A Personal Anthology, by Neil D. A. Stewart

This is a selection of stories (and one song) that have lived in my memory since reading them, in some cases for twenty years or more, in others for a few months. They’re almost all funny in one way or another – dryly witty, outlandish, outrageous, laughter in the dark – and almost all concern that critical moment in their central characters’ lives when everything has shifted, or is about to. My novel Test Kitchen, set in the kitchen and dining room of a high-end restaurant, includes short stories of a sort – the narratives of the diners at each table – and each springs from a similar instant of recent, impending or concurrent change: a transformative realisation, an impetuous decision, a long-planned trap finally sprung. I can trace these in some way back to the stories I’ve chosen below.

Some of the authors here were certainties from the moment I decided to put together a personal anthology (and what a pleasure it was to reread swathes of their work in search of the story that spoke to me most). In other cases – among them John McGahern, Camilla Grudova, David Means, Lucia Berlin, Bora Chung, Petina Gappah, Timothy J. Jarvis, Lorrie Moore and Dennis Cooper – selecting just one story to represent their work felt impossible and I reluctantly had to omit them.

‘Honored Guest’ by Joy Williams (First published in Honored Guest, Knopf, 2004; collected in The Visiting Privilege, Tuskar Rock, 2016; you can read an extract of the story here)

I could nominate any number of Joy Williams’s sere, steely, dryly mordant stories – overall she may be my favourite writer of the form (and her The Quick and the Dead is an all-time top ten novel for me). In ‘Honored Guest’, Lemore and her teenaged daughter Helen are coming to terms – or not – with the prospect of Lenore’s imminent death. This gleefully merciless story opens with Helen’s dismayed realisation that she can’t even threaten suicide, the teenager’s operatic gambit: “Suicide was so corny and you had to be careful in this milieu which was eleventh grade because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke.” The double whammy of “corny” and “milieu” shows us Helen precisely. William’s stories grow distorted and weird, cacti in the desert; what I love most are their surreal touches, hinting at other kinds of consciousness that run alongside the everyday and sometimes jump tracks: here, the family dog has developed a special growl directed solely at Lenore when it cannot be overheard; the mother herself has an unexpectedly heartbreaking habit of calling her own name at times of stress or panic, as if ventriloquising the fear Helen is too transfixed to articulate.

‘Some Other, Better Otto’ by Deborah Eisenberg (First published in The Yale Review, January 2003, and available to read here; Collected in Twilight of the Superheroes, Picador, 2006)

‘“We’re not people – we’re family.”’ What had stuck in my mind from previous readings of ‘Some Other, Better Otto’ was its central set piece, a fraught family Thanksgiving. I hadn’t previously read it, however, as an investigation – glimpsed amid glittering, razor-sharp jokes that distract and deflect – of the wound of internalised homophobia. As he braces himself for the dreaded celebration, we come to understand that the vulnerable, cynical Otto has learned a sense of unworthiness in which the microaggressions of his family, unintended through they may be, have played a part. Deeply insecure about his deserving of love, he spends much of this story trying to drive away his almost saintly partner: “Why had lovely William stayed with disagreeable old him for all this time?” Eisenberg gives Otto a counterweight, another satellite sibling trying to avoid the rest of the family: his sister Sharon, a brilliant scientist with mental health issues (an early line that made me bark with laughter – when she supplies a swift and confident answer to a question he considers abstruse, Otto is moved to question expertise: “Strange, you really couldn’t tell, half the time, whether someone was knowledgeable or insane” – becomes poignant as Sharon’s story is revealed). You can’t pick your relatives, as they say, but you can choose how you deal with them and you can construct a new kind of family – lovers, allies, those others with whom you have shared experiences, and fears, and injuries.

‘Civilization and its Discontents’ by Helen Garner (Collected in Postcards from Surfers, McPhee-Gribble/Penguin, 1985)

A man and a woman; a hotel room in a foreign city; an affair maybe at an end, certainly winding down; a flight home; a reunion with an adult child. In some ways nothing much happens in this story, but in the neat witticisms the lovers exchange – because it’s too late for the big conversations – and the touching banter between mother and son, as well as the careful shapelessness with which Helen Garner allows it to unspool, one thing after another, it flows like life. I vividly remember reading this story over breakfast in St Kilda, Melbourne, putting the book down on the table and having that rare thought that arrives as a complete sentence: “That’s how you do it.” Garner’s stories are close and intimate: they are a friend who sits down beside you, slightly overfills a wine glass for each of you and says, “You won’t believe what he did next.” But it might be the self-ironising smirk of its title that makes this story so great.

‘The Last Mohican’ by Bernard Malamud (First published in the Paris Review, 1958 and  collected in The Magic Barrel, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1958 and The Stories of Bernard Malamud, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983)

I love when a writer falls for their own character and brings them back in multiple short stories. Here’s the debut of Fidelman, a “self-confessed failure as a painter” who arrives in Rome to work on a monograph on Giotto. Almost immediately, he’s targeted by Susskind, a Jewish-Italian scrounger who wangles a few bucks from the scholar – although not the “spare suit” he hopes for as he eyes Fidelman’s suitcase. This first encounter is not to be their last, and Fidelman’s project is about to go very far wrong. The two are intractable opposites, as signified in their initial exchange, in which Fidelman’s lofty false modesty (“He coughed a little … ‘I’ve given a great deal of time and study to his [Giotto’s] work’”) is brought low by Susskind’s ambiguous but wonderfully skewering response: “‘So I know him too.’” Fidelman is the classic Malamud mensch who, believing himself well-meaning, is about to discover the limits to his good humour; Susskind is his mirror image, his tormentor, but maybe also his conscience, and his educator. When Fidelman’s briefcase, containing the invaluable first chapter of his manuscript, goes missing, he immediately suspects the several times denied Susskind and, abandoning his wallowing in classical history, pursues his quarry through signifiers of a much more recent history: the ghetto, its synagogue, Rome’s Jewish cemetery. What the two men reach is not an accord or mutual respect, maybe not even an understanding, but something more complex and nuanced, a kind of merging.

‘Nachman from Los Angeles’ by Leonard Michaels (First published in The New Yorker, January 2001 and available to read here; collected in The Collected Stories, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007 and The Nachman Stories, Daunt Books, 2017)

Leonard Michaels is what they call “a writers’ writer”, by which I mean that I only know of two other people who’ve read him, both of them fellow authors, and one of them only because I pressed a copy of Michaels’s Nachman Stories into his hands myself. Like Malamud’s Fidelman, Nachman is a character who recurs in multiple stories – a somewhat unworldly academic whom his creator drops into a succession of ethical and moral dilemmas to see what happens. Despite his insistence that he wants nothing more than to “do mathematics”, “problems so difficult that [he] sometimes cried”, Nachman is just as capable of significant moral equivocation as those around him, of allowing himself to be manipulated, and of tying himself in entertainingly hypocritical knots. In ‘Nachman from Los Angeles’ the mathematician recalls a time two decades earlier when he was prevailed upon to write a college paper on Bergsonian metaphysics – not his forte – for Prince Ali Massid, a very wealthy, very charming overseas student who is not merely handsome, Nachman notices, but “perfect”. Despite recognising that it is not “strictly correct to write a paper for someone else”, Nachman collects the books he’ll need, begins the required reading, even comes to enjoy the unfamiliar material – and then stalls. As the deadline approaches, Ali showers the mathematicians with gifts, bribes, beseeches him, sends his cheerleader girlfriend to Nachman’s apartment in a wretched attempt at entrapment – but Nachman is stuck because he has put himself in the impossible position of contravening a moral code he only tells himself he possesses. He cannot write the paper and compromise himself; nor can he definitively back out of the agreement he made with Ali and show himself to be dishonourable. What to do? To write the paper or not? Twenty years on, he is still turning the question over in his mind.

‘Adela’s House’ by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell (Collected in Things We Lost in the Fire, Portobello, 2017)

The less Mariana Enriquez tells you, the worse things get. For all the monsters, cannibals and ghosts in Things We Lost in the Fire, her first book to be translated into English, I think ‘Adela’s House’ is its most disturbing story – the tale of three children, two of them siblings, drawn to a mysterious house, where doors open onto impossible rooms and from which none of them will emerge unscathed, if at all. The story is full of detail, but its secret weapon is, well, keeping secrets: the titular Adela – a “suburban princess” living in an “enormous English chalet tucked into [a] grey neighbourhood” in an underprivileged part of Buenos Aires – has lost an arm, for reasons she is never quite able to explain; she and the narrator’s brother watch horror movies then relate their plots to the narrator, plots she does not relay to the reader. When the three children visit that dilapidated, creepy, buzzing house and the truly inexplicable strikes, it’s the very absence of information and comprehensibility that is so terrifying: absence with form and appetite, taking a bite from the world. Revisiting this story, I realised it’s one of the seeds of Enríquez’s maximalist horror novel Our Share of Night, forming almost an extra layer of the uncanny, a ghost story that haunts itself.

‘The Quietest Man’ by Molly Antopol (First published by One Story, March 2010; collected in The UnAmericans, Picador, 2014)

Learning that his daughter has written an Off-Broadway play about their family, Tomás Novak’s response is ambivalent, to say the least: “I knew any good parent would be thrilled. And I wanted to be.” Fearing how he may be depicted, dissected, in Katka’s play, Tomás turns the lens on himself in anticipation, castigating himself as a remote or aloof father, a bad husband, even – as he recalls his youth as a dissident writer in Prague, and the four-day interrogation where he refuses to sell out his fellow dissidents – as a traitor. His unease only grows after he arranges for Katka to visit him in the small college town where he now lives: uninterested in the childish activities he proposes, taciturn to the point of monosyllabic, she seems to him to have become something powerful and unknowable, who is preparing to air his darkest secrets in public. This remarkable story takes two turns: one I find deeply moving, as Katka finally reveals what her play will say about her tormented, self-doubting father; the other – which clinches it as a classic for me – a far stranger twist that transforms the reader’s understanding of how Tomás accounts for himself.

‘Drinking Coffee Elsewhere’ by Z.Z. Packer (First published in The New Yorker, June 11 2000, and available to read here. Collected in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Riverhead Books, 2003)

This is a deeply satisfying story about a deeply frustrating, and frustrated, central character. Dina has arrived at Yale University from a background of some privation and with something of a chip on her shoulder. In an early class, she and her classmates are asked to nominate an inanimate object they relate to and Dina, in the kind of fully conscious, fully self-destructive moment that will characterise her behaviour in this story, chooses a revolver. Dina’s problem is that she is unable to work out what story to tell about herself, and bitterly opposed to the stories anybody else tries to tell about her, particularly a gender questioning student she grows close to yet remains aloof from, for reasons she (characteristically) can’t articulate, though the reader will have their suspicions. It’s sometimes said that good stories are timeless, but this story unmistakably originates in the America of the early 2000s, both in its depiction of an academic world on the brink of a fall, and in the language the students use to talk about themselves and one another (“Her name was Heidi, although she said she wanted people to call her Henrik. ‘That’s a guy’s name,’ I said. ‘What do you want? A sex change?’”). Yet Dina’s situation is familiar and universal: she’s the outsider who yearns to belong but fearing this might mean losing her sense of self, cleaves to – maybe even invents – what sets her apart.

‘Human Development’ by Anthony Veasna So (Collected in Afterparties, Atlantic, 2021)

Another campus story, this time set in the slightly panicky aimlessness of post-graduation. The narrator of ‘Human Development’, from the only collection published by the late Anthony Veasna So, and also named Anthony, is a Stanford graduate who has grown jaded of being the only Cambodian American in any room, and of the expectation from others that he represent a country, a culture, a whole people. On a hookup app he meets Ben, his equal and opposite, a Cambodian American who’s as extroverted, cheerful and driven as Anthony is gloomy and rudderless. Where he sees his minority background as an impediment, Ben – a developer with an idea for an app based around identity politics that is both silly and chilling – thinks the pair and their associate Vinny can use it as a status symbol, even monetise it. There’s so much here about academia (Anthony teaches a humanities course that gives the story its title and, for all his pessimism, genuinely feels Moby-Dick can be a guide to life for “rich kids with fake Adderall prescriptions”), fitting in and standing out, queer identities, and the way that having all of life available to you – the endless scrolling screen of the hookup app – can be as inhibiting and trapping as being starved of opportunity. I rather enjoy a discursive, character-driven story where plot isn’t a priority, and ‘Human Development’ unfurls easily, casually, conversationally, painfully, in a way that always leaves me wanting more.

‘A Little Like Light’ by A. L. Kennedy (Collected in Indelible Acts, Jonathan Cape, 2002)

For about a year I’ve had a line stuck in my head that I knew must come from an A.L. Kennedy story because it’s so painful and so wry, so unmistakably her; including one of her stories here was a given, and as I was going through various candidates, I stumbled on the source of it. ‘A Little Like Light’ is the story of John Edward, a (this is quintessential Kennedy) sexually frustrated school janitor and self-taught close-up magician navigating what could be, might become, may never turn into an affair with one of the schoolteachers. Kennedy never judges her protagonists – John is self-flagellating enough – but simply relates, an empath wielding a scalpel, every minute shift in the non-couple’s relationship and the progress of John’s own self-loathing. Towards the end, as he realises the affair will never come to anything, almost relishing the understanding, we get his wonderful, gutting revelation: “This is love. This terrible feeling. This knowing I would rather see her than be content.” No wonder it stuck with me. It takes the top off my head, every time.

‘Evie’ by Sarah Hall (First published in The Sunday Times, July 2013 and collected in Madame Zero, Faber, 2017; also in Sex and Death, ed. Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs, Faber, 2017)

I realise on looking through this list that few of the stories I’ve selected have a plot twist of the kind that, growing up, it was impressed on me a good short story ought to have (it’s probably hard to teach a child about a gradual dawning realisation or a shift in perspective that casts previous details in a new light). “Evie” is an exception: a brilliant and alarming narrative that builds and builds before a devastating revelation transforms it into an entirely different kind of story. It starts small, with the narrator startled when his wife, the titular Evie, scoffs a bar of chocolate despite not having much of a sweet tooth. Gradually, Evie’s appetites intensify and expand, and soon she is exhibiting wilder hungers. Seeming to pick up her husband’s mild, almost genial sense of marital frustration, she begins behaving in ways that eerily reflect, even anticipate, his idle sexual fantasies. What begins as a kind of wish-fulfilment for her husband – the wife as wanton – becomes ever more dangerous. Unnerving, too, is the growing sense that even this “good man”, who’s on the verge of boasting about this change in his circumstances, thinks on some level of Evie as property to be commodified. Desire itself, personified, is overtaking the characters, warping them into new shapes … and then the twist comes. The wonderful tension here is between the storyline’s almost outrageous eroticism – how far is Evie going to go? How implicated is a reader titillated by the frank and graphic descriptions of Evie’s suddenly boundless sexuality? – and Hall’s always meticulous writing, her precise sentences and alertness to detail.

‘Sixteen Straws’ by The Drones (From the album Gala Mill, Shock/ATP Recordings, 2006)

Not a story, but an epic reworking of an Australian folk song, “Moreton Bay”, reimagined by now defunct Melbourne four-piece The Drones. The originating ballad describes the brutal conditions of a New South Wales penal station overseen by a historical figure, the vicious “commandant” Patrick Logan. The Drones extend and expand this into a saga of the terrible bargain struck by the prisoners on the chain gang as they seek to escape their imprisonment by any means possible. Over acoustic guitar and ghostly mouth organ, Gareth Liddiard’s gaunt, swampy croak – right up close to the microphone, intimate and terrible – adds harrowing novelistic detail, such as an aside about the prison camp’s “chief flogger” who rinses “his lash in a bucket / Then drinks the remains”. When the prisoners form a scheme to cut short their sentences, things go from bad to worse: there comes murder, flames, gunfire, death and catastrophe. Lyrically it’s magnificent, sonically it puts my hair on end. It’s so wide-open yet constrictive, so fierce and desolate yet beautiful – so Australian – and it ends on an unforgettable cliffhanger.

Neil D.A. Stewart is the author of Test Kitchen (Corsair, 2024) and The Glasgow Coma Scale (Corsair, 2014). He works as a freelance proofreader for art galleries and museums, and lives in London with his husband and their cat.

* 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, 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.