A Personal Anthology, by Kenneth Maitland

“Somebody somewhere knows something, right?”
Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday

“Someone has seen her. Someone always sees a girl with forty thousand dollars.”
Martin Balsam in Psycho

“I know what happens.
I read the book.”
Donald Fagen, ‘The Goodbye Look’

The third-person, filmic, or otherwise unrestricted or conditionally “involved” telling of any story, in any form, is haunted by questions like: Who knows this, and how? How’s he seeing it? Through what set of eyes? If “he’s” immaterial, theoretical, and bodiless, how—and why—does he position himself in the characters’ space, on their plane? And what’s his reason for speaking once he’s there, for telling us about all that’s gone down?

In the well-told story, the narrator’s seeing, knowing, and speaking of are so closely integrated, so logically, psychologically, and rhythmically interdependent, they seem to the audience to consist of the same irreducible substance—the stuff of “telling” itself.

My selections here, for A Personal Anthology, exemplify this ideal of integration of function at the level of narrative disclosure. These twelve stories leave me with the eerie sense that the narrators—all mostly “absent” third persons, notice—see more than they tell, and speak with the blunt assurance of someone who doesn’t quite know what they’re talking about.

In making my selections, I preemptively excluded much richly integrative storytelling by favorite writers working in short forms, such as H. von Kleist, G. Flaubert, H.P. Lovecraft, Isak Dinesen, Louise de Vilmorin, and even film scenarists like Manoel de Oliveira and Werner Herzog, who could not, I decided, be fairly thought of as writers of “the short story.”

I’ve also sought to favor writers who, with one exception, don’t already have much presence in A Personal Anthology.

Spoilers follow throughout.

‘The Hunter’ by E. L. Doctorow (First published in Lives of the Poets, Random House 1984. Later included in All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories, Random House 2011)

I’d prefer the story had been told in the past tense, like a true campfire tale, but otherwise ‘The Hunter’ is perfection—one of the very few shorts that I, as a writer, am jealous of. The present tense of the narration is meant, I guess, to generate the atmosphere of “dream,” to soften the light of forensic retrospect, and it’s a choice we can easily enough forgive.

Everything in ‘The Hunter’ is plainly told. Nothing is “defined” or insisted upon. No “point” is made, yet the significance of the story’s every action seems terrifyingly clear. The character of the schoolteacher, her students, and the bus driver with whom she tests the possibility of a romance are never boxed into conventional narrative relationships. They seem, that is, simply and plainly to do.

All we can say, at the end, is that there’s something very, very wrong with the teacher’s mind.

She seems to me a character wandered over from the world of Sherwood Anderson into something like the world of Raymond Carver, though the story takes place in the East, a depressed mill town locked in an eternal gray winter.

The telling relies on an eerie disconnect between the schoolteacher’s actions, cycling as they do between stasis and mania—breaking into sudden runs along the road, watching for the bus that isn’t coming, squatting to pee when you least expect—and the gently “controlling” voice of the third person forever recentering, bringing the reader back into some frame of stable reference.

But I’m not doing it justice. The effect is more subtle than anything I can think to say about it. Another way of saying it might be: The teacher’s actions, as “understood” by the narrator, often seem independent of any particular do-er, are reduced to what the Russian fairytale theorists called “functions.”

Anyway, the teacher, our hero, enjoys secretly cultivating a mystique about herself among her students, her audience. “The mystery of her,” she surmises, “is created in their regard.” As any teacher will tell you, teaching is essentially an ongoing game of perception management, which is a fancy say of saying “of seduction.”

The love story part of ‘The Hunter’ is so thin you suspect it’s included only to indicate its own irrelevance. By the time it comes around you sense there’s no possibility for this young woman to have anything like a “normal” relationship with anyone—not even a one-night stand.

The story has two climaxes: a marvelously choreographed moment in which the teacher realizes she’s being shot at by a hunter at the far end of a snowy field, and the final scene—a masterpiece of muted terror—in which the teacher, quite unharmed, gathers her students toward herself for a group photograph. The confused weeping of one child, resisting the young woman’s embrace, tells us everything the narrator refuses to “know.”

‘Playland’ by Ron Hansen (First published in the short-lived 1980s revival of John Gardner’s MSS magazine. Collected in Nebraska, Atlantic Monthly Press 1989)

Most of the telling of this story consists of a lush, sprawling account of the amusement park of the title—a fantastical pastiche of the long-vanished, early twentieth- and midcentury American pleasure parks and World’s Fairs. For its millions of visitors each year, Playland “represented gracious fellowship, polite surprise, good cheer”…“tinged with the near-panic of erotic desire.”

Reading Hansen’s coy-on-purpose descriptions is akin to lazily flipping the pages of a photo album of somebody else’s fondest memories of artificial beachfronts and turquoise swimming pools, vintage postcards and “then and now” comparisons of hotdog stands and tents with roofs peeked like Oriental palaces. No word spoken or gesture made doesn’t seem to come straight from an old movie on TMC, some unforgettable yet imperfectly remembered one-liner or gag.

But all in Playland is not cotton candy. Something scary lurks beneath these pristine surfaces, like the giant snapping turtle suddenly hauled from the diving pool. Six or seven pages of world-building yields to the actual story part of the story, a love triangle among a bombshell named Bijou, her cousin Frankie—a B actor with A-list looks—and Gordon, her war-wounded G.I. boyfriend, who vaguely longs “to do something masculine.”

“Gordon danced with her and Frankie cut in” is the simple action approached and re-approached by Hansen along a dozen avenues of offhand appeal.

The telling of the story is remarkable in that it maintains a true coyness of style without ever becoming cloying or dislikable. Hansen has a knack for making you enjoy guessing what he’s up to, exactly how deeply involved he, as storyteller, is in bringing about his narrator’s effects.

‘Tropicana’ by William T. Vollmann (First published in Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs, Pantheon Books, 1991)

Vollmann writes with the confidence and unconcern of a man who’s lived a great deal, too much and too wildly to waste time theorizing, justifying, or making sentences pretty. He just has to get it all out and let the question of its import be somebody else’s problem.

‘Tropicana’ rushes forward like notes put down about a story to be written in some indefinite future. Nothing about the telling of it—the text—seems “finished.” Descriptions (“The light was very soft and serious, like a tweed suit”) are disposed of without a care. Paragraphs tremble at the edge of their own disintegration. Descriptions are stupid, like ones you’d find in a kiddie book.

What’s the story about? Whatever it is, it’s perfectly clear and sensible at the level of action, but the telling won’t surrender the action to “interpretation.” (Read it and see for yourself.)

The plot: A government-backed U.S. corporation sends one of its agents to the kingdom of Tropicana, a rum-soaked paradise of mangrove thickets and coral reefs. They send along his secretary, too, for the fun of it—a young woman who looks and acts in my imagination like Joyce DeWitt from Three’s Company, though the character isn’t really described.

In a haze of perpetual tipsiness, the agent, our hero, passes his Tropicana days trailing an “informant”—informing to whom? on whose behalf? about what?—while amusing himself on the side by setting up his secretary with a noncommittal Tropicani woman.

Under the antics, on the story’s hurry to a climax of throwaway violence (which might “mean” anything or nothing), there’s a sadness whose source you can’t isolate, like the kind you sense in the poems of Emily Dickinson.

The images, flavor, and ideas of ‘Tropicana’ (“Won’t you pour me a Cuban Breeze, Gretchen?”) sharply recall Donald Fagen’s ‘The Goodbye Look’ (1982), so much so you wonder if Vollmann drew on Fagen’s material. (Fagen himself confessed to a panicky fear of being accused of plagiarism.)

‘William Wilson’ by Edgar Allan Poe (First published in The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1840, Carey & Hart 1839. First collected in The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. 1, J. S. Redfield, Clinton Hall, 1850)

This artfully sloppy nightmare of seeing oneself from the outside operates, naturally, between two poles—the excessive description of hero’s boyhood schoolhouse in the first half of the telling, and the too-concise account of his (and the other guy’s) grownup adventures in the second.

Exactly where the telling of the story “should be” brief and efficient, by conventional wisdom, Poe’s first-person hero strands us in a tangle of description—the verbal-visual account of an irrationally rambling old schoolhouse, anticipating the drawings of M. C. Escher and the extradimensional Backrooms of 4chan. Freud himself would run screaming from the place, if he could find the exit.

Then later, as the story is just about to reach its operatic climax, the telling of it, the narration, violently contracts, like a sphincter taken unawares. Where the telling, by conventional wisdom, “should” do justice to the hero’s ongoing big-boy adventures, his going forth into the broad world of the Continent in pursuit of his Shadow self, the action collapses into a curt digest where all is a confusion of velvet draperies and crystal chandeliers, where it’s always a ball at midnight or a gambling den at two in the morning, all beauty marks on ladies’ chins and daggers drawn behind doors.

Leaving only the motifs of a fantastical, arabesque Europe, the actual action in this sequence is glossed over, an afterthought only dimly inhabited by “characters,” as if the telling of the story itself were the character, the only actor worth watching.

The stodgy, decidedly un-sprawling Manor House School in North London, which Poe attended in his youth and which has since been replaced by an equally anonymous-looking, dumb, all-purpose block, was the real-life basis for the schoolhouse in ‘William Wilson,’ and resembles it not at all.

‘Another Minotaur’ by Paul West (First published in New Directions 36, 1978. Collected in The Universe and Other Fictions, The Overlook Press 1988)

I’ll quote here from my notes to the voice actor from whom my company commissioned a performance of West’s ruthlessly precise little story: “I need the merest suggestion of a Japanese accent and strong Japanese pronunciations of proper names and loan words (in italics). I just re-read the story this morning over breakfast and will remark here on its style. The pacing is strange, with each sentence something like a self-contained paragraph. There's little sense of ‘flow’ (thank God) between one sentence and the next. As with traditional Japanese culture, the style is more formal than ‘expressive.’ The gore and spectacular violence of the first half of the story should not be overplayed in performance. It abides in the voice of objective fact no different in tone and texture from other, more serene imaginary ‘facts’ belonging to the second half of the story—less ‘violent,’ sure, but just as fantastical…

“Fortunately, the story is quite short—only eight pages—so maintaining a calculated style of performance shouldn’t exhaust you. You’ll also notice a complete absence of dialogue. Oddly—and here you have to use your imagination—the story is told by... the story itself. The narrative voice steps forward and proclaims itself “the biography of Lt. He-Setsu.” (Too arty, so deemphasize.)”

‘Another Minotaur’ tells of a Japanese Airforce officer during WWII who, on an island of no strategic importance, finds himself the sole survivor of a freak attack by saltwater crocodiles. After the war, this man, He-Setsu, spends his life trying to complete the design of his own unrealized destruction, planning, building, and losing himself inside a literal maze of ice.

As with ‘William Wilson,’ West’s story comes off as a brilliant game, almost a gag, of warped proportion, with a deliberate lopsidedness in the narrative’s compartments of attention and interest. But where much of Poe displaces plotted action with the pagan rhythm of storytelling itself—shimmering with life but “going” nowhere—West bodies forth rhythm and music through action.

(A Japanese-speaking friend of mine assures me the lieutenant’s name, He-Setsu, suggests “secret or esoteric theory,” or perhaps “doctrine” or “precept”—a “given” rule.)

‘The Judge’s Wife’ by Isabel Allende (First published as ‘La mujer del juez’ in Cuentos de Eva Luna, Plaza & Janes (Spain) 1989. English translation first published in Granta 21, June 1987, and available to read here; collected in The Stories of Eva Luna, Atheneum 1991)

The more you ask of ‘The Judge’s Wife,’ the more it gives you. It’s a story with all the time in the world to let itself be enjoyed, unpacked, explored, retold—not a “deceptively” simple tale, but one mysteriously so. The unadorned third-person narration, which leaves no doubt as to what’s happening at the practical level of action, holds itself weightless between extremes of experience, with every psycho-dramatic potential coiled like a spring within its own opposite: submission within defiance, renunciation within embrace, confinement within escape, plunder within self-sacrifice, freedom within fate, the “good” mother within the “bad.”

Every scene, no matter how small, is a plot twist. Everything gains traction through some deeply embedded logical contradiction. Every major thematic interest of Western consciousness, except war, comes into play, yet the story never seems “busy.”

An analytical comparison of ‘The Judge’s Wife,’ the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and Petronius’ ‘The Widow of Ephesus’ would be a fine use of time.

‘The Private People’ by John O’Hara (First published in The Saturday Evening Post, December 17, 1966. Collected in And Other Stories, Random House 1968)

The voice of the story seems to proceed not from a single speaker-knower but from a sprawling, anonymous milieu, the delicious air of New York snobbery itself, whose texture and color has been mellowed by cross-currents of gossip, debriefing, and fish stories among midcentury high rollers and Uptown hangers-on. Everyone who’s anyone knows, indeed makes it his business to know, quite intimately, the “private people”—the grandly declining, indefinably “accomplished,” unapproachable people—even the doorman hailing you a cab, reciting by rote the hero’s birth date and Zodiac sign.

The private people are the ones you’ll dimly remember having “heard of” in twenty years. Whenever they’re in New York they need to get to L.A., if only for the weekend, for a premiere, a love connection, or an appointment at a private hospital where the patients are referred to as “guests” and presented with delicately line-itemed bills for tennis games and long-distance calls. And when they’re in L.A., the private people, they’re always needing to get “back East,” where they may be glimpsed but never seen by the vulgarly “public” people, the unanointed in whose memories they may become legend.

But then O’Hara’s narrator lets us in on painful little exchanges no third party in the story could possibly access. The point is even emphasized when a key witness to one scene excuses himself from the back of a limousine and gets up front with the driver, leaving the hero and his wife to hash it out behind a wall of soundproof glass. “If I read about myself in a novel,” the wife says, “I’d say to myself: there’s a woman we can all do without.”

‘The Mysteries of the Joy Rio’ by Tennessee Williams (First published in Hard Candy, New Directions, 1954. Collected therein)

Mr. Gonzales, a middle-aged repairman of clocks, had, as a youth, been taken in by an old German, Mr. Kroger, whose clock shop it was. The Joy Rio of the title is a New Orleans opera house turned B-movie theater, rather near the shop. The theater’s derelict upper balconies have by the time of the present action—the 1950s, we suppose—become gay cruising grounds, and in these gloomy regions, haunted by memories of shame and tenderness, ecstasy and tears, there will be a melancholy reunion of old lovers.

The most remarkable thing about this quietly noble, wistful yard, written by one of the twentieth century’s greatest and still most popular and entertaining serious dramatists, is that it contains practically no direct dialogue, no living verbal exchange between characters, which is the very stuff stage drama consists of. The telling of the story relies on a third-person narrator who intriguing refers to himself as “I” now and then. It is, of course, Williams himself, telling not of men he has known but knowing well the emotional underworld through which they moved.

‘The Shout’ by Robert Graves (First published as a chapbook by Charles Elkin Mathews, November 1929. Collected and anthologized variously and sporadically, most “officially” in Collected Short Stories, Doubleday 1964)

A story of the “natural” supernatural that gives you the creeps in that particularly proper British way—equal parts sunny cricket lawn and desolate, grey-skied beach. Much of the effect proceeds from the complex and subtle framing, the set-up in which the (primary) first-person narrator, ostensibly speaking “as” Graves, embeds himself behind a number of semi-translucent scrims of reference—indirect discourse, story-within-story, total recall of other people’s monologues, etc. We get that tingly “I heard this from a friend of mine, about a friend of his” feeling.

The plot: A globe-trotting bullshit artist, who may or may not be the story’s secondary narrator, its “monologuer,” claims to have learned from the Aboriginals a way of shouting that can drive the shout’s hearers insane, and even kill them. “I’ll shout the ears off your head,” he says. Is it a threat or a sales pitch? Or a go at seduction?

You, the reader, can never sort out what parts of the story, told among inmates at an idyllic, resort-like asylum, belong to fact and which to exaggeration, which to delusion or hope and which to artful mis-remembering or misunderstanding, with each character, either present or narrated-into-being, offering multiple angles into (and on) the action, but Graves’s art is so smart you never too-consciously consider this when reading.

The story—any story—has one personality. But this personality may be fractured into any number of discrete, seemingly autonomous personalities—sometimes those of characters, sometimes of bodiless, editorializing voices, sometimes only of voiceless points-of-view, attitudes, or ways of looking. The prism of the telling of the story, its verbal-visual mechanism, breaks the pure white light of story into a splash of competing colors. In ‘The Shout’ this fact is made rather more plain than in, say, Allende’s ‘The Judge’s Wife,’ in which our view of the action seems more soberly managed by a single, hovering, reasonable mind.

At the end of ‘The Shout,’ one of the narrators is literally struck dead by lightning, “a pang of fire,” leaving the other guy to tell of it—to characterize it, even, as “indescribable.” So we’re left to rely on the word of the less mad of two madmen, and that one, having been busy keeping the cricket score, was only half-listening to what the other guy was saying anyway.

The final word belongs to yet a third narrator, arguably the story’s hero or “main character” (stupid term). “I couldn’t stand the way he looked at you,” the hero says to his wife. (But not everything husbands say should be believed.)

Since selecting it for inclusion in my personal anthology, I learn that Graves distilled ‘The Shout’ from a significantly longer text which his publishers rejected. No trace of this ur-text is known to survive, so no points of comparison are possible, though I sense much of the surviving version’s trickery of perspective is due to Grave’s radical excision of expository passages, elaborations, and “justifications”—so thank God for heartless editors.

Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1978 film version of the story, a masterpiece of adaptation, does more justice to the confusion than might seem possible.

‘Memories of the Space Age’ by J. G. Ballard (First published in Interzone, Summer 1982. Collected in Memories of the Space Age, Arkham House, 1988)

Ballard, one of the most authentically original writers of the last millennium, and one whose full significance we won’t feel until the year 2133, here weaves a mesh of unlikely similes, overloaded qualifiers, rhythmic, incantatory subordinate clauses, and rhetorical questions addressed to the void yet uncannily fused to concrete particulars, as we find them in poetry. Even in his fiction, readers feel a direct connection with Ballard’s obsessive intellect—his mind, his personality. The author and the narrator seem to be in free conversation, bypassing the storyteller. There’s no pretense of mediating “realism.” Ballard is an essayist playing around in the forms made available to him by what we call “fiction.” (The first-person narrator-hero of his most famous novel, Crash, he names casually after himself.)

The story of ‘Memories’ is of a semi-apocalyptic Adam and Eve, a scientist and his lover-wife holed up in an abandoned Cape Kennedy hotel, in the wake of some vaguely defined “time disaster” which has warped the very contours of duration.

A pool diver is held motionless in space. Rocket-ships and tennis courts lie rotting in the sun. Zoo animals drowse in their cages. And a small antique plane, like a giant dragonfly, drones perpetually overhead. “Time had flowed out of Florida, as it had from the Space Age. After a brief pause, like a trapped film reel running free, it sped on again, rekindling a kinetic world.”

You don’t remember what exactly “happens” in this story, but you can’t forget being there, in Ballard’s world, among the disused runways and prehistoric vegetation, with all human action arranged along lines of wet-dreaming and compulsive violence. Offhand pop-culture and fine-art references get mixed up in your head with aeronautical and medical jargon as the characters pursue their lunatic goal of achieving “absolute flight,” an escape from the “primitive mental structure” of time by penetrating “a flurry of charged air” (all while trying to avenge—or ritually reenact—“the first murder ever committed in space”).

‘The Paperhanger’ by William Gay (First published in Harper’s, February 2000. Collected in I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, Free Press 2002)

I love Gay’s story, but there’s something fundamentally wrong with it. It’s about a young handyman, kind of a hippie, working on sundry, more or less cosmetic jobs at the suburban house of an affluent Pakistani doctor and his wife.

One day, the doctor’s small daughter goes missing. The paperhanger, our hero, and other workers are suspected, of course, but quickly cleared for lack of evidence and opportunity. Where could the child have gone, in full view of the mother, in the ordinary light of day? Maybe the girl just wandered off, sure—but where to?

Years pass. The doctor, who believes his daughter hasn’t disappeared so much as “gone into the abstract,” degenerates into a sloppy drunk performing unnecessary surgeries, while his wife, stripped to nothing by her grief, seeks something like comfort with the paperhanger.

Gay’s style has an offhand, “ten-years-ago-this-very-night” campfire feel that elevates the reader to an audience—draws us in, almost bodily, toward the speaker. “Down the ridge was an abandoned graveyard, if you knew where to look.”

Talking with the mother of the vanished child, the paperhanger alludes to the apparent source legend of Ambrose Bierce’s ‘On the Difficulty of Crossing a Field,’ trying either to comfort the woman or slyly torment her. She, whose English is imperfect, becomes for him the ideal audience.

The twist ending, in which the paperhanger restores the child to her mother, is doubly frustrating. Not only have we too easily (but too late) guessed this very thing was coming, the irony of it is addressed to the audience too directly, imposing on us—by force—a new way of seeing, a “revelation” made to us with our eyes pinned open.

Every audience wants to be surprised at the end, sure, but wants it only as the result of having been told the truth since the beginning. In Gay’s otherwise engrossing and spooky ‘Paperhanger,’ we discover most unpleasantly, too disagreeably close to the last minute, that the third-person narrator has been withholding from us crucial facts, that he knew not only what he wasn’t telling but what he wasn’t even letting us suppose was inevitable.

Yet the story intrigues me. Its failure is as instructive and “enlarging” as any lesser story’s success.

‘The Forest of the South’ by Caroline Gordon (First published in The Maryland Quarterly, January 1944. Collected in The Forest of the South, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945)

Now compare ‘The Paperhanger’ to Gordon’s story, whose twist ending is carefully integrated into everything that comes before it. The more times you read ‘The Forest of the South,’ the deeper “the twist” digs into the general body of the material.

Near the end of the Civil War, a Union officer, Lt. Munford, having set up headquarters in a captured plantation, begins an uneasy courtship with the daughter of the place, inviting her to stroll with him in her own estate gardens, per his CO’s instructions and with her father’s blood still fresh on the house’s parquet floor.

If I could choose a musical pairing for this story, it would be the piano transcription of the “meditation” music from Massenet’s Thais, played with kitsch sincerity and slightly out of tune—music to go riding in the carriage by of a Sunday afternoon, with your gloved hands folded in your lap, one side or the other of hereditary madness.

In Gordon’s belle, Miss Mazereau, reside the unspeakable “minor key” qualities Margaret Mitchell would never have allowed her Miss Scarlett. Where Scarlett, rising up through sheer force of modern personality, triumphant in defeat, “was not beautiful, though men seldom realized it when caught by her charm,” the Yankee suitor in Gordon’s story “studies” Miss Mazereau’s “pale, down-bent face, wondering wherein lay its attraction.” Gordon’s “Scarlett” both re-actualizes the then-still-popular fantasy of the Southern belle and inflects it with an unseemly something no gentleman would call by its name.

The genealogy of the characters is as tangled as the greenery that engulfs the ruins of the old house adjacent to Miss Mazereau’s, where conceals himself the girl’s “sane” male cousin, identical to her in the recklessness of his conduct. He wears the uniform of the enemy.

Some numbers to ponder:

Gordon’s story takes place about the year 1866
Massenet’s opera premiered in 1894
Gone with the Wind was published in 1936
Gordon’s story first appeared in 1944

* Kenneth Maitland is a writer in Richmond, Virginia. His book of lyrics, Blood Hyphen, won the 2015 FIELD Poetry Prize, and his feature script, Lynnhaven, based on his own short story (Your Impossible Voice, Issue 23), won the 2024 Virginia Film Office’s screenwriting award and is in preproduction. His novella, Joan of Domrémy, about a decisive episode in the early career of Joan of Arc, is forthcoming from Blackstone Audio. For a decade he’s been obsessively writing a book about story “as such,” its nature and function, drawing on the work of theorists and practitioners from antiquity to the present. On Instagram and Gmail: kennethjmaitland.

* 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.