The Story

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The Story Page 1

by Victoria Hislop




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  About this Book

  About Victoria Hislop

  Also by Victoria Hislop

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Introduction

  LOVE

  Katherine Mansfield

  A Married Man’s Story

  Dorothy Parker

  A Telephone Call

  Doris Lessing

  A Man and Two Women

  Doris Lessing

  How I Finally Lost My Heart

  Margaret Drabble

  Faithful Lovers

  Angela Carter

  Master

  Margaret Atwood

  The Man from Mars

  Angela Carter

  The Bloody Chamber

  Ellen Gilchrist

  1944

  Alice Walker

  The Lover

  Mavis Gallant

  Rue de Lille

  Carol Shields

  Words

  Anne Enright

  Revenge

  Elspeth Davie

  Choirmaster

  Alison Lurie

  Ilse’s House

  Alison Lurie

  In the Shadow

  Jennifer Egan

  The Watch Trick

  Jeanette Winterson

  Atlantic Crossing

  Clare Boylan

  My Son the Hero

  Maggie Gee

  The Artist

  Colette Paul

  Kenny

  Rachel Seiffert

  Reach

  Rachel Seiffert

  Field Study

  Yiyun Li

  Love in the Marketplace

  Nadine Gordimer

  Mother Tongue

  Miranda July

  The Shared Patio

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  The Thing Around Your Neck

  Carys Davies

  The Redemption of Galen Pike

  Alison MacLeod

  The Heart of Denis Noble

  Emma Donoghue

  The Lost Seed

  Roshi Fernando

  The Turtle

  M. J. Hyland

  Even Pretty Eyes Commit Crimes

  Emma Donoghue

  The Gift

  Avril Joy

  Millie and Bird

  LOSS

  Katherine Mansfield

  The Canary

  Elizabeth Bowen

  A Walk in the Woods

  Dorothy Parker

  Sentiment

  Shirley Jackson

  The Lottery

  Flannery O’Connor

  The Life You Save May Be Your Own

  Elizabeth Taylor

  The Blush

  Anna Kavan

  A Visit

  Anna Kavan

  Obsessional

  Muriel Spark

  The First Year of My Life

  Ellen Gilchrist

  Indignities

  Penelope Lively

  The Pill-Box

  Alice Munro

  Miles City, Montana

  Carol Shields

  Fragility

  Margaret Drabble

  The Merry Widow

  A. M. Homes

  The I of It

  Marina Warner

  The First Time

  Nicola Barker

  Inside Information

  Penelope Fitzgerald

  Desideratus

  Lorrie Moore

  Agnes of Iowa

  Hilary Mantel

  Curved is the Line of Beauty

  Susan Hill

  Father, Father

  Colette Paul

  Renaissance

  Yiyun Li

  After a Life

  Helen Simpson

  Sorry?

  Helen Simpson

  Up at a Villa

  Edna O’Brien

  Plunder

  Edith Pearlman

  Aunt Telephone

  Emma Donoghue

  Vanitas

  Alice Munro

  Gravel

  Alice Munro

  The Eye

  Carrie Tiffany

  Before He Left the Family

  Lucy Wood

  Diving Belles

  THE LIVES OF WOMEN

  Willa Cather

  Consequences

  Virginia Woolf

  A Society

  Ellen Gilchrist

  Generous Pieces

  Dorothy Parker

  The Waltz

  Doris Lessing

  Through the Tunnel

  Penelope Fitzgerald

  The Axe

  Margaret Atwood

  Betty

  Penelope Lively

  A World of Her Own

  Anita Desai

  Sale

  Alice Munro

  Mischief

  Elspeth Davie

  Change of Face

  Elspeth Davie

  A Weight Problem

  Penelope Fitzgerald

  The Prescription

  Alice Walker

  How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy.

  Penelope Lively

  Corruption

  A. M. Homes

  A Real Doll

  A. M. Homes

  Yours Truly

  Anne Enright

  (She Owns) Every Thing

  Elizabeth Jolley

  Waiting Room (The First)

  Jane Gardam

  Telegony I: Going into a Dark House

  Alison Lurie

  Fat People

  Nicola Barker

  G-String

  Nicola Barker

  Wesley: Blisters

  Jennifer Egan

  Emerald City

  Muriel Spark

  The Snobs

  Hilary Mantel

  Third Floor Rising

  A. S. Byatt

  The Thing in the Forest

  Maggie Gee

  Good People

  Ali Smith

  The Child

  A. L. Kennedy

  Story of My Life

  Polly Samson

  The Man Across the River

  Helen Simpson

  Ahead of the Pack

  Stella Duffy

  To Brixton Beach

  About this Book

  Also by Victoria Hislop

  About Victoria Hislop

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  Extended Copyright

  Introduction

  While gathering the short stories for this anthology, I have read some of the most brilliant and profound pieces of writing that I have ever come across.

  The authors in this anthology range from a Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing, to the acknowledged queen of short stories, Alice Munro. There are Man Booker winners, Costa winners and Pulitzer winners. A few were born in the 19th century but the majority are more modern. Several of them are as yet unknown, others are household names, like Virginia Woolf. Many of the most vivid and passionate storytellers are young. And without doubt many of the most powerfully original are contemporary writers.

  Apart from the writers all being female, the other guiding factor in the selection is that the stories have been written in English. The stories are varied and I am sure that no single reader will like them all. Perhaps I enjoyed certain stories because they meant something very personal to me. Others I think would be admired by any reader.

  I discovered that it is possible for a short story (unlike a novel) to attain something close to perfection. Its brevity can mean that an author has the chance to produce a series of almost perfectly formed sentences, where every carefully chose
n word contributes to its meaning. Occasionally the result is flawless, something a novel can never be.

  Readers are allowed to be impatient with short stories. My own patience limit for a novel which I am not hugely enjoying may be three or four chapters. If it has not engaged me by then, it has lost me and is returned to the library or taken to a charity shop. With a short story, three or four pages are the maximum I allow (sometimes they are only five or six pages long in any case). A short story can entice us in without preamble or background information, and for that reason it has no excuse. It must not bore us even for a second.

  If a short story has no excuse for being dull, it has even less reason to be bland. As I selected the stories for this anthology, I found myself reading stories that made me laugh out loud, gasp and often weep. If a story did not arouse a strong response in me, then I did not select it. Even if it is elegaic or whimsical, it must still stir something deep in the pit of the stomach or make the heart race.

  Some stories had such a strong effect on me that I had to put a collection down and do something different with the rest of my day. I could read nothing else. I needed to ponder it, or possibly read it for a second time. Muriel Spark’s ‘The First Year of My Life’ dazzled me with its brilliance. That was a day when I didn’t need to do anything other than reflect on her wisdom. For different reasons, Alice Munro’s ‘Miles City Montana’ rendered me incapable of continuing to read. She moves seamlessly from a description of a drowned boy’s funeral to an incident on a family outing where we believe that one of the children will drown. Even the relief I felt at the story’s relatively happy conclusion was not enough to lift my mood.

  Quite often an anthology is named after the author’s favourite short story, and if that were the case I would read the eponymous story first. More often, there is no particular entry point into an anthology (unless you are happy to read them in the order they appear, something I usually resisted) and in that case, there was no better guide than simply whether the title intrigued me. Who, for example, would not go straight to a story entitled ‘How I Finally Lost My Heart’ (Doris Lessing), ‘A Weight Problem’ (Elspeth Davie), ‘How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy.’ (Alice Walker) or even the intriguingly named: ‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own’ (Flannery O’Connor)?

  A short story can be more surreal than many readers might tolerate with a novel and, perhaps, less grounded in reality. Succinctness sometimes allows a writer to explore ideas that may not sustain over a greater length. An example of this is Nicola Barker’s ‘Inside Information’, a shiningly original story told through the voice of an unborn child who is considering the suitability of its soon-to-be mother. Personally, I love the slightly quirky in a short story, but I would probably not be so patient if I had to listen to the voice of a foetus over three hundred pages.

  I think the short story can give a writer the opportunity to experiment and to try a style or a voice that they would not use in the novel form, so there is often an element of freshness and surprise for the reader – and perhaps for the writer too.

  For me, the stories that make the greatest impact are those that are the most emotional. On a few occasions, when I was reading in the library, I noted curious glances from my neighbours. They gave me sympathetic looks, but tactfully chose to ignore my tears, the context probably reassuring them that I was weeping over the fate of a fictional character rather than some personal catastrophe. Perhaps a few hours later, I would be shaking with suppressed laughter. I think I must have been a very annoying person with whom to share a desk.

  I have divided the stories into three categories – Love, Loss and The Lives of Women – but these titles are loose.

  Love is, of course, a central preoccupation of literature, but a love story is so often a story of loss, or indeed a story of life. Many of these stories take an amusing and sardonic look at love, so the division, though slightly artificial, is designed to give a reader the chance to read according to her or his mood. Many of them could appear under more than one heading and, I will admit, some stories could probably fit happily into all three categories.

  LOVE

  Love appears here in all its guises and disguises. As Yiyun Li describes in ‘Love in the Marketplace’: ‘A romance is more than a love story with a man.’

  Perhaps maternal love is the most visceral of all loves. At least it felt so the first time I read the phenomenal ‘My Son the Hero’ by Clare Boylan. ‘Reach’ by Rachel Seiffert and ‘The Turtle’ by Roshi Fernando also powerfully evoke the strength of a mother’s love, and ‘Even Pretty Eyes Commit Crimes’ by M. J. Hyland touches beautifully on the love between father and son.

  In this section there is the painful poignancy of romantic love in Margaret Drabble’s ‘Faithful Lovers’, love that is more like madness in ‘Master’ by Angela Carter and love that is unrecognised until it is too late in ‘The Man from Mars’ by Margaret Atwood. There is love that for some reason is not meant to be. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about this in ‘The Thing Around your Neck’. There is love as infatuation, short-lived and potentially destructive, in Jennifer Egan’s ‘The Watch Trick’, and the making of love, sometimes kinkily, as in Anne Enright’s ‘Revenge’.

  Many readers will know the experience of being haunted by an ex, and Alison Lurie writes vividly about the effect of lost or past loves in her characters’ lives (‘In the Shadow’ and also the even more extraordinary ‘Ilse’s House’).

  LOSS

  Many of the stories in Loss are tragic, some are shocking. All of them are emotional.

  From Katherine Mansfield’s almost unbearably poignant ‘The Canary’, which is written with a feather-light touch, to Alice Munro’s ‘Gravel’, which is blunt to the point of brutality, I think few of these stories will leave readers cold.

  There are lost lives, lost loves, lost innocence, a lost mother (Colette Paul’s ‘Renaissance’), lost breasts (Ellen Gilchrist’s ‘Indignities’), loss of hearing (Helen Simpson’s ‘Sorry?’) and even a lost leopard (Anna Kavan’s extraordinary ‘A Visit’).

  ‘The First Year of My Life’ by Muriel Spark takes the idea that babies are born omniscient and gradually lose their power and their knowledge. In this story, a baby is born in 1913, ‘in the very worst year that the world had ever seen so far’, and watches, dismayed, unsmiling, sardonic: ‘My teeth were coming through very nicely in my opinion, and well worth all the trouble I was put to in bringing them forth. I weighed twenty pounds. On all the world’s fighting fronts the men killed in action or dead of wounds numbered 8,538,315 and the warriors wounded and maimed were 21,219,452. With these figures in mind I sat up in my high chair and banged my spoon on the table.’

  It is a profound story – a curious companion piece to others in the anthology in which the story is also told by a wise, all-knowing baby: Nicola Barker’s masterful ‘Inside Information’ and Ali Smith’s ‘The Child’ (in The Lives of Women) are especially engaging and fresh.

  Carol Shields’ ‘Fragility’, with its hinterland story of a disabled child and a couple’s lost happiness, shares much of the pathos of Yiyun Li’s ‘After a Life’, in which a dying child lies incarcerated in a small apartment. Both stories are agonising to read. Lorrie Moore’s ‘Agnes of Iowa’ is similarly tragic but even more open-ended, with a couple doomed to live in perpetuity with their woes.

  Susan Hill’s ‘Father, Father’, a story of two daughters ‘losing’ their father to a second wife, their step-mother, is insightful and real, a common situation faultlessly described.

  THE LIVES OF WOMEN

  Life provides infinite shades of light and dark and in this section there are many curious tales and unusual settings. There is a handful of stories that made me ask: What on earth gave her this idea? Where did this come from? One example is ‘The Axe’ by Penelope Fitzgerald. It is a chilling horror story that takes place in the deceptively banal environment of an office and describes what happens when a man finds h
is job has been ‘axed’. The narrator leaves us, as she should in such a story, with our hairs standing on end.

  There is plenty of humour in this section and this is often provided by an unexpected or rather marvellous twist. ‘How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy.’ by Alice Walker is flawless. And Penelope Lively’s ‘Corruption’ is too, with the most brilliant visual image perhaps of any story – where a judge, involved in a pornography trial, takes some of his ‘research papers’ on holiday. A gust of wind sends copies of the offending magazines flying around the beach to be gathered by innocent children and even a woman who, until this moment, has been flirting with the judge. It is brilliantly comic. I felt I was watching the action unfold scene by scene, just as if I was watching a film.

  There is a mildly pornographic element too in A. M. Homes’ darkly comic ‘A Real Doll’. It’s almost about love, but more to do with sex. A boy uses his sister’s Barbie as a sex toy and all sorts of jealousies ensue (Ken has an opinion, naturally). It’s funny, outrageous and totally original.

 

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