A Personal Anthology, by Jayne Marshall

This isn’t a scandalous selection, but outrage was my jumping off point for this personal anthology. I’m an editor at a publisher that produces textbooks for Spanish teens learning English. Because of our demographic, each time a famous person is mentioned in one of the books, part of the editorial process now includes searching the person’s name + ‘scandal’. Just to be sure.

This crossed my mind when thinking of which short stories to include here; should I employ the same editorial process as I do at work? I asked myself. And perhaps also because the first author that came to mind (literally, he appeared there without me actually having to think) was Vladimir Nabokov.

‘The Enchanter’ by Vladimir Nabokov (Included in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, Penguin, 1975)

I fell in love with Lolita because of the way Nabokov uses language (This later developed into a full-blown fixation on multilingual authors and a particular use of English described as ‘native and foreign both’.) and also because obsession interests me greatly. When, many years later, the novel was included on a reading list for a creative writing master’s I was studying, I was genuinely surprised at people’s shock. Not that I didn’t notice the abuse, just that, to me, it wasn’t what most struck me about the novel. ‘The Enchanter’ preceded Lolita and they share the same brilliant, twisted premise: marry the ailing widowed mother of a young girl in order to later become her sole guardian. But what initially really fascinated me about this story, was how it came about. In Author’s Note One of ‘The Enchanter’, Nabokov writes: “As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” That this was where the idea for ‘The Enchanter’ and Lolita began, both makes a lot of sense and no sense, which is how the writing process feels a lot of the time, and also how the best ideas are born.

‘So Long’ by Lucia Berlin (Included in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015)

From one multilingual writer to another – I discovered Lucia Berlin by chance when I misconstrued the title of her posthumous short story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women. I read it as instructional, like: how to clean women. No idea why that would attract my attention, that would probably require some regression therapy or hypnosis. I fell in love with her writing, encapsulated for me by her idea of ‘emotional truth’ as really the only writing rule to live by. And also by her eschewing of the line between fiction and reality with this undeniable reasoning: “The story’s the thing.” She inspired the name of my own Substack via one of my favourite lines of all time: “Of course I have a self here, and a new family, new cats, new jokes. But I keep trying to remember who I was in English.” It comes from the beautiful, melodic short story ‘So Long’ that recounts her mad, complicated, rich and fascinating life. In many ways, it stands for all lives.

‘How to Become a Writer’ by Lorrie Moore (Published in Self-Help, Alfred A. Knopf, 1985, and collected in The Collected Stories, Faber, 2008)

From one woman whose name begins with L to another. Lorrie Moore’s collection Self Help was the catalyst for me to start writing. The first story I ever wrote, I wrote in the second person because I found Moore’s use of it so clever. Which it is. Looking back now, I realise it was also about finding a way into writing that didn’t feel as confidently aggressive as the first person because I wasn’t confident or aggressive. It was like I could side-eye my topics that way before finding a way to sidle up to the first person. Perhaps for that reason, my pick from this collection is ‘How to Become a Writer’, with the great opening line: “First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably.” Who hasn’t been there? Or put another way: How many movie star/astronauts do you know?

‘Advice on How to Become an Internationally Famous Filmmaker’ by Pedro Almodóvar (Included in The Patty Diphusa Stories and other writings, Faber and Faber, 1991)

From one story in the second person to another – mi querido Pedro Almodóvar. He is about 93.5% of the reason I ended up living in Madrid. I love his films and I also love how much he loves books. They utterly furnish his films, both literally and as co-conspirators, like in The Flower of My Secret where he lovingly borrows plot elements from Dorothy Parker’s short story ‘The Lovely Leave’. Or more literally, as with his short film version of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice, or Sigrid Nunez in The Room Next Door. He has written a few books. This story, taken from an early collection (his first, I believe), is enchanting for exactly the reasons he states in the introduction: “… all that remains is to ask you to read this book with the same lack of pretension with which it was written.” I particularly liked ‘Advice on How to Become an Internationally Famous Filmmaker’ for, like Lorrie Moore, also narrating an artist in the making and speaking to those of us with a lot of crippling self-doubt: “To pay for your studies and room and board, your uncle takes you on as a brick-layer’s apprentice. And you gotta smile like it’s all you ever dreamed of […] A voice from within tells you: “Whatever you do, you won’t be able to escape your mediocre destiny. Never in the history of film has there been a director who was previously a brick-layer.””

‘The Mysterious Chambers’ by Washington Irving (First published in Tales of the Alhambra, Carey & Lea, 1832)

From Almodóvar’s coming-of-age Madrid to the sultry south and Andalucia. When I happened upon this book at Madrid’s Sunday flea market, I picked it up more for its cheap price than anything else. Taken as a whole the book is a bit rambling, something which Irving recognised when he republished it with edits after a ‘crude’ first edition had already hit bookshops. But it is as enchanting as the Alhambra itself. It’s like entering a world within a world within a world, as Irving shacks up in this abandoned palace overlooking the city of Granada and then goes on to create his own world within it. ‘The Mysterious Chambers’ is the best example of this for me, as, not content with already living within a fairytale, he discovers a hidden door that leads to sumptuous chambers once destined for Elizabetta of Farnese, wife of Phillip V (If that is to be believed, Irving was given to embellishments – who wouldn’t be in that setting?) and decides to set up camp there, moving from his furnished and serviced apartment in the habitable part of the grounds to this mysterious chamber that has been shuttered up for decades, maybe longer. If you are anything like me, reading stories with a strong sense of place immediately makes me want to visit them. After writing this, I was compelled to book a trip to Granada in May. I think everyone should do the same. Or failing that, read these magical tales.

‘The Gnomes’ by Jorge de Cascante (Included in An Entire City Bathed in Human Blood, Blackie Books, 2022)

Let’s stay in Spain a little longer, in the company of Jorge de Cascante. I discovered Jorge when I bought a different book of his, an anthology of short stories that he edited called The Big Book of Cats. I loved his introduction, both for his writing style, his humour and most of all his love of cats. Which I assumed to be all-consuming until I discovered he had also edited the anthologies The Big Book of Dogs and The Big Book of Satan. However, his collection An Entire City Bathed in Human Blood won me back around with its narratives both animal, human and somewhere in between. ‘The Gnomes’ is just two short pages, but takes us from Madrid’s Retiro park, to the suburbs of the capital, to a strange underworld of gnomes. It exemplifies how good de Cascante is at drawing us into a place human and otherwise. And he makes that seem very reasonable and natural. Which makes perfect sense to me.

‘The Cat’ by Colette, trans. Antonie White (First published in French as La Chatte in 1933. First published in English in Gigi and The Cat, Penguin, 1958)

From one cat person to another. Colette’s love triangle involving a cat, is not only a great premise, but single-handedly makes literary my deeply uncool love of cats, for which I am thankful.

‘Some Other, Better Otto’ by Deborah Eisenberg (First published in The Yale Review, 1 January 2003, and available to read here; collected in My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead, HarperPress, 2008)

From one love story to another. Are you a romantic? I’m pretty sure I am, dangerous as that is. And I get more so the older I get, even though I think it’s meant to work the other way around. I first read this story in Granta’s anthology New American Stories, and then again in another anthology My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead, a selection of love stories edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. So who am I to prevent it from making the hattrick? But that, of course, isn’t the reason I want it here. It’s because it is so very lovely. The hope we all have, that someone deeply good will love us despite ourselves is what keeps the world turning, our hearts beating.

‘Baster’ by Jeffrey Eugenides (First published in The New Yorker, June 17, 1996, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Fresh Complaint, FSG, 2017)

From one Jeffrey Eugenides to another Jeffrey Eugenides. When I read The Virgin Suicides, I couldn’t believe how well Eugenides – a middle-aged man - was able to portray the world of the teenage girl. Also, those uncontrollable crushes you have at that age (and afterwards). Another thing I like about Jeff is that he isn’t particularly prolific. As someone who writes slowly, this appeals to me. So when the short story collection Fresh Complaint came out it was many Christmases rolled into one. What I love about ‘Baster’ in particular (as well as how skilfully it is written and how funny it is) is the premise: a not particularly eligible man with bad teeth secretly in love with his old girlfriend inserts himself into her life forevermore by replacing the sperm of a much more eligible candidate (with excellent teeth) in the baster in her bathroom, which is charged ready for her to inseminate herself. I didn’t see it coming at all. But now you will, sorry about that.

‘From Stones to Stars’ by Rebecca Elson (Included in A Responsibility to Awe, Oxford Poets, 2001)

From a writer who stunned me by writing a world I knew so well to one who stunned me by allowing me to enter a world I assumed closed to me. This entry comes from a book of poetry, but it is a piece of prose, included at the end of the collection. Reading Elson was the first time I had ever witnessed a mind spanning the two worlds of art and science: she was both brilliant astrophysicist and stunning poet. Until then my own, limited little mind had assumed you could only do one or the other. Like here, is the ‘enterprise’ she speaks of her poetry or her research? “There are times when the enterprise seems mechanical, when the constraint to pursue the truth seems to suffocate the imagination.” As it says in the blurb on the back of the book, the extracts from her notebooks record the ways in which she refined her understanding of “The known human forces, love & hunger, fear and hope.” This extract allows a glimpse into her backstory, how such a mind was developed and what we can learn from it.

‘The Clothes They Stood Up In’ by Alan Bennett (First published in The London Review of Books, 28 November 1996 and available for subscribers to read here; collected in Four Stories, Profile Books, 2006)

My string of connections ends here, I can find no link between Elson and Bennett, other than they both came into my life not entirely through free will. Elson was on a reading list for that same creative writing master’s and Alan was an impulsive purchase in a charity shop. In Spain, where I live, it’s not all that easy to get hold of books in English, not in a physical bookshop anyway. My parents also live in Spain, in an area where a lot of British people live. And where there are British people, there are charity shops, it seems. Whenever I go and visit them I always hunt for books in English and that is how I found this collection. I love this story because it is so multilayered and also because it features lots of stuff. I also like stuff, like the stuff you can buy in charity shops, for example. But the idea that someone would plunder an entire apartment in order to recreate it exactly as it was in a storage facility is so random and intriguing as a premise, and also much more than the sum of its parts.

‘Walk Away Reneé’ by Billy Bragg (Included in A Lover Sings: Selected Lyrics, Faber and Faber, 2015)

A wildcard to end. I heard a rumour that the personal anthology permits the occasional piece of writing that isn’t strictly a short story. This, I guess, is a poem. Or a prose poem. Or is it a song? Billy Bragg speaks his words over Johnny Marr’s guitar, and it is one of my favourite pieces of writing of all time. I wanted to round out this anthology where I started – with obsession. As, in my reading and writing, it is a topic that has always surrounded me, book-ended me. Here it is in all its glory:

* Jayne Marshall holds a Master's degree in Creative Writing with Distinction from The University of Oxford. Her stories and essays have been published in anthologies and magazines around the world, including in Prairie Schooner (USA) and Transnational Literature (UK). She has also been nominated for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize. She is from the UK, but has lived in Madrid for 10 years. She works as an editor at a large Spanish publisher as well as being a freelance development editor with Modern Odyssey Books. She writes here: whoiaminspanish.substack.com

* 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 newly published in the US by 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.