A Personal Anthology, by Gerard Woodward

In selecting the stories that have been most important to me over the years, it’s slightly disconcerting to note how many of them deal with instances of cruelty, in one form or another. More than half of them do this. Perhaps it’s better not to linger on why this might be, but perhaps it says something about the need of short stories to have some sharp, defining emotion at their heart – the sharper the better. While some brilliant authors can cover a complex emotional terrain in a short story, for most it is a more concentrated, focussed experience, and the jeopardy, the sense of what is at stake, needs to be apparent and immediate. Or perhaps I’m just drawn to these scenarios because they deal with an aspect of humanness that we have to strive harder to make sense of, and asks us more questions of ourselves. We can recognise and understand love quite easily, but what explains cruelty? It’s one of the greatest puzzles of life.

‘Lost Hearts’ by M. R. James (First published in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 1904, and now available in Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James, Oxford World Classics 2013. It can be read online here)

We think of James as a teller of unsettling stories of ghosts and apparitions taking place in pleasant English landscapes, but Lost Hearts might more correctly belong to the horror genre – its subject matter is so shocking that I can hardly bear to describe it – suffice to say it can be thought of as a variation of the vampire myth with added cannibalism and the destruction of innocence. It is, like all his stories, a masterfully constructed narrative creating a completely convincing and believable world where the unbelievable happens. From the opening with its attention to the architectural detail of the stately home, to the charming little friendship between Stephen, the young protagonist and Mrs Bunch the housekeeper, and the butler’s brief appearance - a whole community of the house is evoked in a few pages. The moments of supernatural horror are grounded with convincing esoteric knowledge, and there is the typical James trope of the signs of supernatural intrusion being mistaken for something trivial – rats or wild animals in this case. A real masterpiece of a short story.

‘The Aspern Papers’ by Henry James (First published in The Atlantic Monthly, 1888, now available in The Aspern Papers and Other Tales, Penguin Modern Classics, 2014)

The other James was very prolific as a short story writer, but wrote very few that are under forty pages, and the one I’ve chosen is long enough to qualify as a novella. But it is included in the Everyman edition of his collected short stories, and having read all of them recently, I’m finding that there is something to be said for the long short story. When teaching short stories I usually emphasize the importance of making use of the form’s restricted length, but James is having none of that. Which means that his stories have the quality of compressed novels, but suffer no loss as a result. ‘The Aspern Papers’ is James at his most sensuous, playful and charming. Set in Venice, it concerns a literary scholar’s attempts to get close to the ageing muse of a great poet, using gardening, of all things, as a cover for his endeavours. It is lush, seductive, witty and unsettling.

‘The Buffalo’ by Clarice Lispector, translated by Katrina Dodson (First published in the collection Laços de família, Francisco Alves Editora, 1960, translated as Family Ties, University of Texas Press, 1984, and available to read in Clarice Lispector Complete Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2015, it can also be read online here)

This is a remarkable and shocking story - a woman goes to a zoo and tries to deal with her feelings regarding a relationship by imagining committing violence to the animals. When she commits an actual violent act on one of them, it is ineffectual and useless. The psychological depths this story reaches are remarkable - the central character is nameless and no reference is made to why she is in the state she’s in, just that it might be to do with a man. There is a sense of disembodiment – as though she only exists as an emotional state - when she goes on a rollercoaster she feels the material force of gravity making her dance and forcing her to adopt the physical attitudes of happiness. The animals (all wonderfully described) seem to her to be free of the burdens of love and emotional connection (at one point she feels she is in the cage while the animals are free). When she drops her purse the scattered contents reveal to the world all her anxieties “the pettiness of a private life of precautions”. Lispector’s collected stories are full of treasures, often more accessible to the reader than her sometimes more impenetrable novels.

‘An Encounter’ by James Joyce (First Published in Dubliners, Grant Richards Ltd., 1914: there are many editions now available, including Penguin Modern Classics, 2000, it can be read online here)

What do you choose from a collection where every story is perfect? Well, how about An Encounter, a story of childhood misadventure? You could construct a map of the city from the stories in Dubliners, and indeed in some editions ‘An Encounter’ comes with a map tracing the journey the boys take over the river Liffey and along the Wharf Road to see the Pigeon House (never explained in the story, it’s a power station). A wonderful evocation of a childhood full of weekly comics and cowboys and Indians, there is a growing sense of menace as the boys make their journey. Dubliners is full of characters who seek to escape the oppression of the city, and the boys get further than most, though what they encounter in the end is a curdled vision of adulthood, rather than the world beyond the city.

‘A Distant Episode’ by Paul Bowles (First published in The Partisan Review, 1947, now available from Penguin Modern Classics, 2014)

I’ve only read this story once, and a long time ago, when I had some time to kill in a bookshop in Manchester, but it has stayed with me ever since, and I keep meaning to buy a copy and read it again, but I never do. It’s a story about an academic who has returned to a small Moroccan village to look up an old friend, but then finds himself lured into a trap – I can’t really say any more without giving too much a way. It’s the manner in which this story takes an unexpected turn, so that it is almost like two stories, the one emerging from the other, that has been a strong influence on my own writing. It is also unexpectedly dark and cruel, to the extent you wonder why an author would want to do that to one of their characters – but then sometimes you just have to.

‘Spry Old Character’ by Elizabeth Taylor (First Published in Hester Lily and Other Stories, Viking, 1954. Taylor’s complete short stories are published by Virago)

Taylor is a writer who could rightly be called the Jane Austen of her time – author of beautifully crafted narratives that pick out and play at the hidden tensions between characters, revealing layer upon layer of social and personal meanings, creating fully realised worlds of behaviour and feeling. I love this story for its portrait of an elderly inhabitant of what would today be called an old people’s home (a favourite literary haunt for Taylor) – his is an old rogue rendered helpless by old age and blindness, at the mercy of his well meaning carers, who inhibit every attempt of his to revive his old passions – which are mainly drinking, smoking and gambling. The ending quietly breaks your heart.

‘The Psychiatrist’ by Machado de Assis, translated by William L. Grossman and Helen Coldwell (Translation published by University of California Press, 1966. I bought this collection second hand, it is also available on the Internet Archive. There are other editions available including as part of a collected stories from Jollyjoy Books (where the story appears as ‘The Alienist’) but I can’t vouch for the quality of the publication or the others that come up on internet searches)

De Assis is a fascinating writer, often regarded as the foremost Brazilian author, though still little known and hard to obtain in the UK – he is also hard to pin down – a descendent of freed slaves he is a realist who is also surreal and experimental, a kind of South American Sterne or Voltaire or Gogol or Kafka (whom he precedes). The only easily available novel published in the UK is The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (sometimes translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner), which is published as a Penguin Classic and is a wonderful short novel – picaresque, digressive – one of my favourite moments is when, after a chapter about a donkey that has no relevance to the story, the next chapter begins “damn that donkey for interrupting my thoughts…” ‘The Psychiatrist’ (sometimes translated as ‘The Alienist’) is a wonderful story about a man who builds the first asylum in a town, and then starts widening his definitions of madness until nearly everyone is incarcerated.

‘The Inherited Clock’ by Elizabeth Bowen (First published in The Demon Lover and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1945. Bowen’s collected stories are published by Vintage, 1999)

I like to remind students that if you write a story that is built around a defining central image – a clock, say, you only get one chance, so make the most of it. No one is going to want to read another story of yours about a clock, and if you keep writing stories about clocks, you’ll become pigeonholed as the person who writes about clocks. (This doesn’t apply to themes, which can recur again and again in your stories, but usually in different guises, using different and contrasting images and points of focus.) I can’t help thinking that Bowen might have had such a thought in mind when she wrote this story – I’m not going to write another story about a clock, so I’m going to do everything you can do with a clock in one story. In the Inherited clock two cousins are dealing with this particular timepiece - a domed skeleton clock – and in the course of the story everything is done with the clock that can be done – one character puts their finger in the mechanism and is “bitten”, another puts the dome over their head and so “wears” it, and so on. At times the clock seems like another character, a protagonist, and in a narrative sense, at least, could be described as alive. But that’s just one aspect of the story - as with all Bowen’s writing there are layers and layers of history, characterization and meaning contained in beautifully structured prose.

‘A Late Encounter with the Enemy’ by Flannery O’Connor (First published in A Good Man is Hard to Find, 1955; her complete stories are published by Faber and Faber, 2009)

Another author who doesn’t flinch from being cruel to her characters – in her famous ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ she takes it to a tragic extreme. The tone in ‘A Late Encounter’ is more darkly humorous, and the victim not entirely undeserving. To test this idea you could take this story’s General Sash, the 104-year-old veteran and make him swap places with the old rogue in Elizabeth Taylor’s story and see if you still have the same feelings at the end.

‘Juliette McRee is Accused of Gluttony’ by Ethel Anderson (First published in At Parramatta, F. W. Cheshire, 1956, available in The Oxford Book of Australian Short Stories, ed Michael Wilding, 1994, available second hand or online at the Internet Archive)

Sorry, I think this story will be hard to track down. I came across it in a second hand copy of an anthology of Australian short stories from an Australian publisher (Houghtoin Miffin) published in 1983. It may crop up in more recent anthologies but it seems there isn’t a good current anthology of Australian Short Stories available, which is a pity because Australian literature is particularly rich in this form. There was in fact a boom in Australian short stories around the end of the 19^th century and early 20^th century, thanks to the support of magazines like Bulletin. Barbara Baynton, Frank Davison and Alan Marshall all used the form to write powerful evocations of life in the Outback. Ethel Anderson is a very interesting figure, an essayist, poet and painter as well as a short story writer. The story I’ve chosen is another that focuses on cruelty and childhood trauma, but with a peculiar, darkly comic slant. The story’s opening sets the tone for what’s to come – “Dr Phantom did not really care for children.”

‘Josefine the Singer, or The Mouse People’ by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann (First published as ‘Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse’ in Ein Hungerkünstler, Verlag Die Schmiede, 1924. Translation published in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Penguin, 2007)

I first read Kafka as a teenager and fell in love with his ideas. When I read him now it is the language that I love, the way he uses words with such precision. Reading him is like having a world built around you brick by brick (word by word) relentlessly until you are an inhabitant. Strangely, the experience is quite joyous, even when the subject matter is extremely dark and unsettling. It is the joy of being in the company of a completely liberated imagination. I could have chosen almost anything, but have gone for this slightly lesser-known story. Although we are never quite sure if we are reading about mouse-like people, or people-like mice, the story of the hold Josefine has on her downtrodden and fearful people, who otherwise have no understanding or appreciation of music (“when she is gone, music will disappear – perhaps for ever – from our lives”), is entrancing, terrifying, heartbreaking and hilarious all at once. Oh - and it breaks all the rules of short story writing.

‘The Argentine Ant’ by Italo Calvino, translated by Archibald Colquhoun (First published as ‘La formica argentina’, 1952, and in translation in 1957. Now available in Difficult Loves and Other Stories, Vintage, 2018)

Having very little money at the time, in the early 90s, I remember having a book fund, a sort of piggy bank for loose change which I would spend on books, and I remember I used this to buy a copy of Alberto Manguel’s anthology of fantastic literature Black Water, a big volume published by Picador of 72 short stories. An influential book, I think, bringing together classics like ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ with lesser known works like the Calvino story I’ve chosen here. ‘The Argentine Ant’ is built on a very simple premise - a family, and a community, is driven mad by the relentless presence of ants. It inspired the title poem of my third poetry collection, Island to Island.

* Gerard Woodward is a Booker-shortlisted novelist, poet and short story writer. He has published fourteen books altogether including two short story collections – Caravan Thieves (Chatto, 2007) and Legoland (Picador 2016). He has twice been shortlisted for the Sunday Times short story Award, has won an O.Henry Award in the United States, and has been a judge for the BBC Short Story Award. He is currently Professor of Fiction at Bath Spa University where he teaches a short story module on the MA course.

* 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.