Best British Short Stories 2020

Turning: New Short Fiction, edited by Emma Warnock for Belfast-based No Alibis Press, with an entertaining account purporting to be ‘From Andy Warhol’s Assistant, 1964’. It was one of the highlights for me, along with stories by Joanna Walsh, Eley Williams, Lucy Caldwell and Sam Thompson (I think I’ve stayed in his ‘Seafront Gothic’ hotel).
I read one story last year by a highly regarded author in a very prestigious magazine. In many ways it was masterful, but one thing bothered me. Point of view is handed around like cups of Earl Grey. Not a flicker of emotion was there, either, in this story of mortality. It’s the sort of carefully written story that I have to force myself to finish reading. I find myself wondering what must such stories be like to write? What motivates the authors of such stories to keep going? They’re very fine, but rather dull. And what about point of view? Is it all right to let it float around so much – or at all? If you write in the first person, you restrict yourself to that point of view, so why not restrict yourself in third-person narratives as well? At least within paragraphs, or sections. And yet, in at least one of the stories included in the present volume, point of view is all over the place. Maybe it bothered me, fleetingly, but there was something exciting about the story that seduced me, that made me think maybe I get too worked up about point of view.
Here’s a point of view to end on. It’s about the Paris Review’s announcement of a ‘call for applications to our volunteer reader program’. The Paris Review went on: ‘This is in anticipation of an expansion to online submissions after sixty-six years of accepting unsolicited submissions only in hardcopy manuscripts. (We will continue to receive and consider manuscripts submitted by mail to our New York office.) In this new iteration of our submission process, we hope to grow a far-reaching network of readers who will be responsible for assessing unsolicited submissions of both prose and poetry.’
Hang on there un petit moment. The Paris Review is recruiting volunteer readers to assess submissions?
It goes on: ‘One of our goals is to equip readers with technical language and critical acumen (such as the composition of reader’s reports) necessary for assessment of contemporary literary work. We hope that they will be able to bring these skills with them after their time as readers with The Paris Review, particularly those who wish to pursue a career in publishing. Therefore, applicants at a stage where they feel they would benefit from such coaching, whether in a graduate program, recently post-grad, or interested in gaining a foothold in publishing, are strongly encouraged to apply. However, we will consider candidates at any point in their lives, in any location, so long as they are excited about the project of assessing new writing on The Review’s behalf.’
Alors, an exciting democratisation of the gatekeeper role at the Paris Review? Or they want you to go and work for them, virtually as editors, but without paying you un sou?
It goes on (it does go on): ‘This is a volunteer position requiring at least 5 hours of reading time a week, which can be done remotely, with a commitment of at least six months. Hours can be completed at any time during the day and week. Interested candidates should provide a resume, cover letter, and a half-to-one-page reader’s report on a piece of fiction or poetry published in a magazine or journal (not in The Paris Review) in the past year.’
I have probably allowed my point of view to be inferred, but I would be very interested to hear from anyone who applied, successfully or not. Lots of editors spend a lot of time ‘assessing new writing’ without getting paid for it, those of us who run small presses and certain little magazines. Is that the same or is it different? Is it, like the title of Stephen Thompson’s story in this volume, same same different?
Nicholas Royle
Manchester
May 2020

LUKE BROWNBEYOND CRITICISM1
The man across the aisle from Claire was no longer reading poetry. He had put down the book and picked up his phone, inserted one ear bud and turned to lean against the window, hiding his screen from passers-by on the way to the buffet car, but he had not thought of the way it would reflect on to the window behind him, the girl who was sitting on a low sofa and moving her hand between her legs in a room that gleamed with the green light of California.
Claire had seen this sort of pornography before. In her last days with David, when he avoided having sex with her, she had asked him to show her what he watched when he was alone, what it was that got him off.
But David said he didn’t watch porn. Well, only very rarely. Sometimes, obviously, but mostly out of anthropological interest. Honestly? Did she really want to see?
There would be no judgment, she insisted. This was the id. Desire was beyond criticism.
Real girls was what David liked, women about the age of the undergraduates she taught, when they were persuaded to take their clothes off and masturbate on a sofa as part of a screen audition which they hoped might win them work as a ‘calendar model’. He liked to see their suspicion supplanted by arousal but never fully allayed, to watch the way the women surrendered to their own corruption, the dawning truth of their ambition, like it was, in the end, a relief.
This, she presumed, was how he saw it, though they never talked about it again after that night so she might have been putting words into his mouth. The man behind the camera in these videos liked to begin the series of crises that broke the woman’s resistance by stroking her cheek before slipping a finger into her mouth to see whether or not