinkily, as in Anne Enright’s ‘Revenge’.
Many readers will know the experience of being haunted by an ex, and Alison Lurie writes vividly about the effect of lost or past loves in her characters’ lives (‘In the Shadow’ and also the even more extraordinary ‘Ilse’s House’).
LOSS
Many of the stories in Loss are tragic, some are shocking. All of them are emotional.
From Katherine Mansfield’s almost unbearably poignant ‘The Canary’, which is written with a feather-light touch, to Alice Munro’s ‘Gravel’, which is blunt to the point of brutality, I think few of these stories will leave readers cold.
There are lost lives, lost loves, lost innocence, a lost mother (Colette Paul’s ‘Renaissance’), lost breasts (Ellen Gilchrist’s ‘Indignities’), loss of hearing (Helen Simpson’s ‘Sorry?’) and even a lost leopard (Anna Kavan’s extraordinary ‘A Visit’).
‘The First Year of My Life’ by Muriel Spark takes the idea that babies are born omniscient and gradually lose their power and their knowledge. In this story, a baby is born in 1913, ‘in the very worst year that the world had ever seen so far’, and watches, dismayed, unsmiling, sardonic: ‘My teeth were coming through very nicely in my opinion, and well worth all the trouble I was put to in bringing them forth. I weighed twenty pounds. On all the world’s fighting fronts the men killed in action or dead of wounds numbered 8,538,315 and the warriors wounded and maimed were 21,219,452. With these figures in mind I sat up in my high chair and banged my spoon on the table.’
It is a profound story – a curious companion piece to others in the anthology in which the story is also told by a wise, all-knowing baby: Nicola Barker’s masterful ‘Inside Information’ and Ali Smith’s ‘The Child’ (in The Lives of Women) are especially engaging and fresh.
Carol Shields’ ‘Fragility’, with its hinterland story of a disabled child and a couple’s lost happiness, shares much of the pathos of Yiyun Li’s ‘After a Life’, in which a dying child lies incarcerated in a small apartment. Both stories are agonising to read. Lorrie Moore’s ‘Agnes of Iowa’ is similarly tragic but even more open-ended, with a couple doomed to live in perpetuity with their woes.
Susan Hill’s ‘Father, Father’, a story of two daughters ‘losing’ their father to a second wife, their step-mother, is insightful and real, a common situation faultlessly described.
THE LIVES OF WOMEN
Life provides infinite shades of light and dark and in this section there are many curious tales and unusual settings. There is a handful of stories that made me ask: What on earth gave her this idea? Where did this come from? One example is ‘The Axe’ by Penelope Fitzgerald. It is a chilling horror story that takes place in the deceptively banal environment of an office and describes what happens when a man finds h
is job has been ‘axed’. The narrator leaves us, as she should in such a story, with our hairs standing on end.
There is plenty of humour in this section and this is often provided by an unexpected or rather marvellous twist. ‘How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy.’ by Alice Walker is flawless. And Penelope Lively’s ‘Corruption’ is too, with the most brilliant visual image perhaps of any story – where a judge, involved in a pornography trial, takes some of his ‘research papers’ on holiday. A gust of wind sends copies of the offending magazines flying around the beach to be gathered by innocent children and even a woman who, until this moment, has been flirting with the judge. It is brilliantly comic. I felt I was watching the action unfold scene by scene, just as if I was watching a film.
There is a mildly pornographic element too in A. M. Homes’ darkly comic ‘A Real Doll’. It’s almost about love, but more to do with sex. A boy uses his sister’s Barbie as a sex toy and all sorts of jealousies ensue (Ken has an opinion, naturally). It’s funny, outrageous and totally original.