"Best British Short Stories 2025" by Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2025)

In his longer than usual introduction, Royle

• lists 15 UK book publishers of stories
• lists 14 UK printed magazines that contain stories (I don't know "Extra Teeth", "Open Pen" and "Remains")
• writes that "Extra Teeth" and "Confingo" send him all their issues. Some authors send him the publication they're in. He sometimes asks for publications.
• writes that sometimes when he's tried to include stories by well-known writers they've not replied or have asked for £900.
• lists some magazines he misses - Ambit, Panurge, Warwick Review, etc

The majority of the pieces come from books, the other sources being Fictive Dream, The Brussels Review, Thin Skin, BBC (3), New Worlds, and Confingo.

• "I'm in love with a German film star" (C.D. Rose) - Some music tracks listed, all with some connection (real or imagined) to Magda (who may have been a spy, who may have married 4 times, who may not have existed).
• "Torsos" (Linden Hibbert) - a male detective visits a museum where a surly female curator shows him the torso room (where a torso had been damaged with a blunt instrument), the leg room, etc. He draws the evidence. Later he returns and finds the culprit foot outside. The smell (and here the story ends) gave him a yearning for "an outcome that could not happen. Like taking a stroll in the evening, he thought. Like wanting a child of your own. Or falling in love."
• "The incidents" (Wyl Menmuir) - From birth, animals (bees, snakes, etc) seem to be attracted to Blue. When she's 15 her father dies. She and her mother Emmaline go to Cornwall. Blue hopes to meet Daphne du Maurier there. Emmaline want to meet old friend David, who now has a wife and 2 sons. They go by car, the ocean "unrealistically blue against the green of the fields". On the beach, while the boys wrestle and David is in deep conversation with Emmaline, Blue walks unnoticed into the sea, the whales' calls sounding like home.
• "The headteacher" (Okechukwu Nzelu) - A married couple, Jeremy (his PoV, a lawyer) and Matthew (popular head of a group of schools), are in their mid-fifties. They haven't had sex for a while. It's Matthew's retirement party in their house. His colleagues and ex-students attend. Mrs P helped/coached Matthew through his career, giving him the authority and confidence that Jeremy couldn't provide. Nathan, in his 30s, had been in Matthew's drama club. Jeremy knows about drama clubs. Nathan complains about the broken shower in his expensive flat, not realising that the flat is Jeremy and Matthew's nest egg. [I was hoping it would have more analysis (from Jeremy's PoV) of the influences on (and development of) Matthew's persona, more regrets. It's a bit too plotty/info-dumpy for me at the moment.]
• "Dŵr" (Catrin Kean) - Someone just misses their Welsh father's funeral. They have the key to his house. It's raining. They haven't seen the father for years - he was never part of their life. Next morning a neighbour delivers his dog. The dog takes the narrator on a walk to a waterfall - the water says "dŵr" ("water" in Welsh, about the only word the father has taught them). A stream back leads under the house, In the kitchen there's a trapdoor leading to a cellar which the stream runs through. There's a table, 2 chairs and glasses, a bottle of whisky. The ending is "And then I heard, just behind me, a sigh. A breath. And I knew he was here, and he knew I had come".
• "A fictional detective" (Elizabeth Stott) - "It seems he is created only to solve the endless crimes of fiction." He hopes one day that things will be different, that a train ride will just be a train ride, that he can spend a night in a hotel without notes being slipped under the door. 5 pages.
• "Junction" (Christopher Burns) - 2 men meet on a park bench. It soon becomes obvious that one (whose PoV it is) is the older version of the other. The older one doesn't want to reveal anything (for fear of changing his past) but perhaps he does. He learns afterwards that near the time of the meeting, the younger version is killed in a car accident. He muses on the consequences of this, then begins to fade away.
• "Fabrication" (Imogen Reid) - a description of a room (or of a picture of the room) in Robbe-Grillet style, with line-breaks that isolate a word/phrase that ends a sentence and starts another. I think.
• "Flatten the curve" (Naomi Wood) - Deborah (with husband Cal, 6 y.o. daughter Zara, and a baby) is in lockdown. Andrei, Julia and 6 y.o. Joey live next door. Zoom, phone-calls in the garden, and childcare are a struggle for Deb. Zara flirts with Joey. Deb fancies Andrei (who's a meat-eater, unlike Cal, and sneaks off to play poker - Cal's covid-vulnerable). One night she cooks meat, angering Cal. She stays up late, drinks a bottle or 2 of wine. Next morning Joey charges in and cuddles Zara. Andrei comes to collect him. Deborah tells him to go away.
• "You" (Roger Luckhurst) - The collective narrator follows the life of "You", a child who's like cracked vessel, the cracks just the right size for the narrators to squeeze through. You struggle through school, have a tempestuous adolescence, wonder about spiritualism. The ending is "This is how it will be until you join us, and we begin again the search for another vessel"
• "Lord of the fruit flies" (Pippa Goldschmidt) - Herman Muller is carrying vials of flies. He's been zig-zagging arond the world because of his political views. He hasn't seen his son for 4 years. He's on a train to Edinburgh, sharing the carriage with a female farm vet and a war-time refugee boy. [Is that it?]
• "Laughter ever after" (Mark Valentine) - he's a collector. He takes a rural bus to Biggleswade in seach of a rare leaflet about the singer of "The Laughing Policeman". A gust of wind enlivens the quiet town square. He lets the wind take him over. He's exhilarated, in ecstasy. There's booming laughter.
• "Helium" (David Bevan) - A sad OAP's on a country walk alone. He's spent his life alone. He sees a silver-clad figure on the other side of the lake and walks round to it. He thinks over a new love - his first. They'd slept together. He wonders why he put her off by not wanting to meet her friends. When he reaches the figure it's only "L" and "O" helium balloons. Valentine's Day has just happened. The balloons blow away.
• "The ice tigs" (Rose Biggin) - A single male who gets a temp admin job at a university has problems with bad circulation, maybe triggered by encounters with a ghost. [No]
• "The portal in Lisbon" (Baret Magarian) - From BBC radio 4. Peter, an English lecturer, a man whose friends have married and abandoned him, whose mother has recently died, who had a scooter accident, who's been pick-picketed, goes to Lisbon for a break. He attends an ethnic music concert in a cellar, hoping it will lift his spirits. "Peter could not rid himself of the impression that reality had somehow changed ... He just wanted the music to make him insensate or to restore some spark of life after all the bruises and loneliness life had bequeathed him". After, he's told that the cellar is a museum that doesn't host concerts. Well, well. [No]
• "When viewed from the head rather than the foot" (Simon Okotie) - 6.5 pages. One sentence. One paragraph - "such that the angle subtended by the upper and lower legs would progressively decrease in proportion to that decreasing distance" etc.
• "Flight of the albatross" (Hannah Hoare) - In Turkey a young man takes tourists tandem paragliding. One day his passenger falls to his death. A year later his father tells tourists that his son flies like an albatross - "Albatross flies for joy and finds all he needs up there. He sees the world below and knows he cannot be happy down here."
• "Ghost walks" (Ian Critchley) - Sarah and Tom revisit a town they last went to over 30 years before, when they first slept together. Back then, she'd stood at their window and a woman below waved and stepped back into traffic. No injury. Tom apologies again about something. Next day, alone, she finds herself at the B&B they'd stay at before. She sees a face at the window and steps back into traffic. No injury. She returns to her hotel room, stands at the window. No woman waves back. She collects her things and leaves.
• "Under the flyover" (Iain Sinclair) - 27 pages of sporadically interesting text, with surrealism being a leit-motif. I know something about David Gascoyne, Ballard, "New Worlds", Burroughs, London, etc. Even so, I can't help feeling it should be several pages shorter. Here's an extract - "To be walking with wombats, wind-surfing salt deserts, coupling in non-judgemental sexual bliss under a weightless waterfall, swooping like a killer drone through the private apartments of the Vatican, under stupendous ceilings manfully toshed into a steroidal superhero drama by Michelangelo ... The orbital motorway, turning octopus sprawl into a traffic island, was elastic. Sometimes stretching to accommodate a pregnancy of private estated and revamped asylums, sometimes biting hard like a whale-bone corset"
• "The junction" (Alison Moore) - Paul, driving home to his ill mother after a week away, is hit by a car. The driver, Neville (a widower), invites him to his nearby village house. Paul's fiancee has changed her mind. The pick-up lorry doesn't come. He has to stay the night. He's well looked after. Next day he finds his car in pieces in the garage, and a dead woman in a bed. He discusses with Neville how to spend the day.

Ghost/gothic stories easily predominate over mainstream. The well-crafted New Yorker story is far away. It feels less representative than usual.

"The Best British Short Stories 2024" (by Nicholas Royle (ed)) (Salt, 2024)

In his intro about PoV, Royle points out that 9 of the stories are in the 1st person, 1 is 2nd person, 7 are 3rd person limited, 1 is 1st and 3rd person, and 2 are multiple 3rd person or omniscient. The magazines that stories are taken from include Gutter, New Statesman, Fictive Dream (3!), and Lunate.

• Stories I can't tell anyone I know (Bhanu Kapil) - 2.5 pages.
• Summer of light (Jonathan Coe) - 1924. Livia, a plain girl, was asked by an artist to sit for him, fully clothed. She was impressed by the honest painting. Later, her best friend is pretty Serafina. She has 2 rich male friends. When they find out that the artist has an exhibition in Venice, they all take the train there. He's entitled the painting "The Ugly Girl." The men laugh. Serafina tries to cheer her friend up. In the evening they see the artist walking with friends. Serafina (probably) pushes him into a canal. (No)
• Manoeuvres (Paul Brownsey) - It's post-Covid Glasgow. Drummond's mother goes to safer Crewe because there might be war. He's 59 and wants to volunteer. His husband (the 1st person PoV) tries various maneouvres to stop him, finally mentioning the people he cares for. While he's in the cellar getting Drummond's rucksack for him, a missile destroys their building. Drummond dies. The narrator continues speculating about their debating strategies, how Drummond never tried to persuade him. What did his final "Okay" mean? (I've seen this style of story before in BBSS anthos - a death/disaster doesn't interrupt a narrator's train of thought. Is 'It flashed on me upon me' a typo?)
• River (Cate West) - She goes for a walk by the river (to get away from him?) She sees a whole city in the river. She's running for the tube. The river is still now, marble. 4 pages
• Where are they now? (Alison Moore) - Miss Haines and a girl meet in a cafe for an interview. Miss Haines was once famous - an actress. After, she returns to her poky flat, thinking about the interview and her life. She had fallen in love with Richard, a famous married actor, stalking him. Years later, in panto, she was seduced by Benjamin, a much younger actor. She had still been living with her mother in her big house with a garden. The panto season over, she'd stalked him too. She phones the girl a few times. She dreams of coming off-stage down a long, dark corridor to her changing room, where her mother, Benjamin, and Richard's son are waiting.
• Inside (Alan Beard) - 1st person PoV. She was married for a year and sometimes pretends to have an 8 year-old son, Craig. Her husband smoked and once wanted to do theology. After marriage, she was with Harry from work. But there were other men too. The women she'd like to be friends with play bridge. One of their sons bullies hers. She steals Harry's 3rd child, bundles him into a boot and planned to hurt him. (How much should we care about how much is true?)
• Low stakes (Ecm Cheung) - 3 pages. Readers die at the end of reading a story. Characters are reborn. So the character does little good deeds hoping to be reborn into a better life.
• Stock (Gynan Jones) - 28 pages. His shop is closing down(?) so he gives carrier bags of goods away to his regular clients. He visits his nan who lives an hour away. He helps Ifan, who's having to sell his animals. Someone lives in a converted chapel. Annie drives a car, Mari's in the back. He's scared about the police. He has locked a grocery delivery man in the back of their van, threatening to kill them. (I think I can learn from this. What's gained from fogging the details? This isn't just delaying facts to add suspense. It's not simple "Unreliable narrator" tactics. Even when we know what's going on, details are withheld. From the start of the piece we suspect that the main character is under strain - "He sat integrated amongst the felled trees". Later, the odd sentence loses clarity - e.g. "Bones of a sudden watery, as if he was unmixing". His thoughts come fast, and not always clearly. In "He waited. Bloomed with heat again. A slight chill immediately meeting the edges of his sweat. His neck vein thick, suddenly. Too small." what is too small? His vein? I had to re-read too much. Is the shop his? Is Ifan his uncle? Is Mari his daughter? Maybe 3 times "I" is briefly used.)
• Headshot (Charlotte Turnbull) - A new assistant starts at the shabby Soho HQ of a media company. The female assistants have male names. They call the new assistant Dave. Against the rules the assistants live in the offices. The male bosses aren't well behaved. The male actor they take on is badly behaved. Dave's line-manager, Francesca, attacks Dave, who ends up in A&E. (I don't think I get it. The HQ is society in microcosm?)
• Friday art club (Kevin Boniface) - How an old widower fills his day - walking the dog, looking over a wall he's not looked over before, chatting to the postman, getting an old airfix kit through the post as a belated birthday gift from his daughter.
• Churail (Kamila Shamsie) - The narrator's mother died giving birth to her. Soon after, his father emigrated to England with him because the mother had become a Churail (a being who traps her ex-husband until he's old). She's told this by her cousin Zainab. When the narrator's 16, investor banker Zainab moves nearby. She's everything the narrator's now rich father wanted the narrator to be. But she gave up her job to help when there were floods in Pakistan. She asked the father for a donation. He said no. She went to their hometown to find that the mother's grave was flooded. She brought back a twig from a peepul tree. The narrator planted it. Years later its roots invaded the water pipes and maybe the house foundations, and the father's foundations too.
• Strangers meet we when (Nicholas Royle) - Stylised language - few commas. Set in 1911. The painter was with a newcomer in her bedroom/studio when her big sister Effie called up. Mrs Blyton's reading someone's journal about a trip through Europe 13 years earlier. When Lola appears she picked up a poetry book. "So they sat on the floor and drank tea still hot and Lola sliced lemon cake still flustered to think Miss Blyton no Enid really was so much the author already found herself divulging as she otherwise very well might not have done that her mother was an author too". Lola's mother has published a book about "Faces and how to read them".
• Lapin à la moutarde (Sonya Moor) - September. France. Pascal is bringing his new girlfriend for a meal that his widowed mother (her 1st person PoV) is preparing. She kept him secret for his first 12 weeks. Her husband was Gerald. His mother-in-law was a strong character. The narrator didn't like Pascal's previous girlfriend. She wants his girlfriend to be the daughter she never had. She wants to pass family traditions/recipes on. She recalls a train trip from Avignon to Switzerland with Gerald's sister Suzette, paid by her mother-in-law. She recalls her mother killing rabbits and kittens. She recalls meeting the rich mother-in-law after Gerald had told his mother about the pregnancy. A rushed marriage would have been uncivilised. The mother-in-law paid for a Swiss clinic. Pascal phones. His girlfriend doesn't eat meat. He says maybe he'll visit next week. The ending is "And I sit. Listening to the rabbit simmering, for a child that won't come."
• Minor disturbances (Cherise Saywell) - In a world where food is bland and the air needs to be filtered, a mother is in a play area with her little son. She loses him, thinks he's out in the fields where there are no pigeons, crows, or gulls, then finds him in the toilet.
• To have a horse (Timothy J Jarvis) - There aren't any horses. He creates one from junk, and says a spell hoping to bring it to life. He used to have moments of oneness with Nature. He starts a fire, falls asleep, and wakes up burning. He puts out the flames. He has a long journey to make.
• The sun is only a shipwreck insofar as a woman's body resembles it (Claire Carroll) - A woman dyes Andre Breton's hair on an unbearably hot day. 4 pages.
• An invocation (Ben Tufnell) - The narrator, a photographer, is giving a talk about his most famous photo - of Dee, a pop singer who disappeared on tour after a Royal Albert Hall concert where a spirit (faintly visible in the photo) seemed to be invoked onstage.
• What business has a horse to look down on me? (Rosie Garland) - A horse follows the low self-esteem narrator around the kitchen etc. Near the end is "And if, just if, I put in all the hard work and thankless slog at sorting out my life, I'd have to stop slamming doors. I'd have to turn around and look the horse in the eye.". 2 pages.
• Cul-de-sac (Kerry Hadley-Pryce) - Jamie and Susan arrive at Susan's parents. Jamie hasn't met them before. The father is unfriendly (and ill?). The house shakes whenever a train passes. The roast dinner's an ordeal. Susan ends up cutting the meal on his plate into little pieces. 6 pages. (After 5 fairly short, non-Realist pieces, here's another piece with rather unbelievable detail. This time the exaggeration is explainable by the fraught state of mind of the main character.)
• A private tutor (Gregory Norminton) - Nessa (Oxford degree) is private tutor for a rich Russian family in London. The kids are Stan (16) and Dasha (7, a girl). Vadim manages security. Nessa takes Dasha to a bothy in a wood near Stirling owned by her family. No ransom is requested. Dasha doesn't mind it at first, but the low standard of food and entertainment gets her down. Vadim learns about the bothy, drives up speculatively, and rescues Dasha. The father had said to Vadim that he could do what he wanted with Nessa. He lets her go. 25 pages.

I don't think I share his Flash tastes, which this year is a problem.

With ever fewer UK paper magazines to select from (does he look at "Stand", "Under the Radar", "Postbox"?) the task of finding stories grows harder. I guess the competition anthologies are good hunting grounds. Maybe it's time to let magazines nominate stories by UK writers (in the way that Best Microfiction etc gets nominations).

"Best British Short Stories 2023" by Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2023)

Stories from books and magazines. The magazine list - Tate etc, Extra Teeth (2), Fictive Dream, Personal Beasts Journal, Granta, Lunate, London Magazine, Soanyway - includes a few I've not heard of.

In his wide-ranging introduction, Royle writes that he doesn't like the term Flash Fiction - "it's such an awful term, which has somehow taken hold and spread, like dry rot ... the very nature of the term, with its implications of speed and ephemerality, is, I think, unhelpful ... I do recognise that I have a bee in my bonnet about this". He also quotes from Philip Stevick's "Against Subject: fiction in search of something to be about" - "Is it possible to have a fiction that is coherent on its own terms but so tentative and exploratory that its writer seems never entirely clear what its centre is, not even at its end?"

• Islands - The life of a woman born on an island of breadfruit and callaloo who moved to the UK to marry and have 3 kids, become a nurse. One grandson was interested in her island. He flew there, found gravestones and a few remaining relatives. So the story must have been selected for the style - there are many short (often one word) paragraphs, with empty lines between paragraphs. No.
• The Lowing - Only 3 pages. "It was only a short walk from the farmhouse to the barn" appears 6 times, for reasons that become clearer. Yes.
• The Statistics Revolution - Only 5 pages. A class of med students play a joke on their stats lecturer. No.
• The Incorruptable - 5 pages about the last days of Robespierre by the women who thought she was his de facto wife. No.
• Somewhere out there west of Thetford - A man living in a caravan park starts doing little favours for defiant, old Mrs Grote, a neighbour, a loner. Her unfriendly, rarely seen daughter's a barmaid in nearby Brandon. When Mrs Grote dies, he finds £1200 in a bag in her caravan. He throws it away. Atmospheric, with interesting characters but an unsatisfyingly predictable end.
• The Nights - Jean (lone sheep farmer), Claire (single mother) and Anna (secretly out with boyfriend) take turns at being PoV. Night in a rural setting. Lights, then bangs. At the end the omniscient narrator tells us about the hunter. We presume the corpses are animals.
• Elephant - 1st-person PoV is Coco, a servant. When Lord Dallows dies he leaves everything to his son, Edward, who's not been seen for years and who is now an elephant. The Lord's daughter Cynthia is a married nymphomaniac. Edward returns, and the house is adapted for him. A herd of elephants roams the grounds. The family make it into a money-earning Safari Park. Coco becomes his companion, rides on him, stays out at night with him. At the end he takes Coco to a ridge where his looks down at a thousand fires - his people. Yes.
• Chimera - 3 pages. "You" and "She" visit a basement bar. All life is there. Suddenly they return home where "your" parents are soon due back. The 2 characters are aspects of 1?
• The Clearance - A thoughtful estate agent is selling a house that relatives are emptying. Long, multi-claused sentences. “Some rain falls. The way it so evenly covers the patio is a wonder, a splendour even, he thinks, to an estate agent who has seen so many patios, so many wonders”. I liked it though it took some getting used to.
• The thinker - About 5 pages. A man takes over upkeep of a caged human when a friend dies. He breaks into the deceased man’s house and things get stranger. Yes.
• Middle ground - Brighton, 11, is a schoolgirl. She and friends use primroses for devination. Foregrounds are easy. Backgrounds are harder to comprehend. She walks with a boy. She sees what older girls are like. She begins to take chances. She’s not scared because it’s her choice. Feels like an extract.
• Still life - A man wakes. He’s another thinker. “I try to isolate this moment as a specific event, something with a clear beginning and end so it’s easier to understand, when really everything organised itself so gradually that I’m still only approaching the reality of how things were all these years later”. His partner stops paying the rent, but still uses the place like a girlfriend might, visiting while he's away. He empties the place, dispersing the contents around London.
• When we went gallivanting - Richie's in a tower block when it starts walking. A committee is set up to manage food and power. Big brash Athena Righteous-Fury continues giving swimming lessons (with benefits) in her bathroom. The tower block reaches the sea. She teaches Richie to swim in 15 mins. Yes.
• Qx - Less than 4 pages. A book-lover buys another old copy of a novel where chess pieces come alive. In a cafe he sees a woman beating a man at chess. She leads him out. A slip of paper with "Qx [something]" falls from the book. I know "Qx" means "Queen takes" but I don't get the ending, beyond the obvious.
• The Beard - Leading males in a Muslim state disappear from public view when they turn into women. Their beards drop off and collect in wind, ending up as a bundle in the square. A woman sets the bundle alight. I think more could have been made of the interesting idea/satire.
• The slime factory - It's the 2030s. London's flooded. Nesterov, a billionnaire thanks to exploiting the computing power of slime mould, disappears from view. The narrator's a journalist. His biotech girlfriend goes to work at Nesterov's secret lab. 7 years later she contacts him saying she's worried that a colleague, Thomas, has disappeared. The narrator finds that the colleague is being disappeared from the WWW. Nesterov suddenly re-appears, fat and bold, inviting people to a launch. The narrator goes. Nesterov's created in Gloucestershire a retro landscape of windmills and Morris dancers. He says that mankind took a wrong turn in the neolithic, turning against nature. He presents his idea of the future - an organic train. It has a face - the face of the lost colleague. A year later there's a new train with his ex-girlfriend's face.
• Bonsoir (after Ithell Colquhoun) - Less than 5 pages. I don't get it.
• Common Ground - I think Royle often likes Alison Moore's stories. I don't think this is one of her best.
• The Bull - Someone leaves a wake and walks where they walked with their father long ago - "How did I become this person and not another?" they ask themselves. They'd found a shed/container which they'd thought empty but when the father lifted the child up to see through the grill, there was a bull. We're dripfed with info. The person is female, Chloe. The father stopped work after a colleague died and left the family when Chloe was 13. He had anger issues. She feels she's always resembled him. She's become a men's barber. The last time she saw him he'd come in and asked for a mohawk. Only now are we told that "In his septum he wore the silver ring that he'd worn ever since I could remember" (ah, like a bull). She has "dark ink and fine white scars" on her arms, piercings in lip and eyebrows. She reaches the ruined shed and the story ends - "Tears pricked my eyes, as the hot stink of a huge animal swelled around me. Then, with the roar of great bellows, the darkness began to breathe"
• Tinhead - Nearly 30 pages long - easily the longest piece. Anecdotes and reflections. Rafi, recently moved to Manchester, not far from where he grew up, goes to buy boots for a walk when Darren, from his home village of Hayfield, sees him. Darren tells him about the village deaths and criminals. Rick Tinsley - Tinhead - leapt off a bridge and died. Rafi thought him an intellectual - in spirit anyway. He performed that social role at a village level. Thanks to Tinhead, Rafi had escaped the small-minded village. He thinks that what saved him from Tinhead's fate was that he grew up in a home with books. He'd offered Tinhead his "Nausea" novel which he'd refused. Rafi visits the suicide scene then drives on to Hayfield. His parents had moved there from Manchester. He chats to Tinhead's brother in a pub, fearing he might turn violent. We learn that Rafi had been to Oxford Uni to do a Ph.D but had to quit. Mental breakdown. Later, back home, he thinks he was never of the village - he "he had learned to live in a state of alienation from myself and others".

What you rarely get in these Royle anthologies are New Yorker stories (or Alice Munro stories) where people in normal enough situations deal with what life throws at them.

Other reviews

• Kim Wiltshire (There are clear themes that run through the collection: concerns about the world we live in, and where it is heading, alongside the loneliness of life for so many.)

"Best British Short Stories 2021" by Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2021)

In his introduction Royle mentions many magazines and many impressive-sounding stories that nearly got in. He notes that "Extra Teeth" magazine started in 2019. He writes that "The Lonely Crowd" celebrated "five years of excellent publishing" and "If the chapbook is the best way to publish a good short story ... the anthology is surely the next best thing". He's picked a few stories from themed anthologies.

He sets himself a difficult task, one whose outcome people are bound to disagree with. How can one compare the quality of pieces that are in such different styles? Some may be the best of their type but does that type merit inclusion?

Lots of sunless beaches and condensation. Covid?

• Rings (Tom Bromley) - Oh dear. Already a story whose inclusion surprises me
• Definitely Not (Yasmine Lever) - Neither the main character's belated, suprising admission that he had heard her say "No" nor the ending compensate for the rest, which seems fairly ordinary to me. Not worth 20 pages anyway
• The Reservoir (Meave Haughey) - A pregnant mother of a baby wonders about seeping liquids. A woman has died. Interesting enough, given its brevity
• Bindings (Simon Okotie) - No
• Leather (AJ Ashworth) - Self-consciously meta - e.g. "It is the kind of curdling light that comes before a rainstorm, the writer tells us ... We are impressed by the writer's cleverness - or, at least, we think we should be impressed - but part of us may also be annoyed at having been pulled out of what might have been an interesting fictional dream" - which is Ok by me, though I enjoyed the meta stuff more than the partly supernatural story.
• Backgammon (Uschi Gatward) - A tense dinner party for 3 ends with the guest being told to leave early. Didn't see much in it.
• Am / Thought / Always (Emma Bolland) - A first-person ghost who's good at linguistics notices how her changed concept of time/existence makes her language usage different to that of her ex. Liked it.
• What Never Was (Gary Budden) - A woman who was 7 when her mother died wonders if her father thinks of what might have been. When she's 33 a man she's recently dated dies in an accident. She thinks of what might have been. I like the quiet way it ends, the little things she thinks she'll miss - hence the early mention of ducks and reservoirs. Restrained grief.
• Maman (Mel Pryor) - The mother of Madeline gets a letter from her daughter saying she'll never forgive her. At the end we learn that Madeline had seen her boyfriend kissing the passive mother. Madeline at the end might be ready for peace talks. I like the style of the mother's thoughts - mites, museums, etc. My favourite piece so far.
• The Red Suitcase (Hilaire) - It's winter in a one-bus-per-week coastal village. A retired male lives with his mother who does B+B. A young woman who hasn't booked stays for the week, gets wet doing walks. In the night he leaves a cap outside her door, the cap he wore when he worked on the railway. Son and mother learn little about the visitor, who leaves wearing his cap. It's a gentle portrait of a man who should be sad, but doesn't seem to be. We learn no secrets about him or his past.
• From far around they saw us burn (Alice Jolly) - A write-up of an real orphanage fire in 1943. A cover-up - the Catholic nuns didn't behave well, partly, perhaps, because they didn't want girls seen in their nightdresses. The PoV is of a girl killed in the fire - a ghost. Reportage style.
• Wendigo (Julia Armfield) - Ah, this is more like it. Wow factor. Two non-humans (ancient? Man-eating monsters?) drift from town to town, learning language from the radio, exchanging urban myths. One of them is dying.
• Hide (Roberta Dewa) - Another good one - maybe more than good. Set partly in a bird hide. Short on punctuation, and the grammar breaks - "their house was oh so small like Jarvis said they orange browned it moving in with drippy tins of Dulux it seemed so new but still the spare room stayed spare and blue and condensation ran the walls like tears as if somebody was slow crying, slower quieter all the time ... I gather like a murmuration all dark specks in the sky washing left right they never touch but know as one the sun is after them they sink to roost a quarter mile before my black bike reaches them they huddle in the hedges like the specks of me blown off they click click chatter ... the loneliness it fells her all of it but only for a moment she lies face down writes on the beach beside her with a finger so neat and damp and tight the sand she writes ... she has looked outside in her afterlife through the orange curtains with a pulse still pulsing so wanting to be loved and if not fly then run the sun rise rising"
• The Nebula (John Foxx) - Starts ok, tacky/soppy at the end (which is quite a large chunk of this short piece). Another surprising inclusion
• Edit History (Jen Calleja) - Descriptions of some mobile islands off Europe. Ends with an update that the islands have disappeared, and "Thank you for your submission. This will now be checked by an administrator for approval within 6 to 12 weeks. Would you like to keep editing this history?"
• Our father the sea (Douglas Thompson) - A son recalls his father who regretted leaving the Royal Navy after WW2 and starting a family. "inconsistency, you only realise in later life, is a disastrous quality in a parent". He became a senior lecturer. The son imagines why his father became a misogynist - an affair with a young colleague perhaps, who broke it off to save his marriage. But he told his wife and never forgave his family. There are self-conscious allusions to the sea. Tone and subject matter reminds me of my "Matters of Life and Death" story (Postbox)
• Hair (Isha Karki) - Hair climbing as sex? Liked it.
• Loom (Matthew Turner) - The 1st person's a caretaker of unoccupied London mansions. With a security guard he inspects one owned by Olian - a mysterious person/collection. He's well versed in the theory of urban sprawl, concepts of "home", how a building's hidden spaces might affect minds. At the end (as I suspected) he turns out to be Olian. He recovers his hidden wealth. There are some longeurs. Good though, especially the hidden wealth idea. "follows suite" on p.180 is a typo?
• Going downhill (Josephine Galvin) - Lisa catches a bus through Manchester - rundown areas, Bingo Halls, Emporiums. She's a single mother who married Rick, a man 5 years younger than her when she was 38. Now she's 51. He sometimes teases her about her age/weight - "Rick had stopped finding her attractive; that was natural and expected and not a fault of his". The views through the window become increasingly symbolic - restorations, improvements. Her destination was one of the 2 I'd guessed - "She was a city girl, and the city was always changing, updating, remaining fresh". OK. A bit linear
• 99 customer journey horror (Iphgenia Baal) - No

"The Best British Short Stories 2020" by Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2020)

Apparently there were doubts about whether this series would continue, which is a shame. There's a wide spread of sources - Ambit, Litro. Ellipsis, The New Yorker, MsLexia, etc. My impression is that though Royle's sympathetic to many genres (including meta-fiction), he likes characterisation to remain foregrounded.

• "Energy Thieves: Five Dialogues" (Richard Lawrence Bennett) - the listener of these 5 monolgues becomes steadily less silent, the dialogues sometimes examples of the principles they express.
• "Beyond Criticism" (Luke Brown) - Claire, an intelligent, socially-savvy 38 year old, meets an old right-wing friend before meeting her ex for a meal. He's beginning to go with a under-30 Muslim Labour activist. She snaps, saying 'Exhaust yourself on porn, then you can redeem yourself with a member of the historically oppressed, someone who can prove your credentials, cast my apathy into the starkest light', and so does he. I like how the tone is managed, how they seem to shift subjects until they find something to argue about.
• "The Phone Call" (David Constantine)- An old couple bicker about the significance of being phoned by someone one of them met years before - "Don't look at me like that, Jack, she said. I'm not looking at you like that, he replied. I just don't know what you could find to talk about with a complete stranger for so long. Perhaps you've been on his mind for twenty years. Perhaps he's been writing you poems for twenty years. I very much doubt it, she answered, beginning to feel tired". It's a situation similar to those that Constantine's written about before. This time the behaviour of the caller (who's soon to die) is questioned.
• "Maxine" (Tim Etchells) - "In the year of Asbestos, country of England (sic), Maxime gets a job to read words to a blind man called Casper, what lives alone outside the peripheral ring-road, in a district beyond all forces of yuppification". Maxine reads for people in a lawless alt-future. It's rather brilliant in parts, and I like it overall.
• "Halloween" (Nicola Freeman) - the narrator's husband is dying. Too subtle for me.
• "In the mountains" (Amanthi Harris) - I wasn't convinced at first, though I was moreso by the end. Efficient.
• "The girl with the horizontal walk" (Andrew Hook) - Ellen and Nick are a couple. Ellen's an actress. Her role (as Marilyn Monroe blackmailing president Kennedy) is confused with her own life. Roles/plots get confused too. Not convinced.
• "Belly" (Sonia Hope) - about a page long. I'm puzzled by its inclusion.
• "She said he said" (Hanif Kureishi) - Reported speech. Mateo (an artist) asks Sushila to sleep with him. She's known him 18 years and says no. She tells her husband Len who works with Mateo. Len talks to Mateo and Mateo's long-suffering and ill ex, Marcie. Len learns that Mateo's explicitly propositioned many women and feels it's his duty to warn people. Mateo thinks this is unfair. Len's known to be excessively inhibited. I don't get it. It was in The New Yorker.
• "Weaning" (Helen Mort) - anxious about weening her child, and about forgetting place-names, a woman looks in the mirror - "Her body was Sheffield. She would have to learn it again". The ending is successfully lyrical. She takes a riverside walk - "There were shopping trolleys and tyres, lengths of orange rope. Life was everywhere around them, endless and derelict and broken. It did not matter, she thought, what any of this was called. It was all pure river."
• "The further dark" (Jeff Noon and Bridget Penny) - e-mail issues rather than sunsets, but in the end just another mood piece.
• "Nudibranch" (Irenosen Okojie) - A shape changer meets various men with various reasons for not having had sex. "Her third hand drops soft-bodied, lightning coloured seeds in the space between their heartbeats"
• "Backbone" (KJ Orr) - a women goes into hospital for a backbone op (to get one?). Verging on surreal.
• "Whale Watching" (Diana Powell) - a woman recalls as a child seeing a whale with a man tied to its side, and a film-crew. Old and confused she mixes up Moby Dick and memories. I like it.
• "Greetings from the far man in postcards" (David Rose) - a man tells about his (imagined?) wives. I like it.
• "Safely gathered in" (Sarah Schofield) - lists of contents of self-storage units interleaved with text that starts sounding like ads then becomes more lyrical, dealing with my people preserve memories. A fire breaks out. We go back through the units seeing what the fire does. At the end the owners come and look. Their children "will pester their parents for erasers and pencils and snow globes decorated with the SelfStore4U logo". I like it.
• "Dreams are Contagious" (Adrian Slatcher) - the kind of story I'd like to write: a man who interprets dreams meets a woman writing an app to to the same thing. Jehovah's witnesses. Crypocurrencies.
• "The white cat" (NJ Stallard) - I think I must have missed the point of this.
• "Purity" (Robert Stone) - On an Orkney island Edward is continuing an old experiment with Orang-utans. They roam wild, though a few are domesticated. He thinks that they copy the humans. His wife Marcia is pregnant, though he's unlikely to be the father because of his sterility. She's the only woman on the island. Jack and his slow son Denny help out. It's a little like "The Birds". Edward's worried about the male apes. At the end they may have killed Denny. He has feelings for an old female. The story didn't quite fulfill its promise.
• "The same but different" (Stephen Thompson) - a rather long Granta-style travel piece, with some plot though nothing exceptional.
• "Vashti" (Zakia Uddin) - a dancing teacher is interested in one of her young pupils' father. Good at the end, rather slow until then.

"The Best British Short Stories 2019" by Nicholas Royle (ed), (Salt, 2019)

Many sources - only Ambit, Brittle Star and Mechanics Institute Review supplying more than one story. One of the authors died in 1973. Most of them have already published books. As usual in his introduction the editor, Nicholas Royle, overviews the state of play. He begins with "If I had a pound for every time over the last year someone has remarked to me that the short story is enjoying a notable renaissance, I'd have enough money to submit numerous stories to Ambit and the Fiction Desk."

• "Smack" (Julia Armfield) - Nicola's in a house by the sea. She's never had a job. She married someone rich. The electricity's off and the furniture's dust-sheeted because Daniel, her husband, is emptying the place. He's getting a divorce, though she can't get her ring off. She's running out of food. We discover that she's stolen her sister's car to get there, that she's squatting, that there are plans to evict her. Without leaving the house she watches people's responses to the many stranded jellyfish. She dreams she's a jellyfish. At the end she's abandoned the house, taking with her a few symbolic purchases from QVC - Russian dolls painted to resemble Muppets, an egg-timer containing sand, a coin counter. It's 10pm. She plans to lie on the sand as the next tide of jellyfish come in. Out of the water it takes up to 50 minutes for them to die.
• "Kiss" (Elizabeth Baines) - A young couple kiss on their way out of a tube station. A bomber's in his way in. We flashback a few minutes, a few hours, then have potted stories of their lives (father-molested, anorexic, suicidal girl; racially abused, single-mothered boy; a bomber who parents wanted him to do well at school). Then we return to the present - will the bomb go off?
• "Cluster" (Naomi Booth) - a new mother, her sleep disrupted, becomes attuned to the things of the night and early morning - birds, neighbours, people walking home from the pub. She's passive until she sees a man begin to be physical to his partner. She calls the police (who say that others have called) and goes into the street to tail them. But they've gone.
• "On day 21" (Ruby Cowling) - the narrator's the mother of C, D, and E (the youngest, a female). They have on/off switches. After 19 days of rain, she switches them all off together for the first time. She uses her laptop and phone for a while until her husband B(en) is due home. On day 20, outside a supermarket, she tries switching the kids off but the switches don't work. "I looked around the car park, hoping perhaps to see another person in the same situation. The car park was tidily kept, with good space for each unit of car to sit quietly to itself, sure of its locked doors". When her husband comes home that evening he realises the severity of the situation, leaves C and D with his parents. In the night she tries to kill him. It's stopped raining. They drive to a reservoir where they camped before they have kids. They hug. She can cope with E(vie) crying in the back seat.
• "Sitcom" (Kieran Devaney) - An idea for a sitcom is described. A killer given a 250 year sentence survives to be released. The sitcom idea ends on the day of his release, a van being driven past crowds of protesters, cultists and reporters.
• "On the way to the church" (Vicky Grut) - Sarah (43) and John (50), married for 15 years, have recently had a child. "Some days she felt that 'accident' was the most accurate description of what had happened to them and that everything she'd ever known and valued had been consumed in the wreckage". She's given up her job and John's become undependable. John's driven them for 5 hours through bad weather to his mother in his childhood Welsh town for the christening. On the walk to the church John tells her that he has a brain tumour. I can't see anything especially noteworthy about this story. It was in the Harvard Review though.
• "Beyond dead" (Nigel Humphreys) - The narrator exists in a dark void like Beckett's The Unnameable but using commonplace language and thought. Maybe a Locked-in syndrome patient? Limbo awaiting rebirth? Mention of "Lucille Desmoulins" may be a key allusion, but by then it's too late for me - I've lost interest.
• "The arrangement" (Sally Jubb) - Erin (38, childless, a New Yorker) is with Matthew. He's beginning to collect animals so a taxidermist can stuff them for him. He runs over a vixen - "He squatted beside it, letting his palm rest on its side, feeling it breathe. When the breathing stopped he lifted his hand.". At the end, after sex, she imagines feathers, the smell of recent road-kill, the arrangement of limbs. "She listened to the rhythmic pounding of his heart, lifted her fingers lightly from his chest, and, inching herself away, lay there, incredibly still."
• "Badgerface" (Lucie McKnight Hardy) - The narrator's father's a rough soldier who's away often. The narrator discovers that their 16 y.o. younger brother is gay. Then, melodramatically, the story ends by the brother dying (an accident?) and the father showing some feeling after all.
• "New dawn fades" (Sophie Mackintosh) - 2nd person. Lucy searches an online map using postcodes and names, especially when drunk at night. She has flashbacks of happier moments. Her laptop doesn't seem to stay switched off. She's so obsessed she loses her job and boy friend. She finds a place she wants to go. I liked it.
• "A gift of tongues" (Paul McQuade) - An English women get a job in Berlin. Her boyfriend gives her a tongue to transplant, to help with the language. People think she's from Hamburg. He breaks up with her when he realises that her fluency has made her a different person. She returns to the clinic but can't have her old tongue back. My guess was that her boyfriend would have it transplanted in. She buys the tongue back, but doesn't think she'll see her boyfriend again. She learns that her experience is common. I don't understand the purpose of the key gift, or of the interest in hand-sizes.
• "Reality" (John Lancaster) - Iona wakes thinking she's in the villa of a reality show, calculating the effect of her actions on the audience. One by one others appear. She knew that "you flatter the clever ones for being pretty and the pretty ones for being clever", that "It was vital to think about the viewers all the time. It was also vital not to seem to be thinking about them." "She had a theory ... that this was a new kind of show, one where there was no interaction with the producers or the viewers, no games or tasks or challenges or external organisation, no structure. They wouldn't be told what to do." Though she tries hard to forge appropriate alliances, she fears at the end that the others were all laughing at her. I thought it was going to be "The Truman Show". It's almost the opposite of that. I grew to like it.
• "A hair clasp" (Vesna Main) - Hardly more than a page. A neat ending after too slow a beginning.
• "Curtilage" (Robert Mason) - a man's shown around a house that's for sale. He's cynically observant. We learn that he's carrying a knife. He pick-pockets and sneakily vandalises. The senile wife thinks she recognises him. In fact, he's a stranger who does this for fun. I like it.
• "Nude and seascape" (Ann Quin) - The narrator treats a female corpse on the beach like a still-life prop. Over 24 hours he tries to find a good setting for it, deciding that the body spoils the head. Having cut the head off he hears voices and walks into the sea. Interesting.
• "Cuts" (Stephen Sharp) - the psychotic narrator riffs on the themes of living with his brother, Alastair Campbell, labour MPs, sex, hearing voices, etc. Here's a sample - I did not have any kids. I used to think it didn't matter because I had an immortal soul. But now I wished I had reproduced my genes. Left something behind. Susan Hill left her husband for a woman. Big diesel cars pouring out poison that killed people like me who walked. It was Gordon Brown's fault for encouraging people to stop using petrol. The drivers didn't deserve to live. I wanted to kick a couple of teenagers in the head. They were laughing at me. Sick laughter. Teenagers think about sex 600 times an hour.
• "The heights of sleep" (Sam Thompson) - At 17 the narrator started reading the books of Gaunt. At 32 he meets him for an interview. By then he's written a novel and has a family. We learn much about Gaunt's style. The story interested me at the start, stalled, then puzzled me at the end. Perhaps after Gaunt's death the narrator's life drifted, and he's in danger of becoming detached from his family.
• "The husband and the wife go to the seaside" (Melissa Wan) - A couple spend a weekend in a rented cottage, spending rather independent holidays. Neither minds mind what the other does. The wife (the story's from her PoV) seems less stable than the husband, who controls her more than she controls him. His disappearance for a night without explanation (perhaps he'd pre-warned her and she misunderstood?) or subsequent excuse lacks realism. The female character could have murdered the male construct afterwards - I wouldn't have been surprised. We're not told all that happens to the woman - there are convenient omissions, ones that spare the author having to offer psychological justifications or background - a narrative cop-out?
• "Optics" (Ren Watson) - A mother starts seeing holes in her 3 year old daughter, holes that glow or can be seen through. Her husband laughs it off. She goes to the doctor. She looks in the mirror and she's half disappeared. Doesn't quite work.
• "Toxic" (Adam Welch) - two young men try a perhaps fake drug. I don't get it.

Common themes - seasides; babies causing maternal mental problem or marital issues; altered states.

Typos - p.22 "anyone can write a first a novel"; p.43 I think "I left" shouldn't be italicised; p.98 "cut herself loose and oat to safety"?

''The Best British Short Stories 2018", Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2018)

As ever, an informative and interesting introduction by Nicholas Royle. He's unearthed a few new sources of stories. I'm curious to know if he reads Stand, Forge, and the TSS publications. The biggest hit this year is "The Lonely Crowd" with 4 stories.

Commenting on an anthology that's unthemed isn't easy. It's tempting to point out pieces whose selection is puzzling, so I'll do that first. "Paymon's Trio" seems an old-fashioned spooky story. It may be good of its type, but is it really one of the best 20 stories of the year? "The Homing Instinct" doesn't stand out, and the ending's, well, risky at best. "Cwth" is a workmanlike treatment of a standard plot. "Sister" doesn't get anywhere. In "Waiting for the runners" an abandoned wife meets Julie, her successor, who was also abandoned by Danny. She's lost her looks. Their two sons are school-friends. Julie's little daughter has Danny's hair, and looks a little like Annie. Annie, the daughter of the narrator and Danny, died at 11, which seemed to have sparked Danny's departure. Maybe the daughter's resemblance to Annie sparked Danny's second departure. The meeting does the narrator good. Anyway, it seemed a fairly standard piece. "Swatch" isn't standard plot-wise, but it doesn't have enough. I can't see Lisa Tuttle's story ever being in the US equivalent of this anthology. One problem with it is that the 2-page story-within-a-story is repetitive. That's quite a high proportion of stories to have doubts about.

Another bunch of stories are saved by the final page or two, which justifies the rest. Until then the stories seemed well written but nothing more. I'm still unsure if they need to be quite as long as they are, and in at least one case I predicted the ending. As a whole I liked them though. An example is "A Thunderstorm in Santa Monica". And there were a few stories that began well but didn't continue quite as well - e.g. "How to be an alcoholic".

My favourite piece is maybe M. John Harrison's, or "We are methodists" (a woman gets into conversation over the course of 4 days with a plumber - ex commando). I was also impressed by "Life Grabs" (a father tries to piece together on video his missing son's life), "And three things bumped" (a man meets a taxi driver at intervals of years. Each time the driver recounts his life story. The stories don't match) and "The War" (Wars personified).

The editor doesn't seem to like consciously literary pieces. He likes rounded characters, but not complex domestic "Iowa workshop" dramas where nothing much happens. And for this anthology he's picked stories where a main character's often been affected by a death (of a child, quite often). He can only chose amongst what there is (and what doesn't cost too much to reprint). I didn't like this BBSS anthology as much as the others I've read - several good stories but no Wow stories - no stories that make me want to buy the book they come from.

Other reviews

• Tamim Sadikali

"Best British Short Stories 2017" by Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2017)

20 stories in all, 6 from themed/competition anthologies and 8 from magazines. Copyright restrictions rather than quality may have prevented the reprinting of stories from collections by the likes of Penelope Fitzgerald. There are stories from "Bare Fiction Magazine", "Structo", "Prole" (all of which I've submitted to in vain), BBC Radio 4 (twice), etc. He says that he saw "Prole" for the first time this year, though it's been going for at least 20 issues. Some venerable outlets are missing - "Stand", "Ambit" - and also specialist outlets like "The Short Story", "London Journal of Fiction" and "Short Fiction" aren't represented. "Ariel" (3.5 pages) is the only piece that could be Flash. James Kelman's the biggest name. To my shame, most of the other authors are unknown to me though they all have a track record.

In his Introduction Nicholas Royle writes "2016 was a good year for the short story", "our best short story writers are not short of outlets for their work" and "we could conceivably double the size of Best British Short Stories without any drop in quality", which is good news.

One can't criticize the quality of the writing, though I think there are stylistic trends -

• There are no slightly world-weary, wrought essay-like pieces a la Julian Barnes. I think it's rather difficult nowadays to have a narrator who's a philosopher or an analyst. It's easier for a less academic character to sound "authentic".
• In the guidelines to "Neon", the magazine he edits, Krishan Coupland (who's in this anthology) says "We prefer darker pieces, especially those with an element of the surreal or speculative". Such pieces are pretty common here.

Here's a brief sumary -

• Jay Barnett - A little team of people is checking animal traps as part of a project. Small talk, bickering and awkwardness.
• Peter Bradshaw - a punchline story which almost works for me.
• Rosalind Brown - the story of 2 twitchers having an on/off affair is spliced with bird-watching details that act as metaphors. One of my favourites.
• Krishan Coupland - A schoolgirl who's an avid swimmer starts turning into a fish, and ends by looking as if she's going to swim out to sea.
• Claire Dean - A newcomer becomes involved in strange rural events.
• Niven Govinden - A deathbed scene from the dying person's PoV.
• Françoise Harvey - children die in a village, mysteriously.
• Andrew Michael Hurley - a genre-bending piece. Newcomers are involved in strange rural rituals.
• Daisy Johnson - A dead husband returns, damages with words and actions.
• James Kelman - An aging guy reviews his life. Doesn't work for me.
• Giselle Leeb - A youth (a loner?) watches another younger, more popular youth, then seems to throw himself in a river.
• Courttia Newland - A police shooting. The words of the sentences are in the conventional order, but the order of the sentences has been reversed.
• Vesna Main - The narrator is taken advantage of by husband and friends. She can't take legal action later because her passivity is interpretable as consent. This piece did little for me.
• Eliot North - Another village-based story with hints of macabre fantasy. A boy's approaching puberty.
• Irenosen Okojie - The piece I had the most trouble with. All that imagination come to nothing.
• Laura Pocock - a model village has spooky predictive power. "The Miniaturist"?
• David Rose - The piece I was most disappointed by, perhaps because I had such high expectations.
• Deirdre Shanahan - Gypsy life. Stealing, young pregnancies, deciding whether to leave the lifestyle.
• Sophie Wellstood - Spreading ashes. Not enough happens for me.
• Lara Williams - A woman feels that life is slipping by. Seemed a rather standard piece to me.

Other reviews

• Charles E May
• Charles E May
• Charles E May
• Charles E May
• bookmunch (For the seasoned short story reader, the collection can serve as a ‘state of the nation’ snapshot. Though it’s not obvious, and it is certainly not planned, common themes can be divined. Loss and loneliness: an almost tangible entropic sense runs through several of these selected works ... Lara Williams’ ‘Treats‘, a story of a woman whose life has rather un-dramatically folded, is pretty much short story perfection ... In Kelman’s story, my personal favourite, a whole world can be divined from a single paragraph; such is the power in his writing.)
• Nicole Mansour (it is loneliness and isolation that unambiguously permeate many of the stories here ... one of the highlights of the anthology was Rosalind Brown’s ‘General Impressions of Size and Shape’.)

''The Best British Short Stories 2016", Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt 2016)

Royle's introduction shows that the net's been cast wide, though maybe he was sent stuff as much as he hunted it down. Some familiar authors are here (Alex Preston, David Gaffney, Graham Mort, Stuart Evers, Janice Galloway, etc) and a few magazines/publishers I've heard of (Picador, Confingo, Brittle Star, Lighthouse, Seren, Ambit) but many of the outlets are new to me ("The Ofi Press Magazine", "HOME Publications", "Anglo Files", "Flight Press") and many established magazines and writers don't appear.

Cutting to the chase -

• Claire-Louise Bennett - Too long for what it is
• Neil Campbell - No
• Crista Ermiya - No, except for the final page
• Stuart Evers - Yes. I've not read it before, though I've explored similar themes.
• Trevor Fevin - No
• David Gaffney - Yes
• Janice Galloway - Yes. Big issues dealt with successfully
• Jessie Greengrass - No
• Kate Hendry - Maybe, but it's not enough. I can't see it being in the US equivalent anthology
• Thomas McMullan - Yes. Perhaps my favourite
• Graham Mort - Yes
• Ian Parkinson - Yes. Features a character called Nicholas Boyle
• Tony Peake - Definitely no
• Alex Preston - No. I thought from the start that the might be ghosts, which even if wrong took some of the fun away
• Leone Ross - No
• John Saul - Yes
• Colette Sensier - Maybe. I think I've seen the old people and MMORPGs combination before
• Robert Sheppard - No
• DJ Taylor - No
• Greg Thorpe - Maybe
• Mark Valentine - No

Other reviews

• Charles May (part 1)
• Charles May (part 2)
• Charles May (part 3)
• Charles May (part 4)

"The Best British Short Stories 2015" by Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2015)

Stories from a wide range of magazines, only "Unthology" and "Lighthouse" being sourced twice. Big-named publications are The Guardian and New Statesman. Big-named authors include Hilary Mantel, Helen Simpson, and Alison Moore.

"Lucky" is interesting , slipping from teenage reality to near fable. I liked the idea of where the men are in "The Iron Men", but the rest of the piece was too ordinary. In "Festschrift" the narrator imagines talking to an ex-lover (which doesn't appeal to me). Sometimes it's verbose - "What modulation of emotion was I supposed to apply to the words I had written for myself to speak; words that were, after all, not just to him and about him, but of him, from him, using him and his ideas" (p.56). Sometimes it's puzzling - "I crossed the room, ... cutting across the aesthetic logic of the tiles as surely as if I were chopping the hands from the statues of saints" (p.56). Sometimes it's more striking - "He wasn't a bad dancer, he had a very limited repertoire of moves, but was always moving, slightly, ponderously, rather as if wanting to give the impression that at any moment he was about to start really dancing. She, on the other hand, was a bad dancer, but was making up for this with a familiar repertoire of affectations that somehow took the place of dancing; placing herself provocatively close to him, shaking her hair, throwing back her head to laugh" (p.59).

I didn't get "Five Thousand lads a year". In "Lightbox" (6 pages) a man's relationship with a woman seems to consist in being where she is, watching her silently, following her online, and knowing where she is all day. Turns out he's a voyeur.

"Green Boots' Cave" is short, and has sufficient tricks per page to be appealing. I've seen "The Clinic" before. Ends too soon, too openly. "May the Bell Be Rung For Harriet" has a half-page of magic realism in otherwise average prose. "Strong Man" is by Helen Simpson. I used think her and AL Kennedy equally promising. I think Simpson's well behind now. In her story there are hints of family violence, spouse-rivalry and an impending affair, none of which lead to anything. Interesting enough.

"Voice Over" seemed a bit light at first, but ok in the end. In "The Lake Shore Limited" there's a long train ride during which the narrator recounts his past. In "The First Day" (4 pages) we're led to think that a mother's taking a child to her first day at school (see "Lightbox"). "Go Wild in the Country" features the anthology's second writer in residence. This one has relationship problems and tries magic mushrooms (writers, drugs and relationship problems are 3 subjects to avoid, according to a DON'Ts list I've recently read). "Secondhand Magic" is long and about witches, and yet I grew to like it - "It is an easy thing to take a handful of snow and fashion it into a boy, easier than most anyone would believe. Snow longs to be something else. Bread does not wish to be flesh, water does not wish to be wine, stones do not wis to bleed - but snow, snow wishes always to be the thing that is not" (p.174).

I was puzzled by the final sentence of "Fresh Water". "The common people" is well written, but doesn't add up to much. "Eastmouth" is a typical Alison Moore story. "The Tourists" is the 2nd story in the book by Julianne Pachino. I like the way she writes. "Worlds From the Word's End" is about how language went out of fashion - first nouns, then grammar - "What did we do with the space in our minds that had constantly processed what we read? Well ... I guess we processed other things, but what they were, we could no longer say" (p.235).

There are several unlikeable narrators. There's uncertainty about the nature of the narrator or a main character. Sometimes the mood and tone are the key features.

Other reviews

• Nicholas Lezard (It would appear that – going by this collection and scrutinising the author biographies – your chances of appearing in Best British Stories 2016 will be given a boost by (1) being a woman, (2) having a connection with the north west ..., and (3) writing your story in the present tense. ... Also, (4): be a bit weird, or uncanny)

"The Best British Short Stories 2014" by Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2014)

Royle's introduction is, as usual, informative and opinionated, though he doesn't point out that only 2 of the stories (if that) are from single-author collections. Stories are from 4 to 39 pages long. There's quite a lot of watching people from windows. A few of the stories start in Realism but end elsewhere. There's only a story or two whose presence surprised me. In my comments here I'll stick mostly to judgements. As ever, saying I don't like something doesn't necessarily mean I think it's bad.

• Elizabeth Baines - Like narrating, memory is creative; it involves choice, and is shaped by narrative expectations. (Yes)
• David Constantine - (Yes)
• Ailsa Cox - Well written. The sort of thing I expected to like, but it didn't grab me (Pass)
• Claire Dean - Another story that begins in gritty realism then slides into something like magic realism (or full-blown fantasy) that can't be mistaken for an altered mind-state (Yes)
• Stuart Evers - A sort of "Waiting for Groundhog", until the final shift (not sure, but in the end Yes)
• Jonathan Gibbs - About books, writing tutors and sex. (Yes)
• Jay Griffiths - WW2. Bombs in spiral staircase = conception and DNA. (No)
• David Grubb - (Yes)
• M John Harrison - I liked the style. I had to overcome my allergy to dreams. (Yes)
• Vicki Jarrett - (No).
• Richard Knight - A husband's on a country walk while his wife's awaiting medical test results. He sees a dead body. His wife phones to say "it's ok". He doesn't want to tell her (or anyone) about the body. He'd rather go to Morrison's with her. Death can wait. (not sure, but in the end Yes)
• Philip Langeskov - The longest story - 39 pages - allowing detours like "They felt, or at least Daniel felt, an immediate familiarity in that atmosphere". The story's momentum is maintained by false alarms - in the end no holidays are called off, nobody's seriously ill, nobody disappears and there are no traffic accidents (Pass)
• Siân Melangell Dafydd - Had my doubts about this until it slid into another genre at the end. (Yes).
• Anna Metcalfe - Set in China. I think I've read it before (Pass).
• Louise Palfreyman - Loner voyeurism leading to magic realism (I think it's a Yes)
• Christopher Priest - Good as a genre piece. I'd more or less anticipated the ending though. Also I didn't believe that she could think she was being singled out for observation, or that she could be quite so vague about the money that initially she was "determined never to spend" (No)
• Joanne Rush - It starts in familiar Cambridge compsci haunts. 2 students marry, move away. The husband leaves for Bosnia. The woman's alone. "When I got back, there was a diminutive old lady in a headscarf standing in my kitchen ... Her smile was animated, but she was clearly dead". She's the first of many Bosnian ghosts (Pass)
• Mick Scully - Well written. Set in a care/dementia care home (No)
• Joanna Walsh - A post-trauma, distracted woman. "You had cut but you had not pasted" (No)
• Adam Wilmington - Well written. A couple have trouble getting rid of a mysterious "it" (No)

Other reviews

• Charles E. May
• Katie Lumsden
• Sarah-Clare Conlon (Manchester Review)([Claire Dean's] ‘Glass, Bricks, Dust’, a beautifully written fairy tale with an uncanny leaning (something to which Royle is a self-confessed addict) … There is a lot of weird stuff in these twenty tales. But there is also humour, warmth, hope, compassion.)
• Bare fiction (My favourite piece in this collection is David Grubb’s Roof Space)

"The Best British Short Stories 2013" edited by Nicholas Royle (Salt, 2013)

Unless you buy many short story books and literary magazines, this book's invaluable. I've read the Adam Marek and Guy Ware book from which their stories came (I would have chosen Ware's "All Downhill from Here"). That still leaves 18 pieces new to me. The introduction's worth a read -

• Though he's warming to Flash (he's included a 1-page piece), Royle writes that "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" (p.xi)
• "Prospect magazine stopped publishing original stories in its fiction slot, opting for stories extracted from forthcoming collections instead" (p.xiv)
• "Then the current editor, Steven O'Brien, took over [London Magazine]. ... There was invariably room for one or more of editor O'Brien's poems ... I've not been able to keep up with the magazine's short stories, including, last year, two by Steven O'Brien." (p.xv)

Here are some rough summaries and opinions.

• Moore - Daughter visits father having just left husband
• Sharp - The lonely writer (becomes meta-story)
• Marek - Father/son bonding
• Kay - Character study of an older woman. Weak
• Raisin - Gay footballer. I liked it
• Del-Rivo - Male intellectual loner. Weak
• Preston - Desert warfare
• Lively - Dictators on a cruise. Time-loop
• Lambert - Childless couple. She snaps.
• Mackintosh - A student's slide into madness
• Shearman - Separated couple (husband leaves). Ghost story.
• Shukla - Male, alone, children grown. No
• Wall - Old couple. Male going senile. Daughter visits. No
• Killham - Wife as hyena
• Boyle - Couples and affairs
• Glaister - Old couple. Male ill. Wife recalls his affairs, thinks about daughter. I liked the use of the "Just Watch me" title.
• Ware - Wife leaves husband and kids
• Hyland - Father visits son just after wife has left son (though the father doesn't know that). Son thinks about his father's separation
• Claire - Grim fairy tale
• Rose - A record producer marries a violinist. As she grows ill, he covers her performing inadequacies by using other people's recordings.

Common themes are -

• Middle aged parents having affairs, breaking up, and/or being visited by their grown children. Along with ill, old couples that accounts for at least half the stories!
• Animals acting as familiars or substitutes - in Lambert's piece a post-abortion wife is given a puppy by her husband; in Killham's, the wife is a hyena; in Boyle's, discussion about a cat (should it be put down?) is recognised as referring to a marriage.
• At the climax, irrevocable action replaces words. Something snaps (Preston, Lambert).

Boyle's "Budapest" includes some common tricks that I remain unsure about - late identification in a paragraph of who "he" or "she" is, and uncertainty whether things are said or just thought. On p.114 there's 'He has wonderful eyes,' she says. yet on p.115 there's OK, the boy says. What's happened to the quotemarks? The story has one of the longest change-of-subject endings I've seen. It could be tagged onto the end of many a story -

OK, the boy says [of a spider], but how does it know it's grown up, why doesn't it just keep on growing more legs? Sometimes in old films the camera pulls back from the intimate - the kiss, the fight, the horses being saddled - to show the backdrop panorama: the cityscape, its domes and spires and palaces, the snow-capped mountains. How beautiful, you think. And then just as you begin to suspect that it's not for real, that it's a painted backdrop, the cut to the next scene. The budget was tight, you can understand this, it wouldn't stretch to the whole crew staying for months in a luxury scenic location. You can forgive, if there's anything to be forgiven, which there isn't. But not too tight for a painter to paint that landscape, with all the hours of research and the patience of each brushstroke, even though it will be on screen for barely more than a second.

My suggested replacement for the pieces by Kay, Del-Rivo, Shukla and Wall is "What I've seen" by Dragan Todorovic.

Other reviews

• Alex Ruczaj (Thresholds)
• Susan Haigh (the Short Review)
• Charles May

"The Best British Short Stories 2012" edited by Nicholas Royle (Salt, 2012)

My favourite story was Jon McGregor's. Close behind were pieces by Jo Lloyd, Winterson, MacLeod, and Robert Shearman. Several others were good reads too, in different ways - Tinker, Powell, Gough, Lane, Michael Marshall Smith. The only piece whose inclusion I didn't understand (every anthology needs one, though readers disagree over which one it is) was Adams'.

Ramsey Campbell was a name from the past. He built up a mood by using many comparisons to sad childhood memories and spooky things - p.136 has "put him in mind of" twice and "not unlike" once as an attempt not to over-use "like" or "seemed to".

Other Reviews

• Dan Powell

"The Best British Short Stories 2011", Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2011)

The breakdown of sources is: books (5), non-UK mags (3), newspapers (3), Warwick Review (3), London Magazine (1), Ambit (1), Wasafiri (1), Riptide (1), New Welsh Review (1), online competition anthology (1)

There's nothing under 5 pages long. The selection begins rather tamely but soon develops width and depth with some soft-SF, meta-fiction (In Heather Leach's "So much time in a life" the number of characters is in flux until at the end there are none), a ghost story, a story with pages of foot-notes, tales of broken families, etc. Michèle Roberts' piece is the most consciously poetic. Alas, I've never taken to her style. I'll briefly focus on 2 pieces that use animals as a kind of Symbol or alter-ego

• SJ Butler's "The Swimmer" uses a swan as Symbol. The narrator's "quite unready for the swan" when she first sees it - her gasp of pleasure at its beauty alerts it to the strange sight of a swimmer in its river". But it's dangerous too. In her "sweltering tiny office ... she cannot stop thinking about the swan". Then one evening she can swim close enough to it to touch it. She realises it's trapped in fishing lines. She releases it. It drifts away. "And at the next bend she cannot tell it from the mist rising from the water."
• In John Burnside's "Slut's Hair" a woman's trapped in an unhappy marriage with a drinker. They're short of money. Her husband gets his toolbox out to extract her bad tooth, encouraging her to gulp some spirits down first to dull the pain. After, she sees something in the kitchen, "something vague and unfinished, like a scribble in blue ink amongst the wet shadows - something impossible". A cat maybe, or a fox. No, it's a mouse. "She needed to save it - she didn't know why but she had to". She tries to pick it up near the tumble-dryer, but she came up "with nothing more than a fistful of dust and - what was that stuff you found in dark corners where nobody had cleaned? What was it called? Slut's hair. Yes; that was it. That was what her mother had always called it". Then her husband returns.

Other reviews

• Mario Guslandi (The Short Review)
• bookmunch
• goodreads