Best British Short Stories 2019
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BEST BRITISH SHORT STORIES 2019
edited by
NICHOLAS ROYLE
SYNOPSIS
The nation’s favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its ninth year.
Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or more accurately, by its title. This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor’s brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume.
Featuring stories by: Julia Armfield, Elizabeth Baines, Naomi Booth, Kieran Devaney, Vicky Grut, Nigel Humphreys, Sally Jubb, Lucie McKnight Hardy, Robert Mason, Ann Quin, Sam Thompson, Melissa Wan and Ren Watson.
PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS WORK
‘Salt’s ‘Best British’ series reflects who we are; the state we are in. Britain’s modern short story writers are mapping out the million dimensions to a lonely, atomised life. And this anthology holds up that mirror. Like the finest art, it mesmerises as it disturbs.’ —TAMIM SADIKALI, Bookmunch
‘For those wishing to dip their toes into short stories currently available in a variety of mediums this collection offers an excellent primer. As a fan of the literary format I found it a well curated and enjoyable read.’ —Neverimitate
‘This annual feast satisfies again. Time and again, in Royle’s crafty editorial hands, closely observed normality yields (as Nikesh Shukla’s spear-fisher grasps) to the things we ‘cannot control’.’ —BOYD TONKIN, The Independent
‘For those new to short stories, the quality and breadth of what is being showcased here, will not easily be bettered. Moreover, the experiential difference that contemporary short stories offer, when compared to novel reading – the unique register they can strike – makes this collection all the more valuable.’ —Bookmunch
‘Nicholas Lezard’s paperback choice: Hilary Mantel’s fantasia about the assassination of Margaret Thatcher leads this year’s collection of familiar and lesser known writers.’ —Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
‘Another effective and well-rounded short story anthology from Salt – keep up the good work, we say!’ —SARAH-CLARE CONLON, Bookmunch
‘It’s so good that it’s hard to believe that there was no equivalent during the 17 years since Giles Gordon and David Hughes’s Best English Short Stories ceased publication in 1994. The first selection makes a very good beginning … Highly Recommended.’ —KATE SAUNDERS, The Times
‘When an anthology limits itself to a particular vintage, you hope it’s a good year. The Best British Short Stories 2014 from Salt Publishing presupposes a fierce selection process. Nicholas Royle is the author of more than 100 short stories himself, the editor of sixteen anthologies and the head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize, which inspires a sense of confidence in his choices. He has whittled down this year’s crop to 20 pieces, which should enable everyone to find a favourite. Furthermore, his introduction points us towards magazines and small publishers producing the collections from which these pieces are chosen. If you like short stories but don’t know where to find them, this book is a gateway to wider reading.’ —LUCY JEYNES, Bare Fiction
Best British Short Stories 2019
NICHOLAS ROYLE has published three collections of short fiction: Mortality (Serpent’s Tail), short-listed for the inaugural Edge Hill Short Story Prize in 2007, Ornithology (Confingo Publishing), long-listed for the same prize in 2018, and The Dummy & Other Uncanny Stories (The Swan River Press). He is also the author of seven novels, most recently First Novel (Vintage), and a collaboration with artist David Gledhill, In Camera (Negative Press London). He has edited more than twenty anthologies, including eight earlier volumes of Best British Short Stories. Reader in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize, he also runs Nightjar Press, which in 2019 celebrates ten years of publishing original short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks.
By the same author
NOVELS
Counterparts
Saxophone Dreams
The Matter of the Heart
The Director’s Cut
Antwerp
Regicide
First Novel
NOVELLAS
The Appetite
The Enigma of Departure
SHORT STORIES
Mortality
In Camera (with David Gledhill)
Ornithology
The Dummy & Other Uncanny Stories
ANTHOLOGIES (as editor)
Darklands
Darklands 2
A Book of Two Halves
The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers’ Dreams
The Time Out Book of New York Short Stories
The Ex Files: New Stories About Old Flames
The Agony & the Ecstasy: New Writing for the World Cup
Neonlit: Time Out Book of New Writing
The Time Out Book of Paris Short Stories
Neonlit: Time Out Book of New Writing Volume 2
The Time Out Book of London Short Stories Volume 2
Dreams Never End
’68: New Stories From Children of the Revolution
The Best British Short Stories 2011
Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds
The Best British Short Stories 2012
The Best British Short Stories 2013
The Best British Short Stories 2014
Best British Short Stories 2015
Best British Short Stories 2016
Best British Short Stories 2017
Best British Short Stories 2018
Published by Salt Publishing Ltd
12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX
All rights reserved
Selection and introduction © Nicholas Royle, 2019
Individual contributions © the contributors, 2019
The right of Nicholas Royle to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.
Salt Publishing 2019
Created by Salt Publishing Ltd
This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN 978-1-78463-186-4 electronic
In memory of Dennis Etchison (1943–2019)
Introduction
Nicholas Royle
If I had a pound for every time over the last year someone has remarked to me that the short story is enjoying a notable renaissance, I’d have enough money to submit numerous stories to Ambit and the Fiction Desk. But more on that later.
First, the New Statesman. I like the New Statesman – I subscribe to it and look forward to its arrival in my letterbox every Friday – but I wish it would do more for the short story. Among US newsstand magazines, Harper’s Magazine and the New Yorker regularly publish short stories. (Indeed, the New Yorker publish
ed a very good story, ‘Cecilia Awakened’, by Tessa Hadley, in Sepember 2018.) The New Statesman does, too, but regularly only in the sense of two or three times a year. The 2017–18 Christmas special featured an extract from a forthcoming new collection by Rose Tremain and the 2018 summer special extracted a story from Helen Dunmore’s final collection, Girl, Balancing & Other Stories (Hutchinson). The 2018–19 Christmas special giftwrapped us a new story by Kate Atkinson. How about a new story every week instead of just in the summer and at Christmas (and sometimes in spring)? That way we would get to enjoy not only more stories, but more new stories, rather than mostly extracts from forthcoming collections (rather a lazy way to publish short stories).
Short story competition anthologies have clearly become a bit of a thing. The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology has reached volume 11; the Bath Short Story Award Anthology has been going since 2013 (in print form since 2014). The City of Stories anthology is on its second incarnation; it has a tag line – ‘Celebrating London’s writers, readers and libraries’. Spread the Word are responsible for it and this edition features over 60 London-based writers who took part in creative writing workshops in June 2018 in libraries across the city. A competition for 500-word stories was judged by four writers-in-residence – Gary Budden, Meena Kandasamy, Olumide Popoola and Leone Ross – who have all contributed pieces that appear alongside the winning stories.
May You: The Walter Swan Prize Anthology, edited by S. J. Bradley, is published by Scarborough’s Valley Press in association with the Northern Short Story Festival, Leeds Big Bookend Festival and the Walter Swan Trust. Bradley presents nineteen of the best from a field of more than 300 entries, including a short-list of six and three winners. The judges, Anna Chilvers and Angela Readman, awarded first and second prizes to Sarah Brooks and Andrea Brittan respectively, and they’re very good stories, but I would have been tempted to give top spot to P. V. Wolseley just for the description of a hamster – ‘He was golden-brown and sagged like a beanbag’ – in her story ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. Megan Taylor’s ‘Touched’, short-listed, was also among my favourites.
Megan Taylor also appeared among last year’s chapbooks from TSS Publishing, with ‘Waiting For the Rat’, a worthy addition to an always-enjoyable sub-genre, holiday-let horror stories. It was the fifth in TSS’s series and it was followed by Christopher M. Drew’s very powerful ‘Remnants’, which reminded me of Cormac McCarthy, in a good way. I was delighted to see Rough Trade get in on the chapbook boom with Rough Trade Editions. Mostly non-fiction, the series has included one short story, ‘The Faithful Look Away’, by poet Melissa Lee-Houghton; I hope it goes on to feature more stories.
In yet more chapbook news, Word Factory and Guillemot Press formed a collaboration, the Guillemot Factory, to publish, in the first instance, four new stories in chapbook format. Lavishly illustrated, the four titles, by Jessie Greengrass, Carys Davies, Adam Marek and David Constantine, were received with great enthusiasm. In Constantine’s ‘What We Are Now’, my favourite of the four, an unhappily married woman bumps into an old flame. Nightjar Press, meanwhile, if I may mention my own baby, although now ten years old, published four more chapbooks, two in the spring and two in the autumn.
From single stories to single-author collections. Vicky Grut’s Live Show, Drink Included (Holland Park Press) is a selection of her published stories from the past twenty-five years. There are a couple of previously unpublished stories and two that appeared for the first time in other publications during 2018. My favourite of these was ‘On the Way to the Church’. I would have chosen it for this volume even if it hadn’t featured my favourite track on my favourite album by my favourite solo artist.
Other interesting collections included Sean O’Brien’s Quartier Perdu (Comma Press), Vesna Main’s Temptation: A User’s Guide (Salt) and the publishing phenomenon that was Ann Quin’s The Unmapped Country (And Other Stories). To say that the latter was ‘edited and introduced’ by Jennifer Hodgson, as is recorded on the title page, I’m sure gives very little idea of the amount of love, dedication and sheer hard work that must have gone into creating this book of ‘stories and fragments’ by the great British writer who died in 1973 at the age of 37. Hats off to Hodgson and to her publisher.
Is it a book? Is it a magazine? From issue ten of The Lonely Crowd the answer was on the cover: ‘the magazine of new fiction and poetry’. It still looks like a book, like quite a chunky anthology, and it’s still publishing tons of really good stories. In issue nine I particularly liked Courttia Newland’s ‘A Gift For Abidah’ and James Clarke’s ‘Waddington’, while stories by Kate Hamer, Jane Fraser, Lucie McKnight Hardy and Neil Campbell were the highlights, for me, in issue ten.
Newsprint is not dead: two new publications launched last year. Firstly, the Brixton Review of Books, an excellent and very welcome free literary quarterly created by Michael Caines, whose day job is at the TLS. Well, free if you happen to be wandering around south London when a new issue hits the streets (it’s given away outside tube stations, I believe, and I’ve seen it in the Herne Hill Oxfam Bookshop), or you can pay £10 for a subscription (check the web site). It features reviews, articles and columns, and, in issue three there was a notable story of ‘formless dread’, ‘Down the Line’ by Richard Lea. What’s not to like about formless dread? More, please. Secondly, at the Dublin Ghost Story Festival in June last year I picked up a copy of Infra-Noir, edited by Jonathan Wood and Alcebiades Diniz and published by Jonas Ploeger’s specialist press Zagava. The first issue contains stories by Brian Howell, previously featured in this series, and poet Nigel Humphreys, whose first-published short story ‘Beyond Dead’ is reprinted in the current volume.
Staying with literary magazines, the most interesting things in Hotel issue four – and they were very interesting – were either not short stories or not by British authors. In Structo issue 18, I was struck by Paul McQuade’s ‘The Wound in the Air’ and was similarly drawn to his not-unrelated story, ‘A Gift of Tongues’, in Confingo issue ten, which also included notable stories by a number of writers including Simon Kinch and Giselle Leeb. Jumping back to spring 2018, Confingo issue nine was packed with good stories. Stand-outs: Charles Wilkinson’s ‘Berkmann’s Anti-novel’, one of those stories about oddball school friends and how they turn out, which are always interesting, especially when they’re this well written; Elizabeth Baines’ ‘The Next Stop Will Be Didsbury Village’, which is best read on a Manchester Metrolink tram leaving either East Didsbury or Burton Road in the direction of Didsbury Village; David Gaffney’s ‘The Dog’, which, like Baines’ story, was written to be performed in the Didsbury Arts Festival. ‘Performed’ in this context may strike you as an overstatement, when such performance generally takes the form of reading the story to an audience, but Baines and Gaffney (if that doesn’t sound like a new ITV cop show partnership, I don’t know what does) always read well.
Lighthouse continues to illuminate the darkness with excellent writing. ‘One Art’, by C. D. Rose, in issue 16, was very good, but ‘Smack’ by Julia Armfield in the same issue was outstanding, probably the best story to appear in the journal during 2018. I don’t know what the jellyfish represent, but I don’t care. And yet I do care about the story.
The same dimensions and format as both Lighthouse and Confingo, Doppelgänger was a new publication edited by James Hodgson. Its web site states that it aimed to publish twice a year, with six stories in each issue, three realist stories and three magical realist stories. As far as I can tell, there has been no follow-up to the first issue, dated winter/spring 2018 and featuring work by Dan Powell, Andrew Hook, Cath Barton and others. Max Dunbar takes a risk with his story, ‘The Bad Writing School’. If you’re going to satirise the teaching of creative writing, you’ve got to be pretty sure of your ability.
If I had to pick a favourite story out of all those published in horror magazine Black Static during 2018, it would be Giselle Leeb’s ‘Everybody
Knows That Place’, set on a camp site, which immediately makes it pretty horrifying for me. Some people find taxidermy horrifying, whereas I’m drawn to it, and that’s one reason why I liked Sally Jubb’s ‘The Arrangement’ so much. It appears in issue 42 of Brittle Star alongside other stories, Ren Watson’s ‘Sky-sions’ (reprinted in the current volume, under another title) and Josie Turner’s ‘The Guide’, that emerged as winners in the Brittle Star short fiction competition.
A friend alerted me to the fact that Ambit, the great avant-garde arts magazine founded by novelist and consultant paediatrician Martin Bax in 1959, had recently started charging for submissions. To submit a short story used to cost nothing, unless you counted the cost of photocopying, stationery and postage (not forgetting the stamped addressed envelope); now it costs £2.50, which Ambit says is to pay for the cost of using Submittable, a service that charges Ambit a monthly fee. There are advantages to Ambit in using Submittable, editor Briony Bax tells me: it enables their editors to work wherever they are; they can respond to submissions in a timely manner; it creates a virtual office for their eight editorial readers for whom an actual office would be prohibitively expensive etc. All reasonable arguments, of course, and Bax emphasises that there is a student/unwaged category with no proof required of such status, or people may still submit by post for free.
I don’t much like this development, even as Ambit celebrates its sixtieth birthday, but I haven’t let it stop me selecting two stories from last year’s issues of the magazine: Stephen Sharp’s ‘Cuts’ from Ambit 231 (in the same issue I also liked John Saul’s ‘Tracks’) and Adam Welch’s ‘Toxic’ from Ambit 232.