A Personal Anthology, by Jack Houston
To pick only twelve favourite short stories is a bit like a child only having 10p (12p?) with which to get pick and mix from Woolworths, back when such an unimaginable narrowing of the possible was part of many childhoods. I hope it is obvious that the anthologies, collections, and any other work of the following authors are all well worth tracking down too.
‘Sister Detroit’ by Colleen McElroy (First published in Jesus and Fat Tuesday, Creative Arts Book Company, 1987, and in the UK anthology Breaking Ice, Vintage, 1990)
Margaret Thatcher has been famously misattributed as saying that anyone riding a bus over the age of 25 could consider themselves a failure, and regardless of who coined the phrase, or what your personal views are on the importance of public transport systems in general, one thing remains true: a car is rarely just a means of carrying passengers. It is also a status symbol. In ‘Sister Detroit’ by Colleen McElroy, one such status symbol becomes a vehicle for discussing black power, gender roles and the Vietnam War’s deleterious effect on the young, black American male of its era. It does this while doing Thelma and Louise better than Thelma and Louise a few years before Thelma and Louise. Remarkable.
‘Friday Black’ by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (First published in Friday Black, riverrun, 2018 and available to read in Esquire here)
Class is a theme that circles the subject of the working life like a vulture above the head of a thirsty person limping their last few steps across an arid desert plain. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s ‘Friday Black’ swoops down and devours the whole thing whole. Taking the violent Black Friday scenes made famous by various shop CCTV footages to a logical and surely-soon-to-be-actual extreme, Adjei-Brenyah serves up the experiences of a lone go-getting sales assistant as they deal with a murderous sales season. With a good dollop of tongue-in-cheek, obviously.
‘Are We Not Men?’ by T. C. Boyle (First published in The New Yorker, 31st October 2016, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Relive Box, Bloomsbury, 2017)
Class again comes under the microscope in ‘Are We Not Men?’ by T. C. Boyle, the world as we know it again brought future-skewed in that way the sci-fi short story does so well. Here, it’s genetic manipulation that has been thrust into overdrive: ‘crowparrots’ breeding like parakeets and loudly swearing in everyone’s faces, parents able to choose which features they want their children to have, the resulting babies coming straight from laboratories. There are more time-honoured problems, too, like what happens when a man might start a family with both his wife and his next-door neighbour at the same time. It’s the wonderful last image that remained with me from this. A genetically modified Pitbull snatches a crowparrot from mid-air, and ‘the prettiest feathers you’ll ever see, lift and dance and float away on the breeze.’
‘Limbs’ by Malachi McIntosh (First published on the Galley Beggar Press website, available to read here. Collected in Parables Fables Nightmares, The Emma Press, 2023)
Early-twenties ennui, the seeming inability to commit to something longer than a round of X-boxing, drinking too much, working a job you hate are neatly brought together with a mistaken delivery of rotting flesh by Malachi McIntosh. In ‘Limbs’ our hero’s just been dumped, McIntosh neatly having his main character pay more attention to a colleague’s attempts to use a drinking fountain as to his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend’s discussion of this. The unexpected, and unexplained, arrival of various removed limbs acts as counterpoint to, and representation of, his speaker’s inability to take responsibility for himself. The already-world-weary denouement is hearteningly gross.
‘The Fjord of Killary’ by Kevin Barry (First published in The New Yorker, 2010, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Dark Lies the Island, Vintage, 2013)
Kevin Barry’s takes on life, love and buying old hotels while in the throes of a mid-life crisis never fail to delight. They never fail to delight me anyway. ‘The Fjord of Killary’ is no exception. In it, the hotel in question is completely shut off by floodwater and the hotel’s new owner, our narrator, tries to make the best of a bad situation while also finding out one small secret in service of growing old gracefully.
‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’ by George Saunders (First published in The New Yorker, 8th October 2012, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Tenth of December, Bloomsbury, 2014)
How to write freshly about the intersections of class and globalisation? George Saunders, in a short story already considered by many to be a classic, elegantly nails both requirements by stringing them in a diarised syntax from a microline on a pre-purchased rack in a back garden. Saunders’ central conceit, buying people and using them as decoration for a child’s birthday party, is shudderingly horrific. ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’ hung around in my head for a while.
‘Strays’ by Lucia Berlin (First published in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015)
Plain, stark, direct, Lucia Berlin’s sometimes autobiographical writing on life as it is lived, often drinking too much in southern America are surely some of the best short stories ever written. Many others here have chosen her stories and the one for me, ‘Strays’, opens with the wind in Albuquerque. From there it tells the story, a romance of sorts, between a man and a woman, residents of a pilot-project rehabilitation centre in the middle of said Albuquerque. When the couple are disturbed by a pack of dogs, they see the dogs “had gotten into porcupines”, the dog’s faces “infected, septic”, “eyes quilled shut with tiny arrows”. The man takes the dogs into an outhouse and beats them to death with a sledgehammer. The woman escapes when a film crew arrive and she jumps into a car with one of them who is looking for a drink. Like so much in the rich collection this is from, the writing tells itself.
‘The Tumblers’ by Nathan Englander (First published in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Faber, 1999)
In ‘The Tumblers’, Nathan Englander turns the children’s stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer into a story of the holocaust. The Fools of Chelm remain Chelmian but are rewritten as being forced onto one of the many overcrowded boxcars of the Nazi’s final solution. Englander tackles the horror head on, his characters only narrowly escaping being killed by pretending to be acrobats on their way to be applauded at a Nazi show. The long, final heart-breaking sentence sends a shiver down my spine with every re-reading.
‘Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgating’ by Karen Russell (First published in Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Vintage, 2014)
For those readers unaware, like me, of what ‘sports tailgating’ is, it is the socialising around the back of a car before or after a sports event. Yes, I think that’s a bit weird too. The closest we get to sports tailgating in the UK is people leaving a match early to get out of the car park. However, in ‘Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgating’ Karen Russell uses the idea of sports fandom to construct a hilarious allegory around the hopes and dreams of the various followers of the Antarctic ‘Food Chain Games’, featuring those who always seem to lose, ‘Team Krill’, and their dogged support of their team as their miniscule players come up against ‘Team Blue Whale’, ‘Team Humpback Whale’, ‘Team Fin Whale’, ‘Team Sei Whale’, ‘Team Skua’ and even ‘Team Albatross’. Teams who always seem to come out on top, no mater what.
‘In-Flight Entertainment’ by Helen Simpson (First published in In-Flight Entertainment, Cape, 2010)
The title story of Helen Simpson’s In-Flight Entertainment is one of the best climate-catastrophe pieces I can think of. Two characters are stuck together on a flight interrupted by another passenger being taken ill. Their conversation, in which one brings up the damage the flight they are on is doing to the atmosphere, has Simpson managing a funny Al Gore, explaining to us the perils of the course we’re on without being at all preachy. No mean feat.
‘Then Later, His Ghost’ by Sarah Hall (First published in The New Statesman, available to read here(and read by Emma Haslett here). Collected in Madame Zero, Faber, 2017)
And taking a change in climatic events as a starting point, Sarah Hall’s ‘Then Later, His Ghost’ summons up a post-apocalyptic scenario in which one man tries to survive in a world broken by monstrous winds. It is a world where he has seen someone ‘sliced in half by a flying glass pane, his entrails worming from his stomach’. The winds in this terrifying vision of a near future certainly too strong for anything like life as we know it to continue, but not too far away for its main character to not think he ‘remembered feeling human’.
‘My Brain’s Too Tired to Think’ by Wanda Coleman (First published in ZYZZYVA: The Last Word: West Coast Writers & Artists, Vol. XVIII and collected in Jazz and Twelve O’Clock Tales, Black Sparrow, 2008)
In Wanda Coleman’s ‘My Brain’s Too Tired to Think’, we are fly-on-the-wall of a session between a counsellor and a new client. In it are discussed the hideous effects of colourism and racism, child abuse and one woman’s attempts to deal with the aggravations of a system that is always and constantly stacked against her. The question and answer of a therapy session is one I haven’t seen in a short story before, and to my mind, and in Coleman’s hands, it makes for an effective epistolary form
Jack Houston is a writer, parent and public-library worker from London whose short fiction has appeared in a few places, and also been shortlisted for the Brick Lane Bookshop Prize and the BBC National Short Story Award.
* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 2,600 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com.
* A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs, author of two novels, Randall, and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He is Programme Director of 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!
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