Zadie Smith "Umberto Buti" by Giuseppe Pontiggia
I was assigned the story by the American literary magazine McSweeney's to translate from Italian. I'd never read Pontiggia before. As I translated it I really admired its economy and humour, and its somewhat anti-Italian spirit. There's nothing beautiful in it, and no reverie. It's all hard edges, like a piece by Moravia – but funnier. I think it's interesting to see a writer working against the grain of his culture.
Podcast Today
Richard Ford "The Student's Wife" by Raymond Carver
"The Student's Wife" is from Raymond Carver's first story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, published in America in 1976. You could say it's from Ray's "early period" – written possibly as early as the late 60s, when he was one side or the other of 30 years old. Its verbal resources are spare, direct, rarely polysyllabic, restrained, intense, never melodramatic, and real-sounding while being obviously literary in intent. (You always know, pleasurably, that you're reading a made short story.) These affecting qualities led some dunderheads to call his stories "minimalist", which they are most assuredly not, inasmuch as they're full-to-the-brim with the stuff of human intimacy, of longing, of barely unearthable humour, of exquisite nuance, of pathos, of unlooked-for dread, and often of love – expressed in words and gestures not frequently associated with love. More than they are minimal, they are replete with the renewings and the fresh awarenesses we go to great literature to find. When they were first published in Britain by Collins Harvill, they made a great sensation that quickly spread all over the world, and made Ray (who was lovable, anyway) adored as the great story writer of his generation. Which he was. And is.
Podcast Sunday 23 December
Ruth Rendell "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook" by MR James
I chose a ghost story partly because I thought no one else would; and also because the Victorians wrote the best stories and MR James the best of all. I edited a collection of his, so I know them very well. I don't, of course, believe in ghosts, yet reading one MR James story when I'm alone in the house still terrifies me. I hope it will frighten you but make you want to read more – "Casting the Runes" and "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas", as well as this one, the chilling tale of poor Mr Dennistoun and the demon.
Podcast Christmas Eve
Simon Callow "The Christmas Tree" by Charles Dickens
Christmas was with Dickens all his writing life. The famous Dingley Dell sequence in his first novel, Pickwick Papers, is an early instance. A Christmas Carol is obviously his major statement on the theme, an entirely characteristic alignment of the celebratory aspect of the occasion with deeper (and deeply Christian) themes of transformation and redemption. But his fascination with Christmas was many layered and included deep nostalgia for what he increasingly thought of as his idyllic childhood. In Household Words, the weekly magazine he founded and edited, he contributed a number of highly personal and more or less autobiographical pieces, of which "A Christmas Tree" is one. Like some of the other pieces of a similar character, it is an almost Proustian meditation on the past, simultaneously full of deep resonances and particular observation, and unexpectedly moving.
Podcast Christmas Day
Nadine Gordimer "The Centaur" by José Saramago
It is in many ways a unique story. Here is a creature imagined, something that is higher and better and different from a man. Here is the dream of a creature that is half horse, half man, who has the physical fitness of a horse and the mental complexity of a man. This extraordinary fable shows the depths of the human confusion that the creature faces. It is a wonderful way of looking into the conflict between what one's body desires or dictates – sexual desire as part of our power; it's through sexual desire that you take possession, after all – and many of one's other ideals about how we ought to approach another being. There's as much in this little story as in 20 novels and 20 poems.
Podcast Boxing Day
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie "No Sweetness Here" by Ama Ata Aidoo
The stories in No Sweetness Here, of post-independence Ghana in the 1960s, are written beautifully and wisely and with great subtlety. The characters lie uneasily between old and new, live in rural and urban areas and struggle to deal with the unpleasant surprises of independence.
There is a keen but understated longing for the past in these stories. Aidoo is too good a writer to paint with overly broad brush strokes. She does not at all suggest that the past was perfect; there is no romanticising of culture. "No Sweetness Here", the title story, is the kind of beautiful, old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction. It does what I think all good literature should: it has something to say and it entertains you. But girding that entertainment value is substance, solid and interesting and true. Aidoo has a fantastic sly wit and humour and she does not hit you over the head with her "message", but after you have greedily finished each story in her collection, you sit back and realise that you have been through an intellectual experience as well.
Podcast Thursday 27 December
Hanif Kureishi "A Hunger Artist" by Franz Kafka
The most important things – eating, sleeping and sex – are difficult, if not sometimes impossible, for everyone. Kafka's short masterpiece, "A Hunger Artist", written at the end of his life in 1922, tells the story of a man who makes the most of this by perfecting the art of starvation, and exhibiting himself in a cage for the public. This is self-deprivation and punishment as entertainment, with the anorexic as celebrity. Kafka's parable is absurd, moving and timely.
Podcast Friday 28 December
AS Byatt "At Hiruharama" by Penelope Fitzgerald
In 1998 I edited the Oxford Book of English Short Stories – the slightly shocking idea was that the stories were to be English, and not Scottish, Irish, Welsh or American. One of the living writers I included was Penelope Fitzgerald, who was, I had come slowly to understand, one of the major writers of my time. Her sentences are impeccable and always not quite what you expect when you start on them. She looked at the world coolly and so to speak from scratch, determined to understand exactly and describe clearly. This makes everything paradoxically mysterious. Her worlds are odd and wayward, although at first they appear simple and understandable. She wrote about many worlds – Russia just before the revolution, Romantic Germany, Italy in the 1950s, a failed English bookshop, a sinking houseboat, a school for child actors, Cambridge in the days of the suffragettes – making lives and places and thoughts simultaneously completely composed and very strange. "At Hiruharama", the story in my anthology, is about an English couple in New Zealand. They are far from any town or settlement. They are alone. A child is to be born and the doctor is very distant. Things evolve apparently quietly and fear is not mentioned, and is there. The tale is both tense and witty. The end is dramatic. Nobody else could have told it like this.
Podcast Saturday 29 December
Yiyun Li "Three People" by William Trevor
Like all William Trevor stories with a deceivingly quiet, perhaps even mundane façade, "Three People" reveals the danger, sometimes dark, sometimes fatalistic, sometimes inexplicable, underneath the surface. Time is unkind to all three characters in the story: Mr Schele, whose life is going to be gone from the world like the rosebush uprooted by the storm; Vera, whose youth is no more (yet it is not the loss of her youth that threatens her but the truth she will have to face again after her father's death); Sidney, for whom past and present interweave into an unspeakable dream, half nightmare, half fantasy.
I have chosen this story because a Trevor story requires rereading, and what can be a better way to reread a story than reading it aloud, savouring each line, each word? Also because of what the story means to me: I loved it and wrote a story to have a conversation with this story, which became the title story of my latest collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.
Podcast Sunday 30 December
Jon McGregor "Notes from the House Spirits" by Lucy Wood
In a very good year for short stories, with Kevin Barry and Alice Munro taking the form to new heights, I was surprised to find myself caught out by a debut collection of contemporary Cornish folk-tales. I'm usually allergic to anything supernatural or mythical, so would not have expected to enjoy stories featuring mermaids and talking magpies. But in Diving Belles, Lucy Wood deftly establishes the mythical elements of her stories as something by-the-by; an unspectacular backdrop to some very contemporary tales of loss and loneliness and love and uncertainty.
The story "Notes from the House Spirits" stands out as something special, for its formal audacity as much as its emotional resonance. Spanning an uncertain number of decades, the story ticks by as a series of observations on the changing occupants of a house, and on the spaces between. There are no names, no stories, and very little dialogue; the whole story is built from glimpses and suggestions, and from the overlap between what the reader understands and what the narrators understand. A series of characters arrive, reveal themselves to the reader, and drift away. Time passes in leaps and slides. We feel, as readers, that there could be a full-length novel in the stories that flicker past. But we also understand that the compression gives this story its power. Life is short, and so are the best stories.
Podcast New Year's Eve
Anita Desai "The Postmaster" by Rabindranath Tagore
This story embodies most of Tagore's themes throughout his plays, novels, poetry and polemical writings too: the conditions of women who are treated as servants; the denial of education that effectively cuts them off from the mainstream of life; the insensitivity of even the educated male to matters of the heart; the ignorance of and general contempt for the peasantry and the labouring class; the peasant's intolerable situation – poor, neglected, expected to be content with mere subsistence; and the disturbance of the age-old balance of society caused by the introduction of foreign, western methods and mores.
Over and over he wrote of heroines who were young, illiterate and voiceless in the rigid structure of Hindu society and yet displayed qualities of intelligence, imagination and persistence compared with which the male characters cut sorry figures, deficient not only mentally but more importantly, emotionally.
As the New York Times reviewer of Satyajit Ray's faithful film adaptation of "The Postmaster" wrote: "It says almost all that can be managed about the loneliness of the human heart."
Podcast New Year's Day
Sebastian Barry "Eveline" by James Joyce
Finnegans Wake has defeated me, although guilt has driven me to dip into it over the decades. I read Ulysses in a little octagonal house on Omey Island in 1976, but got disenchanted and disheartened at the entrance to Nighttown. I have gone back to it over the years, feeling not only guilty but alarmed. They are the two ticking bombs of Irish literature.
But I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Back Square when I was a student at Trinity College, standing all day in the weak summer sunlight, and crazy in the head with admiration and gratitude at the end of it. Similarly Dubliners, given to me by one of my grandfathers, whose taste otherwise ran to Kipling.
I chose "Eveline" to read because, 40 years later, I am still not over it. The beautiful and threatening set-up, family horrors half-alluded to, and the happinesses so fairly itemised … The "manly" man that comes to rescue her. The full and heartfelt understanding and encouragement of the reader. The scene at the dockside. I am still inclined to cry out the same thing I cried out the first time I read it, aged 17: "Get on the bloody boat, Eveline."
Podcast Wednesday 2 January
Nathan Englander "The Story of My Dovecote" by Isaac Babel
I've always loved "The Story of My Dovecote". It's one of those short stories that affects me deeply – and differently – every time I read it. And these last years I go back to it fairly often. What I find most fascinating about it is the two radically different frequencies vibrating through the story simultaneously. That is, if you ask me what the story is about, I will tell you that it's about a boy who has done well in an exam and goes to the market to buy pigeons for his dovecote. Simple as that. That's undeniably the plot of the story. But if you catch me at a different time, I will tell you that it's a story about the history of Jews in Russia, about Cossacks and antisemitism, about corruption and pogroms, about fragility and loss and love and loyalty and man's inhumanity to man. That, and pigeons.
Podcast Thursday 3 January
Will Self "On Exactitude in Science" by Jorge Luis Borges
Borges's short stories were what showed me the way: how, with exquisite legerdemain, to fuse the literary, the philosophic and the anecdotal. The brevity of "On Exactitude in Science" isn't really the point – or, rather, it's the entire point: this is a story that is itself a homologue of that which it describes, being a map of a reality that is at once the same size and far, far larger. In truth, all fiction should aspire to this condition: an attempt to achieve the truly veridical. That such an enterprise has been hijacked by the cod-disciplines of "naturalism" and "realism" is only a function of ideological constraint – constraints that Borges's tale deliriously break. I like the way this story makes a flat declaration – in the manner of Kafka – not sugaring the pill of suspension of disbelief, only taking it as a given: either you believe in the truth of there being a map coextensive with the territory it depicts, or you don't. End of story. It also has an acute wistfulness about it – the ragged tatters of the abandoned map, the lapse into ignorance of the populace, these are evoked by mere clauses, with no need for tedious circumscription or proviso. You travel the entire emotional arc within a couple of minutes, and are left puzzling over Borges's attribution … and that's surely the way he intended it.
Podcast Friday 4 January