Jon McGregor, award-winning novelist and short story writer, recommends…
‘The Odour of Chrysanthemums’ by
(CLASSIC: from Selected Stories, Heinemann)
I read this a year or so ago – you have to read Lawrence if you live in Nottingham, it’s a local by-law – and realised that I’d read it as a teenager in Norfolk. The sense of place and time and mood came flooding back in an instant. This is everything his novels aren’t: economical, focused, compassionate. He should have stuck to short stories.
‘Tenth of December’ by
(MODERN: from The New Yorker).
This may seem an undeveloped thought, as it was only published in the New Yorker a month or so ago; but it’s such a powerfully developed example of where Saunders’ writing has been leading lately that I’m sticking with it. Humane, funny, fully-inhabited, tremendously moving. Read it, and the run of New Yorker stories he’s had lately, and swoon.
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