Best British Short Stories 2019 - Nicholas Royle Page 0,1

collections included Sean O’Brien’s Quartier Perdu (Comma Press), Vesna Main’s Temptation: A User’s Guide (Salt) and the publishing phenomenon that was Ann Quin’s The Unmapped Country (And Other Stories). To say that the latter was ‘edited and introduced’ by Jennifer Hodgson, as is recorded on the title page, I’m sure gives very little idea of the amount of love, dedication and sheer hard work that must have gone into creating this book of ‘stories and fragments’ by the great British writer who died in 1973 at the age of 37. Hats off to Hodgson and to her publisher.

Is it a book? Is it a magazine? From issue ten of The Lonely Crowd the answer was on the cover: ‘the magazine of new fiction and poetry’. It still looks like a book, like quite a chunky anthology, and it’s still publishing tons of really good stories. In issue nine I particularly liked Courttia Newland’s ‘A Gift For Abidah’ and James Clarke’s ‘Waddington’, while stories by Kate Hamer, Jane Fraser, Lucie McKnight Hardy and Neil Campbell were the highlights, for me, in issue ten.

Newsprint is not dead: two new publications launched last year. Firstly, the Brixton Review of Books, an excellent and very welcome free literary quarterly created by Michael Caines, whose day job is at the TLS. Well, free if you happen to be wandering around south London when a new issue hits the streets (it’s given away outside tube stations, I believe, and I’ve seen it in the Herne Hill Oxfam Bookshop), or you can pay £10 for a subscription (check the web site). It features reviews, articles and columns, and, in issue three there was a notable story of ‘formless dread’, ‘Down the Line’ by Richard Lea. What’s not to like about formless dread? More, please. Secondly, at the Dublin Ghost Story Festival in June last year I picked up a copy of Infra-Noir, edited by Jonathan Wood and Alcebiades Diniz and published by Jonas Ploeger’s specialist press Zagava. The first issue contains stories by Brian Howell, previously featured in this series, and poet Nigel Humphreys, whose first-published short story ‘Beyond Dead’ is reprinted in the current volume.

Staying with literary magazines, the most interesting things in Hotel issue four – and they were very interesting – were either not short stories or not by British authors. In Structo issue 18, I was struck by Paul McQuade’s ‘The Wound in the Air’ and was similarly drawn to his not-unrelated story, ‘A Gift of Tongues’, in Confingo issue ten, which also included notable stories by a number of writers including Simon Kinch and Giselle Leeb. Jumping back to spring 2018, Confingo issue nine was packed with good stories. Stand-outs: Charles Wilkinson’s ‘Berkmann’s Anti-novel’, one of those stories about oddball school friends and how they turn out, which are always interesting, especially when they’re this well written; Elizabeth Baines’ ‘The Next Stop Will Be Didsbury Village’, which is best read on a Manchester Metrolink tram leaving either East Didsbury or Burton Road in the direction of Didsbury Village; David Gaffney’s ‘The Dog’, which, like Baines’ story, was written to be performed in the Didsbury Arts Festival. ‘Performed’ in this context may strike you as an overstatement, when such performance generally takes the form of reading the story to an audience, but Baines and Gaffney (if that doesn’t sound like a new ITV cop show partnership, I don’t know what does) always read well.

Lighthouse continues to illuminate the darkness with excellent writing. ‘One Art’, by C. D. Rose, in issue 16, was very good, but ‘Smack’ by Julia Armfield in the same issue was outstanding, probably the best story to appear in the journal during 2018. I don’t know what the jellyfish represent, but I don’t care. And yet I do care about the story.

The same dimensions and format as both Lighthouse and Confingo, Doppelgänger was a new publication edited by James Hodgson. Its web site states that it aimed to publish twice a year, with six stories in each issue, three realist stories and three magical realist stories. As far as I can tell, there has been no follow-up to the first issue, dated winter/spring 2018 and featuring work by Dan Powell, Andrew Hook, Cath Barton and others. Max Dunbar takes a risk with his story, ‘The Bad Writing School’. If you’re going to satirise the teaching of creative writing, you’ve got to be pretty sure of your ability.

If I had to pick a favourite story out of all those published in