A Personal Anthology: a two-year celebratory retrospective
Next week sees the start of September, the start of school and nearly the start of teaching at university. It’s also two years since the first mailout of A Personal Anthology, a project I started on a whim, slightly uncertain as I pressed send on the first letter as to whether it was in truth the original idea I took it for. (I haven’t found anyone doing the same thing, yet!)
What started out as an idle daydream – wouldn’t it be amazing if someone asked you to edit an anthology of short fiction, any short fiction, entirely according to your own tastes –translated into a putative blog post, and then into something bigger. If I had such fun picking the dozen stories I would put in my own Personal Anthology, I thought, surely lots of other people would too.
A Personal Anthology has now had 85 editions: 81 selections from individual ‘guest editors’, two Summer Specials – here, for 2018, and here, for this summer just gone – and two Winter Specials – here, for Christmas 2017, and here, for 2018. Of those 81 individual letters, four so far form an ongoing series-within-the-series looking at short stories from one of the other 27 EU nations. I say ‘other’ because, for the moment, at least, the UK is still a member nation of the European Union, and the EU Personal Anthology series was intended as a corrective and response to the isolationism, exceptionalism and outright xenophobia that have been the hallmarks of the benighted Brexit project.
Next week, as I say, the mailouts start again – with some great writers, critics and others already lined up. But as a purely promotional gambit, and for fear that more recent subscribers might have missed some of the brilliance from the earlier contributors, I have decided to preface the annual reboot with a short look back at what A Personal Anthology has produced thus far. Of course, this is a personal selection, and there are gems to be found in each letter, but I wanted to celebrate and showcase the sheer range of the project, both in terms of what is picked, and how this is presented. It’s should come as no surprise that writers, critics and editors can not only produce great insight into writing they love, but also turn their story-introductions to brilliant memoiristic ends.
Every tinyletter has its gems, then, but I have limited myself here to a dozen picks. What I love about the project – what I hope this selection shows – is how flexible the format is. People have bent the rules, or set themselves their own rules – how and dull it would be if no one did! Nicholas Royle picked only stories published in the London Magazine, Julianne Pachico picked only Latin American writers, Helen McClory picked flash fictions, Sam Jordison picked twelve Hemingway stories, damn him. Sharlene Teo picked stories in pairs. Nikesh Shukla explicated stories by way of rap lyrics. Will Wiles found a way to subvert his own expectations of what makes a good short story (you’ll see how he did this below). CD Rose found a ‘secret truth’ hidden in all the best short stories that you’ll have to read his Anthology to discover. David Collard performed an experiment in real-time story reading/analysis. People have picked not just architectural theses and psychoanalytic reports (again, see below), but poems, novellas, pop songs, audio guides. While the primary goal is obviously the sharing of great short fiction, what makes the project endlessly fascinating is the way that writing about these stories allows people to not just reveal but also discover something about their own reading practice, and reading history, and sometimes how this is reflected in their writing.
Hopefully this brief retrospective will encourage readers not only to investigate these twelve guest editors more fully, but also to get stuck into the archive website itself, which now features nearly 1,000 story recommendations! Have a poke around. It is interesting to see which names crop up both as story-pick-er and as picked writer, and to see which names loom large in the word cloud-style sidebar, both among canonical and contemporary writers. I haven’t stopped being shocked at discovering a writer that no one’s picked before in a week’s choices. I hope to go on being shocked, and surprised, and delighted.
A Personal Anthology comes out every Friday, usually at around 2pm. If you’re reading this, you’re probably already signed up. In which case, thank you! And, please do share the project with fellow readers and short story-lovers any which way you can. And if you would like to contribute an anthology of your own, then please get in touch!
Here then is a brief Personal Anthology retrospective: twelves picks picked.
‘The Mountain Inn’ by Guy de Maupassant, translated by H. N. P. Sloman (Found in a soft, green 1957 Penguin books with a far too sedate cover, available to read online here)
I was pronouncing ‘Guy’ incorrectly, the librarian told me. Still getting used to being comfortable with choosing my own etiquette for approaching collections, I read the title story first as a light bedtime treat. I read it again. I kept reading under my covers with a torch until four in the morning, the first time I had ever seen that time on a clock. The underside of my duvet was an alpine slope, the shadows in my curtains were the trunks of sycamores and rifle butts, a knot of wood on my desk was a screaming, hopeless mouth. Nowadays perhaps I would attempt to categorize the stories as psychological thrillers or ghost stories or tight, taut, social commentaries—all I knew at the time was that the final sentence of ‘The Mountain Inn’ reversed the flow of blood in my veins and that the next day when I saw a large-eyed, soft-pawed dog chasing after a ball in the park, I burst into tears and would not be consoled.
Picked by Eley Williams. Read Eley’s full selection here.
‘The Three Fat Women of Antibes’ by W Somerset Maugham (first published in Hearst’s International Combined with Cosmopolitan in 1933, collected in Vintage’s Collected Short Stories Volume 1. Also available online here)
This is one of the first short stories I remember reading: in the days before YA, you simply raided your parents’ shelves, although I seem to remember my mother actually putting it into my hands. Three well-to-do ladies of a certain age take a long holiday in Antibes, which serves the dual purpose of incessant bridge-playing and a serious attempt to shed the pounds. Perhaps their greatest challenge beyond reduction is to find a reliable fourth for cards; and on this occasion they believe they’ve found the holy grail in the (irritatingly slim) shape of Lena. Vivid, witty and spiteful, it is perhaps at odds with contemporary conceptions of sisterhood, but the tales of trumps taken and “antifat” rusks eaten still makes me laugh with agonised recognition of weak will and its consequent mayhem. Read it, but perhaps even better, listen to Maugham reading it on YouTube, made all the funnier by his pronunciation of the “fet” the ladies are determined to banish.
Picked by Alex Clark. Read Alex’s full selection here.
‘A Clear Well-Lighted Place’ by Ernest Hemingway (It can be found in so many places, but I have a copy of The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The First Forty-Nine Stories, Scribner, 2014)
Hemingway. How lazy and obvious to pick him, for so many reasons. I wish I had discovered and been shown so many other writers when I was younger. I wish, at school, we’d been shown all those stories and voices that never had their chance. And I really did think about doing this anthology without this story, from the perspective of me now, not me as I went through life, and the stories I clung to, or that rose up unexpectedly and captured me.
However.
I was twenty when this story found me, came to me, as it was, by being read aloud to those who had turned up to an American Short Story seminar by one of my university professors. I was finding it hard to be alive, sometimes. The world was (is) so big, and human beings so small, so insignificant, or as I suppose I felt, I was so insignificant, what would happen if I just… disappeared.
He read this story, in his beautiful voice (I still think of him reading this, or pieces of Moby Dick in The American Novel seminar, and nothing I’ve ever heard read aloud has ever come even vaguely near it) and I was moved. So. I found an old copy of the collected stories in a second-hand bookshop and cut this one out, stuck it in the back of my diary, and if I ever felt like I might be alone in the universe, I read it.
Obviously, I’ve moved on. I’ve read much better and more complicated and more stylish, more beautiful stories since. I’ve read more important ones too, ones that crack open the world and write it new.
But, this story, it made me pause and think that maybe there was a point to me, that there was this huge café, with thousands upon thousands of tables, where the occupants were just looking for a clean well-lighted place, to feel connection. And it made me feel better, about everything. So.
Picked by Hayley Webster. Read Hayley’s full selection here.
‘The Demon Lover’ by Elizabeth Bowen (First published in The Listener, November 1941. Collected in The Demon Lover and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1945 and The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, Vintage Classics, 1999)
August is a strange time of year, especially in the city. It is the listless countdown to the end of summer: leaves droop tired and tawdry on dusty trees; a whiff of something subtly off-key hangs in the air. School holidays bring exodus and an emptying out for a few weeks until a new, brisker season returns: on the Continent, the great urban destinations such as Rome and Paris sensibly shut up shop, ignoring hordes of tourists descending like greenfly onto roses. In culture, August gives a sense of playing truant from reality and from the self, such as in Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film Celine and Julie Go Boating, a cult classic about two young women who swap identities and tumble down a phantasmagorical rabbit-hole one languid Paris summer.
I first saw it at the old Renoir cinema in London’s Brunswick Square, the same August I started my first ‘proper’ job – at the British Library, then part of the British Museum on Great Russell Street. My job, as a researcher on a seemingly endless project to digitise the library’s vast holdings of 19th-century books, allowed me to wander freely among the book stacks and dust motes. Here, on stiflingly hot afternoons, I read prodigiously – and not only three-decker Victorian volumes. At some point I discovered the wartime writings of the Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen – The Heat of the Day, her superb novel of the Blitz and betrayal – and short stories of forsakenness shot through with horror.
The most uneasy of these is ‘The Demon Lover’ (1941), in which the backdrop of a bombed-out London sets the scene for a fatal promise extracted during an earlier war. Bowen rapidly creates an atmosphere of claustrophobia and menace: late one sultry August day, with the weather about to turn, a middle-aged woman, Mrs Drover, makes a brief foray to her family’s boarded-up London house in a quiet square to pack up a few essential items before returning to the country where they have been evacuated away from the bombs. Though Mrs Drover is alone, we and she sense that she is being observed by someone, or something: “a cat wove itself in and out of railings, but no human eye watched Mrs Drover’s return”.
The emphasis here is on the ‘human’. Inanimate objects have taken on the suffering and disappointment of the war years and all is weirdly askew: “in her once familiar street, as in any unused channel, an unfamiliar queerness had silted up.” As “the unwilling lock” on Mrs Drover’s front door relents to her key, Bowen gifts us the entire arc of the story in the last, leaden sentence of its opening paragraph: “Dead air came to meet her as she went in.” The ensuing ghostly tale is as much about the psychological trauma of war (a period of “lucid abnormality” according to Bowen) and the passing of time, as it is conventionally supernatural. In the house – to which only she and a part-time caretaker have a key – a hand-delivered letter awaits Mrs Drover, apparently from the barely known soldier fiancé who has been missing presumed dead since they last set eyes on each other on a gloomy August evening in 1916, exactly twenty-five years before. It curtly reminds her of a promise made, an hour of meeting, an appointment which must be kept.
In a 1944 postscript to the first publication of The Demon Lover and Other Stories, Bowen explains how in these “between-time stories” “the past discharges its load of feeling into the anaesthetised and bewildered present.” The individual is all but smothered in an atmosphere of confusion and upheaval, where every positive has its reliably sinister negative. Thus Mrs Drover recalls “with dreadful acuteness” the “complete suspension of her existence” during the final days she had spent with her former lover, a passive deferment similar to the annihilating torpor of war. A long impasse has a way of turning against those who cease to be watchful: for, as it turns out most terribly for her: “You have no time to run from a face you do not expect.”
Picked by Catherine Taylor for the 2019 Summer Special. Read Catherine’s full Personal Anthology here.
‘First Love, Last Rites’ by Ian McEwan (in First Love, Last Rites, Picador, 1976)
As an unhappy art student, aged 18, I wandered into a stationery shop one lunchtime and noticed First Love, Last Rites on a carousel of Picador paperbacks. The carousel was a new thing. So too was Picador. So too was Ian McEwan. The cover image of a naked girl lying on a bed in the soft light of dawn appealed to the habitually lovelorn late-adolescent I then was. I wasn’t a book-buyer, but I spent my lunch money on that book – it cost me £1.25 – and seemed to find something of myself in each of the stories. It was only later that I realised that most of them concerned incest, masturbation, the killing of children. By then I was a student on the MA in Creative Writing at UEA, attempting to emulate this title story. Ian McEwan was my literary first love. Malcolm Bradbury, our teacher on the MA, sounded his last rites when he said one day in class, “The problem with Ian’s recent work is that he’s become too aware of the consequences of his own imagination.”
Picked by Andrew Cowan. Read Andrew’s full selection here.
‘The Fly-Paper’ by Elizabeth Taylor (First published in The Devastating Boys, Chatto and Windus Ltd, 1972; Collected in Complete Short Stories, Virago Press, 2012)
‘The Fly-Paper’ was rejected by William Maxwell at the New Yorker and subsequently turned into an episode of Tales of the Unexpected; I didn’t know either of these things when I first read it.
Although all Elizabeth Taylor’s short stories are currently available as one huge tome, they are more easily enjoyed in the editions in which they were originally published: Hester Lilley (1954), The Blush (1958), A Dedicated Man (1965) and The Devastating Boys (1972). The latter is my favourite of the four because of the range of subject matter and because there isn’t a sentence in it, anywhere, that is anything other than flawless. Taylor was a genius of fancy prose but, unlike VN, she didn’t like to talk about it.
I read ‘The Fly-Paper’ aloud from beginning to end at a festival a few years ago and, steadily, it froze a room full of people into absolute shock, not because of the ‘unexpected’ denouement – it isn’t, particularly – but because of the horrible truth of what precedes it: the elegant apprehension of quotidian, human evil.
Picked by Andy Miller. Read Andy’s full selection here.
Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ by Sigmund Freud (First published in 1905, otherwise known as ‘Dora’. Available from Oxford World Classics, translated by Anthea Bell, 2013)
‘Dora’ is the crucible for Freud’s thinking about fantasy, reality, and truth, as well as for his developing understandings of dream analysis and transference. It’s been hugely controversial, for Freud’s imputation to a teenage girl of a desire for the sexual advances of a much older man. It has figured in the last decades as a lightning rod for feminist critiques of Freud and psychoanalysis.
But it’s also a remarkable story, one in which the reliability of narration is the central, raging theme – narration by the protagonists in the story (Dora herself), and narration by the narrator and author. All Freud’s early case studies can be read as often dramatic documents in which Freud the scientist and Freud the writer are trying to find a narrative voice, a persona, and a style. His long career of revision, amendment, and revisiting cast him as his own obsessive editor and annotator. In these case studies, his authorial stance, and the voices of his subjects – sometimes speaking with agonizing clarity, and sometimes struggling to be heard, muffled by Freud’s own wishes – jostle for space and authority. The stories he told, with their own conflicting desires, sometimes contradictory aims, unexamined assumptions, erratically brilliant self-analyses, glaring lacunae, their unsteady implications constantly threatening to outpace Freud’s own attempts to keep them in his mastery, are some of the most exciting narratives ever written.
Picked by Katherine Angel. Read Katherine’s full selection here.
‘Short Days, Long Nights’ by Helen Dunmore (London Magazine, February/March 1990)
A brilliant little story by a 37-year-old Helen Dunmore, who at the time had published three books of poetry. All her novels, story collections, young adult novels, children’s books, later poetry collections and awards were ahead of her. It would make even the hardest-hearted reader sad to read this story now, three months after her death at the age of only 64. A young woman wakes up to find a strange man in her bed. There’s beauty and precision in the way Dunmore describes the woman’s actions. You believe in her right away and because you believe in her you care about her, you’re interested in what happens to her, you’re invested in her. You want to know who the man is and what happened between them and what will happen between them. That they’re in Finland is a detail that is dropped in and it might be neither here or there, but the snow-covered street outside the window comes alive in a couple of brushstrokes. Dunmore would use the title of the story again as the title of her fourth collection of poems published the following year.
Picked by Nicholas Royle. You can read Nicholas’s full selection here.
‘Your Duck Is My Duck’ by Deborah Eisenberg (In Your Duck Is My Duck, Ecco, 2018 – and now Europa Editions, 2019 – and also available through Electric Literature here)
I’m still more than a little surprised that every short story-reading human I meet doesn’t greet me by grabbing my shoulders and demanding that we talk right now about Deborah Eisenberg’s ‘Your Duck Is My Duck’. This is the sort of story whose omission from, well, anywhere at all ought to mean an early and well-earned retirement for the editors in question. I myself missed it when it appeared in Fence: thank heaven for them, for the O. Henry anthology, and for Lauren Groff in championing this story of the rich and poor, artists and patrons, painters and puppeteers.
As that list suggests: one of the greatest challenges in writing fiction with anything to say about right-the-hell-now is getting everybody in the same room. Your Duck not only manages this, but, unblinking, shows how little doing so might matter, how much deeper we’re in it than we imagine, how very late is the hour.
When our narrator, a struggling painter, tries to return some dresses given by her very rich hostess, we get this: “‘The dresses?’ she said. She smiled vaguely, and patted me, as though I had barked.”
There’s so much in this story—every twist and turn is a necessary point on the map of itself. Any account of it would just devolve into endless quotation until the whole story would be typed out below. I won’t do that to you—if you promise to seek the story out yourselves.
Picked by Drew Johnson. Read Drew’s full selection here.
‘Living on the Box’ by Penelope Gilliatt (First published in The New Yorker in 1964. Collected in What’s It Like Out? Virago Modern Classics, 1990)
I sometimes wish I had half the icy-smooth scathing of a mid-century woman writer. Here, Gilliatt turns it on the pomposity of nature poets, and she’s absolutely lacerating. I love the way she scarcely bothers to finish the story, just whips the whole diorama away as if to say: come on now, don’t be daft.
Picked by Jennifer Hodgson. Read Jennifer’s full selection here.
‘Junkspace’ by Rem Koolhaas (In Junkspace with Running Room, Notting Hill Editions, 2013, by Rem Koolhaas and Hal Foster, available here)
When I first attempted this list it was all weird tales and ghost stories. Those are generally (almost exclusively) the short stories I enjoy. It was weird, but also weirdly pedestrian, a lot of Lovecraft and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. So I thought, with a chuckle, “I should put ‘Junkspace’ on here.” In ‘Junkspace’, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas warns about the ubiquitous, homogenous, air-conditioned global environment of airports, shopping malls, convention centres and hotels, an edgeless “fuzzy empire” of “canned euphoria”. But his maddened, feverish tone is straight from Edgar Allan Poe or Colonel Kurtz. It has precisely the structure and prose style of a weird tale, in which a rational man glimpses something unspeakable and returns, his grasp on sanity loosened, to report to us. I’ve recommended it to other writers in the past, and they’ve come back from it wide-eyed. Yeah, I thought, ‘Junkspace’ definitely belongs on the list. And then I thought, what if the whole list was ‘Junkspace’?
Picked by Will Wiles. Read Will’s full selection, NONE of which, strictly speaking, are short stories here.
‘Vacancy for the Post of Jesus Christ’ by B. Kojo Laing (From The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories edited by Chinua Achebe and C.L. Innes, Heinemann Africa Writers Series, 1992. Also included in The Big Book of Science Fiction edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer, Vintage, 2016)
In the summer of 1997, I resigned in a temper from my job as a sub-editing, proof-reading, writing, picture-editing, chain-smoking dogsbody at the London-based magazine Africa Business. I had learned a lot, but it was time to move on. I had a few hundred quid in my bank account when I walked into Black Star travel agency and asked for the cheapest return flight to West Africa. I was offered Lagos, Burkina Faso or Accra. I chose Accra and spent the next twelve months based there, travelling up and down Lake Volta, taking tro-tros into Burkina Faso and further north to Niger’s capital, Niamey. I wrote for all sorts of magazines, I did an appalling interview with Nadine Gordimer, I met Bernardine Evaristo for the first time, and I fell in love with one of Robert Mugabe’s nephews. I also started reading Ghanaian writers like Ama Ata Aidoo, Ayi Kwei Armah and B. Kojo Laing. The B is for Bernard. It is also for Brilliant.
I am reluctant to provide a summary of ‘Vacancy for the Post of Jesus Christ’. I will, however, give you the first few sentences:
When the small quick lorry was being lowered from the skies, it was discovered that it had golden wood, and many seedless guavas for the hungry. As the lorry descended the many layers of cool air, the rich got ready to buy it, and the poor to resent it. The wise among the crowd below opened their mouths in wonder, and closed them only to eat. They ate looking up while the sceptical looked down. And so the lorry had chosen to come down to this town that shamed the city with its cleanliness. The wheels were already revolving and, when they shone, most of them claimed they were the mirrors of God. The lorry was quick but the descent was slow. So many wanted to touch it.
Laing has been described as an Afrofuturist, and his work as African magical realism. I’m not entirely sure what either of those terms means and instinctively I dislike them. What I do know is that Laing writes with a freedom that resists categorisation. If I was pushed, I’d probably say he writes jazz – say Sun Ra meets Thelonius Monk meets Manu Dibango. He lets loose his imagination and his knowledge and trusts his instinct to produce stories. He writes tight sentences that can veer in the most unexpected direction. He is political, he is poetic, he is funny and he is fearless. As of last year, he is also dead. It is curious that, in his lifetime, he did not gain more critical attention. I think he’s one of the best.
Picked by Lara Pawson. Read Lara’s full selection here.
Browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology at www.apersonalanthology.com