The Observer ran a series two weekends back, where writers chose their favourite short stories and explained why... you can find the article here and The Guardian's done a brilliant job of putting up the podcasts on their books page here.
Anne Enright on Fat by Raymond Carver.
‘A story is something told, it is something that really needs to be said. But though we feel its force and resonance, it is often hard to say what a story means. The most we can say, perhaps, is that a short story is about a moment in life; and after this moment, we realize something has changed’
Philip Pullman on The Beauties by Chekhov
'Chekhov's genius lies in the way he manages to convey with such apparent effortlessness a profound sense of the mystery of beauty, and of the sadness of those who observe and think'
Helen Simpson on The Kitchen Child by Angela Carter
‘The narrators mother, a perfectionist Yorkshire cook in the kitchens of a great country house, is impregnated by an unknown admirer as she bends to place a souffle in the oven (she doesn't turn for fear of spoiling the dish)’
Ali Smith on Conversations With My Father by Grace Paley
‘What happens -funny, sad, infuriating- is that the story won't be corralled any more than life itself will’
Colman Toibin on Music at Annahullion by Eugene McCabe
‘McCabe's genius is to make the piano stand for itself and then to have an extraordinary resonance as it comes to stand for all her hope, and all our hopes’
Jeannette Winterson on The Night Driver by Italo Calvino
‘The tension in the story depends on the unknowing. Soon Calvino imagines a perpetual time, the time out of time of long car journeys where it becomes unnecessary to arrive. You have a lover. You're racing towards him/her. Your lover is racing towards you. You will never meet but meeting is no longer the purpose of the journey.’
In a different section on the same day, Lillian Ross of The New Yorker shared her memories of Salinger... and also, JD Salinger's impression about meeting her month old son, Erik:
" Notes on your son: 1. Is an incomparably fine and lovely person 2. Has beautiful eyes 3. Sleeps in a very good position 4. Has courtly manners 5. Is a very very sweet little boy"
On her writing...
"You're yourself whether you're writing fiction or fact. It's very moving. I mean more than that, but that's my first thought"
Hemingway to a young and unknown JD Salinger commenting on Salinger's unpublished stories: 'First you have a marvellous ear and you write tenderly and lovingly without getting wet... how happy it makes me to read your stories and what a god damned fine writer I think you are'
And Laurie Hutton recalled the origins of Malcolm McLaren's stories:
‘ She (his grandmother Rose) dressed him up as a girl, didn't allow him to go to school until he was 10. He had Shirley Temple sausage curls down to his shoulders held Toby tortoise-shell combs... Ever night he had to sit in the corner if the sitting room on a chamber pot while her sisters read to him from the novels of the Brontes and Dickens... Rose didn't allow him to swim in the sea because fish pee in the sea... He was the best storyteller I ever met, and I've met some in my time. He learned it in that room on the chamber pot’
This is what a good Sunday paper should do, make you read and re-read it through the week, increasing your unreasonable hopes that the weekend is just around the next corner and of course, next Sunday's will be better, with its extracts from Tolstoi and Basho and Homer; will be much better as you slowly read it distracted by the falling snow, milky masala tea, short-bread and crackers... London, my London.
