The third in a series of annual anthologies, The Best British Short Stories 2013 reprints the cream of short fiction, by British writers, first published in 2012. These stories appeared in magazines from the Edinburgh Review to Granta, in anthologies from various publishers, and in authors’ own short story collections. They appeared online at 3:AM Magazine, Fleeting and elsewhere.
This new anthology includes stories by: Charles Boyle, Regi Claire, Laura Del-Rivo, Lesley Glaister, MJ Hyland, Jackie Kay, Nina Killham, Charles Lambert, Adam Lively, Anneliese Mackintosh, Adam Marek, Alison Moore, Alex Preston, Ross Raisin, David Rose, Ellis Sharp, Robert Shearman, Nikesh Shukla, James Wall and Guy Ware.
Praise for The Best British Short Stories
‘If the aim of this collection is to show the scope of the short story, then it does so well ... Thought-provoking and highly recommended.’ SHELLEY MARSDEN, Irish World
‘An awesome anthology from an exciting publisher. Features some writers you know, alongside those you’ll hear more of in the future.’ Waterstone’s
‘Let’s hope this series becomes an annual fixture.’ CHRIS POWER, The Guardian
‘If you are new to short stories or are going to get only one short story collection this year then we recommend this one highly’ LoveReading
‘Royle’s (excellent) taste means that little explosions of weirdness or transcendence often erupt amid much well-observed everyday life.’ BOYD TONKIN, The Independent
The Best British Short Stories 2013
Nicholas Royle is the author of more than 100 short stories, two novellas and seven novels, most recently First Novel (Jonathan Cape). 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 New York 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 a judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize, he reviews fiction for the Independent and the Warwick Review. A new collection of short stories, London Labyrinth (No Exit Press), is forthcoming. 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
Edited by
NICHOLAS ROYLE
CROMER
Published by Salt Publishing Ltd
12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX
All rights reserved
Introduction and Selection Copyright © Nicholas Royle, 2013
Individual contributions © the contributors, 2013
The right of Nicholas Royle to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by her 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 2013
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 975 4 electronic
In memory of John Royle (1938–2013)
Introduction
Flash fiction. Was ever an uglier, more inappropriate term coined to describe a literary form? For years, it seemed, we read about and heard about short short stories, short-short stories (subtly different, presumably), very short stories, micro-fictions, flash fiction and so on. At some point ‘flash fiction’ began to take hold and it does now seem to be the most widely used term, with its own Wikipedia entry, numerous prizes (including Salt’s) and even a National Flash-Fiction Day.
I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of writers whom I have read who have published pieces of genuine merit that come in under, say, 1000 words. Lydia Davis is celebrated, with good reason; Kafka left a lot of very short, highly effective pieces. David Gaffney is, I think, one of very few contemporary British writers who have mastered the very short form. I loved his story ‘Junctions One to Four Were Never Built’, which was published in 2011, but couldn’t quite see how something so short could occupy a place in last year’s anthology alongside stories that were so much longer. Well, more fool me. Alison Moore’s irresistible ‘The Smell of the Slaughterhouse’, which opens the current volume, is not very much longer.
Flash fiction is still an awful term. It hardly implies lasting value. But then, given that a lot of so-called flash fiction is not particularly good, maybe it isn’t so inappropriate after all. Whatever term might be used to describe them, there are a few more really-rather-short stories in the current volume than in the previous two years. A careful reader might also suspect a bias this year towards experimental fiction. There was, in fact, no bias towards anything in my selection process, unless towards good writing, and good writing often involves taking risks.
The stories reprinted herein first appeared in literary magazines such as Ambit, Stand, Granta, Edinburgh Review and the Warwick Review, in online publications including Fleeting and The View From Here, and in anthologies and single-author collections.
I have considered hundreds of stories while reading for this volume. During the past year I have come across lots of good work in anthologies arising out of prizes and competitions, such as Lightship Anthology 2, Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Volume 5 and Willesden Herald New Short Stories 6. Good stuff is coming out of universities in magazines and anthologies. Matter and The Mechanics’ Institute Review, from Sheffield Hallam University and Birkbeck College respectively, adopt the same approach as each other, filling their pages with work by a mixture of MA students and guest writers. Postgraduates from the University of Exeter produce Peninsula, a blend of new and old work, fiction, journalism and reportage. Short Fiction, from Plymouth Universi
ty, attracts a range of very good writers. The Warwick Review continues to publish excellent short fiction, including, in the past year, outstanding stories by Elizabeth Stott, Alison Moore and Charles Boyle.
Stand has been going for more than 60 years and has moved around a bit; these days it’s based at the University of Leeds. If I had had a little more space I would have taken Elizabeth Baines’s story from issue 198 as well as Adam Lively’s from the issue before. Copies of two excellent independent magazines arrived from Scotland – Edinburgh Review and Gutter; if the fiction in the former just about had the edge, the look of the latter was a cut above. Also beautifully designed are Structo, a UK-based independent literary magazine, and Magpie Magazine, which celebrates ‘the new folk revolution in art, writing and music’ (issue five included a poignant short story by Claire Massey).
If, like me, you feel a little niggle at the way Granta doesn’t tell you what its pieces are – fiction or non-fiction – go on to the website where they do helpfully tell you what’s what. Boat Magazine is another expensively produced mix of fiction, journalism and photography; issue three included a good story by Lee Rourke about the changing fabric of an east London neighbourhood.
Ambit will hopefully cope with founder-editor Martin Bax’s retirement in 2013. The novelist and consultant paediatrician has been at the helm for more than fifty years. Andy Cox has been publishing quality horror, science fiction, slipstream and crime stories for two decades; his TTA Press stable of magazines includes Black Static, Interzone and Crimewave.
Three of the year’s most interesting anthologies happened to be metropolitan in flavour. There was photographer Roelof Bakker’s Still (Negative Press London), in which writers were invited to take inspiration from Bakker’s photographs of empty spaces in an abandoned Hornsey Town Hall; Acquired For Development By . . . : A Hackney Anthology (Influx Press), edited by Gary Budden and Kit Caless, with stories by Gavin James Bower and Lee Rourke, among others, and cover illustrations by Laura Oldfield Ford; and Road Stories: New Writing Inspired by Exhibition Road (Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea) edited by Mary Morris and beautifully illustrated with paper sculptures by Mandy Smith, in which the story I was most drawn to was Deborah Levy’s ‘Black Vodka’, which would reappear as the title story of the Man Booker 2012 shortlisted author’s collection from And Other Stories and then again in Comma’s The BBC International Short Story Award 2012 in which my favourite original story was Julian Gough’s inventive and entertaining ‘iHole’.
Simon Van Booy’s ‘The Menace of Mile End’ was a highlight of Red: The Waterstones Anthology, published by Waterstones (sic, ie no apostrophe. Insert sad face here) and edited by Cathy Galvin, formerly Sunday Times Magazine fiction editor who went on to run the popular and successful Short Story Salon at the Society Club. There was a lot of good original work in Unthology 3 (Unthank Books) edited by Robin Jones and Ashley Stokes, and some hard choices had to be made. The same was true of Secret Europe, a lavishly produced large-format collection by John Howard and Mark Valentine published by Exposition Internationale of Bucharest, and of new collections by David Constantine and Joel Lane, whose Where Furnaces Burn, a volume of his weird crime stories from the West Midlands that I had been looking forward to for some time, did not in any way disappoint.
What was disappointing about 2012 was, well, a couple of things really. Firstly, the fact that Prospect magazine stopped publishing original stories in its fiction slot, opting for stories extracted from forthcoming collections instead. It’s easier for the editor concerned, but it does turn the magazine (with regard to that slot only, of course) from a worthy sponsor of new writing into nothing more than a shop window for publishers. Secondly, the disappearance off my radar of London Magazine.
I have been an avid reader and collector of London Magazine since I moved to the capital in the early 1980s. It’s been around a lot longer, of course, since 1732 in fact. It was the first magazine to which I submitted my own short stories (they were politely returned by the then editor Alan Ross, a true gentleman of publishing). I watched it get picked up by Picador for a while and then get put down again. It went through editors like an underperforming football club goes through managers. Unpaid, I wrote a film column for the magazine for a year, glad of the free copy. Then the current editor, Steven O’Brien, took over and the magazine started to take on a distinct flavour with the appearance on the masthead and contents page of names like Grey Gowrie, Bruce Anderson, Peregrine Worsthorne. There was invariably room for one or more of editor O’Brien’s poems. My review copies stopped arriving – a series like The Best British Short Stories can’t do its job without the willingness of publishers to provide review copies – and my emailed requests went unanswered. I wondered if ‘special editorial advisor’ Gowrie, who resigned his Cabinet post in 1985 because it was impossible for him to live in central London on the £33,000 salary, had advised cuts. After a number of ignored pleas via a variety of media, I finally heard from an intern that the editor did not ‘feel inclined to offer a free subscription’. From the amount of champagne flowing at the magazine’s 2012 autumn party (pictures posted online) it doesn’t look as if austerity has hit particularly hard. I’m just sorry I missed Gowrie’s 17-page poem ‘The Andrians’, and even sorrier I’ve not been able to keep up with the magazine’s short stories, including, last year, two by Steven O’Brien.
Nicholas Royle
Manchester
March 2013
The Smell of the Slaughterhouse
Alison Moore
Rachel’s father opens the door and looks at her. Seeing her small suitcase, he says, ‘Is that it?’
‘I’ll go back for more,’ she says. She will go when Stan’s out. If she goes when he’s in, he will tell her that he loves her, and she doesn’t want to hear it. Or perhaps she won’t go back. She could leave it all behind and buy new clothes, new everything.
Stepping inside, she sees that she is treading something into the house. She leaves the offending shoe outside, puts the other one on the shoe rack and hangs up her coat. Her father, closing the door behind her, fetches paper towels and carpet freshener. Then he picks up her suitcase and she follows him through the floral mist to the stairs.
He carries her suitcase up to her room, puts it down on the bed and says, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
She packed hastily but has remembered her make-up. She takes her cosmetics case into the bathroom, where she washes her hands and face with her father’s soap before reapplying her foundation, covering the bruising.
Back in her bedroom, she undresses, putting her clothes into the laundry basket and choosing something clean from her suitcase. She puts the rest of her things into the drawers and onto hangers. Her room has not changed at all. When she has finished unpacking and has put her empty suitcase under the bed, it is almost as if she has never been away.
She can hear the kettle boiling and crockery chinking in the kitchen.
Downstairs, she finds her father on his way into the dining room with a pot of tea, cups and a packet of lemon sponge fingers on a tray. Putting everything down on the table, he says, ‘Shall I be mother?’
Her mother always had a clean shirt waiting for Rachel’s father when he got in from work, ready for him to put on after his shower. He smelt heavily of his carbolic soap at teatime.
There was always a cloth on the dining table, and something home-baked. There might be some quiet jazz on the stereo. Her mother would pour the tea and ask about his day. He never really talked about it though. ‘Fine,’ he would say, or, ‘Busy.’
Her mother would say, ‘Good,’ or, ‘It’s better to be busy,’ and nothing much more would be said.
Rachel, sitting down now at the table and accepting sugar in her tea, remembers how she used to look at her father, at the well-washed hands in which he held his slice of cake and his teacup, and she would think to herself that no one would know he had just come fro
m the abattoir.
Except that the smell of the carbolic soap with which he scrubbed himself daily, and whose reek is on her own skin now, has come to seem to her, over the years, like the smell of the slaughterhouse itself.
The Writer
Ellis Sharp
Swirled with mortality, entropy, a sense of wasting, the notion of shrinkage was still with him. The day before, he’d stepped from a northbound Bakerloo train at Oxford Circus, crossed to the Victoria Line and seen, at the end of a stump of corridor, a pair of massive eyes, a vast nose, the helium-filled grossness of a bloated mouth. The giant stared directly at him, with eyeballs the size of footballs. In their flinty blackness Doodles noted a second, more striking resemblance, to the pitiless eyes of the pug in Joshua Reynolds’ painting of George Selwyn, the necrophiliac MP and Satanist, which had transfixed him just thirty-two minutes earlier. As he moved towards the platform – there was no avoiding the giant, as Doodles had to get to Kings Cross – his recognition of those eyes and shrunken cheekbones was, metre by metre, confirmed. He felt like a mouse in the Jagger villa.
Next day Doodles left the Lido behind, in the care of the local authority, and continued along a rising tarmac pathway. The balconies of an adjacent block of flats displayed plants in pots, ironwork chairs and some sodden towels. Soon he was beyond the flats, the path forked, and he went left, as he had been doing since his late teens.
The path here was narrower. To his right a grassy slope rose gently to a ridge, where a dozen trees crowded together for company. The grass had recently been cut and dead swathes of it lay like tufts of hair on a barber’s floor. Death had made the stems curl and become yellowish. On the slope nine ravens stood at a distance of twenty metres from each other. It was as if they had been placed there by a film director who’d graduated with a special interest in surrealism.
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