A Personal Anthology Collaborative Summer Special 2023

Welcome to the fifth seasonal Collaborative Summer Special Personal Anthology, with a batch of summer-themed (though not necessarily sunny) short stories picked and introduced for your reading pleasure – by contributors past and, hopefully, future.

After this selection, as is traditional, A Personal Anthology takes a break until September, when it will return with more great guided tours through guest-editors’ favourite short fiction. I’m always on the lookout for contributors, so if you fancy taking part, please get in touch.

Have a great summer, and happy reading!

Jonathan Gibbs

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‘Longshore Drift’ by Julia Armfield (First published in Granta 148, August 2019, and available to read here) – picked by Jenna Clake

Julia Armfield’s ‘Longshore Drift’ is bookended by basking sharks: “prehistoric things, nightmare-mouthed and harmless”. The sharks serve as an oddly innocent and disappointing presence in the gloomy summer of the story, lingering below the surface, ignored by holidaymakers, swimmers, and paddleboarders. 

This unconsummated threat perfectly mirrors the malaise, boredom, and underwhelm of Alice and Min’s summer, in which they fail to sell ice creams from a van, and the “afternoon is only an attempt at itself – fretful greyness, minnow stink of gutweed”. Min is confident, with bleached hair, a pierced nose, and a sales technique that relies on flirting with local boys and handing out Cornettos free of charge. Alice is reserved, a “clever girl” whose mother worries about her. Alice is disinterested in boys and friendships with other girls in her year. 

This sets up Alice and Min’s painful and uneven journey through adolescence into adulthood, which we see in brief: Min wants to sneak into clubs and kiss boys; Alice has convinced herself she isn’t gay, and follows Min everywhere, sometimes begrudgingly. When Min befriends a group of teenage boys and dubs her friend ‘Savoury Alice’ to her ‘Sweet Minerva’, the tensions between the two are laid bare, and Alice begins to think about Min more carefully, slowly, without knowing what it is she wants to do or say.

Armfield’s British seaside is littered with ice cream wrappers, discarded tennis balls, cigarette butts, chewing gum. This grubbiness is offset by the incredible tactility of the world when the girls are together – electric shocks from polyester shorts, a crunching and rumbling skirt, Min’s hair a “glowstick candle in the dark”, the way Min holds Alice’s wrist or loops her fingers over Alice’s. When Alice enters the sea, she is submerged and is nudged by one of the basking sharks, suddenly afraid she can see right down to its heart. When Min pulls her back up, there’s a sense that what is out there for Alice might seem frightening, but it is calling to her, anyway. 

* Jenna Clake is the author of two poetry collections, Fortune Cookie (Eyewear) and Museum of Ice Cream (Bloodaxe), and a novel, Disturbance (Trapeze). Her poetry criticism has appeared in Poetry London, The Poetry School and The Poetry Review and she lectures in Creative Writing at Teesside University.

‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ by J. G. Ballard (First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1967. Collected in Vermilion Sands, Berkley Books, 1971, now Vintage, 2016; and in The Complete Short Stories, Volume Two, Harper Perennial, 2006) – picked by Robert Cook

“All summer the cloud-sculptors would come from Vermilion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West.”

Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Rich and warm and rhythmic, full of magnificent views and invitingly avant-garde vacationeers. Vermilion Sands, last – as in terminal, as in only remaining – resort of the super-rich, the ultra-self-regarding, the mega-disaffected: a summer escape of endless beaches but no seas, sonic statues*, operatic flora, lakes of fused glass, and viciously bored people.

‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ is a tale of bitter love, climatic revenge, and ephemeral installation art, told by the jaded but still (mostly) gallant Major Parker, retired air force pilot and reluctant beachcomber, who finds himself running an oddball sky-bound performance art troupe with professional lounge lizard Van Eyck, failed portraitist Nolan, and manic dwarf Petit Manuel, all four of them drawn into the celebrity maelstrom that is Leonora Chanel (a type of retro-futuristic Paris Kardashian, if you will). To summarise would be to ruin, but if that gorgeously cadenced opening smacks of radiant Monaco sublime, then the ending is perfectly pitched Death Valley tragi-farce.

“We had entered an inflamed landscape. Half a mile away the angular cornices of the summer house jutted into the vivid air as if distorted by some faulty junction of time and space.”

Which certainly nails the undertow of every summer resort holiday I’ve ever had.

Ballard inverts science-fictional technique. An example: for the first two-thirds of the story, Leonora Chanel is described as having “jewelled eyes”, and because this is Ballardian SF, and because Vermilion Sands is a super-rich hi-technotopia, you naturally enough take it literally: she has body-mods, diamond eyeballs, or emerald, maybe topaz, whatever, but anyway actual bionic gemstone eyeballs! A literal sfnal eyeball-kick! Cool as. And then, in a brief prelude of surface slippage before the finale’s carnival of destruction, Leonora has a hissy fit, and Ballard shows you it’s all for show. Just like summer, when all you can really rely on is the cold winter depth of a human heart.

Ballard said of his imagined desert resort (a far cry from his native Shepperton) that it was a place where he would be happy to live. But then he also said that it “has more than its full share of dreams and illusions, fears and fantasies,” and that “it celebrates the neglected virtues of the glossy, lurid and bizarre.” So of course it’s a place where the great writer of surrealistic interiority would want to live. He’d have had enormous fun sipping coffee on a terrace and watching the slow-quick-slow entropy waltz circling around him.

He wrote a suite of nine stories set there, of which ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ was the eighth written (in 1967, so it’s the same age as me, which is one small reason why it’s my favourite), but it fronts the collected edition, and thereby sets the tone: lush and decadent surface detail, a Riviera of the imagination: louche, decaying, and dangerous underneath. The Vermilion Sands suite (not an accidental term) may be Ballard’s most flamboyantly surrealistic tales. They’re certainly, to me, his most straightforwardly enjoyable — perfect beach reading for people who aren’t, in fact, that keen on beaches.

(*There are at least four very different, yet oddly similar, prog-ambient type music tracks named for this story, all by different bands. It’s just that kind of story.)

* Robert Cook is Anglo-Irish, a registered nurse, and a writer. He lives in Brisbane, Australia.

‘Dr H. A. Moynihan’ by Lucia Berlin (Published in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015) – picked by Hazel Norbury

A young girl is expelled from school for striking a nun and forced to spend every day of her summer vacation working in her grandfather’s dental office. Despite his alcoholism and the filth of his working environment, he makes the best set of false teeth in all of Texas in his workshop, a place of pure horror, where the intensely visceral climactic scene unfolds. With her spare, unsentimental prose, Berlin normalises the trauma the grandfather puts his granddaughter through, even tempering it with the darkly comic image of the child hitting the wrong lever and “the chair spinning him around, spattering circles of blood on the floor”. 

Minor characters such as the Mexican and Syrian neighbourhood children the narrator isn’t allowed to play with, Jim, the black elevator man in the building where her grandfather’s sign “I Don’t Work for Negroes” hangs, and Mamie dying amid “the stench and the flies” speak to us, through their silence, of the poverty and racism of working-class 1940s/50s America. 

* Hazel Norbury is currently completing her MA in Creative Writing at City, University of London, and finalising the draft of her first novel Turkish Mosaic.

‘The Sound of Summer Running’ by Ray Bradbury (First published, as ‘Summer in the Air’, in the Saturday Evening Post, February 18 1956; incorporated into Dandelion Wine, Doubleday, 1957) – picked by Julian Baker

This is my coming-of-age story – not for the protagonist, who remains bursting with youthful innocence at the end, but for me. I raised myself on a diet of genre fiction during my early teens, devouring detectives and aliens. Purchasing a second-hand copy of Dandelion Wine, expecting carny ringmasters and living tattoos, and discovering instead that a tale doesn't require a mystery waiting to be solved. Something as gossamer as capturing 'that summer feeling' can enthral. 

‘The Sound of Summer Running’ places us inside the imagination of Douglas, a world where magic realism is not a necessity, since in his head he can run like a fox or a rabbit — as a fox or rabbit, he becomes the wind. The point of the story is not how he solves his dilemma in yearning for new running shoes. It's to awaken again that feeling of childhood freedom, where one's imagination placed no limits on the world.

I was barely older than Douglas when I first read it. A few years back, I found myself the probable age of the store-keeper, living on a small roadless island in Hong Kong, carting the weekly shop from the mainland over hills. The next day, my feet always throbbing, I conceded deck shoes were inadequate, regardless of my fashion sensibilities. In the mall, gently rocking back and forth in my first ever pair of trainers, Douglas's words returned like a warm summer breeze..."Royal Crown Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Tennis Shoes: LIKE MENTHOL ON YOUR FEET!"

* Julian Baker writes the Consume and Enjoy Substack every week, and has done other stuff in the past.

‘Big Fish, Little Fish’ by Italo Calvino, translated by Archibald Colquhoun (First published as ‘Pesci Grossi, Pesci Piccoli’; published in English translation in Italian Short Stories, Penguin, 1965) – picked by Caroline Clark

This story is in a battered parallel text edition which I get out every August. And what speaks more of summer than a child spending his days in the sea? 

Zeffirino lives to fish. On this particular Sunday, while his father prises limpets off the rocks, he takes a secretly acquired harpoon (“he was a careful little boy”) and revels in the underwater hunt. As with the best stories about children, the telling is as effortless as the child’s movements, and the delight is fully the child’s. 

“He had found the sea-bream again; in fact two! Just as he was aiming he saw a whole squadron of them navigating calmly to the left, and another shoal gleaming to his right. The place was swarming with fish, almost an enclosed lake, and wherever Zeffirino looked he met a frisking of narrow fins and a gleaming of scales.”

This is the story of an encounter between two very different humans, who for an afternoon find a new way to get along. The pivotal moment happens when Zeffirino emerges by a rock to see “a fat woman in a bathing-dress” crying into the sea. No longer carefree, he must assess this adult’s sadness. How to cheer her up. With the wonders of the sea of course: “if she did not stop at sight of a bass or a sea-perch, what on earth could ever console her?”

She accepts his offer to try on his mask but can’t see through her tears, and so she sits on the rocks putting his catch into a pool. The signorina becomes ever bolder in touching the fish, tracing their wounds, till the prize catch of an octopus attaches itself to her arm, then her throat. Things do not end well for the octopus, but Zeffirino is pleased to see there are no more tears. 

* Caroline Clark's books are: Saying Yes in Russian (Agenda Editions), Sovetica (CB editions) and Own Sweet Time (CB editions).

‘Shut a Final Door’ by Truman Capote (first published in the Atlantic Monthly, August 1947, and available to read here; collected in A Tree of Night and Other Stories, Random House, 1949. Currently available in A Capote Reader, Abacus 1989) – picked by Wayne Gooderham

“It was August, and it was as though bonfires burned in the red night sky, and the unnatural Southern landscape, observed so assiduously from the train … intensified a feeling of having travelled to the end, the falling off...”

This early short story from Truman Capote begins with its twenty-three-year-old protagonist, Walter Ranney, alone in New Orleans, sifting through the recent events that have brought him from New York to “this stifling hotel in this faraway town.” Told via flashback, the main action of the story takes place a few months earlier with Walter’s arrival in New York, where it is immediately apparent that he is something of an opportunist; self-centred and amoral; quite happy to pick up and discard friends and lovers (of either sex) in order to further his climb through the echelons of privileged society. But as Walter’s various lies, betrayals and indiscretions come back to bite him, he is also revealed to be strangely, and rather movingly, fatalistic:  

“It was like the time he’d failed algebra and felt so relieved, so free: failure was definite, a certainty, and there is always peace in certainties. Now he would leave New York, take a vacation trip; he had a few hundred dollars, enough to last him until fall.”

And so Walter’s sad and listless “vacation trip” begins. He drifts down to Saratoga; gets drunk in a seedy bar (where he fails to include himself among the bar’s procession of “summer-season grotesques: sagging silver-fox ladies, and little stunted jockeys, and pale loud-voiced men wearing cheap fantastic checks”); then, after a half-hearted and abortive sexual encounter, he moves on, ultimately winding up in New Orleans.

The loneliness that is Walter’s constant companion throughout these closing passages is evoked by a series of anonymous phone-calls, the voice on the other end (“dull and sexless and remote”) ringing off after cryptically intoning, “Oh, you know me, Walter. You’ve known me a long time.” These phone-calls remain tantalisingly unexplained and gently nudge the story into the murkier realms of the uncanny.

With this in mind, it is interesting to note that ‘Shut a Final Door’ was originally collected with another early short story – and another study in loneliness and the uncanny – 1945’s ‘Miriam’. In ‘Miriam’, instead of a callow youth sweating fearfully away in high-summer while being plagued by mysterious phone-calls, Capote gives us an elderly widow, marooned in mid-winter, while being tormented by a mysterious child. It is as if the young Capote already knew that loneliness is all-inclusive, crosses all boundaries, and does not discriminate against gender, class or age.

Indeed, given that Capote was only twenty-three when he wrote ‘Shut a Final Door’ (the same age as Walter) and knowing what we do about Capote’s ultimate fate (a lonely alcoholic, ostracised from the society that proved to be so symbiotic to his work) it is tempting to view ‘Shut a Final Door’ as a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Heel – or as a kind of message in a bottle: scrawled from the subconsciousness of the young Capote for his future self to find (and hopefully heed).

But even without this element of autobiographical foreshadowing, and despite Walter’s numerous shortcomings, Capote still manages to evoke great sympathy for his protagonist-cum-surrogate. And one is certainly left with the impression that this trip to New Orleans will turn out to be a permanent vacation for Walter Ranney, the story ending where it begins, with Walter, alone in his hotel room, watching the ceiling fan rotate above his head (“turning, turning, stirring stale air ineffectually”), while the telephone rings unanswered. “Think of nothing,” Walter tells himself, “think of wind.”

* W.B. Gooderham is the author of Dedicated To: The Forgotten Friendships, Hidden Stories and Lost Loves found In Second-Hand Books. He has written for The Guardian, The Observer, Time Out and Wasafiri and has had fiction published by Fairlight Books. He blogs at http://livesinlit.com and http://bookdedications.co.uk/. You can read his individual Personal Anthology here.

‘Hospital Wedding’ by Jennifer Dawson (published in Hospital Wedding, Quartet, 1978. Available to read on a website devoted the author’s work, here) – Picked by Stuart Heath

The title-story in Jennifer Dawson's sole published collection of short fiction is set in June, at Gledhull psychiatric hospital. It's the institution's 200th anniversary, and preparations are underway for a party in the hospital grounds; with staff, patients and locals all invited. Meanwhile a junior doctor strives to frustrate his senior colleague's efforts to persuade a patient to consent to a lobotomy. It's an abundantly-detailed slice-of-life that, among other things, is about mental health, institutionalization & sexism.

Dawson had ample first-hand knowledge of psychiatric care as both a patient and a professional. Her prize-winning debut novel The Ha-Ha had touched on similar themes, following a young woman's breakdown and subsequent hospitalization. I first learned about Dawson via a reference book: leafing through a charity shop copy of The Oxford Companion to 20th Century Literature in English, my eye stopped at the short entry about her, arousing enough interest to send me off in search of her work.

* Stuart Heath is a middle-aged IT Consultant based in South Wales with no literary ambitions.

‘Caravan’ by Anne Enright (First published in The Guardian, October 2007, and available to read online here; collected in Taking Pictures, Jonathan Cape, 2008, and Yesterday’s Weather, Vintage, 2009) – picked by Stu Hennigan

There’s no such thing as a holiday when you’ve got young kids – it’s same shit, different location, with the added complication of being in unfamiliar surroundings (for them) and having to deal with the little buggers when they’re over-tired, over-excited, radged on sugar, or some deadly combination of all three, which they generally are for The Whole Fucking Time (you).

Anne Enright captures the experience in all its glorious misery in ‘Caravan’, which sees a mam, Michelle, going stir-crazy in the titular tin can as she attempts to deal with a Sisyphean pile of damp washing and keep her brood clean, fed, clothed and entertained, despairing all the while at how they pale in the shadow of the Perfect Family next door.

She’s a magnificent writer – incredibly subtle and perceptive, with a faultless ear for vernacular speech and an eye for the sort of tiny details that make her stories and characters feel 100% real; she’s also possessed of a devastatingly dry wit and wry sense of humour which she uses to excruciating effect here, especially in the conversation Michelle has with her kids in the car on the way home.

She’s best known for her novels (which are, it has to be said, astonishing in places), but her short stories are a treasure trove of tragi-comic delights and well worth seeking out.

* Stu Hennigan is a writer, poet and musician from the north of England. His non-fiction book Ghost Signs: Poverty and the Pandemic is published by Bluemoose. You can read his individual Personal Anthology and other occasional selections here.

‘Our Field’ by Juliana Horatia Ewing (First published 1876) – picked by Clara Abrahams

A family of children discover an undisturbed field full of mosses and wildflowers, spend long summer days deeply embedded there with their dog, and find a way to pay for the dog licence so they can keep him.  

This is a timeless classic, which I read as a child, and, it turns out, have remembered for decades. It is full of forensically detailed natural history, interwoven with playful activity: “sometimes I was a moss-merchant, for there were ten different kinds of moss by the brook, and sometimes I was a jeweller, and sold daisy-chains and pebbles, and coral sets made of holly berries, and oak-apple necklaces; and sometimes I kept provisions, like earth-nuts and mallow-cheeses, and mushrooms; and sometimes I kept a flower-shop, and sold nosegays and wreaths, and umbrellas made of rushes…”

Old-fashioned without being preachy, and especially appealing for those who like stories of families or groups of children, this little gem of a story holds its own magnificently amongst our contemporary enthusiasm for nature writing.

‘Serious Swimmers’ by Michel Faber (First published in Prospect, January 2005, and available to read online here. Collected in The Fahrenheit Twins, Canongate, 2005) – picked by Hannah Piekarz

I chose this story as a complement to Kieron Pim’s choice last week of ‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever. Here, Gail takes her estranged son Anthony out on a custody visit to the swimming pool, under the scrutiny of their social worker. The water givest hem a place to learn about each other, find freedom and a hint of shared joy.

Unlike Neddy Merrell’s liberated trip across the cracked tiles of American suburbia in ‘The Swimmer’, Gail is obliged to be poolside due to the choice of a higher power in the Australian social care system. Her visit is about being observed and tied down by her past choices. Neddy’s inner Narcissist has fallen in love with his own reflection in the water and forgotten about his friends and distant family. Gail’s downfall has been narcotics, and the swimming pool exposes her vulnerabilities. We encounter the floating sticking plaster of reality underneath the surface of Neddy’s pool, yet it offers us a glimmer of sunlight through Anthony’s innocent truth and the promise of a future bond together.

Pools are fab locations as they contrast the calming internal act of swimming with a place which (unless you live in the Hamptons) is usually a disagreeable municipal leisure centre, making it a great leveller and source of endless fun with a foam noodle.

* Hannah Piekarz is a writer and researcher, also an occasional pharmacist

‘Blow It’ by Patricia Highsmith (First published in The Black House, William Heinemann, 1981; reprinted in The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith, Norton, 2001) – picked by Ray Davis

With all due respect to late-February Boston, summer’s the season I dread: in childhood the season of boredom; in early maturity, of physical assaults, desertions, and extremely bad decisions. I’m fish-belly pale, with one carcinoma already knifed out, and even ten minutes at 29°C are enough to begin scooping gray matter from my dutch-oven skull and reduce me to a monosyllabic zombie shambling more or less in any direction you lead.

If my most memorable warm-weather traumas had been triggered by mechanical rather than organic failure, Alfred Bester’s ‘Fondly Fahrenheit’ would be the seasonal selection.

Instead I thought of this stripped-down barely-a-story, simple enough for even the sun-addled to follow. In the summer an upwardly mobile Manhattanite’s fancy turns to thoughts of a Westchester County home — “white, with a lawn, with grown-up trees” — which proves one egg too many for his juggling to handle.

Highsmith was a diagnostician of gender roles, generally presenting the threat of physical violence as a comorbidity of maleness. But, as ‘Blow It’ demonstrates, the Highsmith-male trinity of presumed competence, prescribed sense of agency, and near-absolute absence of rational motive doesn’t need bloodshed to generate recognizable nightmares. What say let’s climb out of these sweaty clothes and into a dry martini?

* Ray Davis lives in the blessedly temperate San Francisco area and publishes his own and others’ work to pseudopodium.org from a cool dark basement. You can read his individual Personal Anthology here.

‘Wizards’ by Naomi Ishiguro (First published in Escape Routes, Tinder Press, 2020) – picked by Raffaella Sero

‘Wizards’ is the first story in Escape Routes, Naomi Ishiguro’s debut collection. It’s about two young men, strangers whose lives brush each other one fateful day in Brighton, as strangers’ lives do on summer days in seaside towns. Peter (or ‘Luciano the Diviner’, as he’s known to his customers) has a fortune-telling stall and his father’s voice in his head, criticising everything he does; Alfie can’t play with the other children, but he’s going to become a wizard when he turns eleven, so he has something to look forward to. Both are facing that summer feeling, destined to return again and again, like a season, throughout one’s life: perched on an ocean of possibilities, they brace themselves to jump in, with no clue what’s going to happen next.

Ishiguro’s beautiful, sea-clear prose effortlessly evokes the texture of childhood holidays, in a story that smells of suncream and has the too-sweet taste of ice lollies. Above all, it conjures the exhilarating and terrifying feeling of endless possibilities associated with the first days of summer.

* Raffaella Sero is a writer and theatre-maker. Her fiction has appeared in The Honest Ulsterman, Profiles Journal, Seaside Gothic and Passageways (Sans. Press). Her one-woman show The Other will be on at the King’s Head Theatre in London on 21st July and at the Edinburgh Fringe in August 2023.

‘Korea’ by John McGahern (First published in The Atlantic, October 1969, and available to read here. Collected in Nightlines, Faber & Faber, 1970; also in John McGahern: The Collected Stories, Vintage, 1992, and Irish Short Stories, The Folio Society, 1999, which includes a powerful set of illustrations, one for each story, by Irish printmaker David R. Rooney) – picked by Tom McGohey

What could be more idyllic than a father and son spending a summer’s day fishing? Plenty of things, it turns out, as is usually the case in a McGahern story, especially one about father-son relationships. No quality time to be had in this case. For one thing, the fishing is not about catching a mess of trout to fry up for a leisurely campfire meal under the stars; it’s about making enough extra money to supplement the bare subsistence income from a small family farm. The fish are oily eels supplied to London restaurants, and even the poor man’s white fish is reserved for selling in local village. And to make things worse, the father is in danger of losing his commercial fishing license to make way for a growing tourist trade of holiday fisherman who don’t like competition.

Money is so tight that the father suggests the son consider emigrating to America, “the land of opportunity,” unlike Ireland, “a poky place … where all’s there’s room for is to make holes in pints of porter.” The father says he’ll “scrape” together money for fare somehow. The son says he’ll think about it. He prefers to wait for results of his school exams, which will dictate his future options, or lack thereof. The father doesn’t have much use of “highfalutin” learning. Regardless, both know this is their last summer working together on the river, and that tension hangs over the story. (Sorry, no names provided, only nameless characters negotiating a timeless business of family obligations and welfare.)

McGahern scaffolds this conflict with two short, searing stories about war, starting with the father’s traumatic experience as POW in the 1919 Anglo-Irish War of Independence, when he witnessed two executions of comrades, barely escaping a similar fate by luck of the draw. He reveals this experience only at the prodding of the son, and later regrets having spoken of it, cutting the son off when he attempts to bring it up again because reliving the war “disturbed me no end. … And the most I think is that if I’d conducted my own wars, and let the fool country fend for itself, I’d be much better off today. I don’t want to talk about it.” The only thing he does want to talk about is the son going to America.

The second story concerns a former local boy – who does have a name: Luke Moran – who went to America, was drafted, and died fighting in Korea. In compensation, the family gets a hero’s funeral for beloved son Luke and a $10,000 insurance payment from U.S. government, in addition to monthly $250 payments Luke earned while on duty. (Naming “Luke” makes him appear more alive in death than our father-son duo, who appear more dead in life.) A veritable lottery, even if the price of tickets was steep.

While preparing for another night on the river, the son learns of these events by overhearing a conversation between his father and a neighbor, and realizes the father’s ulterior motive for shipping him off to America: betting the farm, literally, on prospects of the son getting drafted and suffering a similar fate: “In the darkness of the lavatory between the boxes of crawling worms before we set the night line for the eels I knew my youth had ended.” The father’s “personal wars” have been passed on to the son, who conducts his own private ambush by declining the father’s offer to emigrate, acknowledging, “It’ll be my own funeral,” if things don’t work out for him in Ireland.

The casualties of this family war are piling up, and the roiling mixture of the son’s guilt, love, and murderous thoughts for his father in the final paragraph buckles my knees every time I read this story.

* Tom McGohey taught Composition and directed The Writing Center at Wake Forest University for 20 years. He has published essays in Fourth Genre, Sport Literate, and Thread. Two of his essays have been cited as “Notable Essays” in Best American Essays.

‘The Fullness of Summer’ by Quim Monzó, translated by Peter Bush (Published in English in A Thousand Morons, Open Letter, 2012 and The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories, Penguin Classics, 2021) – picked by CD Rose

For those of us who live in the UK, summer is an elusive thing. We pass the dark winter and chilly spring looking toward the dog days with hope and excitement, making plans for weekends away, music festivals, picnics on a lawn or hillside, long lunches with friends. We pass the damp autumn and cold winter wistfully regretting their passing with nostalgia and, quite often, a sense of regret at opportunities squandered. The few brief days the season does offer are hardly enough to give us the chance to complain about the heat, the flies, the inability to sleep, or the fact that they will soon be over. 

What better way to preserve those memories with a photograph? By snapping away we can, surely, hold on to such fleeting pleasures, and comfort ourselves with them through the bleaker months. 

Though, I imagine, the summers are rather different in Catalonia, this is the idea that Catalan writer Quim Monzó puts forward in ‘The Fullness of Summer.’ An extended family meet for their summer reunion, and the men in the group, cameras in hand, insist on preserving each and every moment. The long lunch and the day itself ends with everyone so busy preparing and posing, that they have scarcely noticed it took place at all. Like an English summer, the story is incredibly brief, and ends almost as soon as it has begun.

* C.D. Rose is the author of The Blind Accordionist and Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else and the editor of The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure (all published by Melville House). You can read his individual Personal Anthology and other occasional selections here.

‘The Long Voyage’ by Leonardo Sciascia, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell (First published as ‘Il lungo viaggio’ in L’Unità, October 1962. First published in English translation in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa Lahiri, Penguin, 2019) – picked by Wayne Holloway

The summer holidays, travel for some across the sea, always makes me think of Sciascia’s ‘The Long Voyage’. Irony delivered without sentimentality. The money to be made out of other people’s dreams, the power of those dreams to drive thousands of people from their home to strange lands, in this case post-war America, the land of Cockaigne. Bristling with tall and wild tales of of the riches to be found there. A loss of love for home, affection for it starved out of you. The tragedy of this. The success stories that filter back from overseas to fuel those dreams, and more besides. If only we could here the voices of today’s migrants with such clarity, such simple storytelling, the universal and timeless motivation, what it is to be human, to want better, no matter what, to survive, but all of this wrapped up as human comedy. Which it is, until it isn’t. 

In an Italian mountain village I once met an old woman who has never seen the sea despite living less than 30 kilometres from it. Nothing ever good comes from it she told me. I know what it look like, I’ve seen the Titanic, she said. Which probably explains her opinion. Also the fact that both her sons disappeared into America, letters home drying up in the years before they both died there.

Dreams bind us, yet we grope around in the dark pursuing them. Others prey on us for money. Desperate people both. 

‘The Long Journey’ is a small tragedy, but sits alongside, is sibling to much bigger ones, and the summer reminds me of this story which gives me pause, as I pack my bags for my holidays.

* Wayne Holloway is a writer/director living in London. He has published two novels, Bindlestiff and Our Struggle, both with Influx Press. You can read his individual Personal Anthology here.

‘The Letter Writers’ by Elizabeth Taylor (First published in The New Yorker, May 1958, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Blush and Other Stories, Peter Davies 1958, republished by Virago Modern Classics, 1986. Also in Complete Short Stories, Virago, 2012) – picked by Emma Cummins

In Elizabeth Taylor’s tragicomic classic ‘The Letter Writers’ a woman prepares to meet a man she’s corresponded with for ten years. Emily and Edmund, an English novelist based in Rome, have never met before in person. With Edmund visiting for the day, Emily has planned a luxurious meal, an outfit change and a crisis of self-confidence:

“At eleven o’clock, Emily went down to the village to fetch the lobsters. The heat unsteadied the air, light shimmered and glanced off leaves and telegraph wires and the flag on the church tower spreading out in a small breeze, then dropping, wavered against the sky, as if it were flapping underwater.

She wore an old cotton frock, and meant to change it at the last moment, when the food was all ready and the table laid.” 

Charged by descriptions of hot weather and glinting light, ‘The Letter Writers’ hums with the headiness of summer. As Emily walks to the village, the sun seems “to touch her bones – her spine, her shoulder-blades, her skull”. Her emotions are fraught and refracted across the landscape, where the sea glitters “like a great sheet of metal” and the late morning silence has the effect of “drugging the brain and slowing the limbs.”

For years, Emily had been tidying her thoughts and observations into sentences for Edmund. “Her days were not full or busy and the gathering of little things to write to him about took up a large part of her time.” There are shades of Anita Brookner in Taylor’s story of a woman – by turns intelligent and idle – conflicted by the prospect of entertaining a man. On this day, she is “more agitated than she could ever remember being”; she’s angry at herself for agreeing to let Edmund come to see her on his visit to England. 

At home, Emily looks in the mirror, ashamed by the “wings of white hair at her temples” and her poor complexion, “unevenly pitted, from an illness when she was a child. As a girl, she had looked at her reflection and thought ‘No one will ever want to marry me’ and no one had.” She sips sherry to stop her hands from shaking; she straightens the knives and forks on the table, and shakes the salt in the cellar until it’s “nicely level”. Her cat smells lobster in the air, so she puts the dish high up on a dresser and covers it with a piece of muslin. 

To say any more would risk spoiling this wonderful story – suffice it to say that the genius of ‘The Letter Writers’ lies in how Taylor flips from Emily’s point of view into Edmund’s perspective as he arrives at the door: “At the sight of the distraught woman with untidy hair and her eyes full of tears, he took a pace back … She was incoherent and he could not follow what she was saying … she seemed to him to be rather drunk.”

Much like Mary Costello’s stunning story ‘The Astral Plane’ – where a man and woman meet for the first time after an affair-in-emails – ‘The Letter Writers’ stretches a wire between two islands: writing and life. Inevitably the tightrope snaps, and after ten years of correspondence, Emily and Edmund are marooned from each other. “There was no more to say, not a word more to be wrung out of the weather, or the restaurant in Rome they had found they had in common, or the annoyances of travel – the train that was late and the cabin that was stuffy. Worn-out, she still cast about for a subject to embark on. The silence was unendurable.” 

What makes ‘The Letter Writers’ so memorable is how, after a short time in a room together, the bridge of words that bound Emily and Edmund falls down, and wounds them. “Don’t say anything. Don’t talk of it,’ she begged him, standing with her hands pressed hard against the door behind her. She shrank from words, thinking of the scars they leave, which she would be left to tend when he was gone.” 

* Emma Cummins manages the Guardian Bookshop and has written for The Guardian, The Quietus and Aesthetica Magazine. She was shortlisted for Fish Publishing’s Short Memoir Prize and tweets @EmmaCummins. 

* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 2,500 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com. 

The previous Summer Special Anthologies are available here: 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2022.

* 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 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!