Best British Short Stories 2016 Read online

  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.

  This new anthology includes stories by: Claire-Louise Bennett, Neil Campbell, Crista Ermiya, Stuart Evers, Trevor Fevin, David Gaffney, Janice Galloway, Jessie Greengrass, Kate Hendry, Thomas McMullan, Graham Mort, Ian Parkinson, Tony Peake, Alex Preston, Leone Ross, John Saul, Colette Sensier, Robert Sheppard, DJ Taylor, Greg Thorpe and Mark Valentine.

  PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS EDITIONS

  ‘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

  ‘Another effective and well-rounded short story anthology from Salt – keep up the good work, we say!’ —Sarah-Clare Conlon, 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

  ‘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

  Best British Short Stories 2016

  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 twenty anthologies of short stories, including A Book of Two Halves (Gollancz), The Time Out Book of New York Short Stories (Penguin), Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds (Two Ravens Press) and five previous volumes of Best British Short Stories (Salt). 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. His latest publication is In Camera (Negative Press London), a collaborative project with artist David Gledhill.

  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

  In Camera (with David Gledhill)

  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

  The Best British Short Stories 2015

  Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

  12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

  All rights reserved

  Introduction and selection copyright © Nicholas Royle, 2016

  Individual contributions copyright © the contributors, 2016

  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 2016

  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 978-1-78463-064-5 electronic

  To the memory of novelist, short story writer and editor John Burke (1922–2011), whose landmark anthology, Tales of Unease (1966), is fifty this year.

  Nicholas Royle

  Introduction

  As editor of this series I read as widely as possible – magazines, anthologies, collections, chapbooks, online publications – as well as trying to catch stories on BBC Radios 3 and 4, but it would be a full-time job to read every story, catch every broadcast. Each year I discover something new, invariably something that has been around for ages, like Brittle Star. Issue 36 of this attractive little magazine contained powerful stories from Kate Venables, DA Prince and Stewart Foster, as well as the outstanding ‘My Husband Wants to Talk to Me Again’ by Kate Hendry. There was also an interesting non-fiction piece by Sarah Passingham about writers reading their work in public. Sarah Passingham had three stories published in 2014 in a highly desirable booklet, Hoad and Other Stories, by Stonewood Press, who are also responsible for Brittle Star. A copy was sent to Best British Short Stories, but, through no fault of Stonewood’s, didn’t reach me until it was too late to be considered for the 2015 volume. This is frustrating because at least one of those three stories, probably ‘Hoad’, would definitely have made it into the final line-up.

  Another small publisher, Soul Bay Press, sent me a collection of stories by Samantha Herron, The Djinn in the Skull: Stories From Hidden Morocco. The author spent time in a community on the edge of the Sahara collecting the tales of storytellers and writing her own stories. Part of the appeal of her collection lies in trying to work out which pieces are traditional tales and which might be the product of Herron’s imagination. Other notable collections that landed on my desk included: excellent debuts from Claire-Louise Bennett (Pond, Fitzcarraldo Editions) and Crista Ermiya (The Weather in Kansas, Red Squirrel Press); Quin Again and Other Stories (Jetstone) by the ever-acute Ellis Sharp; another debut, Jessie Greengrass’s An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It published by JM Originals, where editor Mark Richards is spotting some excellent writers and producing beautiful books; Hermaion: Happy Accident, Lucky Find (Hermaion Press) by Amanda Schiff with photographs by Jane Wildgoose; Joel Lane’s The Anniversary of Never posthumously published in a very handsome edition by the Swan River Press; second collections from DJ Taylor (Wrote For Luck, Galley Beggar Press), HP Tinker (The Girl Who Ate New York, East London Press) and Graham Mort (Terroir, Seren); Marina Warner’s third collection, Fly A
way Home (Salt), and Janice Galloway’s fourth, Jellyfish, which was her first with Freight Books, who also published Pippa Goldschmidt’s The Need For Better Regulation of Outer Space.

  I have been waiting years – yes, years – for Stuart Evers’ story, ‘Live From the Palladium’, to appear in print, after I heard him read it at a Word Factory event. It was finally published last year, in his second collection, Your Father Sends His Love (Picador). There’s one other story in this book that I first encountered when I heard it being read by its author (at the Hurst, in Shropshire, when Leone Ross and I were sharing tutor duties on an Arvon week) and that’s ‘The Woman Who Lived in a Restaurant’, which I fell in love with on first hearing and persuaded Ross to let me publish as a chapbook through Nightjar Press.

  The terms ‘collection’ and ‘anthology’ are regarded by some people as interchangeable. Well, if you want to live in a chaotic universe with no fixed points, nothing to hold on to, you go ahead, but for me a collection will always be a single-author collection while an anthology will contain stories by various authors and there will be an editor, or editors, credited. The distinction between an anthology and a magazine, however, is not always clear. Gutter is a beautifully produced 186-page book – there’s no other word for it – edited by Colin Begg and Adrian Searle and published twice-yearly by Freight Books (see?) and containing short stories, poetry and reviews, but its tag line states unambiguously, ‘The magazine of new Scottish writing.’ Gorse is another one. Published twice a year in Dublin and edited by Susan Tomaselli, Gorse looks like a book, with a lovely design aesthetic and highly tactile soft matt cover, but self-identifies as a journal ‘interested in the potential of literature, in literature where lines between fiction, memoir and history blur’. Issue 4 contained The Beginning of the End author Ian Parkinson’s first published short story. The Mechanics’ Institute Review, on the other hand, published annually by the MA Creative Writing at Birkbeck, is described by project director Julia Bell in the introduction to issue 12 as a ‘curated collection’.

  #1ShortStoryAnthology appears straightforward until we read in series editor Richard Skinner’s introduction, ‘What you are holding in your hands is the second in our series of anthologies made up of work by people who have read at Vanguard Readings, a monthly series of readings that take place in The Bear pub in Camberwell, south-east London.’ The second? #1? Soon all becomes clear, however. The first anthology was entitled #1PoetryAnthology. Their first short story volume, guest-edited by Adrian Cross and Des Mohan, includes some excellent stories by Alex Catherwood, Stuart Evers and Jonathan Gibbs, whose ‘Southampton’ would have been in the present volume if I could have squeezed in just one more story.

  Turning briefly to the world of self- or collective publishing, firstly, Revolutions is edited by Craig Pay, Graeme Shimmin and Eric Steele and published by Manchester Speculative Fiction Group. It includes new work by members of the group and writers not normally associated with speculative fiction. Secondly, Congregation of Innocents is the third Curious Tales anthology, featuring new stories by Emma Jane Unsworth, Richard Hirst, Jenn Ashworth and Tom Fletcher and an introduction by Patrick McGrath (whose collection Blood and Water was published in the ground-breaking Penguin Originals list in 1989) highlighting the anthology’s stated intention to pay tribute to Shirley Jackson who died half a century ago last year.

  There were some outstanding stories in Flamingo Land and Other Stories (Flight Press) edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, particularly those by Colette Sensier, Uschi Gatward and Shaun Levin. Flight Press is an imprint of Spread the Word, whose Flight 1000 programme helps ‘talented people from under-represented backgrounds gain experience, contacts and routes into the [publishing] industry’.

  The Fiction Desk continues to be active, publishing three anthologies a year. Volume nine, Long Grey Beard and Glittering Eye edited by Rob Redman, featured good work by Mark Newman and Richard Smyth among others. The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Volume 8 (no editor credited, but the prize was judged by Sara Davies, Rowan Lawton, Sanjida O’Connell and Nikesh Shukla) was packed with good stories; I especially enjoyed Mark Illis’s ‘Airtight’.

  Possibly my favourite anthology of 2015 was Transactions of Desire (HOME Publications) edited by Omar Kholeif and Sarah Perks and published to coincide with an exhibition, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, at HOME. It’s a bit hit and miss in some respects – inconsistent layout; failure to acknowledge earlier appearance of at least one story; and my copy is already falling apart – but when the work is as good as some of the stories on show here, the overly critical pedant in you relaxes, just a little. A number of stories stood out, in particular those by Emma Jane Unsworth, Adam O’Riordan, Jason Wood, Katie Popperwell and Greg Thorpe, whose ‘1961’ takes place against the backdrop of what has been called ‘the greatest night in showbusiness history’, the night Judy Garland played Carnegie Hall on 23 April 1961.

  Indubitably a magazine and not an anthology, London Magazine reached out and responded to one of my overly critical tweets – about how they’d previously refused to send me review copies – by saying they’d be happy to send me one after all. The August/September issue duly arrived, containing only two stories and one of them was by the magazine’s editor, Steven O’Brien, which made me not only smile but actually laugh out loud, for it was O’Brien including his own work in the magazine that had prompted the remarks I made three years ago when I wrote about London Magazine in the introduction to Best British Short Stories 2013. We’ve all seen the endless photographs online (haven’t we? I’m surely not alone in spending my evenings poring over them) of London Magazine’s glittering champagne receptions. Is there no one among those lords and ladies able to advise O’Brien on etiquette? What about special editorial adviser Grey Gowrie? Oh no, his work has appeared in the magazine on a number of occasions as well. All right then, literary consultant Derwent May? Nope, he too is a contributor.

  Maybe the issue is not so much one of etiquette, but of cool versus uncool. It just doesn’t seem cool to regularly publish your own stories and poems in a magazine of which you are the editor (unless you hide mischievously behind a pseudonym, of course). In recent years, while London Magazine and Ambit have been the two best-known London-based literary magazines, it’s been fairly obvious which one is James Ellroy, if you will, and which RJ Ellory. When it launched in 1959 under the editorship of Dr Martin Bax, Ambit was cool. Fifty-odd years later it’s still cool. Highlights during 2015 included stories by Jonny Keyworth, James Clarke, Louise Kennedy, Giselle Leeb and Alex Preston. Ambit is now edited by Briony Bax, the fiction edited by Kate Pemberton assisted by Gwendolen MacKeith, Mike Smith and Gary Budden, who contributed a piece of interesting non-fiction to issue 13 of another good magazine, Structo, which, in its next issue, 14, published an entertaining story by Jonathan Pinnock and an interview with David Gaffney, who appeared with an excellent story in Confingo 4, the previous issue of that magazine having featured very enjoyable stories by Stuart Snelson, John Saul and Charles Wilkinson.

  Prospect now appears to have banished short fiction to twice-yearly supplements. The Winter Fiction Special featured a Don DeLillo story that hadn’t been original even to the anthology it was extracted from, Ben Marcus’s New American Stories (Granta Books), but the Summer Fiction Special, more happily, had featured an original and substantial story by Tessa Hadley. The Guardian also published an Original Fiction Special in the summer, with new stories by Tessa Hadley, again, and Will Self among others. Over the course of 2015, the New Statesman published new stories by Jeanette Winterson and Ian Rankin and two stories by Ali Smith.

  Danish magazine Anglo Files, produced for teachers of English in Denmark, continues to publish English-language short stories. In issue 177 they featured Tony Peake’s touching ‘The Bluebell Wood’. At least one new print magazine devoted to short stories started up in 2015, namely Shooter (search for Shooter literary magazine to find it online). I saw
two other magazines for the first time last year: issue 30 of Supernatural Tales, edited by David Longhorn, which included Mark Valentine’s ‘Vain Shadows Flee’, a tribute to the late Joel Lane, who would have loved it, and Melbourne-based The Lifted Brow, featuring a story by Chris Vaughan, ‘To Crawl into Glass’, that made the shortlist for the present volume.

  The magazine I most look forward to receiving (four times a year) is Lighthouse, which lists no fewer than ten editors, among them Philip Langeskov, whose work has been included in this series more than once. I could almost fill this book with stories from Lighthouse. On this occasion I have restricted myself to one, by Thomas McMullan, but could easily have gone for stories by Gareth Watkins, Ruby Cowling and Lander Hawes. And, finally, a quick word regarding The White Review. I don’t quite know why I haven’t taken anything yet from this gorgeous-looking magazine. The story of theirs that I liked best this year was published online, in May 2015. ‘Gandalf Goes West’ by Chris Power is the story Beckett might have written had he ever got into video games.

  For up-to-date lists of literary magazines and online publications (three of the stories in this book were first published online – John Saul’s in The Stockholm Review, Trevor Fevin’s in St Sebastian Review and Neil Campbell’s in The Ofi Press Magazine), keep a close eye on ShortStops and Thresholds web sites. Both are excellent resources.

  Robert Sheppard’s ‘Arrivals’ is the first story I’ve taken from a work of, predominantly, autobiography, but Words Out of Time (Knives Forks and Spoons Press) is no ordinary attempt at life writing, subtitled as it is ‘autrebiographies and unwritings’. I was just sitting here reflecting that the line I quoted above from the Gorse web site – ‘interested in the potential of literature, in literature where lines between fiction, memoir and history blur’ – would not have been at all out of place on the cover of Words Out of Time when I opened that book at random for another flick through and my eye fell directly on this line in a piece entitled ‘With’: ‘The Downs with dark gorse clinging to its sides.’ You couldn’t make it up. Or, more to the point, you wouldn’t bother making it up.