A Personal Anthology, by Clare Reddaway

For this list, I decided to go simple. Twelve stories that I like today. You can search for themes if you wish. For me, these are all stories that resonate. They’ve moved me, surprised me, enlightened me, stayed with me. They have made me look at the world in a different way, perhaps only for a moment, but that’s enough, surely. These stories are not obscure, some have been listed many times, but I don’t think that rules them out. This is my list, after all. Making it has reminded me, if I ever needed reminding, how brilliant, weird, varied, life affirming, how glorious the short story form is.

‘The Bloody Chamber’ by Angela Carter (From The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Gollancz, 1979. Now widely available, including as a Penguin Classic, 2015)

I’m starting with Angela Carter. I read Carter in a great big glorious gobble when I was young. I loved her stories and her novels, and they stayed inside me. Then, I didn’t exactly forget about her, but I did shelve her.

Last year I went to see Emma Rice’s Bluebeard. It was theatrical and flamboyant and of course borrowed heavily from Carter. There was a contemporary strand to the show which split the audience. Lots hated it, thought it was unnecessary, I loved it. It gave me a gut punch like the domestic violence it so viscerally portrayed. After the show I went back to Angela Carter’s collection and re-read the stories. I’d forgotten the lush language, the sensual, erotic charge, the luxurious words and images, the sheer originality. I’d also forgotten the violence, and the danger.

The power of this story is the language, but it is also the tension, the way that Carter creates edge-of-the-seat fear. And then gives the power back to the women. Fantastic. Oh, and Angela Carter lived in Bath for a while, just down the hill from where I now live. She called Bath ‘the town of dreams’. I like her for that.

‘The Husband Stitch’ by Carmen Maria Machado (First published in Granta, 2014, and available to read here online. Then collected in Her Body and Other Parties, Graywolf/ Serpent’s Tail, 2017)

I’ve come late to the Carmen Maria Machado party, having only started to read her work in the last couple of years. I love her memoir In the Dream House, which I played as an audio book on a long car journey. Machado read it herself and the story was mesmerising, so now I know her voice and I think of her as my friend. Which of course she’s not. I could have chosen any of the stories from Her Body and Other Parties, but I opted for ‘The Husband Stitch’ because of its form and its power. Machado speaks directly to us as readers, which is so compelling, as she weaves the story of desire and horror, of a green ribbon around a woman’s neck and the desperation of a husband to see what is underneath. This is a deeply unsettling, multi-layered story, it touches so many aspects of female experience whilst using an old campfire tale as a loose structure. It feels very true. It’s an incredible piece of writing.

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (First published in 1892 in the New England Magazine. It has been widely anthologised and republished, including in The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings, Virago, 2009. It is available to read online here)

How could I not have ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ on the list. It is an important story, graphically illustrating the inhumane treatment of the mental health of women at the end of the 19th century. This is another piece where the way it’s told is essential. A masterclass in storytelling, this unreliable narrator has woven her tragic ‘rest cure’ into our hearts. The image of a woman trapped behind the pattern in the wallpaper is so strong and chilling, as the narrator herself gradually inhabits that woman. I can’t get her out of my head, creeping, creeping around the room, scraping at the walls with her broken fingernails, gouging at the paper, tearing it off in strips.

“I’ve got out at last … and you can’t put me back. Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”

The ‘rest cure’ that is forced on the narrator, forbidding her to work, is an echo of Gilman’s own doctor who treated the author’s nervous exhaustion by advising her to lead as domestic a life as possible, and “never touch pen, brush or pencil for as long as she should live.” It’s enough to make a writer’s blood boil.

‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid (First published in The New Yorker, 26 June 1978 issue, and available to read here; collected At the Bottom of the River, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983, and now Picador, 2022)

I love Jamaica Kincaid’s work, and I particularly love this story. It is a To Do list from mother to daughter, and in one long sentence Kincaid sums up all of the concerns of a girl moving from adolescence to womanhood. The tone is hectoring and loving at the same time (although mainly hectoring, to be fair). The story is a mix of instructions and warnings. The mother is bossy and exacting, both domestically:

“Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk bare-head in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil;”

And about relationships:

“…this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man, and if this doesn’t work there are other ways, and if they don’t work don’t feel too bad about giving up;”

But the story is also funny and joyous:

“…this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn’t fall on you;”

Kincaid manages to convey the whole of life on one page, in 650 words, a miracle of compression, voice and character. She also gives us a cracking final line.

I was thrilled to be able to go and hear Kincaid speak a couple of years ago, on one of her rare visits to the UK. She talked about her garden, her writing and her life and I have rarely felt as enriched as I did at the end of her session. Suffice it to say I’m a bit of a super-fan.

‘The Distance of The Moon’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver (First published in Calvino’s collection Cosmicomics in Italian in 1965 and in English in 1968. It is now available as a Penguin Modern Classic)

Sometimes there is a story that takes my breath away at the sheer delight of the writer’s imagination. This Calvino story is such a one. It is story about the Moon, with a love triangle providing the narrative. Calvino takes an old scientific theory that there was a time when the Moon was very close to the Earth and suggests it was so close you could row out to the celestial body and climb up to it on a ladder. Calvino is wonderfully exact about the mechanics of clambering onto the Moon’s surface, which the narrator says is scaly and smells faintly of fish.

“The only odd thing was that when you raised your eyes you saw the sea above you, glistening, with the boat and the others upside down, hanging like a bunch of grapes from the vine.”

Great use of ‘only’ there. This story is like a Chagall painting, charming, strange, surreal, particularly when Captain Vhd’s wife, with her long silvery arms, is stranded on the moon playing slow arpeggios on her harp. Joyous.

‘Tower Of Babylon’ by Ted Chiang (First published in 1990 by Omni. It was collected in Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others, Orb Books, 2002)

Ted Chiang’s stories are extraordinary. I first read them when doing a deep dive into speculative short fiction to teach a class, and was blown away. Chiang doesn’t publish often, but when he does he scoops up just about every award going. He uses science fiction to grapple with some of the universal questions of the age, and while sometimes I find his stories research-heavy (I felt I needed a linguistics degree to grasp ‘Story Of Your Life’), they are always original and thought-provoking. I chose ‘Tower of Babylon’ because of how imaginatively Chiang retells this biblical myth. It’s beautiful.

In the story, the citizens of Babylon have spent centuries building a tower up to the sky. Hillalum, a miner from Egypt, has been hired to pierce through the final vault to get to Heaven on the other side. I was right there with him on his four month climb up the tower to the final point, where I was terrified that he was going to let loose another Flood to sweep away the world. Spoiler alert: the world and Hillalum survive, but what a journey.

‘The Wild Windflowers of Kotal’ by Farhad Pirbal, translated by Jiyar Homer and Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse (First published in English in The Potato Eaters, Deep Vellum, 2024. The Potato Eaters was originally published in Kurdish by Sharafkhan Bidlisi Publishing House, 2020)

During lockdown I started a short story group on zoom. We met every fortnight to read a story out loud and discuss it. It was a brief place of safety cocooned from the madness of the world outside. We have carried on, rather less frequently, ever since. It’s simple and fun, and has led me to read a huge variety of stories, throwing my net as wide as I can.

Last year, inspired by the wonderful Farhana Shaikh at Dahlia Books who curates Short Story September, I bought a copy of The Potato Eaters by Farhad Pirbal, a renowned Kurdish writer, poet, philosopher, artist, singer and activist. He has published over 70 books, but this is the first to be translated into English. Many of the pieces were tragic stories of displacement and isolation, but I found this one, about a soldier returning from war, both specific and universal.

The soldier has been dreaming of the idyll that was his home and the woman he loved, but on his return both have been irreparably damaged. They no longer exist. Although it’s always tricky to read work in translation (I have no idea what I am missing from the original) the story was still poetic and moving. We found a lot to appreciate and discuss about it, and it was one of my favourite stories of 2024. I also have the added pleasure that now I follow Pirbal on Instagram, and he looks exactly like Einstein.

‘Mom Is in Love with Randy Travis’ by Souvankham Thammavongsa (First published in How to Pronounce Knife, Bloomsbury, 2020. Available to read on Electric Literature here)

I will go far for a story which makes me laugh. This one, about a family of Lao migrants to Canada, is by a writer who was herself born in a refugee camp and brought up in Toronto. The humour in this story draws the reader into the family relationships, which are written with warmth and compassion. The father who spends his first pay check on a record player, something only rich people in Laos would have, the mother who is obsessed with country music and in particular, Randy Travis:

“The songs always told a story you could follow—ones about heartbreak, or about love, how someone can promise to love you forever and ever and ever, Amen. My mother did not know what Amen meant, but she guessed it was something you said at the end of a sentence to let people know the sentence was finished. ‘Three apples, Amen,’ she would say at the corner grocery store. Because of this, our neighbors thought my mother was religious, and even though our family was Buddhist, she caught a ride to church with them every Sunday.”

The mismatch between Lao and Canadian society is so poignant, particularly the differing views of love. The father thinks it’s fine to give his wife a twenty dollar bill as a birthday present, then buys cowboy boots in a failed attempt to look more like Randy Travis. The mother makes her daughter write hundreds of (unanswered) love letters to Travis, which her daughter sabotages. Vinh Nguyen, who recommended this story on Electric Literature, talks of a refugee’s faith in ‘unimaginable possibility’. It is the hope and faith of both the mother and the father that breaks my heart.

The only flip side to this piece was that it sent me down a terrible rabbit hole on Spotify. I take a secret very uncool pleasure in country music (‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’, anyone?). Obviously it was really research. Many of the songs are like short stories, after all.

‘Sparing The Heather’ by Louise Kennedy (First published in Banshee Press Issue #8, spring/summer 2019, and available to read here; collected in Kennedy’s collection The End of the World is a Cul De Sac, Bloomsbury, 2021)

This is the best kind of story. Emotionally complex and rich, with a simmering political backdrop, it is understated and seething with subtext. I came to this piece though a session at the Word Factory, and then went on to rip through the rest of Louise Kennedy’s work, including her fantastic novel Trespasses.

‘Sparing the Heather’ is set in Ireland near the border with the north, where the Troubles inform everything. The sense of place is impeccable, the description creates a doom-laden atmosphere, as the main character nearly treads on “a crow from an earlier cull, squeaking with maggots”. The characters are deftly skewered: the Englishman Hugh who “only ate meat he had killed himself”, and Brendan, his fingers tapping to the “those dreary pipe solos he liked to listen to”. An excellent read.

‘Still Life with an Open Door’ by Jon McGregor (First broadcast as part of Still Lives in September 2024 on BBC Radio 4. You can listen the whole collection on BBC Sounds here and to ‘Still Life with an Open Door’ here)

Listening to stories is one of life’s great pleasures. For many years I ran a live lit event Story Fridays here in Bath, where writers and actors would read new stories on stage. I loved reading the submissions, curating a varied evening of stories that would work well out loud, and then watching as an audience focussed in and listened. They’d laugh and gasp, and sometimes there would be that moment of silence at the end where they were holding their breath, still in another world, before they exhaled, came back to earth and cheered and clapped.

So I wanted to choose a story or a writer whose work I have listened to rather then read. David Sedaris is an obvious choice, but I think that his work is more creative non-fiction than short stories. So I’ve gone for Jon McGregor. I first encountered his writing when I heard The Reservoir Tapes on Radio 4, a captivating series about a girl who goes missing, with 13 stories taking 13 different points of view of the incident. McGregor has recently created a new series for Radio 4, Still Lives. He said on Twitter/X:

“I wrote some stories where absolutely literally nothing happens, mostly to stick it to the Dramatic Arc dudes. It’ll probably be too quiet for you. Come for the bowl of fruit, stay for the cheese-board, stick it out until Friday’s grand finale, the one with the drying paint.”

I think quite a lot happens. The stories might be subtle and understated, but they are exquisite microscopic portraits of lives, full of distinctive three-dimensional characters. They brim over with the reality of life. The stories are linked, but can be listened to as standalone pieces. My particular favourite is ‘Still Life with an Open Door’ where an elderly woman has fallen over. She is waiting for an ambulance, she doesn’t want to be a bother. Give them all a listen, they’re brilliant.

‘Fat Tuesday’ by Caio Fernando Abreu, translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato (Originally published in Portuguese in 1982, and first published in English in Moldy Strawberries, Archipelago Books, 2022)

This is my most recent favourite. I was told a few weeks ago that I needed to read Caio Fernando Abreu’s work. He was one of the most influential Brazilian writers of the 1970s and 80s, had I really never heard of him? I slunk away and got hold of this collection. The stories are atmospheric, soaked in alcohol, drugs, sex and loneliness. People are ringing on telephones, hanging around in apartments listening to music (he’ll sometimes provide a soundtrack for the story), as everyone searches for meaning in their lives, full of fear and desire and existential angst. It all felt very familiar, I have spent many hours deep in those conversations. A character walks down a dingy street, a bottle of vodka in one hand, drenched by the rain, pounding on a door that doesn’t open. Abreu’s characters are insecure and lost, but sometimes hilarious, sometimes surreal, and I wanted to spend time with them.

In ‘Fat Tuesday’ it’s all sweat and male desire: “We kept rolling in the sand up to where the waves crashed, so the water would wash the sweat and sand and glitter off our bodies.” It’s Carnival and dancing and glitter - until it isn’t. This is Brazil during the AIDS epidemic, under a military dictatorship where Arreu’s writing about queer erotic life was heavily censored and he was put on the wanted list. “Ai ai, they yelled. Look at them queens.”It’s shocking, and so sad. Seek it out, for this story and the rest.

‘The Happy Prince’ by Oscar Wilde (From The Happy Prince and Other Stories, first published in 1888, and now widely published. Available to read online here)

I wanted to finish with one of the stories that kicked off my love of the form. I still adore Saki’s short stories, and would name a cat after his mischievously wicked character Clovis. Saki’s sense of fun is unparalleled. But I think that Wilde and his ‘children’s stories’ pip Saki to the post (not that the stories should be restricted to children). There’s wit and vivid imagery in Wilde’s stories, but also a moral heart, and an anger at the state of the world. I read The Happy Prince and Other Stories when I was little, and then read them again, and had the stories on audio tape, when my daughter was young. I remembered them clearly. Neither my daughter or I can listen to ‘The Infanta’s Birthday’, it is far too painful, and although I like the imperious ‘Remarkable Rocket’ and the tragic nightingale giving her lifeblood for the wastrel lover in ‘The Nightingale and The Rose’, I think ‘The Happy Prince’ gets my vote.

A golden statue and a swallow, who plucks off the Prince’s gold and jewels and flies them to the student in the garret, the mother in the poor house and the match girl who has dropped her wares, all the time dreaming of his trip south to the warmth of Egypt. I think of the swallow in this story every time I see one swooping over my garden, and I think of the most precious things in the city, a leaden heart and a dead bird. Blimey, Wilde knew how to tug at the heartstrings.

* Clare Reddaway is a writer and playwright based in Bath. Her short stories have been widely published and broadcast. Recent highlights include being long-listed for the BBC National Short Story Awards, short-listed for the Bridport Prize and publication of standalone short The Guts of a Mackerel (Fly On The Wall Press, 2021). A collection of her stories Mouthy will be published in 2025 (Axe River Books). Her debut novel Dancing in the Shallows (Fairlight Books) was published in 2024 in the UK, the US and Italy, and has recently been translated into Turkish. Her new novel Tarnish was long-listed for the Exeter Novel Prize 2024. Her plays have been performed across the UK, including runs in Edinburgh and London. She creates original live story events with her company A Word In Your Ear. You can read more about her work at www.clarereddaway.co.uk.

* 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 (Galley Beggar, 2014, and forthcoming in the US from Tivoli Books, 2025), 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.