Pretty Story Bag: 7 Sweet Tales to Carry Along

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A witch struggling to make ends meet starts to read tarot cards and sell crystals as a side hustle. As a ghost haunting a house, you must figure out ways to scare the families living there enough to make them move out. Two characters swear never to fall in love or date. One of them becomes disappointed the other kept their oath. A character finishes creating the first time travel machine, only to discover it can only move in two-minute increments. An asteroid is heading toward Earth; people in a small town figure out how to spend their last day.

A character discovers they have a terminal illness and decides to let people figure it out with a guessing game. If you love JG Ballard, you should read Anna Kavan. Few novelists, Ballard said, “could match the intensity of her vision”, and that same intensity fuels her stories. The narrator of “A Bright Green Field” claims to encounter the same, unnaturally vivid field of grass wherever she goes. It’s an unlikely candidate for a bete noire, but Kavan’s descriptions of a mountain town in the gathering gloom, loomed over by “the sheer emerald wall that was the meadow”, create an atmosphere of powerful unease. “Extra” by Yiyun Li (2003) A department store sales person runs into an old high school classmate who threatens to reveal information that could lose them their job. Cheever is known as a chronicler of the suburbs, but in this story the leafy neighbourhood of Shady Hill, a recurring location in his fiction, blends the domestic with something much stranger, almost magical. The story is comic (its title mirrors William Wycherley’s 1675 comedy of manners The Country-Wife), but darker currents work beneath its surface and it builds to a stunning finale that is one of the most rapturous passages Cheever ever wrote. “An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad (1897)

Sarah’s father sends her from Canada to Grenoble as a way of ending her relationship with a married professor, but she ends up on the French Riviera. There she meets Roy, an ex-prison inspector, and rashly moves in with him. The story’s charge arises from a combination of wit, the awfulness of the relationship’s collapse, and Gallant’s profound grasp of the psychology of love affairs. She talks about her characters in a way that makes you feel your own perceptiveness is being worked like a muscle. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)

Narayan, who wrote more than 200 short stories, called them “concentrated miniatures of human experience in all its opulence”. The opulence of the clay horse at the centre of this story has faded beneath the Indian sun, but the conversation it triggers between an American tourist who speaks no Tamil and Muni, a poor peasant who speaks no English, is not only very funny, but also telling about the degree to which misunderstanding is an unavoidable part of human interaction. “Minutes of Glory” by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1976)It is uncertain whether it was Turgenev or Dostoevsky who said, “We all came out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’”, but his influence on those writers – as well as on Tolstoy, Kafka, Nabokov, Borges and many more – is profound. The main character of this bleakly hilarious story, the downtrodden government clerk Akaky Akakievich, is arguably the first antihero in modern literature, and his doomed pursuit of a new overcoat one of the most memorably absurd quests in fiction. “Six Feet of the Country” by Nadine Gordimer (1953)

Part poetic incantation, part eccentric kaleidoscopic vision, this is a story which contorts each time you read it. Born in Antigua, Kincaid invents aesthetics which are wholly unique, transfiguring human form and surroundings, in particular, the Caribbean landscapes. Here, she conveys the multiple textures of smaller islands, creating a literary geography which remains experimental, new and indefinable. Irenosen Okojie “Music at Annahullion” by Eugene McCabe (2004) A character is sold the "Best Year of Their Life" by an illustrious company, with the caveat that they must die afterward. Alice Munro once said: “I want the story to exist somewhere so that in a way it’s still happening … I don’t want it to be shut up in the book and put away – oh well, that’s what happened.” Atwood articulates the same position in this fun, thought-provoking story that begins with a man meeting a woman, then offers variants of what happens next. Any ending that isn’t death, she concludes, is false, and the interesting part of stories isn’t what happens, but how and why. “Going to Meet the Man” by James Baldwin (1965)Reasons to Be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe will be published by Viking on 28 March. “The Distance of the Moon” by Italo Calvino (1963) A sailor banished to a year-long journey to atone for his crimes must reconcile with what he's done. Kayerts and Carlier, agents for the Great Trading Company, are “two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals” left in charge of a remote trading station. Conrad mines a deep vein of irony as he describes their work “serving the cause of progress”. As the story unfolds, and the men are shown to be idiotic cogs in the engine of colonialism, Conrad exposes the gap between the high-flown language of such projects (“progress”, “civilisation”, “virtue”) and their brutal reality. “Twilight of the Superheroes” by Deborah Eisenberg (2006)