A Personal Anthology, by Gabriel Flynn

I selected the twelve stories in this anthology with the following test in mind: if I were to arrive at a secluded holiday rental and discover I had left my bag of books on the bus from the nearest town (several hours away on foot and anyway without a bookshop), and if the only book on the otherwise empty shelves were this Personal Anthology, would its twelve stories sustain me happily for several weeks, become richer with each re-reading, and leave me glad that I had left my books on the bus, even wishing the same fate on the next guest? I hope they would.

‘Sensini’ by Roberto Bolaño translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (First collected in Llamadas Telefonicas, Anagrama, 1997, and in English in Last Evenings on Earth, New Directions, 2006. Available to read online at the Barcelona Review, here)

When the narrator of this story, a young writer working odd jobs and living alone in Barcelona, makes fourth place in a short story competition, he discovers among the shortlisted authors the name of Luis Antonio Sensini, an older, under-recognised Argentinian writer whom he admires. “The fact that I had been his fellow runner-up in a provincial literary competition—an association that I found at once flattering and profoundly depressing—encouraged me to make contact with him, to pay my respects and tell him how much his work meant to me.” The two begin an epistolary friendship, Sensini ending his replies with encouragement for the younger writer: “Pen to paper now, no shirking!” The story is a great homage to short story competitions, “those precious supplements to the writer’s modest income,” and, as it reaches its conclusion, transforms into a moving reflection on the lessons we learn from our writer mentors, dead and alive.

‘The Garden Party’ by Katherine Mansfield (First published in The Westminster Gazette in 1922. Collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories, Constable and Robinson, 1922). Available to read online here)

I always think of ‘The Garden Party’ as a perfect story of epiphany. Like Joyce’s ‘Araby’, it introduces its protagonist in place, time and milieu, and ends at the moment she learns a new and irreversible lesson about the world, a lesson that does not need to be named outright because the story up to that point has carefully made the substance of that epiphany legible:

‘Isn’t life,’ she stammered, ‘isn’t life—’ But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood.

‘Isn’t it, darling?’ said Laurie.’

When I first read this story 10 years ago, I understood Laura’s epiphany to be about death – the accidental death of a working-class neighbour on the day of her family’s garden party causes the young protagonist to realise that death looms over life and that she too will die one day – and missed the extent to which the story is about her burgeoning class-consciousness. From the beginning of the story, when she is sent out to instruct the workmen assembling the marquee and disarmed by their friendliness, to the end, when she has to confront the squalid living conditions of her neighbours, the story is about her coming to understand not only that death always looms over life, nor that some people live well at the expense of others living poorly, but that death looms more closely and meanly over the lives of the poor than over those of the wealthy.

‘The Siege’ by James Lasdun (Collected in The Siege: Selected Stories, Vintage, 1999)

This story describes the relationship between Marietta, a refugee from an unnamed, war-torn country, and Mr Kinsky, the man for whom she works as a cleaner and in whose basement she lives. Mr Kinsky develops an erotic fascination with Marietta, which she rebuts, and Lasdun brilliantly describes the subtleties of their charged relationship:

‘Hello, my dear.’ He used the endearment with the authority of someone who has aquired it precisely by virtue of his grace in defeat as a prospective lover.

I first read ‘The Siege’ after hearing about it in a conversation between the author and Adam Shatz, which you can listen to here (they discuss the story around 11 minutes in, and you can hear Lasdun read a short excerpt, accompanied by some of the Schubert that Mr Kinsky plays on his piano in the story).

‘Los Angeles’ by Emma Cline (first published in Granta in 2017 and collected in Daddy, Chatto & Windus, 2020). Available for Granta subscribers to read here)

For the protagonist of this story, a young woman working at a chain clothing outlet in Los Angeles, opening a box of clothes: “all stuffed and flattened together in a cube without tags or prices, made their real worth suddenly clear – this was junk, all of it.” But although she sees through the illusion, that does not free her from the work of maintaining it. “Before they put the clothes on the racks, they had to steam them, trying to reanimate the sheen of value.” Everything in the world of this story is reducible to its exchange value: beauty can be used to entice customers, the aspirations of young actors pay the bills of their jaded older teachers, and the story leaps into motion when the protagonist discovers that even her used underwear can be sold: a younger, savvier colleague regularly sells hers to men on the internet and the perverts who come into the shop, so the protagonist decides – though decides is hardly a word that belongs in the world of this story – to try it too.

In the final scene, the protagonist climbs into a car with a man to whom she is selling her underwear and during their uncomfortable interaction, she remembers a previous, unpleasant incident that she endured by imagining it as a story: “something condensed and communicable.” Even the story form itself is subjected to the same economic logic as the clothes that arrive, flattened into a cube and ready for sale. In its terrifying final moment, she realises that he has locked the car and she can’t get out. Then the ironic, affectless screen behind which this sad life plays out is torn away, and its awful violence is laid bare.

‘Winter in the Abruzzi’ by Natalia Ginzburg translated from the Italian by Dick Davis (First collected as ‘Inverno in Abruzzo’ in Le piccole virtù, Einaudi, 1962, and in English in The Little Virtues, Carcanet, 2018. Available to read here)

Perhaps this ought to be considered an essay. It’s often called one and, in fact, I first read it for a course called ‘The Essay’. Nevertheless, it’s filed away with the short stories in my memory, I suppose because it is so rooted in a place, a time, and a set of characters, and because when I think of it, it’s not an idea I remember but the mood of its narrative voice, its geographical details, and the aesthetic effect of its moving final paragraph. It is a story about the years during the fascist period in Italy that Ginzburg and her husband, Jewish communists, were forced into internal exile and lived in the village of Pizzoli, in the mountainous Abruzzo region. It describes the changing seasons, their relationships with the villagers, and the sadness they felt as the snow settled over the mountains. Its beautiful, devastating final paragraph never fails to send shivers up my spine.

‘Prosinečki’ by Adrian Duncan (first published in The Stinging Fly in summer, 2018 and collected in Midfield Dynamo, The Lilliput Press, 2021. Stinging Fly subscribers can read the story here. Non-subscribers can also listen to a great reading by Wendy Erskine here)

‘Prosinečki’ takes place in a lower-league football stadium somewhere in Northern England and its narrative duration is very short: it begins during a break in play while one of the narrator’s teammates lies “splayed on the ground amid plumes of vapour and hunkering medics” and ends minutes later, when play has resumed, and the narrator has dinked a cross for his striker to head into the net. Really, though, the story takes place in that expansive non-time which is the domain of great writers and footballers alike, and which its writing perfectly evokes:

I was on the midway line, with my back to goal, and as the ball sped to me through the sleet I feigned right and clipped the ball with the inside of my foot, back across my body and past my left knee. Then, feeling the entire earth rushing over my right shoulder, I span left, and the pitch, the stadium, the lights, the forest cleaved open before me.

The story never makes the analogy explicit – part of what makes it so good is that it speaks only in the language of football – but you can also read ‘Prosinečki’ as a reflection on the development of a writer, who like a footballer, endures years of pain and rejection in pursuit of the brief, transcendent moments when it all comes together.

‘The Appropriation of Cultures’ by Percival Everett (first published in Callaloo in 1996 and collected in Damned If I Do, Graywolf Press 2004, reissued by Influx in 2021). Available to read here)

This is a short, satirical story that imagines a black man ‘appropriating’ the white culture of the American South, playing ‘Dixie’ with full-throated passion and driving a pickup truck adorned with the Confederate flag – or, as he calls it, “the black power flag,” drawing the attention and confusion of his white compatriots:

‘What are you doing with that on your truck, boy?’ the bigger of the two asked.

‘Flying it proudly,’ Daniel said, noticing the rebel front plate on the Chevrolet. ‘Just like you, brothers.’

It’s a very funny story, propelled forward by its commitment to the bit – which it takes to a maximalist conclusion – but the humour is underpinned by a cool hardness and a realist style the keeps the story grounded in the social reality it satirises.

‘A Little Fable’ by Franz Kafka translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir (First published as ‘Kleine Fabel’ in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1931, and in English in The Great Wall of China, Schocken, 1946)

I first read this story when I was 16, during a period when I was very lost and unhappy in the wake of my father’s death. It was one of the first texts to open up the possibilities of literature for me and it still lifts my spirits. The story is tiny, so short that I can insert the whole thing here:

Alas,’ said the mouse, ‘the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.’ ‘You only need to change your direction,’ said the cat, and ate it up.

‘The Particles of Order’ by Yiyun Li (First published in the New Yorker in August 2024. Available to subscribers to read here)

This is a strange and surprising story, centred around a dialogue between two women in the Devon home of a dead writer of murder mysteries named Edmund Thornton. Ursula is Thornton’s former typist and now runs his cottage as a holiday rental. Lilian is her guest. Like Li herself, Lilian is a writer who lives in the US and has lost both of her sons to suicide. If at first, when Ursula is its main subject, the style has a touch of the twee murder mystery, that changes as its focus turns towards Lilian. The story’s true concern reveals itself at the revelation that the writer William Trevor also used to live just down the road. Lilian asks:

‘There’s something comforting about the idea of living in his fiction, don’t you agree?’

Comforting? Ursula thought of the years she’d spent as Edmund’s typist – nearly half her life. All that time, however, could easily be condensed into a single image in a William Trevor story, no more than two or three sentences. A woman walks alone by the sea. A man, whom she has not stopped loving, lives without returning her love and then dies without thinking of her. ‘I suppose very few people in William Trevor’s work get themselves murdered, if that’s what you mean by ‘comforting.’

The story becomes a thoughtful reflection on how the two characters’ lives might have fit – or not – into the works of these two different writers, and, in turn, on the way that new experiences need to produce new kinds of writing.

‘And Then My Dog Will Come Back to Me’ by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searles (First published as ‘Og så kan hunden komme’ in To forteljingar, Samlaget, 1993, and in English in Scenes From A Childhood, Fitzcarraldo editions, 2023)

By the second page of this story, the narrator has been informed by a neighbour that a man has just shot his dog. By the fourth, he has decided to kill the man in revenge. By the sixteenth page, the narrator is standing over the dog-killer while he sleeps and driving a pitchfork into his heart: “His mouth gapes open, he is breathing heavily. His jowls are shaking slightly. I look at the left side of his fat hairy chest, I hold the pitchfork handle as tight as I can, tense my body, breathe in a deep breath, tense the muscles in my arms. I am staring at the left side of his chest and I plunge it in.”

This being a Jon Fosse story, all of this takes place beside a fjord, by which the narrator approaches his victim’s house in a rowboat, and by which he escapes: “I row away from land, out into the fjord, I row on, straight ahead, straight out into the fjord, row on. And I say, now that devil is dead, as he should be, it’s what he deserves, that fat bastard, fucking demon, fucking bastard, now that devil’s where he belongs, that fucker.”

‘Signs and Symbols’ by Vladimir Nabokov (First published as ‘Symbols and Signs’ in The New Yorker, 1948, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, Doubleday, 1958)

This must be one of the most-chosen stories in the archives of A Personal Anthology and I didn’t want to choose it for the sake of variety. But in the weeks that I was re-reading my possible selections and mulling them over, I taught this story and when I re-read it, remembered how much I love it and felt that I couldn’t leave it out.

An elderly couple, Russian-Jewish emigres in New York, are visiting their son on his birthday. He is confined to a psychiatric hospital on account of his “referential mania”, a rare condition that causes the patient to imagine “everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence”. Upon arriving, they learn that their son has tried again to take his own life and are sent home, disappointed. While her husband tries to sleep, the boy’s mother examines some old photographs and a second story briefly overtakes the first, the story of their emigration from Revolutionary Russia to Germany, and from Nazi Germany to America, but this story is interrupted when the father emerges, crying in pain and full of resolve to rescue their son from the hospital. Then comes the enigmatic conclusion. The phone rings and the mother answers to a girl asking for Charlie. She has the wrong number. It rings again, and the elderly woman dismisses the girl, telling her that she is dialling ‘o’ instead of zero. Then the phone rings for a third time and the story ends. Surely, it can only be the girl, once again dialling the wrong number, and yet somehow, we believe that this time, it must be the hospital calling to tell the boy’s parents that he has escaped ­– from this life, from the hospital. There is no logical reason but in the overdetermined circumstances of the story, it seems to make a kind of intuitive, aesthetic sense, and so we are exposed as sharing something of the boy’s referential mania, examining a random event as though it must be full of meaning. Somehow – I’ve never quite understood why – this is extremely moving.

‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’ by Hilary Mantel (First published in The Guardian in September, 2014, and available to read here. Collected in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Fourth Estate, 2014)

I might have saved my favourite until last. In this story, Hilary Mantel takes a violent revenge fantasy – a counterfactual assassination of Margaret Thatcher by an IRA gunman after a stay at a Windsor eye clinic – and, without neutralising the fantasy’s political motivation, transforms it into a profound reflection on the nature of history.

The narrator is expecting a local workman, Duggan, who is to fix her faulty boiler. But the man who turns up at her door and lets himself in is not Duggan. She assumes the intruder must be one of the hundreds of press photographers who have descended on her neighbourhood since the prime minister arrived:

‘How much will you get for a good shot?’

‘Life without parole,’ he said.

I laughed. ‘It’s not a crime.’

‘That's my feeling.’

But as he opens his “boiler man’s bag” and removes the “metal parts, which, even in my ignorance, I knew were not part of a photographer’s kit,” the narrator begins to understand that her flat has been chosen for its perfect vantage point over the eye clinic’s rear entrance, from which Thatcher is expected to depart.

The story transforms into something unexpectedly profound when the narrator leads the gunman into a dark corridor to show him a secret exit by which he might be able to escape, and the secret exit becomes a metaphor for the contingent nature of history: “note the power of the door in the wall that you never saw was there. And note the cold wind that blows through it, when you open it a crack. History could always have been otherwise.”

Then the characters return to the bedroom with its view over the clinic ready for Thatcher’s departure, and the story concludes with the event its title promises, an event that never happened but could have, with:

One easy wink of the world’s blind eye: ‘Rejoice,’ he says. ‘Fucking rejoice.’

* Gabriel Flynn is a writer based in Berlin. His short fiction has appeared in Five Dials, Best British Short Stories 2023, and The White Review. His debut novel, Poor Ghost! is out now with Sceptre Books.