So, it is a tradition now, I suppose. November, for me, is short story-reading season. The first time I did it, in 2022, I read 72. Then, in November 2023, I read 90. This past November, I read 75. Read – and ranked! In case anyone – including myself, looking back – cares to know what was floating my short story boat at the time in question.
The rules that have developed for this tradition (or, in most cases, been in place since the start):
- No short stories I’ve read before.
- No more than one story per author (per year).
- Stories that finished in the top ten the previous year earn their authors the right to have another story read this year. (Authors whose stories didn’t make the top ten may of course get wildcards.)
- Generally, story selection to be determined by a mix of recommendations I’ve received or found, by my own whims and whatever happens to land in my lap at the right time, and of course by what I can get access to, either online or in print.
I expect that, barring catastrophe of one kind or another, I will keep doing this in some form for the rest of my life. It’s just so much fun. And I discover so much great writing through it. And it really doesn’t take up too much time. I’m not a fast reader. Still, the average short story takes me 15-20 minutes to read, if that – and so I can manage 2-3 a day, even if I’m fairly busy.
Before I announce this past November’s final rankings, another quick note on selection: I don’t want British/American/Anglosphere writing to dominate as it does, but somehow it’s a real uphill struggle to get even as many non-Anglosphere stories on my radar as I do. That’s partly a result of my own language limitations, and perhaps of not as much being translated as ideally would be. Maybe translated stuff is also more likely to be recent, commercially niche, harder to access. It’s also in large measure down to my recommendation sources – whether those are friends (sorry, guys) or the magazines I read or whatever. We’ve all, I feel, got to work on this. Anyway, two public sources of recommendations that I want to make sure any reader of this is aware of, both for stories in general and non-Anglosphere ones in particular: A Personal Anthology and The Short Story Project. Both have been invaluable for my purposes. Check ‘em out.
Anyway, here’s how the rankings ended up:
The Stone Boy (1957) by Gina Berriault
For Esmé - with Love and Squalor (1950) by J. D. Salinger
Twenty-Six and One (1899) by Maxim Gorky, translation by Ivan Strannik
The People Before (1963) by Maurice Shadbolt
Egnaro (1981) by M. John Harrison
Last Evenings on Earth (1997) by Roberto Bolaño, translation by Chris Andrews
The Pearl of Love (1925) by H. G. Wells
Of White Hairs and Cricket (1987) by Rohinton Mistry
The Man of the House (1949) by Frank O'Connor
The Creature (1973) by Edna O'Brien
Mr Salary (2017) by Sally Rooney
Stickfighting Days (2010) by Olufemi Terry
In the Hills, the Cities (1984) by Clive Barker
Neighbours (1985) by Tim Winton
Summer (1964) by Natalia Ginzburg, translation by Alex Valente
Games at Twilight (1978) by Anita Desai
Birds in the Mouth (2009) by Samanta Schweblin, translation by Joel Streicker
Chicken Hill (2015) by Joy Williams
The Mouse (1946) by Anaïs Nin
The Guest (2012) by Mira Mattar
Loneliness (1937) by Bruno Schulz, translation by Celina Wieniewska
If Yes (2019) by Ben Pester
The Spider (1915) by Hans Heinz Ewers, translation by Walter F. Kohn
Eight Bites (2017) by Carmen Maria Machado
Tyres (2000) by Adam Thorpe
Summer of '38 (2013) by Colm Tóibín
Nnabuike (2020) by Arinze Ifeakandu
The Path to the Cemetery (1900) by Thomas Mann, translation by David Luke
Vincent's Party (2024) by Tessa Hadley
Jack (2005) by China Miéville
We Loved Glenda So Much (1980) by Julio Cortázar, translation by Gregory Rabassa
Semplica Girl Diaries (2012) by George Saunders
The Hut on the Hill (1985) by Can Xue, translation by Michael S. Duke
Same Time, Same Place (1963) by Mervyn Peak
The Dog (2013) by César Aira, translation by Chris Andrews
The Dark, the Light (1985) by Helen Garner
After Rain (1995) by William Trevor
The Universal Story (2003) by Ali Smith
The Wall (2014) by Ho Sok Fong, translation by Natascha Bruce
The Shieling (2007) by David Constantine
Men and Women (1999) by Claire Keegan
Sleep (1989) by Haruki Murakami, translation by Jay Rubin
Mono no aware (2012) by Ken Liu
Flowers Appear on the Earth (2013) by Samantha Harvey
Man and Beast (1987) by Mo Yan, translation by Howard Goldblatt
Borderland (2019) by Olga Tokarczuk, translation by Jennifer Croft
My Mother (1978) by Jamaica Kincaid
The Instant of Passage (2012) by Mathias Énard, translation by Charlotte Mandell
Hole in the Wall (1994) by Etgar Keret, translation by Miriam Shlesinger
Cun (1989) by Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, translation by Greg Lockhart
The Hungry Stones (1895) by Rabindranath Tagore, translation by C. F. Andrews
An Englishman's Home (1938) by Evelyn Waugh
Love of Fat Men (1991) by Helen Dunmore
Hell Screen (1918) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, translation by Jay Rubin
Lies (2011) by J. M. Coetzee
Grace Jones (2019) by Irenosen Okojie
Death and the Maiden (1978) by Michel Tournier, translation by Barbara Wright
A Legend of Old Egypt (1888) by Bolesław Prus, translation by Christopher Kasparek
Peter Pan (2000) by Eka Kurniawan, translation by Benedict Anderson
He Cleans (2022) by Valeria Gordeev, translation by Imogen Taylor
The Head (2017) by Bora Chung, translation by Anton Hur
The Shadow at the Bottom of the World (1991) by Thomas Ligotti
Cold Flesh / Thanda Ghosht (1950) by Saadat Hasan Manto, translation by C. Christine Fair
Fingal (1934) by Samuel Beckett
Baby HP (1952) by Juan José Arreola, translation by Larry Nolen
The Magic Chalk (1950) by Kōbō Abe, translation by Alison Kiprick
The Inspector of Schools (1990) by M. Athar Tahir
Piktor's Metamorphoses (1922) by Hermann Hesse, translation by Rika Lesser
The Veldt (1950) by Ray Bradbury
Small Town (1954) by Philip K. Dick
The Model Millionaire (1887) by Oscar Wilde
X-ing a Paragrab (1849) by Edgar Allen Poe
The Ugly Little Boy (1958) by Isaac Asimov
What's Expected of Us (2005) by Ted Chiang
The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End - And Further Still (2016) by Catherynne M. Valente
As always, I don’t want to give anything much away here.
The Stone Boy at number one… An overwhelming story. A miracle, really. Transported me so effectively into its reality.
The Gorky and the Cortázar are kind of in conversation here. I also think of another favourite of mine, Kafka’s Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk, and of Satoshi Kon’s film Perfect Blue. The Gorky though has a kind of intimacy that none of the others do, plus, unlike all the others, it’s totally realistic, probably has happened almost exactly somewhere at some point.
Shadbolt’s The People Before… I was really taken in by its rural, rugged, peripheral setting and characters, and then on top of that, I feel a strong interest in and sense of the importance of the kind of interaction it captures. I feel I haven’t encountered stories like this nearly enough, somehow. Or maybe this one’s just unusually stark.
Wells does it again! Three years in a row now I’ve read absolutely perfect, timeless stories by him. Brian Aldiss’s description of him as ‘the Shakespeare of science fiction’ starts to seem credible, or even a bit unfair – these stories transcend genre, and is Shakespeare really the measure of all literary quality! In any case, might it be that these three are just Wells’ best stories? I seem to remember reading somewhere that Wells himself said these were his three favourites of his own stories. He had good taste in himself, apparently. But I know other short stories of his are similarly famous. So, let’s see.
Frank O’Connor on the wonder of parents. Yeah, that’s going nowhere bar the upper reaches of this list.
In the Hills, the Cities – wow! What a story! Will not be forgetting this one in a while.
At this point, I’ve read three short stories by Natalia Ginzburg – each one has seemed to me unique and brilliant. ‘Summer’ is, I’d say, one of the most concise and yet rich representations of a depressive spell that I’ve come across. (Incidentally, I could to begin with only find the original Italian version. Having learnt a little Italian a few years back, I tried to read it. I failed. I then put it through DeepL, and read that translation alongside the original Italian. Later I found Alex Valente’s translation, but I have to say I liked it less than the DeepL one. Whether it was more accurate or not, I don’t know.)
The Spider is a fantastic bit of storytelling – intriguing, eery, haunting. It feels like it has something deep to say too. I was impressed by a blog post on it by Matthew Rettino that I happened to find when searching for an online version of the story. In particular, that post’s addendum about how the story can ‘speak to the psychological dynamics of social media’ struck me as brilliant.
First time I’ve read a non-erotic story by Nin. And indeed it’s a powerful counterpoint, in a way, to the erotic stuff. The other side of the same story, you might say.
The Hut on the Hill and My Mother – both of these are really more like poems, perhaps. Both would top the list if it described only which of the stories I’d be most tempted to read again sometime soon. Both puzzled me but also got me in some hard-to-articulate way.
The Ifeakandu – I read this because of the rave reviews of his debut collection I came across, and, yeah, I see it. Seems pretty much the definition of a compelling new voice.
The Aira… Great premise, but the ending disappointed me, and I felt routes to better endings were right there to take.
Ali Smith’s The Universal Story – entertaining, definitely, and satisfying in other ways, but it felt to me like a kind of virtuoso storytelling show, rather than a great story as such. Perhaps that’s unfair.
The Shieling… great concept, great ending, plenty of details that work well, but I felt it need better-developed characters, more of a backstory.
The Keret was probably not helped by the fact that I've seen Rosenthal’s short film and feature film adaptations of it – they have different titles, and I hadn’t realised the connection before reading the story. I love the idea though, and the final line. The jury’s probably still out on the gimmickiness question I raised last year. Definitely Keret’s got something special going on though. Like, if he is a purveyor of literary gimmicks, they’re literary gimmicks of the highest order. I guess I am still waiting for him to really move me though, or change my worldview.
I loved Waugh’s An Englishman’s Home for its shrewd, often funny observations on the various characters to be found in the upper echelons of an English village community, and how easily they’re played off against each other. It’s a mark of how strong the whole list is that this story appears so far down it.
The Tournier… I can imagine someone superficially like the main character in this story, and yet she never quite felt real to me. She felt like a writer's toy. Still, not a bad story.
The Coetzee is surely part of a longer piece, and appetising as such. I wasn’t fulfilled by it though. The same goes for the Énard and the Gordeev. I think, from now on, ‘no novel extracts’ will be another rule I have for my short story reading season.
Dick’s Small Town just seemed quite predictable, familiar. I've written a somewhat similar story myself. Very different ending. Very different gist. But yeah, similar premise. Which I probably got from yet another story, one I’ve forgotten. I do really like that premise, of course.
The Wilde is a charming little story, though it felt like a bit of idle doodling by the standards of such a great writer, and I think I also – and perhaps this is quite silly in the context – didn’t like even the suggestion of it being OK that some are vastly wealthier than others. Would be interesting to read this story alongside The Soul of Man under Socialism, and The Happy Prince.
The Chiang was as grippingly written as ever, and I can imagine some people love this story, but a) its argumentation is very familiar from philosophy classes I’ve been in, and b) I don't agree with its main psychological contention. (Still, I expect I will use this story in Philosophy classes I myself teach – because of both its qualities and its weaknesses.)
The Valente. Propaganda for the better side is still propaganda. I need insight, the useful complication of the picture - not the glorification of a dangerously simplified story we already tend to tell ourselves. Trump was electable principally because of the monstrosity of the pre-existing status quo, though that monstrosity was largely hidden from the view of the educated elites - with that hiddenness part of the monstrosity. The idea of the manichean struggle is not helpful.
LOOKING BACK ON LAST YEAR…
Again, there’s one that seems to me horrendously underrated in last year’s rankings – Olga Tokarczuk’s Seams (#41), which has stayed with me as just the most heart-wrenching, incisive distillation of one strand of old age. I’ve even thought about making a short film loosely based on it.
The whole top 20 still look extremely strong to me. Maybe In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (#18) could be challenged by one or two of the ones in the 20s or early 30s.
Probably Erskine’s Nostalgie (#43) deserves to me a bit higher, especially as, I now realise, a story I’ve been working on must have been in part inspired by it. The Way It Has To Be (#49) is probably too low too.
MY ALL-TIME FAVOURITE SHORT STORIES
So, including stories I read in November of 2023, but not any I read in this just-past November. (I’ll see how those ones sink in.)
Ordered alphabetically (by author’s name):
- In a Bamboo Grove (1922) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, translation by Jay Rubin
- The Corpse Exhibition (2014) by Hassam Blasim, translation by Jonathan Wright
- Clara (1997) by Roberto Bolaño, translation by Chris Andrews
- Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940) by Jorge Luis Borges, translation by Alastair Reid
- The Gentleman from San Francisco (1915) by Ivan Bunin, translation by D. H. Lawrence, S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf
- The adventure of the married couple (1970) by Italo Calvino, translation by William Weaver
- The Burning of the Abominable House (1973) by Italo Calvino, translation by Tim Parks
- The Chance (1979) by Peter Carey
- Why Don't You Dance? (1978) by Raymond Carver
- Axolotl (1956) by Julio Cortázar, translation by Paul Blackburn
- The Dream of a Ridiculous Man: A Fantastic Story (1877) by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
- The Bible (1943) by Marguerite Duras, translation by Deborah Treisman
- Track (2017) by Nicole Flattery
- The Machine Stops (1909) by E. M. Forster
- Town of Cats (1935) by Sakutarō Hagiwara, translation by Jeffrey Angles
- Cicisbeo (2003) by M. John Harrison
- The Artist of the Beautiful (1844) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (1937) by Ernest Hemingway
- The Daemon Lover (1949) by Shirley Jackson
- Eveline (1914) by James Joyce
- A Painful Case (1914) by James Joyce
- The Dead (1914) by James Joyce
- A Hunger Artist (1922) by Franz Kafka, translations by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir
- Before the Law (1915) by Franz Kafka, translations by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir
- Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk (1924) by Franz Kafka, translations by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir
- Blue Notebook, No. 10 (1937) by Daniil Kharms, translation by Robert Chandler
- The Hitchhiking Game (1963) by Milan Kundera, translation by Suzanne Rappaport
- The Second Hut (1951) by Doris Lessing
- The Town Manager (2003) by Thomas Ligotti
- The Paper Menagerie (2011) by Ken Liu
- The Husband Stich (2014) by Carmen Maria Machado
- Toba Tek Singh (1955) by Saadat Hasan Manto, translation by Khalid Hasan
- Light Is Like Water (1978) by Gabriel García Márquez, translation by Edith Grossman
- A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children (1955) by Gabriel García Márquez, translation by Gregory Rabassa
- Sister Imelda (1981) by Edna O'Brien - Guests of the Nation (1931) by Frank O'Connor
- Orientation (1994) by Daniel Orozco - The Return (1946) by Andrei Platonov, translation by Robert Chandler
- I Used to Live Here Once (1976) by Jean Rhys
- Cat Person (2017) by Kristen Roupenian
- The Postmaster (1891) by Rabindranath Tagore, translation by Utsa Bose
- Seams (2021) by Olga Tokarczuk, translation by Jennifer Croft
- The Ballroom of Romance (1972) by William Trevor
- The Dressmaker's Daughter (2004) by William Trevor
- You (2019) by Debbie Urbanski
- The Depressed Person (1998) by David Foster Wallace
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #20 (1998) by David Foster Wallace
- The Door in the Wall (1906) by H. G. Wells
- The Country of the Blind (1904) by H. G. Wells
- The Happy Prince (1888) by Oscar Wilde
- Thank You (2013) by Alejandro Zambra, translation by Megan McDowell
- Rentafoil (1866) by Émile Zola, translation by Douglas Parmée
Comments