A Personal Anthology, by Sindi-Leigh McBride

Interconnected short stories go by many names: short story cycles, composite novel, short story sequence, novel-in-stories. A great linked collection is a granary of characters, micro-plots and imagery but what I love best about them is how not all of the collected stories need to shine, how sometimes the success of a linked collection is how the author lets it breathe – a decent story snugly nestled between two breath-taking stories often lingers longer than the showstoppers. There is just something about sequencing as “a virtuoso display of analogical thinking” that reminds me of Teju Cole describing photobooks: 

“And of all the elements that make a photobook truly special, I think the most important is the specific order of the images. Look at this, the photographer says, then look at this, then look at this one. All books are chronological, but the feeling of being guided, of being simultaneously surprised and satisfied, is particularly intense in photobooks.”

For me, this double whammy of delight, surprise and satisfaction, is the best thing about short stories and it is intensified in linked collections. My personal anthology has two parts: stories from existing collections; and stories from the linked collection of my dreams.
 
Stories from existing linked collections
 
‘Bogart’ by V.S. Naipaul (First published in Miguel Street, André Deutsch, 1959, currently available from Picador, 2011. Available to read online here)
 
This is the first story in Miguel Street (1959), set in wartime Trinidad and Tobago. It was the first time I felt a collection to be a container, each sketch funnier and more tragic than the one before, building up to what I can only describe as a crescendo of cool. Each story focuses on a single character, all of whom live on Miguel Street and waltz in and out of each other’s stories. In this one, Bogart goes from being the most “the most bored man I ever knew” to “the most feared man in the street” and just like that, the story made it clear that the collection would make me laugh as the street broke my heart. 
 
‘Every Little Hurricane’ by Sherman Alexie (First published in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993)
 
Also first in the collection, this story has an innocence that changes subtly as Victor, a character who appears throughout The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, moves from childhood at the start of the collection to adulthood by the end. This little kid reflecting on the “tiny storms” that have marred his life while his parents host a wild New Year’s Eve party downstairs as a storm rages outside on the Spokane Indian Reservation, oh man. It knocked my socks off. It’s the first introduction to stormy themes like familial love and communal despair, easily atmospheric and almost ethnographic in the detailing of people and place. 
 
‘Kunicki: Water (I)’ by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Cross (First published in Polish in Bieguni, 2007. First published in English in n+1, March 2014. Collected in Flights, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017)
 
This is from Flights, a spectacular fragmentary novel about travel and human anatomy which is technically not a short story collection per se but the book has its own internal logics, combining novellas with quick spurts of vignettes. This story about a young husband whose wife and child mysteriously vanish while the three holiday on a Croatian island is continued in three more stories, which are themselves mysteriously tucked into the novel. It is a harrowing read, I was acutely distressed by how Tokarczuk details his search, and even more so his subsequent unravelling in the stories that follow.

‘The Man in The Case’ by Anton Chekhov (First published in Russian in Russkaya Mysl, July 1898. First published in English, translated by Constance Garnett, in The Wife and Other Stories, 1918.
 
I like to read Chekhov when I homesick or hungover. For me, the miracle of his mastery is how his brand of melancholia avoids self-absorption. It’s good for wallowing safely, without devolving into too dire a pity party. Also, branded on my brain are his words: “brevity is the sister of talent, talented writing is terse writing.” I think a lot about how neatly Byelikov’s character is crafted in what has been later referred as The Little Trilogy (1898) along with ‘Gooseberries’ and ‘About Love’.
 
‘My Jockey’ and ‘Let Me See You Smile’ by Lucia Berlin (Collected in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux/Picador, 2015)
 
Choosing one Lucia Berlin story is too hard. All of her stories feel linked. These two were published posthumously in A Manual for Cleaning Women. Just after her death and just before his own, her son Mark wrote, “Ma wrote true stories; not exactly autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes.” ‘My Jockey’ is exactly that double hook of surprise and satisfaction, I shiver just thinking about it. Same when I think about the description of Jesse holding Maggie’s throat. 
 
Stories from the linked collections of my dreams 
 
‘Let me tell a story now…’ by Bessie Head (First published in Tales of Tenderness and Power, Heinemann African Writers Series, 1989)
 
Also published posthumously, this is the first story in Tales of Tenderness and Power, an anthology of stories, personal observations and historic legends by the legend herself. Whenever Bessie Head is discussed, praise for her talent is usually couched in this horrible hushed reverence because of the tragedy of her life in exile. But this story, my God! It is neat as a hotel bed, everything crisply in place, exactly as it should be. It makes me want to shout up at the sky to thank her for making so much make sense in just these three words: “people is people.”
 
‘Memories we lost’ by Lidudumalingani (First published in Incredible Journey: Stories That Move You, Burnet Media, 2015. Winner of the 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing. Available to read here)
 
Published in Incredible Journey: Stories That Move You (2015), this story about siblings violently afflicted by schizophrenia in an isolated rural village is nerve-wracking. When I first read it, I was reminded of ‘Kwashiorkor’ by Can Themba, from The Will to Die (1972), where he presents an vivid image of the gnarled reality of urban poverty as three generations are ravaged by the almost-genocidal development implications of apartheid. Themba’s short stories were banned by the apartheid government and today, read like journalistic reports of black Johannesburg in the late 1950s. Where Themba explored socio-economic horror, Lidudumalingani’s story investigates the community contours of mental illness, part and parcel of the pervasive but still-not-spoken-about-enough underdevelopment that continues to characterise post-apartheid South Africa. 
 
‘And on the Seventh Day’ by Nomali Minenhle Cele (First published in Jalada, July 2018 and available to read here)
 
I like Cele’s non-fiction a lot, I always feel like she gets straight to the point of what is important to her. Her fiction is the same, whip-smart and razor-sharp and usually focused on black girls. But in this story that attentiveness is turned instead to an unnamed male, a devoted husband who does what he must to survive. By the end, I was sated by her telling of the story but this man still prowls around restlessly in my imagination and I want to know what he will do next.
 
‘Chicken’ by Efemia Christiana Chela (Written in 2014. Available to read on Efemia Christiana Chela’s website here)
 
Similarly, the casual vividness of the morning-after scene in this story feels like a phantom limb that I lug around with me, sharing in the grief of mortifying embarrassment. I don’t necessarily want more of that chagrin, but a sequel would be ideal. I really enjoyed how reading this felt easy breezy even though what was happening was so loaded. 
 
*Special mention* 
 
‘9 Passports and No Pass’ by (Written in 2019 and available to read on Lindokuhle Nkosi’s website here and ‘Things I Will Not Say’ by Heather Clancy (Written in 2021 and published on Heather Clancy’s website here)
 
This would be my ideal encore, post-script, curtain call. Neither are fiction, but the way that Nkosi writes about music makes space and time disappear. In this poetic portrait of Miriam Makeba, she seamlessly weaves together sorrow, song, exile and death to tell a story about a very large life. Clancy on the other hand writes about a very large loss with exactly the restraint that Chekhov extols. Her tiny little elegy contains so many worlds that swallowing it hurt, but the good kind of hurt that makes you want to take huge, greedy gulps of life.
 
Sindi-Leigh McBride is a researcher and writer from Johannesburg, based in Basel where she is a PhD candidate at the Centre for African Studies.
 
* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 1,500 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.