THERE will be many of you across the world at the moment who are handing in your final assignments, stepping out of your final tests and saying goodbye to your university education. Congratulations! You can now relax and do the things you want to do (for a little bit at least!). For some of you that might include turning away from the books you have to read and picking up some books you want to read instead.
By the time I had finished my degree, I had read hundreds of academic books, more than enough fiction books, several poetry anthologies and countless reviews. After being forced to process words for a purpose for so long, I found that my brain no longer wanted to indulge in epic works of fiction. It could not handle remembering the previous chapter each time I picked up a book. So it found solace and sustenance in short stories.
If you too are finding it hard to concentrate on longer pieces but still want to keep your brain in practice, here are a few of my favourite short stories and collections.
“Our Cat Enters Heaven” by Margaret Atwood
This is a light-humoured short from the writer of The Handmaid’s Tale. It appears in The Tent, one of Atwood’s later short story collections from 2006. Whilst I found some of the other stories in the collection to be too morbid or complicated, “Our Cat Enters Heaven” has the perfect mixture of humour and insight. The moment the cat is reunited with the parts that were removed when he was neutered is particularly moving.
Our cat was raptured up to heaven. He’d never liked heights, so he tried to sink his claws into whatever invisible snake, giant hand, or eagle was causing him to rise in this manner, but he had no luck.
When he got to heaven, it was a large field. There were a lot of little pink things running around that he thought at first were mice. Then he saw God sitting in a tree. Angels were flying here and there with their fluttering white wings; they were making sounds like doves. Every once in a while God would reach out with its large furry paw and snatch one of them out of the air and crunch it up. The ground under the tree was littered with bitten-off angel wings.
“On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” by Haruki Murakami
Reading books from foreign authors is a great way of expanding horizons: Murakami is possibly the most accessible Japanese author to Western readers. With a title like this, I was expecting the story to be a bit saccharine. Instead I found a beautiful story about the prospect of love. The story plays out in the mind of the narrator, which makes the mixture of matter-of-fact and fantasy work surprisingly well.
One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.
Tell you the truth, she's not that goodlooking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.
“The Sense of Smell” by Richard Adams
The story Watership Down by Richard Adams, is a British children’s classic about a group of rabbits in search of a home. Growing up in Berkshire, England, Watership Down was also a real place we visited a lot in my childhood. 30 years after he wrote Watership Down, Adams returned to the characters in Tales from Watership Down, released in 1996. Rather than being a sequel to the original, this short story collection is based on the idea of rabbit folk-lore. “The Sense of Smell” follows the Prince of Rabbits, El-ahrairah, as he searches for the sense of smell for his people. With clever tricks and a complete Lapin (or ‘rabbit’) language, it holds up to an adult’s reading and holds some dark tones.
"...noses have they, but they smell not." Psalm 115
"Who dares wins" Motto of the S.A.S
'Tell us a story, Dandelion!'
It was a fine May evening of the spring following the defeat of General Woundwort and the Efrafans on Watership Down. Hazel and several of his vetrans - those who had been with him ever since leavinf Sandleford - were lying on the warm turf, full of grass and comfortably relaxed. Nearby, Kehaar was pecking among the low tussocks, not so much feeding as using up the day's remains of his continual, restless energy.
“The Company of Wolves” by Angela Carter
This appears in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979.) With the reoccurrence of incest, necrophilia, pornography and violence in Angela Carter’s work, her novels can be somewhat trying at times. Even some of her other short stories in this collection can be difficult reading. However, “The Company of Wolves”, a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, treads the right side of controversial, with a good mixture of poetic language, sexual awakening and feminist elements.
One beast and only one howls in the woods by night.
The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he’s as cunning as he is ferocious; once he’s had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.
At night, the eyes of wolves shine like candle flames, yellowish, reddish, but that is because the pupils of their eyes fatten on darkness and catch the light from your lantern to flash it back to you – red for danger; if a wolf’s eyes reflect only moonlight, then they gleam a cold and unnatural green, a mineral, a piercing colour. If the benighted traveller spies those luminous, terrible sequins stitched suddenly on the black thickets, then he knows he must run, if fear has not struck him stock-still.
“Smith of Wootton Major” by J.R.R Tolkien
“Smith of Wootton Major” walks a strange world between the well-established folk-lore and history of Middle Earth that crops up in The Lord of the Rings and the true history and setting of Middle England. At 61pages, it could be classed more as a novella than a short story. It tells of a boy who accidentally swallows a faery star that allows him access to the elfish world as an adult. Written in the same style as The Hobbit, Pauline Baynes' illustrations make it a particularly beautiful story for both children and adults.
There was a village once, not very long ago for those with long memories, nor very far away for those with long legs. Wootton Major it was called because it was lager than Wootton Minor, a few miles away deep in the tree; but it was not very large, though it was at that time prosperous, and a fair number of folk lived in it, good, bad, and mixed, as is usual.
“Baba Yaga’s Dumpling” by Agnes Szudek
This is a traditional Polish story about an old witch called Baba Yaga. On her 200th birthday, Baba Yaga decides to cook herself the biggest dumpling in the world to celebrate. Unfortunately, a Dumpling Demon arrives and wants the dumpling for himself. This story can be found in the book The Amber Mountain and Other Stories, which has a varierty of traditional Polish tales and beautiful illustrations from Jan Pienkowski.
Baba Yaga was a very old woman. She lived in a little wooden house neaer the forest, and she kept a cat called Mruchek and a goat called Bucheck.
It was said by mnay that she was a wicth, and one magic word from her toothless old mouth could turn a man into a toad; even the slightest glance from her dark old eyes might do the most terrible things. But no one was quite sure, because the people of the village were afraid of Baba Yaga and kept out of her way.
There are many other short stories I would love to talk about here – many of the fairytales from across Europe that I grew up listening to are still favourites. But space, like the stories, is short and like all good storytellers, I know when to come to an end.
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