A Personal Anthology, by Marni Appleton

Before my short story collection was published, it was part of a PhD thesis on ‘postfeminist feeling in contemporary women’s short stories’. In my PhD, I mainly looked at short stories about girls, a word which I use in a deliberately ambiguous way to refer to anyone who feels or has ever felt themselves to be part of girl culture. The stories I have selected for my personal anthology all have something to say about girlhood. As such, themes such as danger, sex, love, friendship and family recur across my selection. But perhaps, even more than those things, each of these stories is preoccupied with the fantasy of other possible lives – lives that could have been lived, those that might yet be lived. This capacity for imagining oneself anew, for changing, for grasping for something bigger, is something I associate with the liminal period of girlhood – but it is also something I associate with the short story. It is a thrilling form, both to read and write, dense with feeling and with possibility. I hope at least one of my chosen stories will speak to you and draw you into its world.

‘Los Angeles’ by Emma Cline (First published in Granta’s Best Young American Novelists 2017, and available for subscribers to read here; collected in Daddy, Chatto & Windus, 2020)

‘Los Angeles’ tells the story of Alice, a young woman who has moved to the city to follow her dream of becoming an actor. She spends her days working in a clothing store, taking acting classes and running on the beach, until one day a younger colleague tells her about a new way to make money – and perhaps reclaim a sense of control over her own life. I must have read this story hundreds of times – carefully examining the way Emma Cline builds heart-pounding tension, writes in spare, precise prose, and considers femininity as a source of currency and power.

‘The Empty the Empty the Empty’ by Jenny Zhang (First published in Diagram, and available to read online here; collected in Sour Heart, Bloomsbury, 2017)

Jenny Zhang’s short story collection Sour Heart is vivid, gross and hilarious – and ‘The Empty the Empty the Empty’ is no exception. It follows a nine-year-old girl, Lucy, whose youthful enthusiasm is played for laughs: “I lived, breathed, and exuded mind-boggling, head-spinning, neck-craning, heart-pounding, ravishing beauty. I was the best looking girl in fourth grade.” Yet as the story unfolds, we learn that Lucy is capable of acts of cruelty against the other girls in her life – both intentional and unintentional. The story ramps up to its horrifying climax, and the gap between Lucy’s understanding of the increasingly adult world around her and its consequences widens to a point of no return.

‘Head to Toe’ by Abigail Ulman (Published in Hot Little Hands, Spiegel & Grau/Penguin, 2016)

Much like ‘The Empty the Empty the Empty’, this story from Abigail Ulman’s collection Hot Little Hands explores the complexities of girl friendships. The best friends in this story are Australian teenagers who are incredibly bored with their privileged lives – filled with shopping, boys, parties and occasional drug taking. The girls break out of their lethargy by revisiting a horse-riding camp they attended as younger girls, where they enjoy taking on the role of big sisters to their roommates at the camp and offering advice. This is an exquisitely written story about the liminal period of girlhood where the child’s impulse to play and pretend coexists with the desire to experiment with more adult behaviours.

‘Blue 4eva’ by Saba Sams (Published in Send Nudes, 2021 and available online on The Guardian, here)

Saba Sams’ sun-drenched coming-of-age holiday story won the BBC National Short Story Prize in 2022. It’s a worthy winner – exploring class, family, sexuality and desire with a light touch.

‘Would Like to Meet’ by May-Lan Tan (First published in Things to Make and Break, CB Editions, 2014. New edition from Sceptre, 2018)

At the start of this story, struggling artist Vivien is robbed at knifepoint where she works, in a gift shop. This brush with death affects her profoundly – though at first, she doesn’t know how quite to express it. Eventually, she is compelled to respond to an advertisement listed in a magazine by a couple who are looking for a “conscious female” to join them. This is an elegant, moving story about loneliness and the fantasies we make up to get ourselves through difficult times.

‘The Weak Spot’ by Sophie Mackintosh (First published online by Granta, 2016, and available to read here)

The first time I read this story, I could literally feel my brain firing with ideas. Through the invention of a dystopian world in which teenage girls are trained to murder men from a young age in order to protect themselves, Sophie Mackintosh examines the fine line between danger and power. Though the girls in this story take murder classes (otherwise known as “Specialised Life Skills for Girls”), the world they live in will never allow them to be treated as equals.

‘Mr Salary’ by Sally Rooney (First published by the Irish Times in 2017 and available here. Published as a paperback by Faber in 2019)

This early Sally Rooney story is as sardonically funny as the title promises. It follows the complex relationship between Sukie and Nathan, who are sort of friends, sort of family and, by the end, a little bit lovers. Nathan is older and wealthier than Sukie; she is vulnerable and desperately in love with him. Their relationship, uncategorisable but deeply caring and affectionate, is used as a lens through which Rooney explores family, class and power dynamics. Sukie presents a very cool, funny and unaffected persona when she is with Nathan, but throughout the story we get glimpses of an emotional life bubbling just beneath the surface. Throughout, we wonder: is this love, or something more transactional?

‘Virgins’ by Danielle Evans (First published in The Paris Review, Issue 182, Fall 2007. Available for subscribers to read here)

Danielle Evans’ story introduces us to a trio of teenage friends: Erica (our narrator), Jasmine and Michael. The three friends have an easy closeness which is shown through their witty, cutting and perfectly pitched dialogue. The teenagers exist in a world marked by danger and employ various strategies to keep themselves safe; nevertheless, as Erica observes, there is “no such thing as safe, only safer”. Their paths diverge sharply at a certain point in the story. Evans dissects, with breathtaking precision, the complex strategies girls employ to keep themselves safe in hostile situations.

‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ by Joyce Carol Oates (First published in the Fall 1966 edition of Epoch magazine, collected in The Wheel of Love and Other Stories, Vanguard, 1970 and widely anthologised)

Crafted with sharp, simmering tension and a relentless, dread-like momentum, Joyce Carol Oates’ 1966 story has become a contemporary classic. Fifteen-year-old Connie is a typical teenage girl: concerned with her looks, self-conscious, struggling with strained parental relationships. When a stranger arrives, who may not be exactly who he says he is, the story’s conclusion begins to feel inevitable, even pre-ordained. The story has a dreamlike quality that verges horrifyingly into nightmare as it illuminates the specific vulnerabilities of the teenage girl.

‘The Moons of Jupiter’ by Alice Munro (First published in The New Yorker in May 1978 and available online for subscribers to read here; collected in The Moons of Jupiter, Macmillan, 1982; also in Selected Stories, 1996, Vintage Munro, 2004, and Carried Away, 2006)

This Alice Munro story is about the distances that open up between people in a family. The narrator, Janet, has a strained relationship with her older daughter, Nichola, who she is rarely in touch with and misses very much. Janet doesn’t seem to understand why she and Nichola are not close, but later in the story she recounts an event from Nichola’s childhood in which Janet chose to go through the motions of care but withdrew love in order to protect herself. This feels like a very human, self-preserving thing to do, but it has disastrous long-term consequences. This is a deeply affecting story — made even more so by the fact it feels impossible to read any work by Alice Munro and not acknowledge the fact she ignored the abuse of her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner for years.

‘Longshore Drift’ by Julia Armfield (First published in Granta 148, August 2019 and available online here)

There’s something magical hovering at the edges of this story by Julia Armfield about queer desire, teenage awkwardness and chilly beaches. Though nothing actually magical happens, Armfield’s writing of place, and especially the sea, feels dreamlike and otherworldly.

‘Cat Person’ by Kristen Roupenian (First published by the New Yorker in 2017 and available online here)

‘Cat Person’ may be most famous now as a movie featuring Emilia Jones and Greg from Succession, but before that, in 2017, it was the first short story to go ‘viral’ on the internet. It was published online around the time the Harvey Weinstein allegations broke. The story became a lightning rod for conversations about the nature of consent and the tricky landscape of contemporary dating. It was discussed and dissected ferociously online, as though it was a work of non-fiction – something which fascinated me. It’s not a perfect story, and with all things that become very popular very quickly, it has been torn to shreds by many. Nevertheless, the story managed to articulate something very specific that resonated with many people, especially women, and for that reason, I return to it often.

* Marni Appleton is a writer living in London. Marni holds a PhD in creative-critical writing from the University of East Anglia. Her short stories have been published in Banshee, The Tangerine, The London Magazine and others. Marni’s debut short story collection I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY was published by The Indigo Press in 2025.

* 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 written during the Covid lockdown, Spring Journal. He teaches on the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City St George’s, University of London.

* I’m running an online taster for the MA and MFA on Thursday 23rd April, looking at Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts as a way into thinking about writing creative non-fiction. Do come along if you’re interested. It’s open to all! Register here

* 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.