The Best British Short Stories 2014
‘There is no more carefully chosen yet eclectic anthology series in existence in Britain today’ —SUSAN HAIGH, The Short Review
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: Elizabeth Baines, David Constantine, Ailsa Cox, Claire Dean, Stuart Evers, Jonathan Gibbs, Jay Griffiths, David Grubb, M John Harrison, Vicki Jarrett, Richard Knight, Philip Langeskov, Siân Melangell Dafydd, Anna Metcalfe, Louise Palfreyman, Christopher Priest, Joanne Rush, Mick Scully, Joanna Walsh and Adam Wilmington.
Praise for Best British Short Stories
‘Another effective and well-rounded short story anthology from Salt – keep up the good work, we say!’ —SARAH-CLARE CONLON, Bookmunch
‘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
‘Highly recommended’ — KATE SAUNDERS, The Times
NICHOLAS ROYLE is the author of more than 100 short stories, two novellas and seven novels, most recently First Novel (Vintage). His short story collection, Mortality (Serpent’s Tail), was shortlisted for the inaugural Edge Hill Prize. He has edited sixteen anthologies of short stories, including A Book of Two Halves (Gollancz), The Time Out Book of Paris Short Stories (Penguin), ’68: New Stories by Children of the Revolution (Salt) and Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds (Two Ravens Press). A senior lecturer in creative writing at the Manchester Writing School at MMU and head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize, he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks.
Also by Nicholas Royle:
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
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
Published by Salt Publishing Ltd
12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX
All rights reserved
Selection and introduction © Nicholas Royle, 2014
Individual contributions © the contributors, 2014
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 2014
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 978-1-84471-995-2 electronic
In memory of Joel Lane (1963–2013)
Introduction
They say there’s no accounting for taste and it plays a large part in the assembly of an anthology such as this. Zadie Smith’s ‘The Embassy of Cambodia’, published last year as a handsome stand-alone volume by Hamish Hamilton, was beautifully written and you couldn’t fault the author’s grasp of the language, unless you objected to her use of ‘presently’ to mean ‘now’, but was it to your taste? (It did seem to be to many people’s.) What was it anyway? A short story? A very short novella? About 8000 words in length and described by the publisher’s blurb simply as a ‘story’, it came in 21 chapters tricked out with white space, generous leading and wide margins, to look more like a novella or even a short novel. It lifted the spirits to see a major imprint publishing an original short story on its own, even in its crafty little disguise; it would raise them even further to see the same thing happen with authors who don’t enjoy the same level of media attention as Zadie Smith.
Smaller publishers, although they have less to spend, may also have less to lose. Daunt Books – better known, in the form of James Daunt, as a classy bookseller who came to the rescue of Waterstone’s – has started putting out very smart-looking chapbooks containing individual short stories, among them Philip Langeskov’s wonderfully tense ‘Barcelona’, reprinted herein. I hope readers will forgive my including a story first published in chapbook form by my own Nightjar Press – M John Harrison’s ‘Getting Out of There’.
Unthank Books, 3:AM Press, Oneworld Publications, Unlocking Press, The Fiction Desk, Tindal Street Fiction Group, TTA Press and Freight Books are all small publishers with the vision – and good taste – to take on authors and projects that would grace bigger imprints’ lists if only the editors at those bigger imprints were not obliged to dance to the tune of sales and marketing. The above small publishers are all represented in the present volume. As are literary magazines The Reader and Ambit, as well as high-achieving online outlet The View From Here. Two stories were shortlisted in the Manchester Fiction Prize and the author of one of them, Adam Wilmington, walked off with ten grand as the winner. But the development of the year in short fiction – yes, more exciting, perversely perhaps, for this observer, than either Alice Munro winning the Nobel or Lydia Davis nabbing the Man Booker International – was the emergence of Lighthouse, a little magazine from Norwich publishing short stories, poems and essays of exceptional quality, including one (Anna Metcalfe’s ‘Number Three’) that was later shortlisted in the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award worth £30,000. Lighthouse, with its excellent editorial judgment and attractive modishly old-fashioned design, is a publication to cherish.
It’s especially cheering that in the digital era, print publications, rather than merely clinging on, are flourishing, and there are more deserving stories being published than there is room for reprints in this book. I was much taken by two stories in the August 2013 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine – Jennifer Reeve’s ‘A Case of Mis-Identity’ and Val McD
ermid’s ‘Ghost Writer’ – as well as Jason Gould’s ‘All Items of Value Have Been Removed’, in Structo 10, ‘Two Parties’ by Alan Beard, which appeared in The Sea in Birmingham (Tindal Street Fiction Group), and Krishan Coupland’s ‘Men of the Waste’, shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and so included in the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Volume Six (Bristol Review of Books).
There wasn’t a bad story in The Longest Night featuring five ‘curious tales’ by Alison Moore, Emma Jane Unsworth, Richard Hirst, Tom Fletcher and Jenn Ashworth; this handsome volume, illustrated by Beth Ward, was described as ‘an entirely independent collaborative publication’ with no named publisher or editor credited. Two regional anthologies provided a generous number of notably good short stories – Root: New Stories From North East Writers (Iron Press) edited by Kitty Fitzgerald, and Connecting Nothing With Something: A Coastal Anthology (Influx Press) edited by Gary Budden and Kit Caless, featuring new fiction, poetry and illustration inspired by the coastline of south-east England.
Some titles may reach small audiences, but they are labours of love and we are all richer for their existing. Hoax started up last year, a single A3 sheet folded to A5 and describing itself as ‘a literary venture to present all forms of creative, text-based work as equal and to remove useless definitions of what creative work can be’. Further information at hoaxpublication.co.uk. Piece of Paper Press, run by author Tony White, is going strong after a number of years; last year saw it publish an original short story by Michael Moorcock, ‘A Twist in the Lines’. Interrobang, possibly the world’s first origami literary magazine, was created by York St John creative writing student Fionn Coughlan-Wills; like Hoax, this unfolds to a single piece of paper – glossy and printed in colour – but you try folding it back up again after a couple of drinks.
York St John is just one of the many universities around the country running lively and imaginative creative writing departments with excellent staff and talented students. Novelist, screenwriter and short story writer Hanif Kureishi made the news early this year with comments he was reported to have made at the Independent Bath Literature Festival. Kureishi, who was made a professor at Kingston University in autumn 2013 and teaches creative writing there, was reported to have said, ‘A lot of my students just can’t tell a story.’ He was reported to have gone on: ‘A lot of them don’t really understand. It’s the story that really helps you. They worry about the writing and the prose and you think: “Fuck the prose, no one’s going to read your book for the writing, all they want to do is find out what happens in the story next.”’
This perhaps resonates with the experience of a friend of mine who applied for a job teaching creative writing at a university in the north of England. He confided that, when he went for an interview, there were four people in the room including the Head of English and himself, and three of them said they weren’t that fussed about punctuation. The Head of English admitted to not knowing how to use a semi-colon. My friend was shocked and was quite relieved not to be offered the job and so have to decide whether to compromise his standards.
But the fact is there are some excellent writer-teachers on the staff at Kingston, as elsewhere, who must have been rather frustrated by Kureishi’s comments. Why did he appear to bite the hand that feeds, adding, according to the Independent, ‘The whole thing with courses is that there are too many teachers on them, and most are going to teach you stuff that is a waste of time for you’? Was he venting spleen, stating a sincerely held view, being mildly disingenuous or simply engaging in downright mischief? He did, after all, have a new book out, and newspapers never tire of the old debate: can you or can you not teach creative writing?
While the smart answer may be that you can teach it all you like, and the real question remains whether you can learn it, the fact is that my colleagues and I at the Manchester Writing School at MMU see remarkable results every year, and we’re not alone in that. If you can write, the practice of workshopping and exposure to other elements of a creative writing MA will, in most cases, help you to write better.
This year’s anthology is dedicated to the memory of Birmingham-based author Joel Lane, a much-loved writer of bleak and disturbing short stories – his preferred term was ‘weird fiction’ – as well as two outstanding novels and several volumes of poetry, who died unexpectedly on 25 November 2013 aged only 50.
NICHOLAS ROYLE
Manchester
April 2014
The Faber Book of Adultery
Jonathan Gibbs
Mark followed her to the living room, drink in hand. The room was two rooms knocked together, running from white wooden slatted shutters at the front to a view of the lawn at the rear, scattered with toys. The long wall opposite was thick with shelves, the books backing onto the no doubt equally well-stocked shelves of the house next door. The terrace, in Mark’s mind, extended away from them in both directions, like a paper chain of human figures joined at the hand and foot, a procession of paired mirror images. In all of them, people having dinner parties, couples flirting, children soundly sleeping.
Elizabeth had gone to the stereo, with her husband’s iPhone, so he took himself in the other direction. He cruised the shelves, running his fingers over the spines, before allowing them to settle on one, as if at random. He levered it out, enjoying the feeling of resistance it gave as it slid against those packed tight on either side. When it came free, almost with a pop, the books alongside seemed to sigh into the space it left, their pages filling with air.
The book was Richard Ford’s Women with Men – the handsome Harvill Panther edition. On the cover was a Doisneau-esque couple kissing, or sort of kissing, on a railway platform. He flicked the book open with his thumb – the page edges smudged with age – to reveal a second photo, inside, of a barge on the Seine. Those low embankment walkways. That was where the true loucheness of Paris lay, he thought, in the flatness of its river water, so far from the sea – no overexcited tides, falling and rising, like the Thames.
Have you read this? he said. She was coming back over to him, her music selection drifting from the speakers.
Let me see, she said.
Yes. Look. And she showed him her initials, penned into the top corner of the first page. She thumbed on through it, giving a little grunt of recognition, or surprise.
Mark oriented himself against the mantel shelf, giving himself a clear view of the doorway into the hall, which turned and led down to the kitchen extension, where they had eaten: he and Laura and Elizabeth and Zac, and these two other women, Genevieve and Nicci, friends of Elizabeth’s. The others were clearing the table and loading the dishwasher. Elizabeth, having cooked, was exempt, and Mark had said he would keep her entertained until they were done.
He took his first sip of the whisky Zac had poured him in the kitchen. The taste of it spread, making his mouth glow, as if he’d been given a very gentle anaesthetic, or stung by a swarm of infinitesimal and ultimately benign bees. Elizabeth’s hair was the colour of whisky, but not whisky held up to the light: whisky seen looking down into the glass. He was quite drunk.
Why did nobody have drinks cabinets any more? He looked around the room. This was another difference between their generation and their parents’. Did this mean they were less adventurous in their drinking? Were their parents’ hangovers worse, then? Grander, more splendid?
Elizabeth closed the book and handed it back. It’s been a while since I read it, she said. And those American writers, sometimes it’s difficult to hold onto a definite image of each individual story, you know.
All those endless adulteries, you mean.
I suppose so.
He could hear occasional yelps of laughter from the kitchen, short swells of conversation that gave birth to others: a healthy, stable wash of chit-chat.
I know what you mean, he said. Ford. Updike. Cheever. Yates.
Philip Roth.
Philip
Roth. It’s like they’re incapable of writing a story that doesn’t hinge, doesn’t depend entirely for its moral resonance, on the traducement – is that the word? – of a marriage.
And you’ve never written a story about adultery?
No, but then I don’t really do stories that much. And the novels are reasonably free of them, I think. But no. I’m yet to write my first adultery story.
She raised her eyebrows at him, and he considered the terrible, and terribly exact beauty of a woman’s eyebrows, their pluckedness and trimmedness. Really, it made you wonder if binding their feet might not be such a bad idea either, after all.
Adultery and the short story, he said, in his seminar voice, and gave the whisky in his glass a swirl. Actually, I had this horrible realisation, in the class I’ve been teaching, that a good half of the stories I’d set them were about adultery. Carver, obviously. Not Updike – nobody teaches him any more, it seems – but Yates, Lorrie Moore, Anne Beattie. Yes, the women, too. What?
She was laughing, into her glass.
I was just thinking, how nice it is for the women that they get to have first names.
Ha.
No, I’m sorry. And what do they think of it, of their tutor foisting all this filth on them? Does it embarrass them?
God, no. If it was tutor-shagging-student stories, perhaps. But adultery, marriage, middle age, all that is so remote from their lives, it might as well be Chekhov.
She laughed again, the laugh turning into a sneeze. He removed a tissue from a box on the shelf beside them and offered it to her.
Thanks.
It’s interesting, though, don’t you think?
She finished blowing her nose. Interesting?
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