A Personal Anthology, by Benjamin George Coles
OK, so this is just 12 stories that I am, at this point in my life, particularly enamoured of. No theme, beyond that or those of my enamourment.
‘Rentafoil’ by Émile Zola, translated by Douglas Parmée (First published in French, with the title ‘Les Repoussoirs’, in Zola’s collection Esquisses parisiennes in 1866. Douglas Parmée’s English translation first appeared in 1984 in his Zola collection The Attack on the Mill and Other Stories. The original French text is available on Wikisource)
I'm so perplexed by this story's comparative obscurity that I'm half-inclined to propose cultural-psychological conspiracy theories to explain it. Like, is there something in this story that people just desperately don't want to think about? If there is, that's perhaps part of why it feels so fantastically fresh and inventive, even 160 odd years after it was written.
I'll give you the premise, as it was hearing of this story's premise (in, if I remember rightly, Edward Said's Reith Lectures) that propelled me to seek it out. A business entrepreneur in Paris establishes an agency from which women can hire other women who are less attractive than they are to keep them company and so make them appear, in the eyes of men they encounter, more attractive themselves.
What follows is a delightful skewering of the 'stupidity' of the male gaze, the beauty industry, capitalist enterprise, Great Man-based media coverage... but it's more than that... It's of course utterly tragic. And it gets at something unbearable, the fundamental inaneness of frequently determining factors in even matters so great as love.
‘The Postmaster’ by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by Utsa Bose (First published in Bengali in 1891. Utsa Bose’s English translation was first published in Asymptote Journal in 2020 and is available to read here)
For many years, literally all I knew of Tagore were those beautiful lines of poetry, “Those who speak to me do not know that my heart is full with your unspoken words / Those who crowd in my path do not know that I am walking alone with you”. Then I spent a while in Bangladesh, and I got the sense that Tagore means something to people there in a way I’m not sure any writer does to people in the UK or Western Europe. Also while there, I heard and really liked some of his songs. ‘Phagun Haway Haway’ jumps to mind (the Arnob version).
So when I at last got round, about a year and a half ago, to reading a story of Tagore’s, I had high expectations. Nevertheless, I was completely blown away by it.
I don’t want to reveal anything about the plot. I’ll just say this story somehow has a strong connection for me with a sculpture in this little garden right in the centre of Regent’s Park, where, in a previous life, I would sometimes go for my lunch breaks; this sculpture was of, as I remember it, a small girl standing defensively over a lamb; it had an inscription, announcing that the garden was dedicated to the protectors of the vulnerable. The story also makes me think of two other short or shortish stories I really love, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s ‘The Little Prince’ and Andrey Platonov’s ‘The Return’.
I’ve read a few more Tagore stories since, all good, none this good. By the way, did you know Freaky Friday is essentially a Tagore story? Called ‘Wishes Granted’. Crazy times.
‘The Town Manager’ by Thomas Ligotti (First published in Weird Tales magazine in 2003, and then collected in Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco in 2006)
I’m a little obsessed by this story right now. And I think there are several reasons for that. First, it gives me a thrill similar in nature and, more remarkably, extremity to that I felt during my first encounters, in my late teens, with Borges, Kafka, Beckett, Marquez, Calvino, Ionesco… these writers who blew my mind – it really doesn’t seem an exaggerative expression here – with their stories so far off the tracks of anything I’d thought up to then. Other stories have had that kind of effect on me since, but rarely to such an extent.
Then also, I feel that in every little twist of this story’s plot there is great political acuity. I feel that, in its poetic, dream-like way, it captures so well elements of how the political dimension of our lives really feels and even is at this point in history.
Finally, the figure of Ligotti causes me to do a bit of a double take… This is a man who has written, as well as these wonderfully intense philosophical horror stories, a non-fiction book exploring and basically advocating strong pessimist, nihilist and antinatalist views, and containing the claim that “the world is a malignantly useless potato-mashing network”*. Part of me wonders if he’s for real. Part of me feels very sorry for him. Part of me wonders if he’s essentially entirely right. I’d so love to talk to him. Also I’d so love to take part in a multidisciplinary symposium where we’d consider side-by-side – and with a focus on any overlapping or corresponding themes and subjects and ideas we could find – the stories of Ligotti and of, say, Wodehouse.
*Yes, it makes more sense in context, but still!
‘The story of the married couple’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver (So far as I can gather from cursory research: First published, in Italian, in 1958 in the third section of Calvino’s collection I racconti. That third section, titled ‘Gli amori difficili’, was then expanded into a collection of the same name, published in 1970. William Weaver’s English translation of the latter collection then came out in 1983, with a couple of other added stories – and this was the first of at least two translated collections of Calvino stories, somewhat different in content, with the English title Difficult Loves. I have the Vintage edition of that first translated collection)
Some time ago now, before I’d realised how much this story means to me, I was at my cousin’s wedding reception, and the guest book was being handed round the tables and suddenly it was in front of me and I was at a loss as to what to write, and then I found myself just writing ‘Calvino’ and the title of this story.
I love love stories, but I feel they’re just about the hardest type of stories to do a good job of. If they indeed are, I think that one reason for that – and probably there are several – is that, as Jean Valjean and co sing, “to love another person is to see the face of God”, and capturing the face of God is no easy task – let alone two of the damn things. I think more elemental approaches get round that difficulty to some extent, and this story is a model in that respect.
‘Friend of My Youth’ by Alice Munro (First published in The New Yorker in 1990, and collected in the book of the same name that same year. It’s available to New Yorker subscribers, and non-subscribers who haven’t used up their monthly free quota, on their website. Also collected in Selected Stories, McLelland and Stewart, 1996 and Alice Munro's Best: Selected Stories, Everyman, 2008)
How virtue slips into the weaponisation of virtue, how storytelling slips into the weaponisation of storytelling. It's one I'd do well to pay a lot of attention to, I feel. It's also just a great story, quite unusually and yet, I think, very naturally framed.
Makes me think of another one I've long loved, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s ‘In a Bamboo Grove’.
‘Town of Cats’ by Sakutarō Hagiwara, translated by Jeffrey Angles (First published in Japanese in 1935 in, according to the Internet Speculative Fiction database, the magazine「セルバン」("Seruban"). Jeffrey Angles’ English translation first appeared in Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938, edited by William J. Tyler. This translation has since also featured in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories and The Big Book of Classic Fantasy: The Ultimate Collection, both edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer)
I might say that there’s a neat little idea or observation here, eloquently and yet conversationally related. But then that neat little idea or observation easily starts to seem to me close to all-important, or at least it’s extremely resonant for me.
Meaning to expand on what I’ve just said, I started writing a list of to-my-mind fascinating questions and arguments that I’ve encountered over the years, all of which came to mind upon re-reading this story in preparation for possibly including it here. The list was fast becoming a treatise, so I deleted it. But you get the point. This story functions for me like a perfect little gateway to a series of connected topics that I’ve never properly thought about but am now, what with the steady build-up of related material at the back of my mind, absolutely primed to think about. I imagine this is a common kind of appeal that stories have for people.
Quite apart from all that, this story has a special charm for me, as I’m sure it does for others, as a kind of urtext of the great Japanese cat obsession, with the plot here blending seamlessly into classic Ghibli and Murakami territory, for instance.
‘The Happy Prince’ by Oscar Wilde (First collected in The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888. Available on Wikisource)
I always worry, when I re-read this story every few years, that I will have outgrown it, but so far its effect on me has only become more textured and stronger overall. It is – unambiguously, I suppose – a children’s story; Wilde wrote it for his son Cyril, and these days I really hear and am moved by the fatherly tones and concerns in it. Wilde was probably my first proper literary love, and at some point the story also became more poignant and fascinating for me because of a growing awareness I had of how deeply and kind of presciently it relates to developments in his own life. He memorably refers back to it in De Profundis, just after this award-winning motion picture of a paragraph:
“I remember when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen’s narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall:—all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at all.”
But my love of this story predates my love of Wilde, and goes back to the very beginnings of my love of reading. I don’t remember the details of how the story first struck me, only that it struck me with great force, great emotional force. A scene from a bit later in the timeline of my relationship with the story comes to mind. Towards the end of secondary school, I read it out to my Philosophy class. We were considering the question ‘What is art?’ and the teacher had invited any of us who wanted to to present an exhibit to the class. I didn’t read it very well – I stumbled on a few words, and even made, so as to pre-empt sniggers, an awkward spur-of-the-moment substitution of a perhaps unfortunately dated expression. I didn’t bring out the different voices especially either. But when I looked up at the end, there were tears running down the teacher’s face.
‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ by Raymond Carver (First published, in an earlier form, in Quarterly West in 1978, and then, in the form I’m familiar with, in The Paris Review in 1981. First collected the same year in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and then in Where I’m Calling From, Atlanticm 1988/Harvill, 1993. The story’s available to Paris Review subscribers on their website)
What Carver does here puts me in mind of one of those popularly imagined martial artists who, through the subtlest positioning and alteration of balance, dispatches his charging opponent. By that I suppose I mean I'm very struck by the minimalism here, the mastery of craft, the role given to the reader - also the sheer impact. It really, really gets me, this one.
‘Thank You’ by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell (First published in Spanish in Mis documentos in 2013. Also in 2013, Megan McDowell’s English translation of the story was first published on vice.com. Her translation of the whole collection – My Documents, in English – then came out in 2015. The story was available on vice.com until recently, and seems like it’s meant to be still, only there’s a problem with the webpage. Happily, it’s also available on The Short Story Project website)
I find I don’t want to tell you anything at all about this one – just encourage you to go on the journey.
I can tell you that, on the strength of this story, I went and read the whole of My Documents – the collection it comes from – and, although no other story in the collection affected me quite like this one, I thought the whole thing was great, and two other stories from it I particularly like are ‘Camilo’ and ‘Family Life’.
‘On the Darkness of the Evil One and “the Other Life We Can Build Out of This One”’ by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Bela Shayevich (First published in Russian as part of the book Время секонд хэнд in 2013. Bela Shayecivh’s English translation of that book, with the title Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, then appeared in 2016)
This one would not typically be referred to as 'a short story' – though it is a story, an incredible one at that, and it is short, at least in this telling.
Attributing it simply to Alexievich is also questionable. The most important co-authors are Irina Vasilyeva, Yelena Razduyeva, and two men identified simply as Yuri and Volodya/Vladimir. These people are also the story's main characters.
It's a story that appears, self-contained, towards the end of one of the most extraordinary books I've ever read, Alexievich's Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Alexievich, for those who don't know, is an oral historian or literary documentarian, who, in each of her books, collects and curates a large number of testimonies from diverse people involved in a particular historical episode or phenomenon, enabling her to represent it with unusual depth, nuance and humanity. In this book, her theme is nothing less than the disintegration of Soviet civilisation and the emergence of its replacement, whatever that is.
The particular story I’m highlighting is about a woman, Lena, who leaves her beloved husband and three children to dedicate herself to a convicted murderer, serving a life sentence in a remote prison, who she, on the basis of only a photograph and the handwriting of a short, fairly nondescript letter, believes featured in a dream she had many, many years ago, telling her she would be his bride before God. We get Lena’s perspective, her abandoned husband’s perspective, the perspective of the convicted murderer, the perspective of a woman who previously made a documentary about these people and their situation and somehow cannot let them go now, and the perspectives of many fellow villagers and prison inmates who’ve known the main characters for years. It’s incredible! And of course made more so by the parallel – or even the deep connection – between Lena’s commitment to her vision, and that which the Soviet people, or many of them at least, had to theirs.
It's hard to imagine a short story, in the usual sense of that term, achieving anything close to what this one does. I need to soon try and discover other great literary documentarians, other approaches to and innovations in that form.
I have myself heard spontaneously told, never-written-down stories that, to my mind, stand with the best literary ones I’ve encountered. I would think and hope we all have, even if we don’t normally think like that. I know I don’t. We’re perhaps a little too in awe of the institutional frame. I’m a huge fan of Living Libraries / Human Libraries, and of, you know, getting to know people.
‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #20’ by David Foster Wallace (First published, under the slightly different title ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6’, in The Paris Review in 1997. Then collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in 1999. Available to Paris Review subscribers on their website. There’s also, on YouTube, a great recording of Wallace reading the story, and it’s been there long enough for me to hope that it’s there legally)
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is probably my favourite short story collection, and this is my favourite story in it.
I love how it reaches out across the chasm, of course grown yet wider since its publication, between political left and right (is it just my ignorance, or is it hard to find stories that do that?), I love how it clocks a typical contemptuous, shallow perception of a person and then blasts through that perception to something beautiful, I love how it finds profound truth in even a thoroughly bogus ideological package, I love its tussle between real monstrosity and real redemption and its consideration of everyday forms that both can take. I also find it funny, moving, shocking. A proper epic of the short story form, I’d say.
I should add that, as I express my love of Wallace, I’m mindful of two kinds of claim being made about him by others. One is that he was, in many ways and many situations, a cruel and misogynistic person. The other is that that cruelty and misogyny pervade his writing too. Having read most of Wallace’s work, I find that second claim particularly hard to buy. If it’s true, I have a lot to learn on this. But then, yeah, maybe I do have a lot to learn on this. For now, I’ve read and heard a few cases against Wallace – none have persuaded me of the second claim, but I continue to be up for the discussion. The first claim, on the other hand… That one I find a lot more persuasive. According to one of Wallace’s editors, many of the Brief Interviews were even based on discussions Wallace had himself had, with him in the Hideous Man role. Of course self-awareness never absolved anyone of anything, as Bo Burnham precisely put it. Then again, we might consider the possibility of there being, in these stories, not just passive self-awareness but determined acts of self-scrutiny, self-castigation, moral striving, warning to others, attempted atonement even.
I’ve come across some clearly intelligent people saying David Foster Wallace’s books should simply not be read or taught. It’s difficult for me to describe how that makes me feel. There are elements in there of panic, of sadness, of confusion, of weariness, of fatalism… The fact is that this writing does a spectacularly good job of making me more critically alert to my demons and possible demons, and more eager to be kind and caring, and it gives me great joy in the process, and makes me feel more at home in this world. You want to take that away? I don’t feel the desire to exonerate Wallace. Far less to canonise him, as biographer DT Max puts it. I don’t want to cut the art work away from the artist either – I don’t think that would be wise. I do want to recognise his humanity. And encourage us all to fully recognise our own. I mean, acknowledge that we’re all capable of being both wonderful and terrible, and there might even sometimes be causative links between these two extremes in us, and we don’t just wilfully generate our evils out of nowhere, these things have histories, pathologies, roots stretching way beyond the scope of what we choose, and all of us are, to some considerable extent, tossed around on the seas of fate, there but for the grace of God, so to speak, and goodbut for the grace of God too, because not yet in the situation that would bring our demons mercilessly to the fore or show up the full extent of our moral vulnerabilities (and so perhaps for now blissfully unaware of these). Can we consider the possibility that people who do terrible things, and then live with the knowledge and consequences of what they’ve done, sometimes have important things to tell us, or even a related moral strength of feeling that most of us cannot so easily muster? I want to appreciate the wonderful things Wallace created (and feel gratitude and admiration towards him for them, yes), and look right into the darkness of what wrong he did too and be appalled and learn the lessons, and see and consider the probable vital links between this wonder and this darkness, and hold this all together, and breathe. And if that indeed sounds like a hell of a challenge, well, a) I think it’s a challenge we stand to realise we face with many great artists, or even, in a sense, with all people, including ourselves, and b) I think it’s a challenge Wallace’s stories, and maybe especially this one, can help with.
‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man: A Fantastic Story’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (First published in Russian in Dostoevsky’s A Writer's Diary journal in 1877. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s English translation first appeared in their Dostoevsky collection The Eternal Husband and Other Stories in 1997. An older, probably serviceable but, by all accounts, less good translation, by Constance Garnett, is in the public domain and available at online-literature.com)
Almost a bit of proto-sci-fi from Dostoevsky, as well as the morality tale to end all morality tales. I’m not sure I’ve ever liked the basic idea of a story more than this one – which probably says a lot about me.
As I believe short film to be an outrageously neglected art form, I’ll also flag up Aleksandr Petrov’s adaptation, which is visually stunning, as well as interesting in how it renders visual certain non-physical elements of the plot – though, all told, I miss too much of Dostoevsky’s intense, intricate thinking.
Benjamin George Coles has published short stories in The London Magazine, Every Day Fiction and Erotic Review, and essays in Film International and Bright Lights Film Journal. He won the 2022 Crème Fraîche screenwriting competition at the Luxembourg City Film Festival – as a result of which his short film A Place to Be was made. He’s based mainly in Luxembourg, where he’s done reporting for Land newspaper and Radio Ara, proofreading for the EU Publications Office and the European Court of Justice and research and political activism workshop facilitation for the non-profit Our Common Future. He’s also a member of the pan-European artist collective Antropical, and writes art criticism for their blog.
* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 2,800 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 is Programme Director of 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 and have slots available in April and May!
* 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.