A Personal Anthology, by Camilla Grudova

These are all stories that either a long time ago, or more recently, sparked something in me, and which I think of often, not only when trying to write a story of my own, but at random and with vividness like personal memories.

‘Egg Meat’ by Ivor Cutler (From the album An Elpee and Two Epees for free, Decca, 2005)

My beloved adopted country of Scotland tends to grow bad poets and ‘storytellers’ like a particularly noxious fungus. When I feel disheartened, I turn to the best Scottish storyteller of all, Ivor Cutler. This strange little story about the mysterious “egg meat” you buy from the ironmonger is heightened by Cutler’s wonderful intonations and Glaswegian accent. Ivor Cutler is a much lesser-known figure than he ought to be.

‘God in the Billiard Room’ by Barbara Comyns (First published in Lilliput Magazine, and then included in Sisters by a River, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1947, republished by Virago Press in 2013)

This is an excerpt from Barbara Comyns’ Sisters by a River, a novel whose chapters were serialised in Lilliput magazine under the title “the novel nobody will publish”. It’s gloriously plotless, highly descriptive, and with the surrealism every child experiences. In this one God appears as a sort of floating brown paper bag. It is done in a deadpan, factual way and such a wonderful little chapter and it’s taught me to be more fearless and more surreal in my fiction.

‘In the Cupboard’ by Zbigniew Herbert, translated by Czeskaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott (In The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, Ecco Press, 2007)

This, and other wonderful short short stories are included in Herbert’s Collected Poems as prose poems. It is too short to quote, but it is magical, do read it.

‘Who Will Greet you at Home’ by Lesley Nneka Arimah (First published in The New Yorker, October 2015, and available to read here; collected in What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, Riverhead/Tinder, 2017)

This beautiful story reminds me of the strange dreams I have while ovulating, the sense of something coming into being or falling apart. In the story, women must choose what material to make their children out of with whatever materials are within their means. When the protagonist Ogechi brings various babies of cotton and paper to her mother, her mother destroys them, saying they are not durable. When I first read it in my twenties, it was so exciting in its originality, and while it still is to me now, recent readings are tinged with sadness as I think of how my own desire to have children has been thwarted by my economic situation and my means.

‘Garden Magic’ by Diane Williams (First published in The Paris Review 230, Fall 2019, and available for subscribers to read here; collected in How High? – That High, Soho Press, 2022)

I am very fortunate that a couple weeks after a horrendous breakup, a friend read this story aloud to me, a reminder of how ridiculous romantic relationships often are. The object of affection is a man named Horace whose “place was tidy and a bit surprising. He showed me his sword cane and his living room features an owl that’s made of poultry feathers.”

‘The Springs of Affection’ by Maeve Brennan (First published in The New Yorker, March 1972, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Christmas Eve, Scribner, 1974; also in The Springs of Affection, Houghton Mifflin, 1997, republished by Peninsula Press, 2023)

The title story of a recent rerelease of Brennan’s work is a beautiful and sad description of one family, and the children who make fun of their illiterate, sentimental father who becomes attached to the pigs he raises for butcher. Maeve Brennan died impoverished in New York in 1993, despite having worked for the New Yorker for many years.

‘Journey of a Cage’ by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull (Written in Russian in the 1920s; First published in English in Unwitting Street, NYRB classics, 2020)

Like the dancer Nijinsky, Krzhizhanovsky was a Russified Pole, and like Nijinsky, beautiful strange and vivid. Living as he did in the Soviet Union, Krzhizhanovksky’s work wasn’t published until 1989, long after his death in 1950. ‘Journey of a Cage’ has something in common with the sad French film Balthazar, in that it tracks the tragic passing of an animal through many human hands, in this story, a grey parrot in a cage.

‘Star’ by Yukio Mishima, translated by Sam Bett (First published in Japanese in Gunzo, November 1960. First published in translation as Star, New Directions/Penguin, 2019)

Authors who committed suicide have a reputation for being gloomy and serious, but in fact it is the opposite, their writing is often the most humorously dark. This story is written from the perspective of a Japanese male celebrity actor having an affair with his older, “dowdy” assistant. It has much to say about our grotesque obsession with fame.

‘The Thing in the Forest’ by A. S. Byatt (Published in The Little Black Book of Stories, Vintage, 2004; also available as a Vintage Digital single, 2011)

A. S. Byatt is one of those rare writers equally powerful as a short story writer and a novelist, both filled with her rich knowledge of culture and history. Her work isn’t very fashionable at the moment, and I think its because we live in an especially anti-art and anti- intellectual moment. Like Angela Carter, she is one I still wish was around to reflect on things. This is a retelling of the Lambton Worm legend set during the blitz of World War Two, when city children were evacuated to the countryside.

‘The Red Shoes’ by Hans Christian Andersen (First published as De røde sko in Nye Eventyr. Første Bind. Tredie Samling, Reitzel, 1845. Variously translated, including by Tiina Nunnally in Fairy Tales, Penguin Classics, 2005)

I love Hans Christian Andersen. His stories are part of the cultural subconscious, but he isn’t often read directly. This story, which inspired a Powell and Pressburger film and a Kate Bush album, is particularly dark and terrifying – I don’t think a lot of writers read him or take him seriously because he is from a lower class background.

‘First Love’ by Samuel Beckett (First published in French in 1970, and in its English translation by the author by Calder and Boyes, 1973. Now available in First Love and Other Novellas, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000, and The Expelled / The Calmative / The End / First Love, Faber, 2009)

The British Penguin publication of this calls it a novella, because of the English aversion to short fiction, but this is one of the most perfect short stories. I feel like I am in some sort of strange green belly when reading it. “My sandwich, my banana, taste sweeter when I’m sitting on a tomb,” says the narrator. Whenever I feel like I have forgotten how to write a short story I go back to this one.

‘Sweeney Agonistes’ by T. S. Eliot (First published in the New Criterion, October 1926 and January 1927 and collected as Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama, Faber, 1932. Now available in The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I, Faber, 2015)

T. S. Eliot has taught me how to write, and more recently, also, how to be a Christian. This unfinished verse play I turn to a lot. Lines like “She’s got her feet in mustard and water,” and “I don’t like eggs; I’ve never liked eggs; and I don’t like life on your crocodile isle.”

Camilla Grudova is the author of The Doll’s Alphabet, Children of Paradise and The Coiled Serpent. In 2023 she was named as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.

* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 2,900 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!

* 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.