A Personal Anthology, by Henry Woodland

Some of the short stories I have chosen were not published as short stories. That might be taken as a tired comment on form, though actually I just don’t read very many short stories. I generally find them too long, though when I do make the time I regret that perspective.

As to the form question, I guess one could take the list as a departure point for ‘what constitutes a short story’, but I have long since stopped finding those conversations interesting. Embarrassing memory: a few years ago I was sitting with the Australian poet Louis Klee and asked him whether Anne Carson was more of a poet or an artist. He looked bored and said “if you’re asking that question you already know the answer”. I nodded in agreement but wasn’t sure whether that meant the answer was “yes” or “no”. I still don’t have much of a handle on the relationship but, as I say, the point has long ceased to be interesting.

I haven’t seen Louis since, but remember that day as basically happy—it was early spring in Cambridge and rare sun was coming through the windows. We talked about Les Murray and Louis read me “Bat’s Ultrasound”. It was the first time I had heard it and it seemed closer to a piece of music.

‘For a Traveller’ by Jessica Greenbaum (First published in Poetry, May 2014, and available to read here. Collected in Spilled and Gone, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)

Greenbaum is a poet and this is from a book of poems. She helps me out with the opening line, though: “I only have a moment so let me tell you the shortest story”. Do you think she is saying something about the nature of the prose poem? See introduction: not interested.

As a short story this leaves us to fill in a lot of blanks, though we come to understand that much of the speaker’s life is defined by absence. I find it heartbreaking, and often repeat the question in the last line.

‘The Instruction Manual’ by John Ashbery (Published in Some Trees, Ecco Press, 1978. Also available to read on the Poetry Foundation website, here)

Ashbery is usually obscure, and this must be one of his more straightforward pieces in terms of narrative and syntax. A speaker is writing an instruction manual on the uses of a new metal, and lets their mind wander to Guadalajara. This is the appropriative act that Michel de Certau, in the Practice of Everyday Life, called “La Perruque” — doing creative work surreptitiously while on the company payroll.

I now realise that, like the Greenbaum story, this ends on a question I often repeat to myself: What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do.

‘It Happens Like This’ by James Tate (Published in Lost River, Sarabande Books, 2003. You can read it on the poets.org website, here, and hear Tate read it here. I find it upsetting that people are laughing because I think he was serious)

James Tate breaks that rule where you are supposed to show something in the middle of action rather than giving specific exposition. Almost every piece opens with a paraphrase of setting and person. Here: “I was outside St. Cecelia’s Rectory smoking a cigarette when a goat appeared beside me”. His stories cause me concern because they describe things that happen to all of us. We almost understand them, and he was the only one who could begin to begin talking about it.

‘Do You Belong to Anybody?’ by Maya Binyam (First published in The Paris Review 241, Fall 2022, and available to subscribers to read here. I am told this is actually an excerpt from Binyam’s novel Hangman, published in 2023 by One)

A short story that comes dressed as a short story. It is quite long, actually, but look at the opening few lines:

“In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up. The radio announced traffic due to an accident involving a taxicab driver, a police officer, and a woman whose occupation the dispatcher did not care to identify. But there was no traffic. My ticket was in the breast pocket of my jacket, which was handed to me as I exited the passenger door”.

The story doesn’t graduate to anything more specific, and the first few times I read it I thought it was concerned more with the materials of a story than with the story itself. Who is this person, where are they, and why? What happens to the character is not really the point; the story is about their journey and the absence of a destination.

I’m pretty sure I’m missing some larger comment on dispossession, particularly because of one violent piece of dialogue around the middle. It happens and then moves on as if it didn’t. This bears careful re-reading.

‘The Death of Hart Crane’ by Mark Ford (First published in the London Review of Books, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Six Children, Faber & Faber, 2011)

Everybody knows that Hart Crane died on the steamship Orizaba. What this story presupposes is: maybe he didn’t?

‘Seasonal Dresses’ by Jane Dabate (Published in New Papers 2, 2025)

This is a story by a young writer named Jane Dabate. A lot of her work seems like poetry to me because it is drawn in by feelings and images:

“I found myself cold on the streets, in between brownstones, in between boyfriends, begging my favourite professor to be my guarantor in a series of emails that would go unacknowledged. It was cold in every sense. Summer had passed. Nobody was saying: stay for the weekend!”

Every new writer in London is American now but it turns out some of them are human.

‘Thank You’ by Alejandro Zambra (First published in Spanish in Mis documentos in 2023, translated to English by Megan McDowell as My Documents, Fitzcarraldo Press, 2015. Available to read online here)

Alejandro Zambra is my favourite living writer. His short stories are all basically about the same thing, or at least use the same materials. Here, an Argentine woman and a Chilean man in an ambiguous relationship have an ambiguous experience in Mexico City. This has happened to all of us, or is going to.

‘The Complete’ by Gabriel Smith (Published in The Drift, January 2022, and available to read here)

This story is an exercise in aesthetic centrism, between the familiar poles of schizophrenia and depression. It is one of the most compelling things I have read recently, though I didn’t finish it.

‘The Woman on the Dunes’ by Anaïs Nin (First published in Little Birds, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979)

Anais Nin is a pervert, and so is everyone else. In selecting ‘The Woman on the Dunes’ for this series Leone Ross commented she respected Nin “for her insistence on including the erotic in all things”, but I think Nin really recognisedthe erotic in all things.

I like this story because it diverts in the final third into another story, spoken by one of the characters. It is overwhelming and mildly evil, much like sex itself.

‘American Dreams’ by Peter Carey (Published in American Dreams, University of Queensland Press, 1974)

The best paper I took at University was by an academic named Ragnhild Eikli on the Theory of the Short Story. It took Joyce’s Dubliners as a theoretical prayerbook for understanding the form, and I think that holds up: Eikli was able to show that in each of Joyce’s stories there is a moment of epiphany and a gesture towards a much larger unnatural tension.

Eikli put me on to this story by Peter Carey which can be read according to those same concerns. He is one of the better-known names in the unknown pantheon of Australian literature.

There is a genuine horror here. There is also much that has ‘aged well’ – hoarding property, building walls, and the intrigue of small transgressions in suburbia. But I think Carey in 1974 was realising something about art or Australia or both that remains unacknowledged: the only available pastime is building tiny models of our situation, then taking them apart.

‘Geometric Unity’ by Eric Weinstein (Published April 1 2021, available to read online here)

I have had a fetishistic preoccupation with the group of thinkers known as the “Intellectual Dark Web” for, I don’t know, around ten years now. A lot of people believe Douglas Murray or Jordan Peterson to be the cornerstone of that movement, but it is in fact disgraced physicist Eric Weinstein, disciple of Peter Theil, whose sole work is this self-published “Theory of Everything”.

Each member of the movement self-styles as an intellectual, but they are really just cranks. There is a delicious aesthetic to this paper, which almost imitates actual thought. Like everything from this circle it comes down to an attempt to justify fascism, though I genuinely don’t think they know that.

Is this a short story? Yes, a kind of narrative: see the concluding passage “Isolation”. I believe the crank is a strange and strangely contemporary figure. I teach at a University and often independent researchers send me their work unsolicited. Some are interesting but most are insane, and almost always claim to be the victim of a conspiracy (Weinstein’s is the ‘Distributed Ideas Suppression Complex’ or ‘DISC’).

I believe we can learn a great deal from them. Here’s Freud:

“Dreams, then, are often most profound when they seem most crazy. In every epoch of history those who have had something to say but could not say it without peril have eagerly assumed a fool’s cap. The audience at whom their forbidden speech was aimed tolerated it more easily if they could at the same time laugh and flatter themselves with the reflection that the unwelcome words were clearly nonsensical”.

Unlike Freud’s nonsense philosopher there is no abstract wisdom to be taken from the crank, but there is a kind of photonegative of learning and aspirational politics. I think Joyce used the term ‘Gnomon’ — a theory of everything that was never suppressed.

‘The Worm in the Apple’ by John Cheever (Published in The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, Harper and Brothers, 1958)

My mother showed me this story, which I find more or less believable.

* Henry Woodland is a poet who lives in Venice.

* 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.