A Personal Anthology, by Robert Loyko-Greer

Eight years ago in 2017, I was working for a bookshop called Desperate Literature in Madrid and living in a small room in the back of the shop. While I was working there, we started something called the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize – a prize that aimed to champion the short form and writers of boundary-pushing work, while also providing a network of opportunities for its writers, including prize money, publication, residency programmes and event opportunities, and consultations with editors and literary agents. Around the same time in London, the Brick Lane Short Story Prize started in a similar spirit, also publishing an annual collection of some amazing writers. This month we have joined forces to publish an anthology that brings together writing from the first five years of both prizes - 22 Fictions: New Writing from Desperate Literature and Brick Lane Bookshop. We hope it will introduce many people to some brilliant writers, while also telling the story of DIY publishing produced by independent bookshops during the last ten years.

Putting together the anthology with my co-editor Kate Ellis has made me think a lot about what I like to read and why. With the prize, I would always push for pieces that attempted something different, whether in creating their own artistic form, or in doing something with narrative that made me reframe my viewpoint as a reader. From 19^th century Russia to the Streatham Ice Rink, here are some pieces that had that kind of effect on me.

‘Extras’ by Yuri Felsen, translated by Bryan Karetnyk (Original in Russian, circa 1930s. Translation found in Prototype Vol. 3, Prototype, 2021. Read here in the LARB)

The Russian writer Yuri Felsen is a fascinating figure – he wrote almost entirely in exile, having fled Russia after the 1917 Revolution, travelling first to Riga and then eventually settling in Paris. Paris became home, and in the 1920s and 30s Felsen became an important figure in the Russian literary émigré scene within France. Known among his contemporaries as ‘the Russian Proust’, he published a series of connected novels and short stories through a Russian language press in Paris. Felsen did not survive WWII – he was Jewish, and was murdered in Auschwitz – and neither did any of his immediate family. As a result, his work fell out of print for over half a century, until it was republished in Russia some ten years ago, and in recent years, brilliantly translated into English by Bryan Karetnyk.

Felsen was a very distinctive prose writer, his writing bores inward in long, lonely, intricate sentences. In “Extras”, Felsen’s narrator goes to a film set on the outskirts of Paris, seeking work as an extra in a new film production. Upon arrival, he meets a group of people doing the same, who are all Russian exiles. As they wait around, the story captures the stilted conversation and pained nostalgia for the recent past, while hopefully waiting for the good news of a day’s employment. There is something so powerful about what Felsen leaves unsaid in this story, always humming around the quiet but constant anxiety of statelessness, the struggle of trying to get a foothold anywhere within a world utterly indifferent to one’s presence.

‘The Winter Journey’ by Georges Perec (Originally published in French in 1979. Translated by John Sturrock, found in The Winter Journey, Syren, 1996)

This is just so much fun. While searching through an archive in an old farmhouse on the eve of World War II, a literary historian finds a novel from the 1860s that contains almost the entirety of modern French literature in the intervening era, containing echoes of everything from the Symbolists to the Modernists, and everything in between. But before he can visit the library again, the war intervenes, and when he finally returns many years later, the book is gone. Tormented by a lost document that could change the course of French literary history, the man’s life and mind begin to unravel, in a story that examines plagiarism and obsession, while never diverting from what always seems to be Perec’s primary concern, which is having a bloody good laugh.

Through the device of the anticipatory plagiaristic novel, Perec manages to pack an entire alternate universe into just a few pages. I bought a thin one-story pocket edition of this story from Burley Fisher Books, but curiously, in writing this piece, I searched my house for the book but I believe that it too is now lost. Perec is laughing somewhere.

‘Places you Didn’t Think to Look for Yourself’ by M. John Harrison (In You Should Come With Me Now, Comma Press, 2018)

‘In the light falling horizontally along grey lapboards. In very fast light, as on any seafront… In Portsmouth. In real dejection, not just the kind we have now.’

Is this a story? Is it a poem? Is it a list? Can it be all of them? The first time I read this playful, one page piece of short fiction from M. John Harrison, it made me laugh out loud but also feel a bit sad. Oh Mike! In using what might be considered a neo-Oulipian constraint, Harrison manages to convey – without any plot in the conventional sense – a sense of character and an entire lifetime. M. John Harrison is a fabulous writer who excels in basically any form that he chooses to write in, but in his fragmentary short fiction he has great fun in creating new ways of telling stories. This collection is one of my favourites of his many excellent books.

‘Avant-Ice’ by Isabel Waidner (in Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018)

Waidner’s narrator begins by searching the internet for second-hand figure skating dresses and skates. They confess that they came to figure skating late, having been ‘a butch child’ with no time for the monoculture of mid-1980s rural Germany, in which skating at the weekend involves engaging with a repressively conservative culture. Fast forward a few decades and our narrator is writing about the career of the anti-drag artist David Hoyle, and his 2000 show The Divine David On Ice at Streatham Ice Rink. The performance (and perhaps Hoyle’s work more generally) is a revelation, and for the transitioning narrator, figure skating becomes a territory to explore the self. I like how Waidner plays with forms of biography and art criticism within this story and the other pieces by Waidner in the collection, which work really well together. The collection itself had an absolutely seismic effect on me when I read it in 2018, and I think that was true for others at Desperate Literature as well. It was such an exciting book, and I think remains so. Containing work by writers like Isabel Waidner (who edited the collection), Eley Williams, Jay Bernard, Joanna Walsh, and Juliet Jacques, Liberating the Canon introduced me to a new generation of writers doing something that felt so fresh and new. It’s a book that I’m constantly returning to.

‘Savage Messiah 1 – 10’ by Laura Grace Ford (in Savage Messiah, Verso, 2011)

I’m going to cheat here and include all of the issues of Savage Messiah, originally self-published by Laura Grace Ford as zines between 2005 and 2009, compiled into a collected edition by Verso in 2011. Produced in a collaged graphic form evoking the DIY fan zines of late 70s punk, the collected works here tell a combined story of a disappearing London, set somewhere between the M25 free parties of the early 1990s, and the tail end of the New Labour era. The spectre of the 2012 London Olympics looms significantly throughout Savage Messiah, in the erosion of landscapes, spaces, communities and histories of working-class London from Golborne Road to the Lea Valley. The visually-led nature of Savage Messiah might cause a certain type of reader to question what exactly this book is – is it literature? Is it art? – but the writing in Savage Messiah is extraordinary. Laura Grace Ford is an incredibly evocative storyteller, veering between Ballardian, dystopian depictions of late-Blair London, to bittersweet, often harsh, but strangely formative stories of love, friendship, hedonism, betrayal and strife. There’s melancholy to it but also joy, and each story / edition works well as a self-contained yet uncontainable story of urban drift.

‘The Nose’ by Nikolai Gogol (First published in Russian in 1836. This translation by Dora O’Brien, collected in Petersburg Tales, Alma Classics, 2014)

“The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol is a masterclass in gaslighting and absurdist humour. A St Petersburg barber is alarmed one morning when he discovers a disembodied nose – recognisably that of a regular customer – embedded in his breakfast. The barber’s wife accuses her husband of being involved in violent crime, and encourages him to take the nose to a nearby bridge and throw it in the river. But in attempting to do so, the barber is apprehended by a police officer who wants to know what he is doing.

Nearby, Major Kovalyov wakes up to discover that, inexplicably, he no longer has a nose. Had he lost it? On his way to report the incident to the police, he sees his nose as a human sized figure dressed in gold, stepping out of a carriage. Major Kovalyov confronts his nose – who is now a high-ranking state official – encouraging the nose to return to his face. However, Major Kovalyov’s nose is not having any of it, and admonishes the Major for lying, and for accusing a higher ranking official, making some vague threats before slipping away in a crowd. The Major goes to the police, and to anyone else who will listen, but is treated as mad, and condescendingly offered snuff by the head of police as consolation for his loss. Social class essentially determines whose truth is more valuable in ‘The Nose’, a brilliantly weird story in which Gogol – with great invention – uses supernatural humour mixed with social realism to depict societal corruption.

‘Attrib.’ by Eley Williams (from Attrib. and Other Stories, Influx Press, 2017)

I like this story because it dramatises the lives that we live in the 21^st century while we do our isolated tasks and look at our screens, telling a story where there is plot and tension aplenty but perhaps not in an obvious sense. The story centres on a sound artist creating an installation for a Michelangelo exhibition. It’s written in a fragmented, tangential form that through the obsessively detailed repetition of almost comically specific actions begins to reveal a story behind the narrator, who is creating imaginary worlds in solitude. The tension is created by repetition, wordplay, sound, sensation, and an incredible focus on minutiae that ends up revealing a lot about the narrator. When I first read this collection I remember thinking that it expressed how it felt to be conscious in the opening decades of the 21^st century. I have heard people describe this book as ‘experimental’, but I don’t really like that word, it implies a kind of failure, or a temporary, perhaps unconfident stylistic digression. Eley Williams work is not like that at all, so how to describe this book? Inventive, bold, adventurous, playful, it creates psychological landscapes of a spirit that are unique to Eley Williams.

‘The Arcadian’ by Shola von Reinhold (2019, collected in 22 Fictions, CHEERIO, 2025. Read online in Hotel / Tenement Press)

I remember reading this story as an anonymous submission to the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize in early 2019, and just thinking that this was exactly the sort of thing that I was looking for in new fiction. The story an obvious choice for our shortlist that year, and was one of the winners when that list went to our panel of judges. “The Arcadian” features the Utopian, Henrik, who is fascinated with the future, and the Arcadian, Bim, who is drawn to the past. Beginning with a meeting in a 19^th Edinburgh hotel bar, the intellectual and sensual interplay between the two characters mediates a narrative gliding through a series of points – Blackness and femininity, gender and androgyny, what becomes history, otherness and sexuality. It ends with a discussion of a painting, specifically whether the Black figures in the painting would have been real models living in Edinburgh in the 19^th century. This story is told with incredible lyrical beauty, and perhaps a sense of ambiguity. 6 years on and I’m still thinking about it, and when we were putting 22 Fictions, it was the first story on my list. Like Shola’s award-winning novel LOTE, it’s a work of sublime brilliance, and again, is something that creates its own form.

‘A Double Room’ by Ann Quin (Circa late 1960s, published in The Unmapped Country: Stories & Fragments, And Other Stories, 2018)

Ann Quin (1936 – 1973) is one of the great British writers of the Twentieth Century – a brilliant working class modernist whose work has had something of a revival in recent years, due in no small part to the efforts of Jennifer Hodgson (who edited this collection, much of which was previously unpublished and unknown) and And Other Stories, who republished Quin’s four novels alongside The Unmapped Country.

“A Double Room” tells the story of a young woman in the 1960s taking a train to a seaside town with a married man to have (or continue) an affair. From the off the tension is high, but not exactly with romance ‘If people stopped to look, they would think we were father and daughter on our way to an aunt’s funeral.’ Told from the young woman’s perspective, the couple arrive at the hotel, attempt to have sex, drink whisky, eat steaks, take a walk on the beach, and engage in a few more rounds of unsatisfactory lovemaking and pub exploring. Through the unnamed woman, Quin expresses a complicated set of feelings related to the search for romantic love and illicit thrills – want, disgust, awkwardness, shame, excitement, raging sexuality, boredom – and despite the disappointment experienced throughout, ends on a slightly ambiguous note. Though the story ultimately explores the distance between a desire for a transcendent experience and an underwhelming reality, there is a lot going on underneath surface, a complicated mix of feelings. It feels very 1960s Britain but also kind of timeless – a timeless bad date? The Unmapped Country is a great way into Quin’s writing – read this collection and then her first novel Berg.

‘The Debutante’ by Leonora Carrington (1939, collected in The Debutante and Other Stories, Silver Press, 2017)

Officially ended by Elizabeth II in 1958, the formal debutante party was a very weird thing indeed. Leonora Carrington famously hated hers in the 1930s, running away shortly afterwards to take up with the Surrealists in Paris.

‘The Debutante’ is a strange comic horror story that lampoons the brutality of ‘sophisticated’ societal ritual. As in her paintings, Carrington’s writing draws from waking reality and dreams, from playfulness and from malevolence. In the “The Debutante”, a young woman preparing for her coming out ball meets a hyena at her local zoo. The girl is not at all enthused about the upcoming party, but the hyena is very keen to go in her place. They hatch a plan to squeeze the animal into the girl’s dress. A maid is callously killed so that the hyena can have a face to wear, to complete the disguise. The hyena goes off to the party and the girl stays home and has a nice time. Later, the mother returns furious – the hyena caused a terrible scene, refusing to eat any cake, before eating the face that it was wearing and escaping out of the window.

‘Arrival’ by Gurnaik Johal (Collected in We Move, Serpent’s Tail, 2022)

Full disclaimer: I work for the publisher of this book, but what a talented writer Gurnaik Johal is. At Serpent’s Tail we have just published Johal’s debut novel Saraswati, which has been highly anticipated due to We Move. Within the collection, Johal excels at telling intricate, delicate stories crossing the generations of a small corner of Northwest London, centring around the British-Punjabi communities in Southall and Northolt, near Heathrow airport.

Within “Arrival”, Johal finds a way of telling two different love stories through the single device of an abandoned car. The car belongs to Divya, and has been left stranded at the house of family friends Chetan and Aanshi. Chetan is expecting to pick up Divya from the airport, but she doesn’t arrive, and they are stuck with the car. We eventually discover that the no-show is because she has decided not to marry her fiancé, who arrives to pick up the car in a tense scene that opens and ends the story. In between, waiting for news, Chetan and Aanshi begin to use the car. They enjoy taking trips to IKEA, Windsor, and Brighton, their romance reilluminated by the novelty of the vehicle in their lives. It’s very sweet, and even when the car is collected, they are left in a sense of happiness, perhaps with a slight sense of cheekiness at getting caught. The story – which reminds me a bit of Mike Leigh’s films – is told so skilfully. It’s a terrific short story, and won the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize in 2022.

‘The Debt Collector’ by Jen Calleja (Collected in I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For, Prototype, 2020)

I am a huge fan of Prototype, one of the most impressive independent publishing houses of this era in which there are so many brilliant independent publishers. Even what they have published by Jen Calleja alone is quite a remarkable body of work, starting with this excellent collection, published just as the world shut its doors in March 2020.

This is an unsettling story, which, coincidentally, starts with a character reading from Leonora Carrington’s The Debutante & Other Stories. Specifically, the character reads a line within the book in which one character tells another to leave their husband. Reading this, Calleja’s protagonist sees this as a sign, and decides to leave not just her husband but her entire life. She finds a small, barely habitable room above a shop on the other side of town, and slowly moves there in secret, finally leaving a note to her husband one day saying that she is gone, with no explanation, and warning him to not come looking for her. She eeks out a living in the room above a shop on her dwindling savings, before getting a part-time job in a local bakery. Years pass. There is something incredibly stark and brutal about this story – a character wilfully untying the threads of their existence, a process of life transformation that is somehow quite shocking in its detachment from emotion – but it’s completely captivating. Calleja is a great writer. Read this then her novel Vehicle.

* Robert Loyko-Greer is a writer, book publicist for Profile Books, co-founder of the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, and the co-editor of 22 Fictions: New Writing from Desperate Literature and Brick Lane Bookshop, published by CHEERIO in June 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, 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.