A Personal Anthology, by Julian Girdham

I have been teaching teenagers English for almost 40 years, and my selection  here is of short stories which work well in the classroom. There are few more unforgiving audiences than schoolchildren, and so you can be sure these stories have survived that test. I have read all of them out loud: no-one is too old to close their eyes and listen, and a live audience really tests the quality of the writing.

Teachers are also actors, and stories provide such great performance opportunities, as long as your reading is servant to the story rather than drawing attention to itself. When you read a story out loud repeatedly over the years, you learn its shape intimately. Its rhythms become pleasurably familiar.

‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ by J.D. Salinger (First published in The New Yorker, January 1948. Collected in Nine Stories, Little Brown 1953, sometimes titled For Esmé – with Love and Squalor, and Other Stories)

Of course I first came to Salinger’s stories via The Catcher in the Rye, but whereas I have long stopped teaching that novel (it feels worn down now - overfamiliarity, or are there weaknesses in its DNA?), the stories are still fresh and often edgy. ‘For Esmé - with Love and Squalor’ is a heartbreaker. In the same collection ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ always grips a class. It provides lots of opportunities for voices when I’m reading it, especially the little girl Sibyl as she responds to the young man’s strange story of the fish who eat so many bananas they can’t get out of the ‘banana hole’. The shocking ending needs careful preparation in advance.

‘The Piano Tuner’s Wives’ by William Trevor (First published in The New Yorker, October 1995, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in After Rain, Viking, 1996)

William Trevor’s considerable output is extraordinary: such controlled writing, such understanding of the form. By coincidence he went to the school I teach in (under his real name, Trevor Cox), and I wrote a piece about his relationship with that school, a place which often appears in his writing, though not in this masterpiece. ‘The Piano Tuner’s Wives’ has all Trevor’s greatest strengths: such tenderness for the characters and their frailties, such skill in ranging across so many years in so few pages. What elevates it to greatness is the moment near the end when the second wife realises what direction she can go in, and the piano tuner tacitly lets her do this, with understanding, grace and generosity. You can see the realisation dawn in the classroom.

‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan (First published in The New Yorker in February 2010, and available to subscribers to read here; subsequently published in book form by Faber and Faber, 2010)

Is ‘Foster’ a short story or a novella? Claire Keegan doesn’t care, and nor should we. I have taught it many times, and it never fails.  For several years before, pleasingly, she gained a lot of notice, I thought that Keegan was one of the very best writers in Ireland. In ‘Foster’, pupils get a masterclass in careful writing and subtlety. Here too is a portrait of decency in a man, Mr Kinsella, like Furlong in the later short novel Small Things Like These. Irish literature has more than enough dreadful men. Indeed, in her recent short story ‘So Late in the Day’ Keegan presented one such horrendous misogynist. A favourite line from the novel, which we could apply more often in contemporary life:

‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’

A bonus with ‘Foster’: the Irish language film An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) is a wonderful adaptation.

‘Recitatif’ by Toni Morrison (First published in Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, ed. Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka, Morrow, 1983. Published in book form with an introductory essay by Zadie Smith, Chatto and Windus, 2022)

Toni Morrison’s only short story is fascinating: pupils are truly engaged in the voices of Twyla and Roberta: which is white, which black?  What is particularly impressive about Morrison’s writing is that the conceit is never tricksy – it justifies itself again and again as the story deepens, and like all the best short stories it has the amplitude of a novel. In the end the narrative turns out to be about us as much as the characters.

‘The Selfish Giant’ by Oscar Wilde (Published in The Happy Prince and other tales, 1888)

Every two or three years I read this out to 350 pupils in our school Chapel, usually coming up to Christmas. Our Chaplain reserves Wednesday mornings for talks and musical recitals rather than the standard service, and when I tell the school they are about to hear a children’s story I can see their scepticism. But then the simple and compelling narrative starts, and even the 18-year-olds succumb to its magic.

‘Daughters of the Late Colonel’ by Katherine Mansfield (First published in the London Mercury, May 1921. Collected in The Garden Party and other stories, Constable, 1922)

As a teacher reading this out loud in class, my job is to get across the delicate atmosphere in the house of Constantia and Josephine in the aftermath of their domineering father’s death. They are very different characters, but both it seems are simultaneously aging and childlike. The story is funny and tender, and a perfect demonstration of Mansfield’s delicate touch.

‘Aliens’ by David Leavitt (First published in Family Dancing, Knopf, 1984)

I started reading ‘Aliens’ to classes shortly after Family Dancing was published in the UK by King Penguin in 1986. I have received so many melodramatic stories over the years set in hospitals, especially about catastrophic injuries to characters. Pupils often assume sensational equals interesting. Leavitt’s story does indeed start in a hospital, as the narrator visits her damaged husband Alden while he undergoes rehabilitation after a car accident. But here the coolness of the narrative voice carries the distressing material easily. I also read it out to show how effectively the present tense can be used.

‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ by Geoffrey Chaucer (from The Canterbury Tales, c. 1386. Translation by Neville Coghill, Penguin, 1952)

Perhaps it is cheating to include the Wife of Bath’s Prologue as a conventional short story, but I have read it so often in class (in Neville Coghill’s translation: Middle English is a little too challenging for 16-year-olds), and it prompts delight and discussion. “What is it that women most desire?” is bound to generate classroom energy, especially if you teach both boys and girls as I do. Another opportunity to try out accents too, especially the old crone who, naturally, transforms into the gorgeous woman of every boy’s dreams. I’m determined to keep on teaching Chaucer, even if he slips off the school curriculum, and this story is a good entry point.

‘Cat in the Rain’ by Ernest Hemingway (First published in In Our Time, Boni and Liveright, 1925)

Few books in recent years are as helpful to English teachers as A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (in which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life) by George Saunders. His analyses of how stories ‘escalate’ is indeed masterful, and he suggests Hemingway’s story ‘Cat in the Rain’ for classroom use. As Saunders does with Chekhov’s ‘In the Cart’ at the start of his book, I hand out short sections of the Hemingway, and we discuss each before moving on to the next one:

This little story offers a great chance to talk, in particular, about escalation. It’s quiet but never sits still. There’s a subtle escalatory development in just about every paragraph.

This is a wonderful way for young people to explore the shape of a story.

‘How the Crab Apple Grew’ by Garrison Keillor (Originally a monologue for the radio show A Prairie Home Companion. First published in Leaving Home: a collection of Lake Wobegon Stories, Viking Penguin, 1987)

There was a time when I regularly read Lake Wobegon stories to classes. Keillor’s collection Leaving Home was a rich source: ‘The Speeding Ticket, ‘Life is Good’, ‘State Fair’ and ‘Where Did It Go Wrong?’ were always warmly received. ‘How the Crab Apple Grew’ opens with teenager Becky Diener writing a 750-word English assignment for her teacher, Miss Melrose, ‘Describe your backyard as if you were seeing it for the first time’:

How can you describe your backyard as if you’d never seen it? If you’d never seen it, you’d have grown up someplace else, and wouldn’t be yourself; you’d be someone else entirely, and how are you supposed to know what that person would think?

Good point. But then she does find a way to write about her backyard, and the crab apple tree planted in it by her father 10 years after he married her mother. What follows is lovely, and funny, and makes teenagers think about their own parents:

‘A backyard is a novel about us, and when we sit there on a summer day, we hear the dialogue and see the characters.’

‘Tell Me’ by Colm O’Gaora (From Giving Ground, Jonathan Cape, 1993)

‘Somehow, despite his denials, I knew that my father and I had been this way before’.

O’Gaora’s story of an adult son being shown the now abandoned home of his father’s lover is full of a sense of place, and is a helpful way to show pupils how description can deepen a story. It is all about suggestion - in that old formula, showing rather than telling. I like it especially for its ending, which shows how a story does not have to be explicit:

‘I turned back to face my father, and caught the trailing edge of that last cloud drifting across his face.
“Tell me,” I said.
And he did.

‘Zikora’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Amazon Kindle, 2020)

I often teach Adichie’s first novel Purple Hibiscus, and pupils really tune into the story of Kambili, her dominating father Eugene, and her transformation when she stays with his sister Ifuemo and her family. Adichie’s story ‘Zikora’ offers plenty of her novels’ pleasures. In a few pages, she manages to give a sense of a much wider life, opening out from the raw immediacy of the opening to a series of different connections, all of which are skilfully drawn.  

‘The Miraculous Candidate’ by Bernard MacLaverty (First published in Secrets and other stories, Blackstaff Press, 1977)

Bernard MacLaverty’s career is long and distinguished. His recent collection Blank Pages shows that in his early 80s his standards are as high as ever. Story after story compels you to relish it through to its natural ending, and then to start the next. ‘The Miraculous Candidate’ is almost 50 years old, and I read it out at the end of every year to my own candidates who are about to face into the last English exam of their school careers. Fourteen-year-old John is sitting his science exam, but receives a paper that means nothing to him and leaves him in a state of desperate panic. So as his granny advised, he prays to the patron saint of examinations, St Joseph of Cupertino, with unexpected results. This always prompts laughter, the kind that comes from pent-up tension.

Julian Girdham has taught English at secondary school in Dublin for almost 40 years. He organises conferences for teachers, and often speaks at them, as well as delivering training via webinars. He writes on books, teaching and education generally at www.juliangirdham. His Fortnightly newsletter on these topics has been issued since 2016, and is now on Substack at

* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 2,900 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!

* 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.