A Personal Anthology, by Amy Grandvoinet
Introduction (or, Help!)
Gary Raymond told me about Jonathan Gibbs’s e-bulletin / website project whereby guests offer notes on a dozen short stories at their whim. In the Brixton Review of Books (brb he he) Jonathan says it’s a literary parlour game that’s now been played by over 250 ppl (over 3,000 short story offerings!)! Offerings, says Jonathan, are best when aesthetic excellence is weighed up with personal significance: yeah! Dream! But Hard! Jumping to dream-edit desk rapidly to realise my own A Personal Anthology, fear and excitement panged. Chill out, baby. I tend to identify myself to others as somebody who isn’t a literary person (hideous inferiority complex display), but this activity triggered (happily) in my brain a life-time actually of tale-appreciation I’d seemingly convinced myself to forget about. Hooray.
Jonathan says you can do A Personal Anthology many ways; mine is simply select recent favourites AT PRESENT. After some deliberation I’ve stuck quite close to an up-tight definition of what a short story is (according to Google a story with a fully developed theme but significantly shorter and less elaborate than a novel), mainly to limit free-association crazie. A crisp-packet can be a short story! But c’mon, it’s no longer era Marcel Duchamp. Initially I’d included more classics, but wouldn’t you have rather read Anton Chekhov or Fyodor Dostoyevsky when they were actually doing it prior to the Posthumous Collection? Hot word. I did check out A Personal Anthology’s archive to see what has or hasn’t been mentioned and am sad to not add new entries for Angela Carter or Leonora Carrington. Yet, this is a heart-felt curation that feels right currently (Jonathan says go with your heart).
I’m doing a PhD on so-called literary psychogeographies at the moment. While blissfully liberating myself from that parameter in making this A Personal Anthology, a theme of spatial politics and human affect is I think at least abit reflected in my choices. It coulda been a far more concentrated batch as such though, just to let you know! On that matter, if you happen to know any short stories particularly attuned to the contested notion of psychogeography, plîs will you get in touch? I’m on a Literature Wales x Disability Arts Cymru programme this November-to-March to develop short story skillz in those-ish realms, and desire bites.
Somebody should make a baker’s dozen for A Personal Anthology if you are a baker-writer?! I am not so didn’t think I could legitimately give myself an extra one, but wanted to!
‘The Guest’ by Mira Mattar (at Mute Magazine since 2012 and online here)
Ma Bibliotèque published Yes, I Am A Destroyer (2020) to beguiled claps, debut book of Jordanian-Palestinian poet and fiction writer Mira Mattar blurbed by Sharon Kivland and Lisa Robertson as oscillating between lucidity and dissociation, demonic and angelic, maniacal and generous, & accidentally elegant in prosing the bad city with refusal of subjection and anarchical vigour. I snapped it up lately and am yet to read, but in the meantime found ‘The Guest’, Mira Mattar’s 2012 short story in Mute Magazine (find more at wwws of 3:AM Magazine and Makhtin). It is an unnerving vignette of a humanity-bereftness in a hospitality setting, opening with a ghoulish-green-pixel’d graphic of luxury-yacht espace intérior ~ the ensuing locus. “CL”, “head stewardess” who subversively embroiders subtle “CL” initials onto her standard white work gloves, prepares a room for “the guest” judged to have packed in surveillance anticipation. Still, she cannot avoid feeling “Stupid. All her things have betrayed and humiliated her” (gross razors toothpaste-tubes price-tags) and that she’s missed the mark (“But though she had located her smartest most casual smart-casual clothes, the guest still somehow got it wrong”). After vapid on-board dinner where “the guest” and others are unable to speak, only emiting “a common word like ‘iPhone’ or ‘tiramisu’” intermittently, “the guest” the next morning following an alienating breakfast tries to teach language to mysterious “the child” who will only write “X” or “0”. At night “the guest” sleeps naked next to the empty body-form of her clean-pressed jammies in foetus position. Pristine, cruel, empty, negligent, faux-functional. Free Palestine (read Mira Mattar on starvation as a tool of genocide in Gaza via culinary magazine Vittles and see also arablit.org and gazapassages.com).
‘Interior Bunch Concerns’ by Ed Garland (published in The Stinging Fly Issue 50 Volume Two, May 2024)
Ed Garland was described by our mutual-friend Laura Phillips as a beautiful writer and it is t r u e ! His short story ‘Yeah Not Bad’ (feat. medicality fuck-ups, kale attack, toxic labour, et cetera) arrived at The Stinging Fly online in 2023, then ‘Interior Bunch Concerns’ in The Stinging Fly’s summer print-issue the very next annum. I’d had the privilege of Going About with Ed Garland while ‘Interior Bunch Concerns’ was in draft mode for example on magic Bristolian barge-cafés and in wooden hôtel-lounge milieus. ‘Interior Bunch Concerns’ is the premonitory title of a fraught-living-set-ups and fraught-bodies tale, all scrunched up and bleugh. A nameless narrator and his “top-notch companion” wanna live in “Marseille!” and make a “durable baby” there, so get lodgers toward accruing the wealth required to do so, supplementing their incomes from yucky occupations (socio-economic hoops Ed Garland terms “lucrative ordeals”). Exact not-yet-Marseille location is unknown, but the “slate-grey couch” where the couple sit daily with laptop-braised legs makes me wonder if it’s at least somewhere in Mid-Wales where Ed Garland and I both live at the time of writing. The “two sunburned cherubs” who emit rosy-cheek smile emojis and own a weird silver spaniel are fucking eerie and bring unbearable domestic uncomfortability ~ the end to its temporary endurance climaxes with a spoiler I will not reveal here. Still, the fight for Marseille’s not over! Dark yet Optimistic, Zesty. Every word is BIG. Get excited because Ed Garland is writing a NOVEL at the moment (it’s not a secret) utilising his immaculate attention to auditory (and otherwise) terrestrial details. Go!!!
'The Mouse' by Anaïs Nin (part of Under A Glass Bell first published by Gemor Press 1944, various editions thereafter and also available online here)
On the sparkli nu T5 TrawsCymru Electric Bws to Aberaeron one day Ed Garland and I were discussing Anaïs Nin’s infamous diaries and private life. I became desperate to read her fiction but she was not in Gwisgo Bookworm when we got there nor in Ystwyth Books back in Aberystwyth so I sent off for a Penguin Twentieth Century Classics version (originally published by Anaïs Nin’s own Gemor Press kl) of Under A Glass Bell (1944) it has that pale aquamarine-coloured framing around a monochrome image of a lady behind a lace curtain which I find calming. ‘The Mouse’, short story No. 2 in the collection, struck me as the most tender, upsetting, and insurgent parable of solidarity. It begins: “The Mouse and I lived on a houseboat anchored near Notre Dame where the Seine curved endlessly like veins around the island heart of Paris”. “The Mouse” is explicitly “a woman” who dresses fluffily and has become chronically frightened, never finishing the Bretagne folk songs she sings while performing household tasks or obtaining soap or cheese groceries, hyper-vigilantly forever thinking “danger or punishment” is just round the corner. Sad. Anaïs Nin’s “I” wants to help, but Mouse is so scared that “Before every act of friendliness she was suspcious, uneasy”. Sadder! Mouse’s anxious figuration of a water-fountain catalyses her (more-or-less inevitable) trapping due to horrendously messed-up hegemonic culture. If Mouse had only been able to trust “I” ~ kind, assertive, eloquent, honest, considered (psychoanalytic healthy ego metaphor?) ~ all could have been so different. A potentially tragic ending is left unfinished, though: rooting for you, Mouse! A Spar JAM DONUTS receipt was my bookmark.
‘Come and Pick Me Up Immediately’ by Claire Carroll (part of The Unreliable Nature Writer, Scratch Books 2024)
Claire Carroll and I met some years ago at a PhD-funding soirée. Claire Carroll’s thesis is on Surrealist literary legacies and mine is on Situationist literary legacies. Shortly after our meeting, PROTOTYPE 5 (yearly assembly of texts by Prototype Publishing) arrived at my flat and Claire Carroll’s ‘A Sun is Only a Shipwreck Insofar as a Woman’s Body Resembles It’ was in there, an outstanding imaginary anecdote involving André Breton to which I was strongly compelled to write a fan-girl response. But that was a while ago; since then, Claire Carroll has released a whole tome of short stories with Scratch Books ~ The Unreliable Nature Writer (2024). It’s all wickedly wry in tone though somehow still soft and of vulnerability. ‘Come and Pick Me Up Immediately’ documents a female protagonist (I t h i n k “The Unreliable Nature Writer” who appears through an eponymous series of bamboozling contemporary episodes?) dealing with a Very Needy & Conventionally Attractive Man (her drunk manager). “Can you call me? There’s something urgent I need. […] I NEED YOU TO TAKE ME TO A WOODLAND STREAM” – his txt – kicks it off. So many eyes are rolling; Claire Carroll is excellent at ffs-vibe interpersonal drama. Basically, she (obligatorily) drives him (very perfumed) out of town across “sick, burnt ochre” landscape to the pined-for woodland stream, and he is underappreciative but wireless-contact-payment-taps them a post-quest ice-cream each. I read ‘Come And Pick Me Up Immediately’ on, appropriately I thought, Marylbone High Street.
‘If YES’ by Ben Pester (within the rooms of Hotel online here, Tenement Press & Prototype 2017-22)
I was in London because it was Claire Carroll’s book launch at The Social W1W 7JD me and my friend Jess Payn attended together. We met Joshua Jones of (more short stories) Local Fires (2023) and did not m e e t Ben Pester but heard him read from his Boiler-House-Press-published (also short stories) Am I in the Right Place? (2021). Another of his stories, in the rooms of e-existent Hotel (2017-22), that is * so funny * I’d fell upon earlier is ‘If YES’, a short egg story. It seems a great many great writers have been obsessed with eggs at some point in their careers has anyone else noticed this? ‘If YES’ is an office gambol framed in a user-satisfaction feedback form by Ben Pester. A Large Egg is surprise-delivered at the work-place to which “Ben” (main character) and colleagues are “deeply attracted”. Its proximity mystically effects an “instant Alpha brainwave state” causing powerful primal-corporate cameraderie and, ultimately, business (“start-up”) productivity. Of course, there is an oviparous in the egg and I was l-o-l-ing at the strength of the tension-building (snort-worthy single line paragraphs) Ben Pester achieves re speculation over what will be inside the oeuf. Things of course get dreadful and I say a real Oh no reading ‘If YES’ it’s so eggishly palpable. Commerce dialect looms massive as our cultish capacities under late-late-late-stage Capitalismo are so well allegoried. See also Seven Rooms: Assorted materials from a Paper Hotel (2023), Hotel-on-web’s paper component.
‘Ticky Picky Boom Boom’ by Pat Thomson (included in The Puffin Book of Five Minute Stories, Puffin Books, 1998)
This is a nostalgic short story for me about not eggs but yams. Mine and my sister’s Mom ‘n’ Dad read to us as kids from books (they also made up genuinely good stories from their heads which we demanded as preference these are things I feel lucky (not Lucky) about). Soma the best wackiest books came from carboot sales (no LRB-franchise Aquila Magazine does the Anarchist Review of Books have a youth arm?). Eleven years ago the Malcom X Elders in Bristol staged ‘Ticky Picky Boom Boom’ alongside other Caribbean folk yarns at acta Theatre. I can’t work out who Pat Thomson is but she * MIGHT * be a badass education academic now? ‘Ticky Picky Boom Boom’ was in The Puffin Book of Five Minute Stories (1998) I remember it strangely often for its totally addictive rhythm. In ‘Ticky Picky Boom Boom’, a hoard of yams keep chasing “Mr Tiger” under the spell of “Ananse the Trickster” (Anansi a folk-spider creative and cunning and wealthy and not very nice). “Mr Tiger” cannot escape the possessed yams even with the help of “Mr Dog”, “Sister Duck”, and “Mr Goat”. Répéter répéter again and again ~
And down the road came the yams and the noise their feet made sounded like this: Ticky Picky Boom Boom
Ticky Picky Boom Boom
Ticky Picky Boom Boom bouf!
The nice guys win though, yay, and all the yams get eaten E a t t h e R i c h. It reminds me of J. G. Ballard’s novella Running Wild (1988), where murderous children from posho Pangbourne prevail (but in a kind-of reversal of that plot).
‘I am no longer baby I want power’ by Roisin Dunnett (part of Animal, Vegetable brought to you à Broken Sleep Books 2021)
Broken Sleep Books sent something gratis and it was Roisin Dunnett’s Animal, Vegetable (2021) containing odd and profound ‘I am no longer baby I want power’ (first of three short stories) split into “Part 1” and “Part 2” based on a meme ~ “I’m baby” ~ involving Gameboy Dream Land’s Kirby which “she” (un-named third-person throughout) identifies with so much it’s like witnessing God. Observing “a fashionable woman with buffalo style trainers on, no socks” (obscurely significant) coming home from dinner with friend, “she” sets the .jpeg as wallpaper and screensaver and feels acutely recognised as helpless adult in company of the “I’m baby” imago. Revelling in Kirby “doctrine”, “she” sleeps whenever she likes, gets drunk lots, melancholically scrolls “garish nail art, mac and cheese and Doritos” on her smart-phone, relies on the care of loving allies. There’s an involute agency to it however: “Kirby’s principal method of battle was the absorption of an enemy’s powers – Kirby would become engorged, like a puffa fish, by their acts of violence, only to vomit the violence, unchanged, back out at them again”. It is all so b a r e. Soon “she” glimpses a screenshot ~ “I’m no longer baby I want power” ~ on Twitter (not X) causing another algorithym-induced relevation; realising she’s been in “Power Saver Mode” after exhausting stints of activism, “she” is back. In “Part 2” there are temporal hops and Roisin Dunnett says lots in un peu expanse (similar themes to Anaïs Nin’s ‘The Mouse’, an apple consumed from a pocket, a new Kirby birthed). I asked Google Is roisin an Irish name and that scary AI Overview feature told me Yes, Róisin is an Irish girl’s name that means little rose. The Rose Garden (2024), Maeve Brennan’s short stories smashed together by Stinging Fly Press came out on Tuesday!
‘Moonbeam Kisses’ by Leonora Brito (from Dat’s Love and Other Stories, first published by Seren in 1995 and republished by Parthian in 2017)
Leonora Brito’s not yet on A Personal Anthology! But she is a major short story writer from Cardiff! Like Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) which I read during English A Level L i t e r a t u r e & L o v e classes (applause to legend M. Grainne O’Riordan) Dat’s Love (1995) is named after a song – ‘Dat’s Love’ – not from Ludwig van Beethoven but 20th Century Studios ffilm Carmen Jones (1954) starring Dorothy Dandridge. In a sequence of meditations on the Welsh capital’s Tiger Bay and Docks areas where she grew up, Leonora Brito provides a black feminist-y insight into migrant working-class culture there. In ‘Moonbeam Kisses’ specifically (further citing Nat King Cole’s pleasant chanson) a nine-year-old girl arrives at a nunnery / orphanage the day after the Pope dies, encountering “fat white roses” over stone-lettering entrance and a bat-like nun who asks “‘What is it they call you? What?’”. Harsh. Behind the hostile nun is a statue of Madonna stepping on a snake (I think of Rosa-Johan Uddoh’s taxonomical ‘Black Mary’ in Practice Makes Perfect (2022) a Book Works production). Roses are a complex love symbol, and the nine-year-old girl destroys the nuns’ garden full of them that she had previously served as vinyl-player-slave for, and thus must leave. When Leonora Brito studied Cultural Studies at Cardiff University in the 1980s she wrote an essay on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) what does she opine.
‘He Cleans’ by Valeria Gordeev translated by Imogen Taylor (first at GRANTA online here in 2023, included in forthcoming novel with S. Fischer 2025)
Writing my A Personal Anthology I did actually scour GRANTA to see what was in there at the moment, which I probs don’t pay enough religious attention to normally. A short story I came upon of special interest was ‘He Cleans’ by Valeria Gordeev translated by Imogen Taylor. Yes, it is an extract from a future novel, but as ‘He Cleans’ has won awards in its own right I thought hey it’s okay to include here? ‘He Cleans’ is about a man who cleans obsessively. Once upon a time I developed terrible Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, suffering warped notions re how to secure sanity part-manifesting as an isolating drive to control bacterial surroundings. Thank GOD this is no longer so it’s such a distressing neurosis I admire those who write about it (swear there was a Shakespeare & Co. podcast with poet on OCD but can’t find it here’s something else!). ‘He Cleans’ begins with the two-word sentence “He cleans”, and continues “Cleans the sink, cleans the plughole, takes out the sink strainer and cleans the underside”. This minutiae activity description extends for some duration. It’s about prevention of harm, seeking safety amid problematic chaos that becomes perceptually multiplied (“the place is crawling with spiders and grease and dust”), which can be difficult to emphathise and be patient with ~ a reaction, for example, is “you exaggerate, she says, ты преувеличиваешь”. There’s talk of cleaning ears ~ the man doesn’t like earbuds which he thinks look like swastikas: “Nazis out!”. The prose’s suitably monotonous, with few paragraph breaks and a claustrophobic ambience. Can a whole novel go on this relentlessly? Intrigued.
‘Keep Your Miracles To Yourself’ by Zoe Gilbert and Jarred McGinnis (second of eight stories in DUETS, Scratch Books 2024)
Zoe Gilbert’s and Jarred McGinnis’s ‘Keep Your Miracles To Yourself’ is bizarrely serene I think that’s why I like it, a quietly endearing love story. Scratch Books, run by loveli Tom Conaghan, recently published eight short stories each by two authors ~ Duets (2024). ‘Keep Your Miracles To Yourself’ (no. 2) opens “I leaned over the railing, looking into the green glass of the canal’s water. A mobility scooter and a traffic cone […] lay at the bottom like Pompeii lovers. Beautiful and gross in the way only cities manage honestly”. Hook. Ex-alcoholic narrator Martin nervously anticipates telling wife Jo he’s been fired, especially cos they’ve just had a little bébé (born by emergency caesarean into a “grey island”). He takes a walk. Cue gorish-dead pigeon “Event” then maddo happenings. An agent from firm “Auricle” with nails “black in a style called Stiletto” and “earrings like small chandeliers, which plinked and tinkled” (I wish it said “plinked and tinked”) and a perverse aspiration to eat lead from a special “gold propeller-pencil” forcibly installs a singing mouth into “Chosen One” Martin’s belly, visible thru glass portal abit like Teletubbies. Martin returns after the belly-installation to Jo and “rubbed her back and told her it’s alright; we’ll be alright”. Martin’s belly performs at the South Bank Centre’s Festival Hall (a disaster) and the resulting celebrity means Martin gets his job back and he and Jo live happily ever after, reading bébé to sleep. Triumphant. In the margins I’d scrawled Sophie Ellis-Bexter’s ‘Groove Jet’ (2000) had been playing whilst I was reading it ~ apt !
‘Fingal’ by Samuel Beckett (from More Pricks Than Kicks first published by Chatto & Windus 1934, various editions thereafter)
Recently I was at the Samuel Beckett Centre trying to work out whether Samuel Beckett had anything to do with psychogeography in 1950s Rive Gauche Paris. I really like ‘Fingal’ from his earliest throng of short stories More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) (my copy is Grove Press fyi). It’s less formally radical than later collections like Fizzles (1976), but radical nonetheless. All of More Pricks Than Kicks focuses on “Belacqua”, a young fellow named after minor lazy-but-rewarded character woo in Dante’s Divina Comedia (1321). After an initial tale detailing Belacqua’s precisest requirements for constructing a perfect lobster-and-gorgonzola-sandwich, ‘Fingal’ pictures he with “Winnie” who’s “pretty, hot and witty, in that order” (can you believe Samuel Beckett was saying “hot” in this way in the 1930s?!) going outside Dublin on a countryside adventure. Past ruins, burrows, furze, brambles, and slopes to the top of a hill overlooking the county of Fingal, Belacqua feels like a “sad animal” but apparently Winnie’s high-spirited: “‘The Dublin mountains’ she said ‘don’t they look lovely, so dreamy’”. Aah. They talk about “Milan (to rime with villain)” ha ha while they’re up there, “travelled spinster” Belacqua shaming Winnie for her geographical short-comings. “Things were beginning to blow up nasty” between them but then Belacqua and Winnie kiss and “their moods were in accordance” and “things were somehow very pleasant all of a sudden” as they gaze on Portraine Lunatic Aslyum (which Belacqua had thought was a bread factory). They go there and meet Dr. Sholto, with whom Winnie is somehow acquainted, for a drink and chat avoiding a farmer Belacqua worries wants to attack them, then a bike is stolen and then there’s an escape to a pub. It is an Evocative Romp.
‘Tuscan Leather’ by Laura Grace Ford (included in The White Review No. 30 2021 also available at The White Review online here)
How regrettable it is that magazines stop ~ Rest-In-Sweet-Peace The White Review! ‘Tuscan Leather’ by Laura Grace Ford is signature-ly bleak. I listened to Ayşegül Savaş on the difficulty of writing fiction that’s happy-without-smug the other day and was heartened it might be possibe; but Laura Grace Ford’s work is often unhappy and * so * far from smug and this too is welcome. “KARA” and “FRANK” make up ‘Tuscan Leather’ as connected narratives. In “KARA”, Kara copes with an abusive boyfriend situation drifting “skittish” East London “the air is cinder toffee and carbon” amid “thirty-story ravines and ziggurat hotels, new expressways and conference centres” and “UK Garage, decelerated Jungle”. Laura Grace Ford is Princess of Ambience I think and also really good at doing getting ready: “I rubbed a circle in the mirror, raced through the ritual: orange lipstick, copper eyeshadow, black kohl”. ‘Tuscan Leather’ is meandery, spatially (weaving evictions demolitions new-builds) and temporally (bad memories everywhere kindled by “chanced-upon street” or “the scent of Tuscan Leather on a stranger’s skin”). Endurance glimmers with sum1 named “Idris”: “our relationship kept us going through the winter, it staved off the dark”. <3. We learn Frank’s someone Kara, who wears a Puffa jacket, once was a care-worker for. Sumptuous writing, melodic through dank dereliction. Sparklers and the frankinsence. Frank, after Kara’s wondered if he’s okay wherever he is, in “FRANK” then reveries Kara gorgeously. Laura Grace Ford’s illustrations are there too – paintings, biro-drawings, watery blue ink. She really gets it <3.
Amy Grandvoinet studied History at UCL then after a fugitive time Literary Studies at Aberystwyth, and her PhD-in-progress is on literary psychogeographies. Plîs find her modest opus at linktr.ee/amy_k_grandvoinet or amygrandvoi.net!
* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 3,000 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com.
* A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs, author of two novels, Randall, and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He teaches on the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.
* And if you are interested in contributing your own Personal Anthology to the project, then please let me know by replying to this email. I’m always on the lookout for guest editors!
* Finally, if you enjoy this Substack you might enjoy Creative Digest, a collaborative Substack produced by the Creative Writing team at City, and to which I contribute. Read and subscribe here.