Our Favourite Short Story Collections

The shortlisted authors for this year's BBC National Short Story Award choose their favourite short story collections...

MJ Hyland

I first read Nikolai Gogol's Diary of a Madman & Other Stories when I was in my final year of high school. His gripping stories, especially 'The Overcoat', conjure the 'vivid fictional dream' which John Gardner insists should be every good writer's aim. Miss Erin Shale, the high-school teacher I then lived with, gave me Gogol. And so, she not only rescued me from a home that had become a shambles, she gave me the books that would later help teach me to write. Gogol's influence on me was profound, although his stylistic influence can't be seen in my uninflected prose, where most of the traces of artifice are deliberately and assiduously removed. But his stories, like Flannery O'Connor's stories in A Good Man is Hard to Find, showed me that I could write about madness and perversity and tragedy without sacrificing narrative or structural control, or humour. Miss Shale also gave me Nabokov's Dozen and my favourite story was Signs & Symbols. How controlled and yet unflinching; how heart-breaking and yet how calculated. How mysterious, and yet how clear. Like Orwell said in his essay 'Why I Write' , good prose is clear, 'like a window pane', and these writers, Gogol, O'Connor and Nabokov and the extraordinary short fiction of Joyce Carol Oates (see, for instance, Boy, which appeared in Sudden Fiction International, 1989) showed me how important it is to create an authentic, uncluttered fictional truth. And they warned me, loud and plain: if you want to put words on the page in the right and proper order, you need to work and work some more, with an eagle-eyed and ruthless glee. So, I try.

Alison Macleod

I'd choose Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter.

It was really Angela Carter who showed me the power of the short story to flash, combust and illuminate all at the same time. She seemed to re-make the short story form with almost every story she wrote, trusting the story she was telling to find its own urgent shape. She mixed fact with fiction; the analytical with the legendary; illusion with history; the sacred with the comic and the profane.  

Recently, I've been re-reading her three 'Lizzie Borden' stories, about the girl who, according to the old skipping rhyme, literally went over-kill with an axe. Each of the stories is impressively restrained, starkly strange and yet so beautifully focused: 'Even on the sunniest days you could not say the landscape smiled; the ragged woodland, the ocean beaten out of steel, not much, here, to cheer the heart, and all beneath the avenging light…'

Who else but Carter could describe Lizzie's despised step-mother in this way: 'She pours cold gravy, lumpy with flour, into her plate, so much gravy she's forced, in the end, to cut herself just another little crust of bread with which to finish up the gravy… She is a promiscuous eater… She is the nymphomaniac of the pig-bin.'

I can't not laugh when I re-read those lines. Carter's prose is so good, I want to eat her sentences as I read. Like Mrs. Borden with her crusts of bread, I get greedy. It's this fascination with desire, appetite and Eros, in all its forms, that brings Carter's stories to life. She was the first contemporary writer I discovered who simply - and compellingly - told the truth.

Jon McGregor

I first read Raymond Carver when I was seventeen, on my way to watch Short Cuts. (I wanted to say I'd read the book first. I was that kind of teenager.) I didn't get it at first; these were hardly stories at all, I thought, but paper-thin sketches about men who drank too much and waitresses who smoked and boys who went out shooting ducks. And then, each time I closed the book, I realised how much work those few words were doing; how much work they were allowing me, as a reader-participant, to do. And I kept going back for more. I liked the dead-pan humour, the lightly-evoked ache of loss, the idea that these characters could be people I knew. I liked the thought that, with enough practice, I might be able to write like this.

Which is the problem, of course. It's a style which is easy to try and imitate; it's a style which is easy to teach. And so by now, two decades on, if I read one more collection of 'spare', 'taut', 'restrained', or 'muscular' stories, I think I'll probably puke semi-colons. Now, while I still love and return to Raymond Carver's work, I'm more interested in the lyrical absurdities of Donald Barthelme, or the evocative mis-speaking of George Saunders, or Donald Antrim's flights of mania, or - and most especially - the rigorous and dense and adventurous minimalism of Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories is, I've decided since I started writing this, my favourite short story collection.

K J Orr

There are many collections of short stories that I love and have been influenced by for very different reasons. However, Ethan Canin is a relatively recent find for me, and his debut collection, Emperor of the Air, is among the very best I have read: it was first published in 1988, is written with a graceful assurance, won Canin a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, and launched his career.

Canin explores everyday life: the family, father-son relations, sibling relations, marriage and modern relationships, always with one eye on those moments when everything is transformed and the world is cracked open - associated at times with a sense of wonder, at others with intimations of something dark, and troubling. He favours first person narrative, and the direct address lends the stories an intimate edge that is compelling, fostering the promise of disclosure - a promise fulfilled by endings that linger in the mind. Canin has a fine ear for dialogue, and overall combines elegant understatement with real energy and warmth. He wrote this collection while a medical student, and there is evidence of a mind that is alive to the world, as curious about the miracle of evolution, or the complexity of the solar system, as it is about the workings of the human heart. Canin's stories are intelligent, thought-provoking and emotionally resonant, with a rich seam of humour drawing at least in part on commonalities - those frustrations and obsessions and rites of passage that connect us all.

D W Wilson

Tim Winton's The Turning is an interlinked short story collection set, like most of his work, on the west coast of Australia. I've picked it as my favourite for its musicality and for its unrivalled sense of place - the landscape and the setting are characters in their own right, and as you read through each story you'll see them both grow and shift. The stories are about people caught in a place that seems hopeless: two highschool boys embark on a roadtrip after they both fail their final-year exams; a woman finds solace from her abusive husband in a friendship with two born-again Christians; throughout the entire book we follow a boy as he searches for his estranged father Winton's prose is rhythmed and nuanced and the writing about as spare as the world it depicts. There's music in it, and a sense of sorrow that rarely deviates. But more impressive than the language and the landscape is Winton's compassion for his flawed characters. These are broken people, wronged people, people with dark pasts and darker secrets, but Winton never makes judgements upon them. The Turning is beautiful and bleak, but underscoring each of the stories is the possibility of hope, the chance to turn away from the life they're immersed toward something better.