Best British Short Stories 2018
BEST BRITISH SHORT STORIES 2018
edited by
NICHOLAS ROYLE
SYNOPSIS
The nation’s favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its eighth 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.
This new anthology includes stories by Owen Booth, Kelly Creighton, Colette de Curzon, Mike Fox, M. John Harrison, Tania Hershman, Brian Howell, Jane McLaughlin, Alison MacLeod, Jo Mazelis, Wyl Menmuir, Adam O’Riordan, Iain Robinson, C. D. Rose, Adrian Slatcher, William Thirsk-Gaskill, Chloe Turner, Lisa Tuttle, Conrad Williams and Eley Williams.
PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS WORK
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘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
Best British Short Stories 2018
NICHOLAS ROYLE has published three collections of short fiction: Mortality (Serpent’s Tail), shortlisted for the inaugural Edge Hill Short Story Prize in 2007, Ornithology (Confingo Publishing), longlisted 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 seven 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 publishes 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
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
To the memory of Colette de Curzon 1927–2018
NICHOLAS ROYLE
INTRODUCTION
A VERY SHORT introduction this year, because there was, as you no doubt remember, only one short story published during 2017 and that was ‘Cat Person’ by Kristen Roupenian, which went viral on social media after its appearance in the New Yorker. A unique alignment of popular opinion, media frenzy and hashtag bingo made it virtually impossible to express any opinion of ‘Cat Person’ other than unreserved, drooling approval.
Oh, all right then, there were some other stories published last year, but you wouldn’t think so from Prospect magazine’s ‘Winter Fiction’ supplement, dated January 2017, which devoted seven of its twelve pages to extracting Peter Hobbs’s story, ‘In the Reactor’, from the Faber anthology he had edited with Sarah Hall, Sex & Death, in 2016.
There were, however, lots of notable anthologies published during 2017, including, among many others: New Fears, a major new horror anthology edited by Mark Morris for Titan Books, the first of a new series; She Said He Said I Said: New Writing Scotland 35 (Association For Scottish Literary Studies) edited by Diana Hendry and Susie Maguire; Tales From the Shadow Booth Volume 1 (no publisher given; I especially enjoyed Timothy J Jarvis’s ‘What the Bones Told Hecate Shrike’) edited by Dan Coxon; Ruins & Other Stories (Cinnamon Press) edited by Adam Craig; Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Volume 10 (Tangent Books); The Mechanics’ Institute Review edited by an extensive team at Birkbeck, with excellent stories by Alan Beard and Sarah Evans; Unthology 9 (Unthank Books) edited by Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones (I loved Roelof Bakker’s ‘Yellow’); New Ghost Stories III (The Fiction Desk) edited by Rob Redman; The Bridport Prize Anthology 2017 (Redcliffe Press) with an outstanding second-place winning story, ‘Ends’, by Chris Neilan; and three issues of The Lonely Crowd, described on its web site as a ‘literary journal’ although each issue is an ‘anthology of new short fiction, poetry and photography’ – but who cares about minor details of nomenclature when the editor (John Lavin in this case) has such great taste and publishes so much good work?
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bsp; The highlights of last year’s Lonely Crowd issues may – or may not, according to taste – be the stories reprinted in this book (by Kelly Creighton, Iain Robinson, Jo Mazelis and CD Rose), but number six included stories by Neil Campbell and John Saul, who are always interesting, while in number seven I liked Durre Shahwar’s ‘Nowadays’ and Eley Williams’s ‘Channel Light Vessel Automatic’, and number eight in particular was packed with good stories by Jenn Ashworth, Thomas Morris, Jane Fraser, Angela Readman, Giselle Leeb, Jaki McCarrick, David Rose, Toby Litt and others. Gorse continues to publish probably the most attractive journal-anthology in these islands, each issue bursting with envelope-pushing fiction, poetry and essays. Issue eight contained an excellent story by David Rose, ‘Translation’, riffing and punning on the problems facing any literary translator, and an interesting piece by Hugh Smith, ‘John 1.1’.
The good magazines keep on publishing good stories. For this we must be thankful to Ambit, Anglo Files, Bare Fiction, Black Static, Brittle Star, Confingo, Lighthouse, Structo and others. Two stories in Ambit 230 stood out for me: Tom Heaton’s ‘The Writer Didn’t Know the Pen Was Still Writing’ and Paul Brownsey’s ‘Time and the Heart’ (Brownsey’s ‘Peace and Goodwill’ in issue 22 of Scottish literary journal Southlight was notable, too). Ghostland was new to me; it feels net-based, with the editorship credited to Twitter handle @havishambler, but exists only as a print zine. Painted, spoken edited by Richard Price had reached issue 29 before I came across it (thanks to David Rose’s recommendation); it appears ‘occasionally’. I enjoyed Bill Broady’s story ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank’. For more information go to hydrohotel.net. Speaking of hotels, I think I’d like to live in Hotel edited by Jon Auman, Holly Brown, Thomas Chadwick, John Dunn, Dominic Jaeckle and Niall Reynolds. They seem to add a name or two to that list with every issue, so I hope I’m more or less up to date. The first issue came out in 2016 and I’m really quite cross with myself for missing it, but I’ve got issues two and three, which came out in 2017. It feels like a cousin of Ambit, and Ambit had better watch out, because Hotel is very good.
It was a strong year for short story collections, with new titles from Alison MacLeod, Martyn Bedford, Tania Hershman, Eley Williams, Leone Ross, Conrad Williams, M John Harrison, Adam O’Riordan, Joanna Walsh, Lucy Durneen, Mike O’Driscoll, Erinna Mettler, Michael Stewart and others. Stories from some of these are included in the present volume. The story that spoke most clearly and poignantly to me in Gregory Norminton’s collection, The Ghost Who Bled (Comma Press), was the title story, which I remember reading for the first time in Prospect magazine in 2004. Joanna Walsh’s new collection, Worlds From the Word’s End (And Other Stories), reprints stories first published between 2013 and 2016, but, unless I’m misreading the acknowledgements, did not include any new work.
Stonewood Press published When You Lived Inside the Walls, a lovely little mini-collection of three stories by Krishan Coupland, including his Manchester Fiction Prize-winning story from 2011. Among the British writers shortlisted for the same prize last year were Jane Fraser, Hannah Vincent and Dave Wakely. Their stories were published online.
Also online I came across a fine story by Jaki McCarrick, ‘The Collectors’, on the Irish Times web site and, on – or should one say at? – Music & Literature, I read, with mounting excitement, a piece called ‘I Went to the House But Did Not Enter’ by Paul Griffiths. Mounting excitement because it was the best thing I’d read for some time and had been created as a piece of experimental writing under a set of constraints. It’s always rather wonderful when constraints appear to have a liberating effect. Sadly, I discovered it had been first published, elsewhere, some years earlier, making it ineligible for inclusion in this book.
The Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize 2017/18 longlist included ‘Cluster’ by Naomi Booth, in which a sleep-deprived mother observes and tries to connect with her surroundings. There’s something moving about the realisation that she’s not the only person who called the police over an incident of domestic abuse she witnesses. ‘Other people have called too,’ the call handler tells her. Robert Mason, previously shortlisted for the Manchester prize, made the Galley Beggar shortlist with ‘Curtilage’, a disturbing story about a man who preys on vulnerable targets. What makes those two stories stand out is their attention to detail. Detail is not always necessary and quite possibly it often needs to be cut, but in these stories it’s what elevates them.
There’s something especially pleasing about short stories – especially good short stories – turning up in unusual places. Issue 102 of Pipeline: The Journal of Surfers Against Sewage, a handsome, full-colour 60pp A5-size magazine, contained an original environmental ghost story, ‘The Gyre’, by Man Booker Prize-longlisted author Wyl Menmuir, who also features in the current volume with a story published in chapbook format by the National Trust, the launch title for a series of such publications.
TSS Publishing, run by Rupert Dastur, started publishing short story chapbooks in 2017, with three titles by Sean Lusk, Chloe Turner (reprinted herein) and Matthew G Rees. They are attractive, small-format booklets, uniformly designed and numbered. Nightjar Press (founded in 2009 by the editor of the book you may be holding in your hands if you are reading these words) entered its tenth year of publishing with new chapbooks by Claire Dean, David Wheldon and Colette de Curzon. ‘Paymon’s Trio’ by Colette de Curzon was written in 1949 when its author was 22. She put it away in a folder of her work where it stayed for 67 years until one of her daughters, the novelist Gabrielle Kimm, found it and was advised by Alison MacLeod to send it to Nightjar Press. Thanks partly to the enthusiasm of poet and artist David Tibet, who championed and recommended the story to his many followers, it became one of Nightjar Press’s fastest-selling titles. It is reprinted in the current volume, which is dedicated to the memory of Colette de Curzon, who sadly passed away in March 2018.
Chapbooks are not a new phenomenon. Indeed, an article about them by Ruth Richardson on the British Library web site is written entirely in the past tense. Just lately I have been reading (and rereading) a lot of Giles Gordon’s fiction, including his alarming short story ‘Couple’, published exclusively as a chapbook by Sceptre Press of Bedford in 1978. I have written about Gordon before in one of these introductions. People sometimes say to me, ‘Giles Gordon, he used to edit that series you’re editing now,’ or some variation on that, because he co-edited a series called Best Short Stories, which ceased publishing in 1994, while this series started in 2011, under the very obviously different title Best British Short Stories. That was years before anyone ever uttered the hideous word ‘Brexit’, but every year I work my way through magazines and anthologies reading only stories by British authors and ruthlessly ignoring work by Americans and Australians and writers of other nationalities even if they are writing in English. I feel as if I’m locked into some awful rotten marriage of bitter inconvenience with Nigel Farage or Jacob Rees-Mogg, or Theresa May, for that matter, or even David bloody Cameron, whose responsibility it all surely is. As if I were, like some of the above, motivated by isolationism and xenophobia and misplaced patriotism. Four previously unpublished stories by Raymond Carver’s editor Gordon Lish in the third issue of Hotel? Any sensible person would be all over them. But pressure of time means I generally limit myself to the British contributors in any publication of this type.
When we started Best British Short Stories there was already a Best British Poetry, so it made sense to stick to the British-only rule. Since then the Man Booker Prize has, regrettably, been opened up to American writers, which in a way makes one happy to remain British-only with this series, but then there is Brexit. There is always Brexit. Unless, of course, it doesn’t happen. I live in hope.
NICHOLAS ROYLE
Manchester
May 2018
COLETTE DE CURZON
PAYMON’S TRIO
I HAD ALWAYS been fond of music: it was a kind of passion in me, around which I centred my whole existence, and
in the beauty of which I derived all the pleasures I required from life. I was well up in anything and everything connected with music, from the earliest and most primitive of rondos to the latest symphonies and concertos. I played the violin passing well, though my ability of execution fell far short of my desires. I had played second violin in various concerts, provincial ones, of course, for a natural shyness prevented me from daring to launch my meagre talent into higher spheres. Besides which, the violin for me was not a profession: it was merely a friend in whom I confided all the thoughts and emotions of my soul, which I could not have expressed in any other way. For even the most retired of men needs to express himself in one way or another.
I had always connected music with the beautiful side of life. In this, for my fifty-odd years, I was strangely naïve. The experience I went through shook the rock-solid foundation of my innocent belief. It will, no doubt, be hard for anyone reading this story to believe it all, or even any part of it; but I am here to testify that every word of it is true, I and my two very dearest and noblest of friends, for we all three went through the same experience, and all three unanimously declare that every word of it is solid fact. A few years have elapsed since the evil day that brought a passing shadow on my life’s passion, but the memory of it is still fresh in my mind.
I will start at the beginning and try to impart all its vividness up to you.
It was on a raw November’s evening, with dusk swiftly descending on windswept London, as I was returning from Hyde Park, where I had taken my dog, Angus, for his afternoon exercise, that I suddenly remembered I had gone out for a double purpose: the first already mentioned, the second a half-hearted quest for a second-hand copy of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. To say that I was interested in that work would be a great exaggeration. I had heard various reports about it that did not rouse my enthusiasm, but as it had got a new vogue and was much talked of, I wished to acquaint myself of its content, so as to know, roughly, at any rate, what it was about.