A Personal Anthology, by Tom Vowler

If you enjoy A Personal Anthology, you might enjoy Creative Digest, a new Substack from the Creative Writing team at City, University of London, which I’ll be curating and contributing to. More details here — Jonathan. Now, on to today’s Anthology…

There’s something monstrous in selecting a dozen short stories, fashioning a list that seems merely to bring the absentees into relief. Emotionally, I found it like lining up my children (were I to have any), announcing who was staying and who should beat a path to the orphanage. In the end I opted for stories that have flayed me, pieces with an ineffable voltage and bravura at their core. A world without these stories would be irredeemably bereft. Sincere apologies to the orphans.

‘Manifest’ by ’Pemi Aguda (First published online in Granta, October 2019 and available to read here)

“The third time your mother called you Agnes, she hit you in the face with a Bible.”

There are moments in Nigerian author Aguda’s story when breathing becomes a challenge, the lungs corralled into paralysis as she winds us repeatedly with a sentence, a concept, an image. Told in the second person (which somehow permits both displacement and great intimacy), the piece escalates as its young narrator, a woman whose mother believes she is possessed by the spirit of her own mother, commits increasingly wicked, cruel acts. African horror stories tend to occupy more nuanced territory than their often glib Western counterparts: tension is hewn not from hyperbolic gore, but by evoking our primordial fears of what lies just beyond the veil of reality. The violence, when it comes, avoids grandiose pyrotechnics, the understatement rendering it ever more chilling. A beautifully written, inimitable and extraordinary story.

‘A Romantic Weekend’ by Mary Gaitskill (First published in Bad Behavior, Simon & Schuster, 1998; collected in The Granta Book of the American Short Story, Granta Books, 2007)

“Despite their mutual ill humor, they fornicated again, mostly because they could more easily ignore each other while doing so.”

There’s coruscating irony in Gaitskill’s title, which dawns on the reader as her two characters indulge in a pre-arranged union of consensual sexual violence. Roles and power, however, soon shift, their weekend of sado-masochism rapidly unravelling into discomforting incompatibility. It’s an uncomfortable read at times, with Gaitskill holding a mirror to the reader, forcing us to squirm as we contemplate what it means to offer and take pleasure from sexual encounters when desires are misaligned.

‘The Half-Skinned Steer’ by Annie Proulx (First published in The Atlantic, November 1997, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Scribner, 1999)

“On the main road his tire tracks showed as a faint pattern in the pearly apricot light from the risen moon, winking behind roiling clouds of snow.”

In this reconfiguration of an Icelandic folk tale, Proulx occupies territory I tend to discourage students from: having a character spend long periods alone; freighting the work with considerable backstory; employing character introspection rather than just narrating what’s happening. But the author’s genius of course renders such ‘rules’ irrelevant. Her protagonist journeys to the harsh, unforgiving American west to attend a funeral, a hostile landscape he’d escaped as a young man, one of decay, violence and inexorable legacy. At its heart, a story embedded in a story about the (mis)treatment of animals and a disillusionment with the pioneering American Dream.

Strangely, Proulx, in interviews, doesn’t much rate this one of hers. I think she’s wrong.

‘Gravel’ by Alice Munro (First published in The New Yorker, June 2011, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Dear Life, McClelland & Stewart Limited, 2012)

“I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture.”

A remembered life, as Munro reminds us in this exquisite meta-fictional story, bears as much resemblance to the truth as we allow it. From the relative sanctuary of adulthood, the narrator trawls her childhood, a terrain of innocence and naivety, to make sense of a nebulous, tragic event and its attendant guilt. She recalls playing with her older sister and the family dog, moving into a trailer beside a gravel pit with a new step-father, their mother pregnant. A wolf loiters at the edge of the narrative. Beyond this, we are uncertain what to trust, as the fragility of memory blurs into a series of constructs that ponder the nature of storytelling itself.

‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (First published in Prospect, June 2004, and available to read here; collected in The Thing Around Your Neck, Fourth Estate, 2009)

“You wanted to feel disdain, to show it as you brought his order, because white people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same – condescending.”

As with Proulx’s story above, the American Dream again proves a fallacy, or at least prohibitive for some. An unnamed narrator leaves Nigeria for Maine, seeking new opportunity as she stays with an ostensibly helpful uncle who isn’t an uncle, until he abuses her. ‘America is give and take,’ he tells her. Amid the diasporic disorientation a romance ensues, her white boyfriend attentive yet blind to the insidious prejudice or effusiveness that flanks them everywhere. ‘…the nasty ones were too nasty and the nice ones too nice.’ She sends money home, an illusion of success bestowed, but the cultural disconnect is irreconcilable, the death of her father in Lagos luring her home, perhaps forever.

‘The Dressmaker’s Child’ by William Trevor (First published in The New Yorker, October 2004, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Cheating at Canasta, Penguin Books, 2007)

“She came out of the blue cottage and ran out at cars.”

The story (and collection) responsible for seducing me to the form, beguiled and astonished as I was by Trevor’s ellipses and obliquity, how less could be so much more (than the bloated novels I was growing weary of). A young Irish mechanic is hired to drive a pair of credulous Spanish tourists on a pilgrimage to a statue, the Virgin of Pouldearg, after they hear rumours – furnished by a man in a bar they buy drinks – of it miraculously weeping. The events that follow chart a forlorn yet poignant course, navigating guilt, self-delusion and penitence, the sheer serendipity of the trials that befall us. Life’s path in Trevor’s stories often alters in a heartbeat, a moment of recklessness, a quiet betrayal. And yet, as here, tragedy can also birth hope. The audacious arc of this piece still astonishes me.

‘She Murdered Mortal He’ by Sarah Hall (First published in Granta 117, October 2011, and available to read here; collected in The Beautiful Indifference, Faber and Faber, 2012)

“The ocean wind was strong. Grains of sand stung her arms and face. Her dress fluttered. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps they were not in step.”

I once read someone bemoaning their fortunes in one of the big short story prizes: ‘How it works, basically, is everyone enters and Sarah Hall wins.’ Beneath the cynicism, there was also a grudging respect, acknowledgement that such success was deserved. I often tell my students that the best short story writers are Irish, or American, or African. Canadian. Rarely British. Hall being one of the few exceptions, her deep understanding and execution of the form almost unrivalled.

A quiet story, this, until, as with all the great ones, it isn’t. A couple holidaying on the coast of an unnamed African country, their relationship collapsing, take a break from hostilities and each other, the female narrator fleeing along the beach. A stray dog approaches her, threat and menace palpable. What follows might peter out in mere mortals’ hands, but of course Hall sustains the tension right up to the shocking finish, which is all the more impactful when we realise what has occurred off-stage.

‘The Edge of the Shoal’ by Cynan Jones (First published in The New Yorker, October 2016, and available to subscribers to read here; also available to read at the Guardian online here. Winner of the BBC National Short Story Prize 2017 and collected in The BBC National Short Story Award 2017, Comma Press, 2016)

“The water beneath him suddenly aglut, sentinel somehow, with jellyfish.”

Jones’s short novels pulse with a quiet, brooding tension, made tauter by the spare, cadenced prose, which approaches its subject matter obliquely and with great understatement. This story, extracted from one of these books – Cove, presides over a kayaker struck by lightning, battling injuries, fear and the elements, buoyed only by thoughts of his pregnant partner ashore, his late father. Crucially, Jones’s sentences are never mere fact conveyors, but also impact us on an abstract and affective level, the ellipses and shifts in tense and point-of-view mimicking the kayaker’s disorientation and desperation. Time distends and lumbers, skews and stills in this claustrophobic tale of oceanic survival.

‘Terroir’ by Graham Mort (First published in Terroir, Seren Press, 2015 and available to read online here)

“When you drank wine, Gaultier had said, you’re sipping time and weather, the rising and setting sun, even tasting your own mortality.”

An ambitious young enologist is hired by an entitled, largely absent vineyard owner to oversee that season’s harvest, setting in motion a cascading sequence of tragic events. Mort transports us deep into Bordeaux country, its traditions and rhythms, its heady concoction of toil and passion, a pulsing heat that loosens morals and fosters incaution. At its heart is a story of love, lust and revenge, of temptation and consequence. I typically prefer stories less crafted than this, but Mort’s brilliance as both poet and skillful storyteller wins me around.

‘The Intensive Care Unit’ by J.G. Ballard (First published in Myths of the Near Future, Jonathan Cape, 1982; collected in The Complete Stories, Vol 2, Fourth Estate, 2014 and  English Short Stories from 1900 to the present, Everyman Classic, 1988)

“As we undressed and exposed ourselves to each other the screens merged into a last oblivious close-up . . .”

With typical Ballardian prescience, this harrowing dystopian story reveals how contact with other people is restricted to screen-time only (sound familiar?) with humans isolated in their homes in solitary confinement (even the couple’s wedding night takes place apart). We are never told why this separation is necessary – seasoned storytellers know to shun explanatory neatness – but instead witness the aftermath of what occurs when a family (Ballard’s intensive care unit) decides to flout the draconian rules and meet in person. (Oh, how life imitates art.) Bookended by the present tense carnage is the story of how the couple met (via a screen of course), the ensuing domestic bliss and arrival of children (conceived via AID – which we presume to be a version of IVF). Amid the dark humour lie meditations on our desire for physical connection with others and what we become when this is removed.

‘Last Night’ by James Salter (First published in The New Yorker, November 2011, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Last Night, Penguin Books, 2005)

“It was in the uterus and had travelled from there to the lungs. In the end, she had accepted it.”

Stories that turn on a singular moment run the risk of appearing gimmicky, like the punchline of a joke, the denouement of a magic trick – briefly thrilling but ultimately facile.  Salter, however, sets up this spectral moment so surgically that the thrill endures, the reader both fascinated and appalled as it plays out. Charged with eroticism, betrayal and cowardice, ‘Last Night’ offers none of its protagonists a redemptive escape lane – if you like emerging from a story with a semblance of hope, this one isn’t for you. Humans, men especially, in Salter’s stories, are deeply flawed and self-destructive.

‘Something that Needs Nothing’ by Miranda July (First published in the New Yorker, September, 2006 and available to subscribers to read here; collected in No One Belongs Here More Than You, Simon & Schuster, 2007, as well as in My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro, HarperPress/HarperCollins, 2008)

“We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.”

Short stories aren’t about things; they are the things themselves. Sure, they’re braided with thematic skeins simply by virtue of possessing characters with human sensibilities. But unlike the vast canvases of their flabby cousin, the novel, they tend to revel in artifice, an authoritative geometry of their own. July’s achingly poignant and at times hilarious tale of a complex, often unreciprocated friendship achieves its unifying identity from the vulnerable, compelling narrative voice. It’s a heavily stylised story that transcends its own themes of loneliness, coming-of-age, alienation and sexual identity by having us ache alongside the narrator, accompanying her in the kind of intimate possession all great stories achieve.

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Tom Vowler is an award-winning author and editor living in the UK. An Arvon tutor with a PhD in creative writing, his work has featured on BBC radio and been translated into multiple languages.  His forthcoming sixth book is a collection of flash fiction and he’s working on a memoir. More at www.tomvowler.co.uk

 * You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 2,500 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. His story 'A Prolonged Kiss' was shortlisted for the 2021 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. He is Programme Director of the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.

* If you enjoy A Personal Anthology, you might like Creative Digest, a new Substack I’ll be curating and contributing to from inside the Creative Writing team at City. More details here

* Finally, 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!