“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe (1843)

Poe’s obsessive theme was the terror of losing sanity – never

more dramatically evoked than in this masterpiece. In “The

Tell-Tale Heart”, one of Poe’s shortest “tales of the grotesque

and arabesque”, and the one that seems most

contemporary in the hallucinatory intensity of its narration, an

unnamed individual commits a brutal, seemingly

unprovoked murder of an old man with whom he lives,

disposes of the body by dismembering and burying it

beneath the floorboards of the residence they share, and

succumbs to madness and self-destruction in the aftermath

of guilt. Throughout, the narrator insists on his sanity: “True –

nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am;

but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had

sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them.”

That the murder is entirely irrational is acknowledged by the

murderer: “Object there was none. Passion there was none. I

loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never

given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his

eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a

vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it.”

Quick and easily shared, is the short story the form for our

times? Leading authors pick their favourites

by Hilary Mantel, George Saunders, Tessa Hadley, Jhumpa

Lahiri, Chris Power and more

Sat 2 Feb 2019 09.00 GMT

1,318

“The Tribute” by Jane Gardam (1980)

John McGahern and Annie Proulx are among my favourite

authors, but to dispel gloom I choose this story from Jane

Gardam’s 1980 collection The Sidmouth Letters. Reading this

gleeful story in my expatriate days, I recognised the cast of

“diplomatic wives”, trailing inebriate husbands through the

ruins of empire. Mostly dialogue, it is a deft, witty tale in which

a small kindness – though not by a diplomatic wife – pays off

40 years later. I must have read it a dozen times, to see how

its note is sustained and the surprise is sprung; every time it

makes me smile with delight. Hilary Mantel

“The Stone Boy” by Gina Berriault (1957)

This great and underrated masterpiece is a meditation on

good and evil and especially about the way that people’s

expectations and assumptions about us may wear us down

and eventually force us into compliance with their view. But

it is a much deeper and more biblical story than that and, like

any great work of art, resists reduction. Berriault, who died in

1999, is known as a San Francisco writer. A wonderful

sampling of her stories is available in Women in Their Beds:

New & Selected Stories. George Saunders

“The Love of a Good Woman” by Alice Munro (1998)

Among the handful of short stories closest to my heart, I’ve

chosen “The Love of a Good Woman” by Canadian writer

Munro, from her 1998 collection of that name. It’s about a

murder – probably it’s a murder, because nothing is certain –

and a love match that depends on keeping that murder

secret. Like so many of Munro’s stories, this one has the scope

of a novel yet never feels hurried or crowded. The sociology

of a small town in rural Ontario is caught on the wing in the

loose weave of her narration; the story takes in whole

lifetimes, and yet its pace is also exquisitely slow, carrying us

deep inside particular moments. A woman moves among

the willows beside a river at night, making up her mind. Tessa

Hadley

Alice Munro.

Alice Munro carries us deep inside particular moments.

Photograph: Alice Munro./Alamy

“The Siren” by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1961)

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Born in Palermo in 1896, Lampedusa was a learned prince

who died before his work was published. In addition to his

celebrated novel The Leopard, he left behind some short

stories, including “The Siren”, a mysterious masterpiece that

jolts and haunts me every time I read it. It contains two

narrative planes, two central protagonists, two settings, two

tonal registers and two points of view. There are even two

titles; though published as “La Sirena”, it was originally called

“Lighea”, the name of the siren, portrayed as a 16-year-old

girl. Lampedusa’s description renders this fatefully seductive

creature specific, vulnerable and real. Jhumpa Lahiri

The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa

Lahiri, will be published on 7 March.

“A Simple Heart” by Gustave Flaubert (1877)

Flaubert wrote this story for his old friend and “fellow

troubadour” George Sand. It’s the story of Félicité, an old

servant-woman, and the diminishing loves in her life, the final

one being a (live – at first) parrot. It has a sombre novelistic

density, and is touching and tender, comic and grotesque.

Control of tone is central to its effect. It also exemplifies the

Flaubertian principle that irony and sympathy are not

incompatible. Sand died before she was able to read it. “So

it is with all our dreams,” noted Flaubert. Julian Barnes

Books that look like sushi

“Friends” by Grace Paley (1985)

This story tracks three friends as they visit a fourth who is dying.

The women then go home on the train. It ends with a brief

conversation between the narrator, Faith, and her 18-year-

old son. The piece has warm intimacy as well as cold spaces

within it. It captures the all-encompassing intrusion of the

world and its conditioning of our day-to-day emotions, our

children’s colonisation of our hearts and our powerlessness

ultimately to protect them. Its understated tone is perfectly

pitched: the narrative moves gently, then soars, into either

sadness, or joyful contentment – again and again. I am in this

story, and so is the world. Ahdaf Soueif

“My Life” by Anton Chekhov (1896)

This is Chekhov’s longest short story and one of the very few

he wrote in the first-person singular. It’s the autobiography of

a young man in provincial Russia struggling to live up to his

lofty ideals and being brought down by life’s random

contingencies. I actually adapted “My Life” for a play and

know it intimately. If you could only read a single Chekhov

story then this is the one: all his gifts and genius – the wry, dark

comedy of his voice, his unique angle on the human

condition, his refusal to judge – are contained in it. William

Boyd
“In the Night” by Jamaica Kincaid (1978)

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Part poetic incantation, part eccentric kaleidoscopic vision,

this is a story which contorts each time you read it. Born in

Antigua, Kincaid invents aesthetics which are wholly unique,

transfiguring human form and surroundings, in particular, the

Caribbean landscapes. Here, she conveys the multiple

textures of smaller islands, creating a literary geography

which remains experimental, new and indefinable. Irenosen

Okojie

“Music at Annahullion” by Eugene McCabe (2004)

McCabe’s story is set on the border between Monaghan and

Fermanagh sometime in the 1950s or 60s. Two brothers and a

sister are uneasily sharing a smallholding. The landscape itself

and the states of sour feeling are described with sharpness

and precision. When the sister announces that she would like

a piano that is advertised for sale locally, one of the brothers

buys it for her. But it won’t fit into the house and is left to rot

outside. The failure to get the piano into the house has an

extraordinary power and pathos. Its purchase has stood for

all hope, and now there is no hope. The hard-won sense of

despair and darkness in the final pages of this small

masterpiece is memorable and chilling. Colm Tóibín

Jo Ann Beard

Densely textured reportage … Jo Ann Beard

“Werner” by Jo Ann Beard (2007)

Only afterwards did I discover that this was in fact a piece of

densely textured reportage, but it taught me so much about

how to write a short story that I will always see it as one. A

young man, Werner Hoeflich, trapped by a fire, escapes by

leaping from the window of his New York apartment, across

the intervening gap and in through the window of the

adjacent building. It has the richness of a novel, the raw and

dirty grip of life and was, for me, a revelation. Fine language

and a deftly conjured mood are all well and good, but fiction

– of whatever length – should thrill. Mark Haddon

“The Window Theatre” by Ilse Aichinger (1953)

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Miscommunication, antic disposition, voyeurism, glee – this

translation of one of Aichinger’s most famous stories provides

windows upon windows upon windows. Simply expressed

and made to linger long in the mind, it was my first

experience of the prizewinning Austrian writer and her dark,

precise prose styling, and the start of an ongoing pursuit on

my part to read more of her work. Eley Williams

“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe (1843)

Poe’s obsessive theme was the terror of losing sanity – never

more dramatically evoked than in this masterpiece. In “The

Tell-Tale Heart”, one of Poe’s shortest “tales of the grotesque

and arabesque”, and the one that seems most

contemporary in the hallucinatory intensity of its narration, an

unnamed individual commits a brutal, seemingly

unprovoked murder of an old man with whom he lives,

disposes of the body by dismembering and burying it

beneath the floorboards of the residence they share, and

succumbs to madness and self-destruction in the aftermath

of guilt. Throughout, the narrator insists on his sanity: “True –

nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am;

but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had

sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them.”

That the murder is entirely irrational is acknowledged by the

murderer: “Object there was none. Passion there was none. I

loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never

given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his

eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a

vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it.” Poe is a master

of the “unreliable narrator” – a voice that speaks with

devastating spontaneity and is utterly convincing – that has

come to be a staple of much suspense and horror fiction in

the 20th and 21st centuries. Unhampered by the literary

pretensions of certain of Poe’s other, longer stories, totally

committed to its unrepentant pathology, and its visceral

celebration of this pathology, “The Tell-Tale Heart” is the very

essence of Poe, as Poe is himself the very essence of the

American gothic tradition. Joyce Carol Oates