Best British Short Stories 2020

Creek didn’t appear to have an editor credited, but it was a new venture from Storgy Books, in which the stories, by Tom Heaton, Daniel Carpenter, Aliya Whiteley, David Hartley and others, had to be set in the fictitious eponymous town.
Port, edited by MW Bewick and Ella Johnston, is a fascinating and cherishable addition to the editors’ own Wivenhoe-based Dunlin Press catalogue. It features, poets, place writers and short story writers responding to the theme suggested by the title. My favourite piece was Sarah-Clare Conlon’s ‘The General Synopsis at Midday’, about sailing to the Isle of Man. There were more boats, buoys and pontoons in Conlon’s ‘Warning Signs’, in a flash fiction special issue of the ever-wonderful Lighthouse journal from Gatehouse Press. At the darker end of the spectrum, Black Static, from TTA Press, continues to disturb and unsettle. My thanks to editor Andy Cox and some of his contributors during 2019, including Stephen Volk, Tim Lees, Steven Sheil and David Martin, for continuing to shine their flickering torches into the darkness of the worlds both around and within us.
Cōnfingō Magazine is super-reliable. Last year’s two issues included stories by David Rose, Stephen Hargadon, Justine Bothwick, Elizabeth Baines, Tom Jenks and Vesna Main. I especially liked David Rose’s ‘Smoke’, but not quite as much as his ‘Greetings From the Fat Man in Postcards’ online at Litro. Highlight of Structo’s 2019, for me, was David Frankel’s story, ‘Shooting Season’, in issue 19. The regular arrival of Ambit remains a cause for celebration and the fact I selected only one story from their four issues last year – Richard Lawrence Bennett’s ‘Energy Thieves: 5 Dialogues’ from issue 235 – is a reflection of how many good new stories are being published in magazines, anthologies and collections, and online.
I very much enjoyed four debut collections: Jane Fraser’s The South Westerlies (Salt), Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Manchester Happened (Oneworld), Nick Holdstock’s The False River (Unthanks Books) and The Map of Bihar and Other Stories (Circaidy Gregory Press) by Janet H Swinney, whose ‘Washing Machine Wars’ is a wryly observed tale of politely warring Turkish and Indian neighbours in suburban England and their years-long bouts of competitive cooking, gardening and household appliance acquisition. ‘“I don’t know why they’re called white people,” said Aslan, one of Mrs Çelik’s older boys, “because they’re grey.”’
From Valley Press came a science fiction anthology, the winner of last year’s longest title award: Science Fiction For Survival: An Archive For Mars, Terra Two Anthology: Volume One edited by Liesl King and Robert Edgar. Terra Two, it turns out, is an online magazine hosted by York St John University. Down the A19 and right a bit, Catherine Taylor edited The Book of Sheffield for Comma Press’s ongoing ‘A City in Short Fiction’ series. At least, I hope it’s ongoing. There wasn’t a bad story in this anthology. Leaving aside Philip Hensher’s ‘Visiting the Radicals’, a novel extract, stories by Margaret Drabble, Geoff Nicholson, Gregory Norminton, Naomi Frisby and Tim Etchells were all strong, but there was something somehow more mysterious about Helen Mort’s ‘Weaning’ that appealed to me. Etchells’ Endland (And Other Stories) took me back to his 1999 collection Endland Stories from Pulp Books, an imprint of Elaine Palmer’s seminal small press Pulp Faction. The new volume combined reprints from the previous work with new stories.
Etchells’ stories fizz with the kind of disruptive energy that animates the contents of I Transgress, an anthology of mostly previously unpublished work edited by Chris Kelso for Salò Press, which has also been publishing original short stories in chapbook format, which it calls, rather wonderfully, ‘Flirtations’. Andrew Hook’s ‘The Girl With the Horizontal Walk’ was one of these. Another chapbook, NJ Stallard’s The White Cat, a beautifully crafted artefact, arrived from The Aleph, which ‘designs and publishes rare and limited editions’; these are definitely worth investigating.
One of the highlights of volume 12 of Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology (Tangent Books) was Cherise Saywell’s yearning tale of satellites, human beings and a dog, ‘Fellow Travellers’, while issue number 16 of The Mechanics Institute Review was, I think, the biggest and most handsome volume yet in that publication’s history. Billing itself ‘The Climate Issue’, it features stories (and poems and essays) by established and emerging writers alongside MA/MFA students from Birkbeck. The project director is Julia Bell and the managing editor is Sue Tyley, who has a sizeable editorial team working with her. In this volume the editors have saved, in my opinion and talking only about the short stories, the best till last, with two very strong pieces at the back of the book, ‘Gold’ by Lorraine Wilson and ‘This Place is No Vegas’ by KM Elkes. Wilson writes beautifully about birds, and Elkes about life, death and ponds. Wilson writes about life and death as well, and bird baths, if not ponds.
Issue 11 of The Lonely Crowd was packed with good stories from Iain Robinson, Jo Mazelis, Jaki McKarrick, Susanna Crossman, Niall Griffiths, Gary Budden and many others. I had not previously come across Mal, ‘a journal of sexuality and erotics’. Edited by Maria Dimitrova, its fourth issue, ‘Real Girls’, focuses on ‘girlhood and agency’. Luke Brown’s story, ‘Beyond Criticism’, appears alongside pieces by Natasha Stagg and Chris Kraus as well as poetry and illustrations. Simply yet beautifully designed, it is a sharp, intelligent publication. I hadn’t come across The New Issue either, but that is because it is a brand-new publication, a subscription-only magazine from the Big Issue, edited by Kevin Gopal. Issue 1 featured a new story by Sarah Hall taken from her new collection Sudden Traveller. Another new magazine, which I discovered too late to think about picking either or both of the excellent stories by Martin MacInnes and Janice Galloway, is Extra Teeth, put together in Scotland by Heather Parry, Jules Danskin and Esther Clayton.
I enjoyed Michael Holloway’s story, ‘The Devil and My Dad’, in issue 23 of Open Pen, edited by Sean Preston. The same writer pops up in Still Worlds