A Personal Anthology, by Robert G Cook
The bit of Borges that has always stuck most firmly in my head (and let’s be honest, everyone has a bit of Borges stuck in their head; even if — perhaps especially if — they’ve never actually read him) is the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In his 1942 essay ‘John Wilkins’ Analytical Language’ — which is indeed an essay, not a short story — Borges describes the real-life 17th century philosopher’s actual and historically documented attempt to create a universal language based on the categories, subdivisions, and yet further subdivisions of all known things. This ambitious yet essentially arbitrary systemisation of knowledge Borges judiciously compares to the list of animals in “a certain Chinese encyclopaedia”:
“In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.”
Borges then states, in the very next paragraph, that this encyclopaedia (not, of course, directly seen by Borges himself, but attributed to the further attribution of the very eminent sounding, and most recognisably initialled, Dr Franz Kuhn) is apocryphal; and indeed no other reference to it has ever been found. Because Borges, obviously, and deliberately obviously, made it up for the purposes of his essay (I mean, come on: “those that have just broken the flower vase”?). Which is why ‘John Wilkes’ Analytical Language’ is probably actually my favourite Borges short story, but since this is the Introduction it doesn’t count.
Anyway. I think that this, or something very like this, works equally well as a set of criteria for what constitutes an includable-in-my-personally-curated-short-story-anthology ‘short story’. Curator is an interesting job description, after all. Curate, curious, cure, curare. A choosy person who chooses; chooses which artefacts to preserve, to fix in amber, to paralyse. And every choice, however discriminate, is also partially indiscriminate, because informed or framed or fed (or poisoned) by personal experience. Every act of curation has something particular to say; it is its own story, and it’s usually mostly about the curator.
And there are hundreds, obviously; thousands, tens of thousands if you cast the net of ‘what is a short story?’ wide enough. Curating that down to twelve is like paring an iceberg down to a handful of cubes for your gin, then looking over your shoulder to find you’ve made a whole other, very different-looking iceberg with all the shavings.
And so:
‘The Bet’ by Anton Chekhov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (First published in Russian as ‘Пари’ in Novoye Vremya, January, 1889. Collected in Fifty-Two Stories, Penguin Classics, 2020. Available to read on Project Gutenberg in an earlier translation)
(a) Short story as premature existential challenge:
For years, I was convinced this story was by Guy de Maupassant. As it is, it’s the only Chekhov I’ve ever read, and it turns out I haven’t read any Maupassant at all.
A rich and arrogant banker bets an idealistic young lawyer a small fortune that he, the lawyer, can’t spend fifteen years in solitary confinement. This is at a party, you understand: there was rich food, plentiful alcohol, hijinks of manifold sorts, and a dangerously sloshed intellectual argument about whether capital punishment or life imprisonment was the more (or less) humane judicial sentence. We’ve all been to a party like that, right? The lawyer says that to “live somehow is better than not to live at all” and the banker says, basically, prove it mate, and here’s two million roubles on the table. “‘I accept!’ says the lawyer. ‘You stake your millions, and I stake my freedom!’” Which is a little rash of him, considering.
It doesn’t go well. The banker spends fifteen years losing enough of his fortune that paying out the two million will ruin him. The lawyer spends his time cut off from contemporary human contact, but has access to books, musical instruments, writing materials, and alcohol and tobacco. He drifts in and out of madness, learns half a dozen languages, alternately sates himself and goes on hunger strike; spends a year playing the piano constantly, another talking to himself, another in silence.
He reads everything.
The night before the final day, the banker is desperate. He only has one option. But, it turns out, so does the lawyer, who has made a final, modest testament:
“‘I know that I am more intelligent than all of you. [Okay, not that modest.] And I scorn your books, I scorn all the world’s blessings and its wisdom. It is all paltry, fleeting, illusory, and as deceptive as a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and beautiful, but death will wipe you from the face of the earth the same as cellar mice, and your descendants, history, the immortality of your geniuses will freeze or burn along with the terrestrial globe.’”
To a book-loving fifteen year old who’d just lost his father to a random heart attack, this came as a cosmically chilling revelation. I mean, it’s like positing Chekhov as precursor to Lovecraft. Be smart and read all the books, sure; just don’t read all the books or this existentially abyssal plain will open up and lose you in its heart forever. I felt so small reading that, and yet somehow so absolutely powerful.
It wasn’t till reading it again recently that I fully appreciated the subtle ironies that perfuse, or perhaps irradiate, ‘The Bet’s ending. Bankers are, after all, bankers. And yes, you short story purists who blanched at the first paragraph of this section, I am now reading more Chekhov.
‘William Wilson’ by Edgar Allan Poe (First published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, October, 1839. Collected in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Lea & Blanchard, 1840, and The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, Penguin Classics, 2006. Available to read online here)
(b) Short story as doubling of one sort or another, or several sorts all at once:
In his essay-cum-flowchart ‘Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories’ (which bears more than a passing resemblance to Borges’s Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge), Roberto Bolaño boils it down to ‘just read everything by Poe.’ If you want to boil that down further, just read ‘William Wilson’, a story which manages to be both the essence of Poe and at the same time, somehow, something quite different from the Poe most people have read. It’s a perfect short story that shouldn’t be nearly as good as it is. It’s a deadly serious comedy and a life story in ten pages.
Mainly though, it’s a doppelgänger story. I’d argue it’s the doppelgänger story, except I haven’t read all the other doppelgänger stories ever written, so I can’t. But it feels like it should be, and has certainly been claimed as prime influencer for many subsequent doppelgänger tales by many different writers. A man relates the sorry tale of his life, and for the purposes of convenience (he says) he’ll call himself William Wilson, his real name being, by now, absolute dirt. At school he discovers there is another William Wilson (presumably also not his real name), whose birth and school-starting days exactly match his own. This other WW becomes both friend and foe, equal and superior, until a final yet ambiguous confrontation sends them both on their individual ways. Years pass. Their paths cross again, and again, and then again, and while the narrator slides inexorably towards debauchery and dissolution, his enigmatic double never fails to shine a searing light on his sins. It doesn’t go well, not least because Poe’s narrator is, as so many of Poe’s narrators are, clearly bonkers. But he tells his tale as a sort of one-sided diacritical discourse with himself playing both parts, and it’s too rationally told to be a straightforward case of madness à la Tell-Tale Heart. As more than one commentator has noted, ‘Will I am, offspring of Will’ is hardly a randomly chosen pseudonym under the circumstances.
‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ by JG Ballard (First published in Bananas, issue number unknown, 1976, and in RE/Search, No. 8/9, 1984. Collected in War Fever, Paladin, 1991, and The Complete Short Stories Volume Two, Flamingo, 2001)
(c) Short story as a playground to be filled with boobytraps:
Talking of doubling: there is a chapter in Ballard’s 1967 fix-up-collection-collage-novel-anomaly-thing The Atrocity Exhibition titled ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ which is entirely different to this 1976 story; and yet also, because it’s Ballard, isn’t, quite. This ‘Notes’ though is probably my all-time favourite Ballard story, because it is made entirely of footnotes, and I love footnotes. Or possibly it’s that I love footnotes because of this story. Whatever.
An eighteen-word synopsis is all that remains of an “undiscovered document” detailing the final breakdown of one Dr Robert Loughlin, and events associated therewith (and just pause there a second to consider that whole “undiscovered document” notion). The story consists of those eighteen words and a paragraph-long footnote for each one of them (including for the two ‘a’s, two ‘his’s, and an ‘and’) that gradually eke out the details of the various characters’ tragic final meeting at Gatwick airport. Each of the characters is named for an aircraft manufacturer, except for Loughlin’s lover who is called Leonora Carrington (but who isn’t the Leonora Carrington, or at least I don’t think so). About halfway through is it noted of Loughlin, who is obsessed with man-powered flight, that “for some reason, empty swimming pools and multi-storey car parks exerted a particular fascination.” By this point, it’s clear that Ballard is having fun with his own mythology. We are then told that the obviously bonkers Dr Loughlin had a habit of meticulously footnoting every single word of large pharmaceutical indexes, usually with “imaginary aviation references”, and it is at this point you realise that you’re in an ouroboros of a story and that there’s no way out.
‘Something by the Sea’ by Jeffrey Ford (First published in The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, Golden Gryphon Press, 2002, then in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November, 2002)
(d) Short story as infinite and unending dream:
I remember reading an interview once in which Jeffrey Ford raved about the unique perfection of ‘William Wilson’, but by that point there was very little that could make me love either that one Poe story or any of Jeffrey Ford’s stories more than I already did. How no one has yet chosen a Jeffrey Ford story for A Personal Anthology, I have absolutely no idea.
‘Something by the Sea’ is a gorgeously convoluted hymn to Oneiros that starts very simply, with an elderly man leading his niece and her dog to a perfect spot under a willow tree for a bit of family storytelling. There are fireflies and lanterns and sweet treats. And a hookah. And the dog is called Mathematics, and speaks. Or maybe we’re into the dream by now, it’s (delightfully) unclear; as is whose dream it might be. There are pirates and goddesses and wars in strangely-named-yet-entirely -believable lands, and questions like “When you eat a brain, what does it taste like?” (and answers like “Bittersweet”), and most of it happens on or under or over the sea, and all of it is Uncle Archer’s story for Maggie, and the hard, awful truth in the cracks of it is to do with Maggie’s mother’s madness. It is beautiful and sad and immense and endless, and completely insane and entirely dream-logical, and Jeffrey Ford is a magician, and you should read him.
‘Settling the World’ by M John Harrison (First published in The New Improved Sun, Harper & Row, 1975. Collected in The Ice Monkey and Other Stories, Unwin, 1988, Things That Never Happen, Gollancz, 2004, and Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, Comma Press, 2020)
(e) Short story as sacred physical artefact:
Someone — I forget who; certainly not me — once said that Jeffrey Ford was the American M John Harrison. Which, like most such comparisons, sort of works and also almost entirely doesn’t. ‘Settling the World’ is a case in point. It has the wonky, left-field, yet entirely natural-seeming inventiveness of Ford’s early stories, mixed in with a sort of John-Buchan-meets-Saki archness, and topped off with something incurably bitter. But it’s Harrison’s preternatural precision that marks it as entirely his own.
“With the discovery of God on the far side of the Moon, and the subsequent gigantic and hazardous towing operation that brought Him back to start His reign anew, there began on Earth, as one might assume, a period of far-reaching change.”
As one might assume, indeed. Oxlade, our Departmental hero, an odd cross between Harry Palmer and Richard Hannay, is sent out to investigate goings-on along God’s Motorway, the mysterious miles-wide divine link-road that has formed ex nihilo between the Thames Estuary and the industrial Midlands (Harrison does love to traumatise genre tropes, in this case the beloved Big Dumb Object of hard sci-fi). Oxlade’s nemesis, retired foreign spy Estrades, is also there, digging around and causing trouble. It’s all a bit of an old school cloak-and-dagger hoot with extra weirdness thrown in, until they get onto the Motorway itself and Estrades’s real plan is set in motion. It doesn’t go well. Trying to blow up the Umwelt of God never does, and even that is far from the end of Oxlade’s travails.
This is easily one of my favourite Harrison stories, even though, like the Poe, it’s a bit of an odd one out for him (it was originally written for an anthology of ‘utopian science fiction’ but Harrison really doesn’t do topias, whether u or dys; what he does do is something that stretches the grimy mundane and the gnarly weird directly across each other and as far as either will go without quite snapping; sometimes even further). But it’s also my favourite because it’s in my copy of The Ice Monkey that cost me £5.99 in the mid-90s and that the man himself signed, with great down-to-earth friendliness and aplomb, at a reading at The Horse Hospital in London in 2013. While, as per Oxlade, it’s almost never good to meet your God, it was, in this case, a sheer and genuine pleasure to meet my writing god.
The book itself is, of course, now in a hermetically sealed bulletproof glass case in a time-locked vault in Zürich.
‘Down by the Water’ by PJ Harvey (First published as the lead single from the album To Bring You My Love, both Townhouse Records, 1995. You can watch the video online here)
(f) Short story as weird gothic blues confessional rock ballad:
In a blog post about ‘interesting sf & good fantasy’, M John Harrison cites PJ Harvey’s 1996 B-side ‘Who Will Love Me Now?’ and it’s a fair point: songs can be epic dark fantasies too (I mean, have you listened to Tom Waits’s ‘What’s He Building in There?’?). I prefer Harvey’s ‘Down by the Water’ though, a dirge-like thing of wheezing guitars and Hammer-horror violins that follows a woman who drowns her baby girl in the river and then pleads with the river’s deities to bring her back in one piece. Or rather, to bring back all the pieces of her, so that the deranged woman can herself commit the required resurrection?
“Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water
Come back here, man, gimme my daughter”
To be honest, it’s all a bit unclear, which is what makes it all the more horrifying and grimly compelling. It’s a beautiful song about ugly things, and it makes you crave to read the story it’s based on, and then you listen to it again and realise you’ve just heard the whole thing, entire.
‘The Women Men Don’t See’ by James Tiptree Jr aka Alice B Sheldon (First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December, 1973. Collected in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, Gollancz, 2014)
(g) Short story as manifest sleight of hand:
Another spy story that becomes an alien story, except this time neither of those is actually the point, because the spy telling the story is really the alien, at least from the point of view of the people he’s telling the story about, and the aliens are the spies and are a tiny bit lame, to be honest, like out-of-their-depth Boy Scouts lost in the jungle, or in this case the mango swamps of Belize.
Alice Bradley Sheldon wrote critically and commercially successful science fiction under the pseudonym of James Tiptree Jr, and no one knew for a decade. ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ is written utterly convincingly from a standardly privileged 1970s man’s point of view: the women in the story are there, he unthinkingly assumes, for his benefit, to be interested in him, to be attracted to him, or at least seduced by him, to care for him when he’s injured, to back him up when he recounts the tale of their adventure, etc; the women are there to see the men, not the other way around.
Except the women — Ruth Parsons and her daughter Althea — are in fact the tale’s true protagonists, and ordinarily arrogant, blinkered, out-of-his-depth Don Fenton is an unwanted sidekick, barely a bit-part in their story. We just happen to be listening to his (hopelessly skewed) version of events. The best part of this is that all the macho male genre critics of the time assumed Tiptree was a man, and praised ‘his’ writing for its Hemingway-esque qualities, its eloquent capturing of the true male spirit, and so on, completely missing that they were being perfectly skewered just as much as pointless feckless Fenton. As Sheldon’s biographer Julie Phillips notes, ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ is about the psychic damage caused by having to see the world through men’s eyes, and thereby to understand how little you are, yourself, truly seen.
‘Nurse’s Song’ by Louise Glück (Collected in Firstborn, The New American Library, 1968, and in Poems 1962-2020, Penguin Classics, 2021)
(h) Short story as lyric poem:
“As though I’m fooled. That lacy body managed to forget
That I have eyes, ears; dares to spring her boyfriends on the child.”
It’s impossible to do this one justice in a commentary that’s going to end up three times longer than the poem; really I should just quote the whole thing, but I don’t think that’s allowed. It’s a classic kitchen-sink, upstairs-downstairs tale of Edwardian melodrama, ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ set in pre-WWI Bloomsbury, except it’s told from the nursemaid’s point of view and with stunning economy. If a short story is a novel with all the unnecessary words taken out, then this poem is a short story with all of its unnecessary words utterly excised. Glück’s body of work encompasses many of these stripped-down narratives — ‘Archipelago’ for instance is The Odyssey reset as a terrifying 11-line micro-horror-story. ‘Nurse’s Song’ hovers on the edge of jealousy and vengeance without descending into either, and in ten lines of good-hearted plaint (but with a stinging kick at the end) tells a whole tale of decadence and deceit and hubris, and of what that might do to a child of such a marriage, and of how only the unnoticed servant can see the damage or care enough to do anything about it.
‘Hilda’s Wedding’ by Elizabeth Jolley (First published in Looselicks, 1976. Collected in Woman in a Lampshade, Penguin Books Australia, 1983)
(i) Short story as something that is fabulous and broken:
“Smallhouse and Gordonpole polished the whole hospital every night. It took them all night. They emptied the bins too and they were allowed to smoke which was fair enough when you saw what was sometimes thrown away from the operating theatres.”
Elizabeth Jolley was an English expatriate Australian writer who was originally a nurse, and said about both professions that they “require a gaze which is searching and undisturbedly compassionate and yet detached.” As both nurse and writer (and English expat) I could not agree more. It’s not always a comfortable position to be in — the inside outsider — but it’s inescapable. It’s probably why I chose nursing when I realised I didn’t have the balls to commit to writing.
‘Hilda’s Wedding’ is classic Jolley: innocent yet biting, playful yet profound, mired in the everyday grime of common reality even as it spins off into a deeply weird and quintessentially Australian gothic surreal. Night Sister Bean (a recurring character in Jolley’s stories) is, everyone says, a witch. “‘Always stand between Sister Bean and the drip,’ they said.” Our unnamed narrator decides to test this hypothesis, but then the story steps sideways into poor simple “always pregnant” Hilda’s lack of a suitable husband, and while Sister Bean is away recovering after her own surgery, the hospital’s night crew stage an impromptu wedding. The Casualty Porter is pressed into service as the bridegroom, Smallhouse volunteers to give Hilda away, and Feegan the Warden conducts the ceremony, at one point mixing up the marriage liturgy with the funeral service to hilariously screwball effect. The kitchen boy gets rather left out, and is seen crying near the end, though the whole wedding was a play-act (we assume). And then suddenly in the last paragraph we’re back to Night Sister Bean and the possibility of karmic retribution for her infusion witchery. It’s such an oddball rattle-bag of a story, and entirely loveable, not least for its spot-on description of a large hospital:
“One block for hearts and one for chests, a block for bladders and one for bowels, a block for bones, one for women’s troubles, one for mental disorders, one for births and all for deaths.”
Written in 1976 and set easily 20 years earlier, it’s still a horribly accurate picture of where I work now.
‘Inescapable’ by Peach Momoko (First published in Star Wars: Darth Vader - Black, White & Red #1, Marvel, April 2023)
(j) Short story as über-commercialised graphic design:
I cannot quote this story in any useful way, because it is wordless, and because it sits in its own unique place in the vast agglomeration of story and lore and canon that is the Star Wars universe. But after forty-five years and counting, that universe is now so utterly supersaturated into popular culture — is now literally inescapable — that it would be near impossible to find anyone who had so little idea of the storied elements of the Force, the Dark Side, and Darth Vader that they wouldn’t be able to understand and be moved by the vast terror and all-too-briefly grasped relief told in these twenty-four eye-poppingly gorgeous panels.
Honestly, I am fully Star-Wars-ed out. Glutted, satiated, full to puking. I don’t care how good the reviews are for Andor and Ahsoka, I’m done. But I have read this short graphic tale countless times now, and it will not leave me alone, because it’s a horror story, full-bore hellscape horror, with Vader as the demon at its heart, and what the hell is that doing in the Star Wars universe? The fact of it, and the awful meta-irony of the title, never mind the stare-at-it-for-hours monochrome-and-blood-red beauty of the art… it’s unsettling, and disruptive, and did I mention it’s gorgeous to look at? Graphic design as a terrifyingly wordless scream of a short story.
‘John-Paul Finnegan, Paltry Realist’ by Rob Doyle (Collected in This is the Ritual, Bloomsbury/The Lilliput Press, 2016. Available to read online here)
(k) Short story as obscenely unfiltered literary criticism:
On the Holyhead-to-Dublin ferry, a man called Rob — who may be Doyle, but probably isn’t, but possibly is, either way he’s the narrator, although he barely says anything himself — this man called Rob listens to his friend John-Paul Finnegan as Finnegan sets forth his theory of Irish literature, or more accurate to say his theory of what the Irish people, those who’ve stayed in Ireland at least, think of literature. Which is not a lot, reckons Finnegan, and spends pretty much the entire story bewailing this sorry state of affairs to friend Rob, and at one point to most of the rest of the ferry’s understandably terrified passengers, in a long, repetitive, looping, and utterly foul-mouthed rant. Finnegan uses Ulysses as his case in point, also coincidentally the name of the ferry on which the pair are embarked for home, and look, you could probably make a game attempt to divide Doyle’s story up into Joycean-Homeric chapters if you thought that would be fun, but, again, as previously mentioned, it consists mostly of Finnegan ranting to Rob and saying fuck a lot, so maybe not. The thing is, it’s laugh-out-loud hilarious even as it’s pitch-perfect bleak and sad about the realities of even attempting literature, never mind failing at it, and it’s spot-on about Joyce and his legacy even as Finnegan is furiously wrong-headed about the whole damned thing, and I think of all the current crop of genius Irish writers it’s Rob Doyle who is the true heir of Flann O’Brien, and so there.
‘A History of Violence’ by Olivia Laing (First published in frieze, June, 2018 and available to read here. Collected in Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, Picador, 2020)
(l) Short story as art criticism, or possibly the other way around:
Olivia Laing is just about my favourite writer at the moment; reading The Lonely City and To the River have played a significant part in keeping me sane over the last two years. So maybe favourite’s not the right word. She is my essential writer at the moment. From 2015 to 2019 she wrote a regular art-cultural criticism column for frieze magazine, and the best of them are weird tales easily the equal of anything else I’ve chosen here. ‘A History of Violence’ begins with a man at a London party coming up to her and just starting to talk:
“My dad was Irish, he said, he worked on the building sites. London was built by the Irish. They all died young. No compensation. It was the asbestos, it got into their lungs.”
Which makes zero literal sense if you actually think about it, but is culturally true. Or, as Laing goes on to elucidate, is capitally true. “Everything is seeping to the surface now,” she writes, “the slow or hidden violence of late capitalism… You can be an accidental connoisseur of snuff movies simply by scrolling through Twitter with a breakfast cup of tea.” In the space of barely three pages she glides through, or rather connects up, the fate of Irish navvies, the tar pit of social media, contemporary French literature, and the blood-soaked art of Ana Mendieta — then takes a final vertiginous step into Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, and how “Eichmann’s trial testimony was marked by a constant refrain of looking away.” Except from one thing: a burial ditch from which the blood would not stop seeping.
Eichmann refused to look so he could pretend he hadn’t seen. Laing’s humane genius is to look at everything, to bear witness, and to bring back the stories of what she has seen.
Robert G. Cook is an Anglo-Irish writer and nurse living in reluctantly self-imposed exile in Brisbane, Australia. Once upon a time he published a short story, and then a couple of poems, and now he’s gathering material for a memoir about lying.
* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 2,700 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 new Substack originating from the Creative Writing team at City, and to which I contribute. Read the first four issues and subscribe here. The most recent issue has a short story writing tip by Gurnaik Johal.