Best British Short Stories 2020 by Nicholas Royle (best novels to read for students txt) 📕

In memory of Clive Sinclair (1948–2018)

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

NICHOLAS ROYLE

Introduction

LUKE BROWN

Beyond Criticism

IRENOSEN OKOJIE

Nudibranch

DAVID CONSTANTINE

The Phone Call

ZAKIA UDDIN

Vashti

RICHARD LAWRENCE BENNETT

Energy Thieves: Five Dialogues

NICOLA FREEMAN

Halloween

AMANTHI HARRIS

In The Mountains

ANDREW HOOK

The Girl With The Horizontal Walk

HANIF KUREISHI

She Said He Said

SARAH SCHOFIELD

Safely Gathered In

SONIA HOPE

Belly

JEFF NOON & BRIDGET PENNEY

The Further Dark

STEPHEN THOMPSON

Same Same But Different

KJ ORR

Backbone

DIANA POWELL

Whale Watching

DAVID ROSE

Greetings From The Fat Man In Postcards

NJ STALLARD

The White Cat

TIM ETCHELLS

Maxine

ADRIAN SLATCHER

Dreams Are Contagious

HELEN MORT

Weaning

ROBERT STONE

Purity

Contributors’ Biographies

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

NICHOLAS ROYLEINTRODUCTION

Imagine if we had a high-profile weekly newsstand magazine, in this country, publishing a new short story every week. Americans have the New Yorker. Obviously we can read the New Yorker, we may even subscribe, but how often will we find a British author featured? Every now and then, sure, but the magazine doesn’t tend to look very far beyond the upper echelons (British writers featured in the magazine last year included Hari Kunzru, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Pat Barker and Tessa Hadley). The New Yorker doesn’t appear to feel any need to encourage emerging British writers – and why should it? That would be the job of a prestigious British magazine, like, say the New Statesman. I suppose we should be grateful that the New Statesman continues to publish stories at Christmas and, somewhat unpredictably, in either or both of their spring and summer specials.

The trouble with the Christmas double issue is that it carries both dates – the old year and the new. Was Kate Atkinson’s story, in the 2018/19 Christmas special, published in 2018 or 2019? You might think it doesn’t matter, that I should be less obsessed by dates, but you’ve got to have rules. Without rules you have anarchy. The 2019/20 Christmas special had a story by Lucy Ellmann. Three other stories appeared in the magazine in 2019: Daisy Johnson’s Big Brother satire ‘How to Win’ in the spring special and Sarah Hall’s discomfiting ‘The Woman the Book Read’ in the summer special. In the autumn books special, William Boyd introduced a story by Olga Nekliudova. Knowing of William Boyd’s enthusiasm for metafictional trickery (remember Nat Tate?), I went online to find out a little bit more about Nekliudova and the very first link took me right back to the New Statesman and a section of the magazine’s website devoted to the fiction it publishes, which, when I scrolled down, appeared to solve the mystery of which year its Christmas stories are published in. The Lucy Ellmann was dated 11 December 2019 and the Kate Atkinson 5 December 2018. Mystery solved. Except that a little further down I find an Ian Rankin story dated 8 January 2016. My collection of back issues includes the 2015/16 Christmas special, dated 18 December 2015 – 7 January 2016; it contains the Ian Rankin story supposedly published on 8 January 2016, so, in fact, mystery not solved, after all.

Still, I think we’d all like it if the New Statesman would publish more stories. One a week would be nice, please. The 2020 summer special came out while I was writing this introduction and I flicked through it looking for the expected short story. There wasn’t one – or isn’t one. But perhaps this is a matter for next year’s introduction. Next year? Didn’t I announce last year that this year would be my last, as series editor? I did. Concerned, however, that the series might be discontinued, I changed my mind.

I had already made most of my selections, for the present volume, before the arrival in the UK of Covid-19, but, crucially, what I didn’t do was fetch a number of books and magazines from my office at Manchester Metropolitan University before the lockdown put them beyond reach. These were books and magazines that I would need to do as thorough a job of writing this introduction as I normally aim to do.

I did, however, have some of those books and magazines at home, among them Wall: Nine Stories From Edge Hill Writers (Edge Hill University) edited by Ailsa Cox & Billy Cowan. I loved this. The stories are good, it’s attractively designed and it’s short. Ultimately one story stood out. I liked how the absence of a conventional narrative in Sarah Schofield’s ‘Safely Gathered In’ made you want to create one, or more than one, only for one eventually to emerge that was different from any of the ones you’d dreamt up.

Two more volumes of Tales From the Shadow Booth appeared. The editor is Dan Coxon and there’s still no publisher named, but there’s a website. One has to assume it publishes itself. Stand-outs (in volume three) included Richard V Hirst’s ‘The School Project’ and Robert Shearman’s ‘I Say (I Say, I Say)’. Volume 4 boasts some great names, including Lucie McKnight Hardy, Gary Budden, Jane Roberts, Giselle Leeb … I could go on. In fact, I could just repeat the list of contents. The imprint page is dated 2018, which I assume is a mistake, unless in the world of the Shadow Booth time goes backwards. Citizens of Nowhere (Cinnamon Press) edited by Rowan B Fortune, an anthology of utopian stories, is distinguished by stories from Jez Noond and Diana Powell, who, in 2019, won the Chipping Norton Literary Festival short story competition with ‘Whale Watching’.

I enjoyed original stories by Alicia J Rouverol, Mark Lindsey and others in issue 15 of Route 57 Environs: Modern Natures edited by Dan Eltringham and Vera Fibisan, part of a collaboration between the University of Sheffield and The Hepworth Wakefield; new stories by Angela Readman and Regi Claire stood out in Unthology 11 (Unthank Books) edited by Ashley Stokes and Tom Vowler. Threads and paths through life offered a way of connecting up the stories in Somewhere This Way edited by Rob Redman, the thirteenth volume in an ongoing series from the Fiction Desk. Shallow