A Personal Anthology, by Elizabeth Stott

The short story is flourishing in the 21st century. It was always a place of wonder and joy, but back in the 20th century it is did not feature much at school for me, except as the ‘essays’ we wrote for homework. Mine were always ‘short stories’. However, my main interest at the time was science fiction. I read the alphabet, from Aldiss to Zelazny. I encountered a lot of advanced science concepts from my avid reading of SF, which were also not covered at school. But these close encounters led me towards a degree in physics. In mid-life, I returned to writing and have published fiction and poetry. My personal anthology begins with an SF story I read as a teenager. It is a pointer to themes in my other selections, and each story has a link to at least one other. I am interested in the worlds evoked by the stories.

Much wonderful short fiction today is published by small independent outfits, and they feature prominently in my selection.

‘Evidence’ by Isaac Asimov (First published in Astounding Science Fiction, September 1946)

Isaac Asimov wrote extensively in his fiction about robots. One can trace the fascination with animating the inanimate back through recorded history and religious texts. Consider ‘men of clay’ and the notion of the ‘golem’. Asimov’s robots were made in the shape of men, sometimes uncannily human in appearance, with ‘positronic’ brains. They could operate autonomously, but Asimov set them up constrained by ‘The Three Laws of Robotics’, which prevented robots from harming humans or allowing them to come to harm from inaction on their part. Robots would sacrifice themselves for a human life. I was never clear that we could regard the robots as living beings. But perhaps they could be thought of as ‘sentient’. The emphasis in Asimov’s stories was on the positronic brain, but we humans don’t just think with our brains, our bodies and complex neurobiological activity are part of the story. How would the bodies and senses of a robot affect its thinking? Is it capable of emotion? But Asimov’s robots could be relied upon not to kill you, which is surely a good thing!

This one, ‘Evidence’, written in 1946, stuck in my mind, perhaps because it included a female scientist, Susan Calvin. In this story she attempts to prove the humanity of a character, the lawyer Stephen Byerley, who some believed had replaced himself with a robot after being seriously injured in a car accident.

Byerley ran for the position of mayor against an opponent who was suspicious that Byerley was not human. That he was never seen to sleep or eat was a factor. (Robots don’t need to do these things.) Susan Calvin produces an apple from her handbag. Byerley bites the apple. He must be human! (Reminds me of another story of a woman and an apple…) However, Calvin, privately, considers the possibility that Byerley has a stomach installed. Ultimately, she vouches for Byerley’s humanity, as even though she believes him to be a robot, she also believes that a robot would make a better mayor as he/it would never harm a human being. Susan Calvin lies for the sake of humanity. Byerley becomes mayor and later goes on to higher things. When he dies, his remains are atomised so that the evidence is forever hidden.

‘Dialogue With a Somnambulist’ by Chloe Aridjis (First published in Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays & a Portrait Gallery, House Sparrow Press, 2021. Expanded edition published in 2024)

This was my first encounter with the work of Chloe Ardijis and it was a wonderful surprise. Aridjis is an award-winning writer of Mexican extraction who now lives in London.

This is the title story of Ardijis’s collection, Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays & a Portrait Gallery. We discover the strange progression of a woman’s relationship with a man and a mannequin. One night after her evening meal she decides to take a walk. Should she go left into a busy street, or right into a quieter one? Her decision is to follow a plastic bag buffeted by the wind into the quieter street where the only other pedestrian is “one of those dark city angels who appear like holograms only to disappear a second later”.

The woman and the ‘angel’ end up walking to a bar, described as “the finest in the city”, but “only a select few were ever able to find it”. And the woman and her new companion succeed. Within, they find a collection of grotesques and smoke. She encounters the Somnambulist in a glass case. He is a waxwork mannequin – “Tall and regal and encased in darkness.” The enchantment begins, and the woman becomes a regular at the bar, each time inspecting the mannequin, fretting over his condition. She encounters a former boyfriend, Friedrich, and the two wonder if there is a spark left from their previous relationship. Without giving too much away, the story proceeds – Friedrich procures the Somnambulist – “who ever heard of shutting up a somnambulist when movement was what defined them.” It/he takes up residence in the woman’s bedroom. Pompei, as she calls him, begins to move… Read this excellent book to find out how it goes.

‘The Man Who Walked Through Walls’ by Marcel Aymé, trans. Sophie Lewis (First published in French as Le Passe Muraille in 1943. Published in English in the collection The Man Who Walked Through Walls, Pushkin Press, 2012)

Marcel Aymé was born in France in 1902. ‘The Man Who Walked Through Walls’ is part of a series of absurdist fictions he wrote during the Nazi occupation of France. Written in dead-pan style it concerns a man, Duttilleul, who works in the Ministry of Records. At the age of 43, he discovers he has the power to walk through walls. Aymé has given his character superhuman capabilities, which also happens in other stories in this wonderfully inventive collection.

At first, Duttilleul is disturbed by this ability, and visits a doctor, who diagnoses an ailment of the thyroid, for which he prescribes a bizarre treatment that includes centaur hormones. Aymé’s descriptions are delivered po-faced with a hint of irony, which heightens the sense of absurdism, but allows the reader to suspend belief. (I note that the tilleul, or linden tree, is associated with medical benefits and with truth and liberty. I do not know if this was an intentional reference of the writer.)

What follows is a comedic romp of a story. Dutilleul clashes with his officious new boss who has a “nailbrush moustache” and objects to Dutilleul’s old-fashioned pince-nez and goatee, Moreover, the new man wishes to reform office procedures, and objects to his subordinate’s use of a traditionalist long-winded language in his correspondence. He relocates Dutilleul’s desk to a broom cupboard adjacent to his own office. Dutilleul torments his bullying boss by manifesting his head and upper body through the wall of the man’s office. The outcome of this is that the boss ends up in a mental asylum and Dutilleul is free to return to his usual modus operandi. However, M Dutilleul wonders what good use he could make of his transmural capabilities. He embarks upon a series of robberies, amassing a decent stash of cash and a famous diamond. His calling card is the name ‘Werewolf’ left behind in red chalk. He quickly becomes newsworthy and a folk hero for outsmarting the police. His ever more ambitious thefts undermine the authority of government officials who are forced to resign. Dutilleul becomes a wealthy man. He delights in hearing his colleagues deliver encomiums about his achievements but wishes to become known as the man who is the heroic ‘Werewolf’. This vanity leads him to more spectacular exploits, during which he is arrested and sent to prison, where his abilities allow him to move about the prison and play tricks on the guards. Ultimately, he escapes and changes his appearance, living incognito until he is recognised by the French painter Gen Paul, who had the ability to detect the “least physiological change” in a person. Dutilleul decides to go to Egypt but is stopped in his tracks when he meets an attractive woman. His subsequent amorous adventures weaken his wall-walking abilities, and he develops headaches, for which he takes what he thinks is an aspirin. Of course, it is one of the pills originally prescribed by the doctor. The combined outcome of “over-exertion” and the pill is that he becomes fixed within a wall, where he remains until this day. Herein is the moral! Wonderful stuff and part of a collection of deliciously subversive fiction. There is a sculpture of Aymé portrayed ‘passe-muraille’ in Paris.

‘Junction’ by Christopher Burns (First published in Mrs Pulaska and Other Stories, from Salt Modern Stories, 2024)

Christopher Burns has published short fiction and several acclaimed novels. ‘Junction’ is one of his most recent short stories and is included in his new collection of short fiction – Mrs Pulaska and Other Stories, from Salt Publishing.

What would you say to your younger self if you could meet them? In this case you are already dead.

An old man arranges to meet his younger self in a park, just before the young man is killed in a road accident outside the gates. “This can’t happen, can it?” his younger self asks. He is surprised at how he has aged, losing his hair and wearing glasses. The older man has memories of things he believes he did, in the intervening period. It is an awkward conversation. He cannot tell his younger self that he is about to die. There are musings and questions, disagreements and regrets. What can we know? Who are we without memory and can memory define us? What is left behind when we die? The story haunts us with possibilities. One doesn’t expect resolution or answers, but the reading is a meditation.

‘Recording Angel’ by Helen Garner (First published in Cosmo Cosmolino, McPhee Gribble/Bloomsbury, 1993)

There is an epigraph, which is a quote from Rilke: “Every angel is terrible.” This short story, set in Sydney/Melbourne in the late 20th Century is the first in a sequence of linked fiction contained within a single volume – Cosmo Cosmolino. Another short story, ‘The Vigil’, and a novella – ‘Cosmo Cosmolino’ follow on. ‘Cosmo Cosmolino’ translates into ‘small world, big world’. It seems a metaphor for Garner’s work here, she incorporates the small human details and the process of living (and dying) into the of the world at large into her often poetic accounts. What I love about Garner’s fiction is her ability to incorporate the inner lives of her characters, sometimes idiosyncratic and bizarre, into her narratives. Strange things appear to happen.

‘Recording Angel’ is an unsettling and uncanny story of a woman and her memories. Told in the first person, it has a resonance with Burns’s ‘The Junction’. What is memory, and what matters about a memory of one’s life? In this story a woman engages with an old friend, Patrick, who has known her all her life. Patrick “had mapped out the story of my life, and the lives of everyone we knew, into a grid-like framework and nailed it down; and everything done, witnessed, dreamed, heard of or read he had lined up under cast iron headings, those terrifyingly simple categories of his.” She is disturbed by the notion that her history will transcend her life via Patrick’s memory. But Patrick is shortly to have an operation to remove a brain tumour and the implications for his legacy of her life are disturbing.

‘Reality’ by John Lanchester (First published in the London Review of Books 2018 as ‘Love Island’, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Reality and Other Stories, Faber, 2020)

The ‘reality’ of our selfhood and place in the exterior world has become hard to define in the context of how we fabricate an idea of ourselves on social media. Here, John Lanchester dives into the world of ‘reality TV’. Told via the interior monologue of Iona, an “actress slash model slash influencer”, which her agent describes as “a triple threat” to the other participants, we encounter six young people in a beautiful villa in the Balearic Islands. They wait for the ‘tasks’ to begin, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.

They are being watched… What will the viewers think of Iona? Communications are coded; “Allegiances and alliances were covertly forming. Iona couldn’t say anything explicitly, of course, but she knew she could do a lot with body language and eye talk, grunts and nods and even silences”. She is jealously alert to Nousche, a skilful player of this psychology, and possibly more attractive to the handsome “ripped” guys of the group than Iona. We gain the sense that Iona is not as clever as she thinks, perhaps more a derivative of the world she is attempting to create. Iona remembers her poker player father’s advice about determining whether someone is telling the truth by listening to the echo of their voice. The villa is full of echoes, mocking and derisory. It seems a metaphor for Iona’s world. An ocean of the echoes of others. Like the island she is named for, Iona is surrounded by it. Lanchester is skilful in his use of sound as part of the narrative, and the naturalistic language of the contenders, like the woman Laz’s distinctive “Oi oi”, and Nousche’s French expressions, which give her an exotic edge. The story coalesces after Nousche makes them porridge for breakfast. Misunderstandings, nuanced remarks, and Iona’s comment “I wish I hadn’t had that porridge… Bloat City”. Allegiances turn, and Iona finds herself alone in an echoing sound of laughter. “the sound of souls screaming in pain grew louder and louder”. The scene breaks when one of the men, puts his arm around her. He reassures her; “…the tasks and evictions, they’ll begin soon. It’s not as if this will go on for ever”.

‘Three Weddings’ by Sonya Moor (First published in The Comet and Other Stories, Confingo Publishing, 2023)

Sonya Moor is a French and British writer living in Paris. I first encountered her work in Confingo Magazine, which published the title short story of her collection The Comet and Other Stories in its Spring 2021 issue. Confingo Press is noted, inter alia, for its list of stylish and unusual arts-linked non-fiction and fiction. Sonya Moor’s platform here is of ekphrasis - writing descriptive of art. As the author says in her introduction, the inspiration derives “from visual to musical, to comedic and criminal”. The stories “present female protagonists inspired by representations of females”.

‘Three Weddings’ is inspired by the film My Fair Lady, which is itself a modern take on the story of Pygmalion. Here, a father’s obsession with his beautiful daughter, Galatea, is visited over a number of years from the perspective of an older cousin, at three family weddings. “Caz and I stare at the baby: a great cream puff of a thing.” “Dressed like that, anyone would think it was the baby getting married, not her brother”. Moor artfully presents uncomfortable family dynamics giving us glimpses into the life of a girl growing up as an ‘ideal’.

‘Margate Sands’ by Uschi Gatward (Shortlisted for the London Short Story Prize, 2013. Published in English Magic, Galley Beggar, 2021)

From Uschi Gatward’s short story collection English Magic. Published by the independent Galley Beggar, in another fine volume from their list. ‘Margate Sands’ is a story of memory and a disjuncture with reality. Two female students, Angela and Lisa, go to Margate in the 1980s, where Angela wishes to return to the ‘shell house’ she saw with her family as a child. She has detailed memories of the visit, even of an old lady and a little shell owl she bought. Tourist information brochures talk of a shell grotto, which the girls visit, but this is not the ‘shell house’ Angela remembers, and she is upset to the point of anger and tears. No one can corroborate the memory. Was it real or manufactured? Years later (2012) Lisa returns to Margate to visit a Tracy Emin exhibition in the newly built Turner Contemporary art gallery. On the way she drops into the tourist information office and reaffirms that the shell house of Angela’s memory does not exist.

As the story ends, there is an ‘ekphrastic element’ in storytelling. Outside the Turner Contemporary, Lisa finds a new Mark Wallinger installation – Sinema Amnesia – overlooking the sea, located in an old shipping container designated – The Waste Land – which shows visitors recordings of a view of the sea from the ‘window’, which is a projection of the view but from the previous day. Lisa observes that “It looks exactly the same as today.” The attendant responds “Doesn’t always”.

‘The China Factory’ by Mary Costello (First published in The China Factory, The Stinging Fly/Canongate, 2012)

‘The China Factory’ is the title story of the debut collection of short stories by Irish writer Mary Costello.

Costello’s narrative is woven from the social architecture of working-class rural Ireland, where life pivots around the church. Costello’s worlds are very real, allowing us to enter the lives of her characters. A woman reflects on her past, casting her mind back to when she was 17. The teenager, shortly to leave for college, takes a job for the summer as a “sponger” in a china factory. Her mother drives her unwilling daughter to ask a neighbour, Gus Meehan, for a lift to the city every day for work.

“That’s an awful way to live” her mother says when they get into the car to leave. “The people who went before him would be ashamed.” But it happens that Gus is a distant relative. Gus’s life was ruined by a harsh upbringing, and, later, excessive drinking. His story is told indirectly as the story progresses.

The woman recounts: “I could smell the previous night’s alcohol seeping from his pores. I could smell other smells too and I tried not to think of his body. When he spoke, he hung his head a little and lowered his voice. I knew he was trying to deflect from his body and in the effort his words came out full of apology and shame.”

The story unfolds as the girl integrates herself into the life in the factory, knowing that it was temporary for her, but not for those who will work there permanently, including Gus. The other girls are appalled that she shares a car with Gus. “How d’you stick it – the BO?” She denies being related to him. “They’re a bit strange from your part of the country, aren’t they?”

She has told no one that she is leaving for college in the autumn, and dreams about her future. The china they make forms a metaphor for a more gracious life, the factory Visitor Centre selling gilded plates to wealthy American tourists.

Gus’s deeper character is revealed to the young woman through her daily interactions with him. He talks about the factory brochure, “Earth, water, air and fire – that’s what goes into the china. Who’d have thought it? …The same stuff as we’re all made of…”

A dramatic event occurs where Gus intervenes to stop a gunman – a mentally ill relative of one of the other girls. The men exchange quiet words. Later, the woman reflects: “I wonder if it was to the man or to his madness he spoke?”

‘The Red Suitcase’ by Hilaire (First published by Nightjar Press, 2020. Subsequently in Best British Short Stories 2021 from Salt Publishing)

Published by the independent Nightjar Press as one of a sequence of single-author chapbooks. Hilaire is an Australian writer of prose and poetry who now lives in London. This is an elegantly written story set in Australia concerning a life, or lives, not lived to their full. As with Helen Garner’s writing, the small details of life bring out the world of the characters. However, here, there is much that we are left to wonder about.

Dougie Blake is a retired signalman who lives with his elderly mother in her two-bedroomed bungalow situated in a small coastal Australian town. Here, the highlight of the week is a night out at the Constitutional Club. The arrival of a stranger, in this case a woman who calls herself ‘B’, on a day in late autumn sets up a tension in Dougie’s world. “B is there and not-there, and it made Dougie uneasy.” “an acquaintance… a friend…” had told B that she could get a room “at the Blake widow’s cottage”. She is not known to Dougie’s mother who lets out her own room to paying guests. Curtains twitch when B approaches the bungalow with her red suitcase and badly fitting coat, a visitor out of place and out of season.

Dougie’s mother happily gives up her bedroom to B for the week. She is pleased to have the “extra pennies”. Dougie isn’t so sure; the stranger isn’t like the “hardy young women” with “tanned calves and sunny dispositions” who travel with rucksacks in the summer. He can’t imagine taking her along to the Club as he did with the others. B is shy, and awkward, taking solitary walks along the shore in the cold wind. Dougie is unsettled by her presence, how she and his mother get along so well. He looks forward to B leaving. By the end of the week Dougie is perplexed that he finds himself worrying about her. At night, he hears strange sounds through the shared wall between his bedroom and hers. The story progresses with Dougie finding himself unwittingly drawn to this unwanted guest.

‘Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom’ by Sylvia Plath (First published by Faber Stories, 2019)

A strange short fiction written in 1952 when Plath was a student at Smith College. I read this in the Faber Stories edition, which was the first publication of the story in its original form. Plath steps outside the ordinary world in this story with Mary Ventura – who in her red coat is bundled unwillingly onto a train by her apparently loving parents for a journey to the far away and mysterious ‘ninth kingdom’. “You know how trains are” says her father. “They don’t wait.” The station clock “clipped off another minute”.

Plath gives details of the train interior, with reference to “red plush seats, the color of wine” and “the seams of the car, rivetted with bright brass nails”. Mary sits by the window, behind a pair of argumentative boys, whose mother is engrossed in a magazine, ignoring them. Mary is joined by an older woman out of breath from rushing to make the train. It seems fortuitous that there was a spare seat next to Mary’s. The train departs in clouds of smoke and cinders. The woman takes out her knitting. Mary admires the “leaf-green” wool. It turns out that the woman is knitting a dress “For a girl just about your size…”

Plath described the story as ‘a vague symbolic tale’. We can identify many ‘symbolic elements’ and make our own sense of it. The tone of the story, the sounds and rhythm of the text is compelling. We hear the train moving as machine and metaphor for something implacable. Unease and apprehension rise. The irrevocable passing of stops. Long, dark tunnels. Children crying, a mother with a baby in a soiled blanket. Men complaining about a crying baby. But the train will not stop until it arrives in the ninth kingdom. Outside, the terrain is gloomy and smoky. “It’s the forest fires” the woman explains. The scenery becomes post-apocalyptic in appearance. There is a scarecrow “crossed staves propped aslant and the corn husks rotting under it.” “Night comes on quickly.”

It seems that the strange has made this journey often, although no one else takes this journey more than once. There is no return. Mary asks questions about the journey and the ninth kingdom. “The last station, …Are you sure?” the woman asks.

Mary protests “It’s not my fault I took this train. It was my parents. They wanted me to go.” But the woman chides her for her lack of rebellion. Mary decides to pull the emergency cord. There are various ways we might interpret the story, which ends mystically. The publisher describes it as “a strange dark tale of independence over infanticide”.

‘The Family Whistle’ by Gerard Woodward (First published in Legoland, Picador, 2016)

This story was longlisted for The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. It is a powerful story of lives re-written. The story is set on Germany some years after the end of WWII. Florian, a German housewife, is becoming comfortable after the exigencies of World War II. Luxuries have appeared in the shops again. She delightedly takes her morning’s purchases, including silk stockings and coffee to show her husband, Wilhelm, at the bar where he works. He seems as pleased as she is and promises to bring home “something good” from leftovers.

At home, she makes them into a pleasing display. “The tin of coffee formed the centrepiece. The silk stockings, still folded, shimmered beside. A packet of eggs. A handful of cherries. A block of butter. Everything was so perfect, beautiful, promising.”

Then comes a knock at the door. Surely her husband isn’t home so soon? Has he forgotten the key? The story changes direction abruptly. Outside is a man “tall but desperately thin” wearing filthy clothing. She recalls the returning soldiers of a few years ago, and wonders if she should offer him a piece of cake. She soon discovers that her obligations go much deeper. The man claims to be her husband, only now released from a Russian prison. She slams the door in his face.

“Can you hear me, Florian? Why won’t you let me in?” He speaks through a crack in the door. She tells him that her husband has already returned from the war. The man informs her that her ‘husband’ is an imposter. Perhaps she had been too willing to accept his claim; some things were awry, but she had ignored them.

The man outside reminds Florian of the ‘family whistle’ – a coded sound that only she would recognise. They had used it for their assignations when they were courting. She hears him on the other side of the door “his mouth was right up to the crack, she heard him wet his lips, she heard the inrush of breath as he prepared, and when the whistle came, it was moist, breathy, and beautiful.”

* Elizabeth Stott is a writer based in the north of England who has published short stories and poetry in magazines, anthologies and at spoken word events. Her poetry pamphlet, The Undoing, was published by Maytree Press in 2023.

* 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, in the US, 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.