A Personal Anthology, by Claire Carroll

I wrote a collection of stories, The Unreliable Nature Writer, which is about love, the climate crisis and the weirdness that lurks at the intersection of nature, technology and desire. Here are some of the short stories that inspired it…

‘Escape from Spiderhead’ by George Saunders (First published in The New Yorker, December 2010. Collected in Tenth of December, Random House, 2013. You can access it here) 

If you get to the end of this selection, you’ll notice that the many of the following pieces all coalesce around a subtheme, which is that they are fave stories from fave collections. The former were very hard to extract from the latter, so I wanted to mention each story as a choice in and of itself but also a synecdoche for the collections that they are contained within. ‘Escape From Spiderhead’ is a seminal piece from a seminal collection (please ignore the offensively underwhelming Netflix movie adaptation from 2022). The story is set in a luxurious high security drug testing facility, with characters that are infused with different drugs which influence their emotional states and behaviour. The story is unctuously satisfying in its playfulness with language. The real-time internal monologues of the main character, Jeff, that track his emotional modulation, are somehow at once tender and deeply unsettling. The merging of the familiar yet contrasting languages of bureaucratic big-tech and awkward interpersonal intimacy is both hilarious and very sad, but it’s the ending of the story, where this clipped, emotional sterility breaks out into descriptions of the garden surrounding the Spiderhead compound, that does it for me.

 ‘Library’ by Ali Smith (Collected in Public Library and Other Stories, Penguin 2015)

A collection’s order is like its connective tissue. As a writer compiling one, you can choose whether your stories coalesce thematically, visually, formally or otherwise. Ali Smith’s Public Library departs from the form of a short story collection altogether in an episodic auto-fictional piece that runs through the book. This series, of which ‘Library’ is first, circles around real life moments and conversations that the writer has had relating to public libraries. This vignette sees Smith and her editor walk into a private members club in a building that may once have been a library. The story ends quickly, with many questions hanging in the air, but the piece alludes to the notions of municipal space - especially the public-private dichotomy - which is a recurring theme throughout the collection. I have always admired the tightrope walk between fiction and non-fiction in Smith’s work, but the idea of an episodic piece that draws everything back to a central line to be something I needed to incorporate my own practice. 

‘Orientation’ by Ben Pester (Collected in Am I in the Right Place? Boiler House Press, 2020. Also in Granta, here)

Pester is one of contemporary literature’s great surrealists. His work pokes holes in our understanding of reality, challenging us to explore the darkness of the human psyche via the interminably banal. It’s also really funny. ‘Orientation’ is the first story in Am I in the Right Place?, another jealous rage / throw-at-wall collection from Boiler House circa the pandemic and uses office jargon, powerpoint formatting to tell a story in which a character (you) is being given an induction on their first day at a new job. Pester uses the second person throughout, conjuring an air of acute claustrophobia between the reader (for it is we who are being oriented) and Graham, an entirely ordinary yet deeply unsettling colleague who is in charge of your onboarding. In typical Pester fashion, things escalate to a hysterical fever pitch taking a spatially and temporally away from the office, back in time into a memory, before Graham waves us vaguely away. 

‘Boca Ratan’ by Lauren Groff (Collected in Warmer Collection, Amazon Original, 2018)

Climate anxiety is a very real phenomenon, and this was the first time I had seen it actualises in a contemporary short story. Unlike the imagined future landscapes conjured by Nazdam and Jamieson, Groff holds us in an alarming present. Much of her short fiction focuses on her adopted home of Florida, and in this case the very real threat to the state of rising sea-levels. We meet a narrator who is plagued with anxiety about the impending environmental crisis, coming to terms with her grief at the realisation that she is powerless to stop it. 

‘Bulk’ by Eley Williams (Collected in Attrib., Influx Books, 2018)

This story has been anthologised many times, but still I could not leave it out. The whale as a huge, hefty metaphor for the interplay of humanity with nature and the planet is wielded expertly by Williams in this story. I recommend reading it alongside ‘Fathoms: The World In the Whale’ by Rebecca Giggs, which serves as an elegy for dead whales in general. ‘Bulk’ pays attention to animal otherness in a way which I found to be at once frightening and tender; a soft haze of grief sits over the whole story. Williams is, undoubtedly, a master of linguistic agility, but she also does emotional resonance with unparalleled proficiency. 

‘Eleven Sons’ by Franz Kafka (written between 1914 and 1917. In 1919, it appeared in Ein Landarzt. Kleine Erzählungen (A Country Doctor)) 

I am, regrettably, a Kafka fan. I know what this says about me, but I can’t help it. I am a particular fan of his extremely slight, barely there at all stories, which function as oddly-shaped parables. One of these is Eleven Sons, which Kafka wrote as a means of expressing frustration with a pile of unfinished stories. The ‘sons’ are the pieces of writing he is grappling with, and the form of the story follows a description of each in turn. There is a freshness to this format, in lots of ways it's deeply antithetical to what is apparently necessary for narrative prose fiction: the story has no plot, no setting, it relies entirely on the narrator's reporting of these characters, who are not even really characters at all, but metaphors. The boldness of Kafka’s minimalism here is addictive; I wanted to see how far I could push the envelope in the same direction.

‘Biophile’ by Ruby Cowling (First published in The White Review, April 2014. Collected in This Paradise, Boiler House Press, 2020. You can read it here.)

When I first read Ruby Cowling’s collection ‘This Paradise’, I almost threw the book across the room in a jealous rage. This beautiful, erudite and formally inventive book is weird and lush, tender and dark. I return to it again and again. Biophile is about an emotionally avoidant and sexually frustrated videogame designer called Danni who likes to bury herself in the ground. This is my favourite sort of character to write; complex, deeply sad, but irreverent and defiant nonetheless. I try to bring something of Danni into the women in my collection. 

‘Roy Spivey’ by Miranda July (First published in The New Yorker, June 2007. Read it here) 

Roy Spivey is not his real name, because the narrator has obscured it by rearranging the letters. She has done this because Roy is a married Hollywood actor, and she wants to protect his identity. The story follows the narrator and Roy on a plane journey, during which they have a brief but intense romantic encounter. The piece is hypnagogic and sexy; a half-daydream that we’ve all had about [insert actors name here] while dozing off on a plane. July leaves a hole where a man should be in this story, thus inviting the reader to fill it with whatever their own fantasy might be. In that sense, and in the sense that this is a story about unadulterated (if short lived) pleasure is what makes it one of the most transgressively generous short stories I’ve ever come across.

‘Good Solid Obliterating Fuck’ by Anna Wood (Collected in Yes Yes More More, Indigo Press, 2021)

Following from July’s imagined encounter with celebrity, Wood’s narrator here meets a handsome man, who might be Marcel Proust, on a train. The story is told through their conversation, a technique I love to both read and write. The sleepiness of their dialogue precipitates an indulgent, intimate tension. They talk about love and  sex tenderly, humorously, but don’t ever touch. It’s an extremely sensual piece of writing, in which the narrator appears to check in with us about how delightful the moment is: “I didn’t know then and I haven’t learned since,” she says, “what to do with something unexpected and precious.” Pleasurable tension is elusive but addictive, Wood, like July, masters it perfectly here. 

‘Future Perfect / Nothing Arizona’ by Rosie Šnadjr (Collected in The Hypocritical Reader, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018)

Anarchic, chaotic and vulnerable, this collection is one that I turn to again and again, whenever I need reminding of the infinite possibilities of prose fiction. In this story, a protagonist with the same name as the author spins us through space and time, the prose is dense, unctuous and lush (“The round moon highlights exalted phrases and, above, the fronds of a buckled coconut tree hush.”) but the delivery is exhilaratingly uncontrolled at times and the story is all the better for it. 

‘Flyfishing’ by Bonnie Nazdam and Dale Jamieson (Collected in Love in the Anthropocene, OR Books, 2015. An excerpt available here.) 

Nazdam and Jamieson, a fiction writer and philosopher, collaborated in 2015 to consider how to write about love and life in the late anthropocene. Flyfishing is a story of a father and daughter on a fishing trip in an homogenised mountain region where technology has either replaced or enhanced the wildlife and surroundings. The story is set at an unspecified time in the future, and plays with the idea of wilderness-as-leisure facility. Under the surface throughout is this idea of the shifting baseline; the notion that one generations’ norms will differ greatly from the next, and how this impacts on the natural world. 

‘Logarithm’ by Irenosen Okojie (Collected in Nudibranch, Dialogue Books, 2019)

Pushing the boundaries to breaking point is one of the many things I greatly admire in Okojie’s writing. She writes like no one else; distorting genres and defying convention in a way which is intimidatingly courageous. A story’s place within a collection is a vital element of consideration when writing. What comes first and last is important.  ‘Logarithm’ opens this wildly original collection, and consists of a brutally short stream of sentences, each of which present an object. There is a gothic attention to the domestic and the bodily in these sentences that almost all begin with ‘Here is…’. This repetition becomes like a mantra, that almost disappears into nothing as the story reaches a crescendo and then breaks its own pattern with a chilling question: ‘But where is the baby’. Everything is just out of reach in this piece; it’s deeply unsettling, and put me (deliciously, thrillingly) on the back foot as I pushed through into the collection. 

Claire Carroll lives in Somerset, UK, and writes experimental fiction about the intersection of nature, technology, and desire. She is a PhD researcher at Bath Spa and Exeter Universities, where she explores how experimental short fiction writing can reimagine how humans relate to the natural and non-human world. Her short stories and poetry have been published by journals including The London Magazine, Gutter, 3:AM, Lunate, perverse, The Oxonian Review and Short Fiction Journal. In 2021, her short story 'My Brain is Boiling with Ideas' was shortlisted for The White Review’s Short Story Prize, and her short story 'Cephalopod' was the recipient of the Essex University & Short Fiction Journal Wild Writing Prize. Both pieces are taken from The Unreliable Nature Writer (published on 6th June by Scratch Books), a collection of linked short stories that examines the interconnection of climate anxiety, surviving late capitalism and dealing with personal loss.

* 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. My latest post explores why, though I love Alice Munro’s stories, I won’t be putting any of them on my university reading lists. Read and subscribe here.