An Animal Personal Anthology, by Charlotte Tierney

Animals might be considered, broadly, unsophisticated and unremarkable, while also being cosmically bananas, like the rest of the natural world. It’s interesting to compare how they are observed, presented and communed with in short story form. In this personal anthology, their purpose varies: they are metanarrative, character study, plot device, scene detail and more. The great auk, giant snails, a goldfinch, axolotls, a horse, a polar bear, ortolans, the missing link, the memory of a dog, angels (they count), an invisible creature (it also counts), and finally Lucia Berlin on devastating form (because people are animals too).

‘An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It’ by Jessie Greengrass (Collected in An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, JM Originals, 2015)

When you finish this story, you will feel fully culpable for the extinction of the great auk, even at the remove of 180 years, and not only because it is written in the fourth person. Weep, for the human condition – the violent, gnawing appetite for possession and consumption, and the mental maths of self-justification.

“Here is the truth: we blamed the birds for what we did to them.”

‘The Quest for the “Blank Claveringi”’ by Patricia Highsmith (First published in Eleven, Heinemann, 1970 and, in the US, as The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories, Doubleday, 1970)

Like so much of Highsmith’s writing, ‘The Quest for the “Blank Claveringi”’ is dehydrating, claustrophobic and vertiginous. An idyllic tropical island becomes a hostile, threatening landscape, and a slow-moving, banal snail becomes a relentless predator for one supercilious professor.

“The professor walked on aimlessly in shallow water near the land. He was still going faster than the snail.”

The pace a man is walking as a gun on the mantelpiece.

Highsmith liked snails, took them to parties in her handbag, and also smuggled them into France in her bra, allegedly. Even if true, it’s not really relevant, although it feels like it is, somehow, incredibly relevant.

‘The Goldfinch Is Fine’ by Giselle Leeb (First published in TSS Publishing 2018, and Sunburnt Saints: An Anthology of Climate Fiction, Seventy2One 2021. Collected in Mammals, I Think We Are Called, Salt, 2022)

I don’t read a lot of climate-related fiction, probably because I am a coward. In this story, a weatherman reports on an increasingly severe climate event (it’s very wet). He clings to the live stream of a lonely goldfinch in its nest high up on a glacier as the world drowns around him. You can expect to become increasingly anxious about the safety of this lonely goldfinch, and the equally lonely weatherman, as the world becomes utterly unpredictable.

“The weatherman excuses himself and goes to the toilets. He sits in a stall and gets out his laptop and watches the goldfinch. It has all come down to this: a small bird in nest of ice, alone. Unexpectedly, he starts to cry. Why is he still presenting the weather? It is becoming hard to predict anything.”

While it’s true we’re all lonely birds, or lonely weathermen – in a nest of ice, or an eighty-six-foot wave – when the storm hits, Leeb reminds us that’s not everything we are. I love this whole collection which is no better summarised than by its title Mammals, I Think We Are Called. A whole class of individuals, each one reaching out to connect with the whole.

‘Axolotl’ by Julio Cortazar (First published in Spanish in Litereria, 1952 and collected in Final del Juego. First published in English in End of the Game, Pantheon, 1967 and collected in Blow Up and Other Stories, Pantheon, 1985)

By the third sentence of ‘Axolotl’ we discover the narrator has become an axolotl. Although we see him develop an interest in a tank of the animals, we never understand how he became one. By the fourth paragraph, the narrator begins to flip between the third and first person to describe the axolotls / himself:

“I saw a rosy little body, translucent (I thought of those Chinese figurines of milky glass), looking like a small lizard about six inches long, ending in a fish's tail of extraordinary delicacy, the most sensitive part of our body.”

The narrator’s voyeurism raises questions about what we take on – what we change about ourselves – when we do nothing but stare.

“The axolotls were like witnesses of something, and at times like horrible judges. I felt ignoble in front of them; there was such a terrifying purity in those transparent eyes. They were larvas, but larva means disguise and also phantom.”

When we focus intensively on only one interest or perspective does it limit our ability to see more broadly? Will we find ourselves in a tank, with glass between us and everything else, “condemned infinitely to the silence of the abyss, to a hopeless meditation”?

‘Cortés the Killer’ by Samantha Hunt (First published in The New Yorker as ‘Three Days’, January 2006, and available to subscribers to read here, and collected in The Dark Dark, Corsair 2018)

This story of a brother and sister grappling with the death of their father is ruminative and dark, like all of Samantha Hunt’s compelling collection The Dark Dark. The sibling grief is as sharp and unexpected as a beloved farm horse cracking the ice of a pond on a shopping centre building site, then drowning in it.

“The horse is twisting and snorting. She screams as much as a horse can scream. Clem raises his hands to his face. He takes another step towards the horse. ‘Clem,’ Beatrice repeats his name a third time. He turns to look at her. A seam has been cut open in Clem through the center of his face. A seam that says there is no way to stop this. No way for a man to save a horse drowning in freezing water. Clem brings his hands up to his ears and, pressing the small knobs of cartilage there, he stops listening.”

‘The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon’ by James Hogg (Published in Tales and Sketches, Volume I, Glasgow: Blackie and Sons, 1837. Collected in Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World’s Ends, British Library, 2022.)

This story was a primary complaint of most of the reviews I read about the Polar Horrors collection, however, Iadored it. As a great fan of an unpleasant protagonist, I found the bald moral self-assurance of the narrator set against his behaviour viciously entertaining.

The 1939 film ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ starring Basil Rathbone is set on a Dartmoor so bizarre it is my belief they did not use even one (1) accurate visual reference of the landscape. So, too, this Arctic survival story set in 1764. Much like the 1939 film (and a Dartmoor that is both the moon, but also the Acropolis) I consider this tenuous polar experience one of the story’s charms.

The narrator has been drunk for a month at the point at which he first meets a bear – whom he takes, at first, for a naked woman, “I was sure I saw her bare feet and toes and from her form, she appeared altogether without clothes.” He kills the bear, and is devastated to find “milk in her dugs”, but what can be done? He carves it up for meat and skin, after all, he is in a survival story. Lo, a starving, whimpering bear cub appears, bleating with joy to find its mother’s skin.

He names his cub Nancy, after the only girl he ever loved. Nancy changes his life. She sleeps in his cabin, and he raises her with much affection. She proves to be a great companion and resource for him. However, when he is taken in by a “colony of Norwegians”, he is delighted to be with females of his own species again, and thinks “some of the young ones the most bewitching creatures in the world.” Nancy’s jealousy of his new woman(s) is untenable, and so on to the disturbing ending, where the bear’s behaviour is the least of the savagery in this chilly rendering of eighteenth-century imperialism and misogyny.

‘Fears and Confessions of an Ortolan Chef’ by Eley Williams (Collected in Attrib. and other stories, Influx Press 2017)

Eley Williams is heavily anthologised here. It’s no surprise. She is a startling, humorous, heart-breaking writer with a unique sentence-level dynamism. Attrib. will surely prove itself a modern classic.

“You once told me that nobody could ever fall in love with a person whose job involved boiling birds in liquor.”

‘Fears and Confessions of an Ortolan Chef’ is an anxious story of judgement, moral blind-spots, and love. The songbird gastronomy is experienced like a hyperviolent film, and the tension brought by this brutal practice constantly tests the fragile bones of a new relationship. As the relationship fractures, it is not only the Ortalan consumption that becomes taboo. As with much of Williams’ writing, the maelstrom of verbosity sharply outlines everything not put into words: the crux of the story.

‘Hodge’ by Elinor Mordaunt (First published in Metropolitan Magazine, 1921, and later collected in The Tales of Elinor Mordaunt, Martin Secker, 1934. Collected in The Villa and The Vortex: Supernatural Stories, 1916-1924, Handheld Press, 2021)

I considered doing a whole anthology of classic weird women short stories (E. Nesbit, Du Maurier, Mary Elizabeth Braddon etc). These works are a huge source of inspiration for my writing. They often feature a gothic interplay between interior and exterior landscapes. The insidiously oppressive atmospheres arise from the writers’ attention to domestic environments and insipid social mores, and not from the wild gallop of plot rattling through them.

The children – Rhoda and her younger brother, Hector – in ‘Hodge’ (1921), living an isolated but companionable life in a strange, unbeautiful marsh in Somerset, speak of a ‘Miocene’ Forest so real to them they feel they’ve been there, “they would find themselves saying ‘Do you remember?’ in speaking of paths they had never traversed.” One day, they appear to find the fictional forest of their games at an exceptionally low-tide, but as they age away from each other, each maturing to a different social rubric, the reality of the Forest’s existence becomes a tussle between them until years later when Hector finds it again. This time, there’s something in it. “An ape – a sort of ape.” Prehistoric Hodge is, in some ways, like Rhoda’s experience of her brother Hector, “nearish to a man, but –”, and the teenagers enjoy their new Stig-of-the-Dump friend.

This coming-of-age story is haunted by the Victorian fear of devolving from civilised mores to crude desires, and the characters move from innocence to experience when their missing-link pet demonstrates his base interest in Rhoda.

‘Plunged in the Years’ by Jeffrey Ford (First published in Conjunctions 83, 2024)

Robert G. Cook wrote in his own contribution to A Personal Anthology: “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.” I once described Jeffrey Ford to someone as a weird Stephen King, but I don’t especially stand by that either.

This story reached me in a contributors copy of the 2024 Fall edition of Conjunctions. It was an awesome table of contents – all ghost stories by some of my favourite writers (Paul Tremblay, Margaret Atwood, Carmen Maria Machado, Brian Evenson) – but I flicked straight to the very end to read Jeffrey Ford’s story first. I still well up a little each time I re-read it. It features the memory of a family dog, and a possible seagull.

Is this story about estranged brothers a fiction, an auto-fiction or something more than labels allow? (The narrator is referred to once as ‘Jeffy’, his wife is called Lynn, and he teaches in Ohio). Does it even matter?

Here, the narrator of ‘Plunged in the Years’ tells his wife he’s heard his brother’s voice calling the family’s old dog during a walk in a forest –

“In an instant, I saw him in my imagination, waiting all those years for me to show up, traipsing the planks of the wooden walkway, and bellowing for the dog. ‘Come on, you know what I mean. Just his voice. I’m telling you I heard it and it was his. Disembodied.’

‘You’re a kook,’ she said and shook her head.

‘I love you,’ I said. ‘Can I have your crusts?’”

Jeffrey Ford’s worlds are strange, but their hearts are so familiar.

‘Hell is the Absence of God’ by Ted Chiang (First published in Starlight 3, 2001. Collected in Stories of Your Life and Others, Tor Books 2002, and Picador 2014.)

Although he’s known for his science more than anything, Ted Chiang delivers mind-bending ideas. ‘Hell is the Absence Of God’ interrogates suffering, religion, faith, selfishness, selflessness, irrationality, rationality, gratitude, ingratitude, devotion, virtue, morality, deity, the morality of deity, all punctuated by massive, impassive angels.

“Pilgrims took up residence all over the site, forming temporary villages with their tents and camper vans; they all made guesses as to what location would maximize their chances of seeing the angel while minimizing the risk of injury or death.”

‘The A Bao A Qu’ by Jorge Luis Borges (First published in The New Yorker, October 4^th, 1969. Collected in Manual de zoología fantástica, Fondo de Cultura Economica 1957, and translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni into English in The Book of Imaginary Beings, Dutton 1969)

“On the stairway of the Tower of Victory there has lived since the beginning of time a being sensitive to the many shades of the human soul and known as the A Bao A Qu. It lies dormant, for the most part on the first step, until at the approach of a person some secret life is touched off in it, and deep within the creature an inner light begins to glow.”

Some days we’re the A Bao A Qu desperate for help to self-actualise.

Some days we’re the dreadful traveller stopping the A Bao A Qu from self-actualising.

Spoiler: I’ve never known a tentacle plot-twist like it.

‘Unmanageable’ by Lucia Berlin (Collected in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015)

I find myself slightly incapable of introducing this story. It is about a woman; a mother; an alcoholic. It is short, the writing is spare. Berlin manages to cram the cruel dynamics of addiction, neglect, duty, guilt, motherhood, and childhood into so few sentences, and not without a little wit and even warmth. It is characteristic of the whole collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, and every time I read it, I feel like I’ve been hit by a lorry.

It is the middle of the night when the narrator realises her bottle of vodka is empty:

“At six, in two hours, the Uptown Liquor Store in Oakland would sell her some vodka. In Berkeley you had to wait until seven. Oh, God, did she have any money? She crept back to her room to check in her purse on the desk. Her son Nick must have taken her wallet and car keys. She couldn’t look for them in her sons’ room without waking them.”

* Charlotte Tierney is the author of The Cat Bride (Salt, 2024). Her short stories have appeared in Conjunctions,The London Magazine, 3:AM Magazine, New England Review, Best British Short Stories, The Galley Beggar Short Story Prize and elsewhere.

* 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.