Top ten short stories

In 2007 novelist and short story writer Alison MacLeod named her top 10 short stories for the Guardian.

Her criteria and one story from the list:

Writing a short story is a high-wire act, sentence by sentence, foot by foot. Very few story writers work with the safety net of a plot conceived in advance. They trust in the humming tension of a single opening line or in an image that rises in their mind, or in a fragment of a character's voice. They might have a sense of where they want their characters to go; they rarely know how they'll get them there. At times it's unnerving work. Lose your concentration or the line of tension in the story and both you and it fall. The best short stories have a breathless, in-motion quality to them, a quality that makes them ideal for adaptation into film, as directors are increasingly realising. A great story ending resonates far beyond its final word. It's a hit to the brain. I read stories and love them for that hit. As the writer Elizabeth Taylor commented, the short story gives the reader the feeling of "being lifted into another world, instead of sinking into it, as one does with longer fiction". The best stories leave you exhilarated.

"Meneseteung" by Alice Munro

While novels are arguably about life's big moments, stories, Munro says, are about "the moments within moments". This is the story of Almeda Roth, a little known Victorian poetess-spinster who lives in a small Canadian town. She resides on the respectable Dufferin Street but her back gate opens onto the edge of a boghole, an area known locally as the Pearl Street Swamp. "Bushy and luxuriant weeds grow there, makeshift shacks have been out up ... " and a woman cries out: 'Kill me! Kill me!' ...Yet there is something taunting and triumphant about her cry." It makes Almeda uncomfortably aware of the narrowness of her own life, one in which she waits to see if Jarvis Poulter will finally deem her to be suitable wife material. The woman of the Pearl Street Swamp is to Almeda what Bertha is to Jane Eyre: her alter ego, her nemesis, but also the agent for Almeda's new, painful insight. The detail of Almeda's home and her inner world are tenderly and sharply observed. Munro's prose is, as usual, translucent - so breathtakingly clear there is nothing between you and the world she creates.

Read about another title on MacLeod's list.

--Marshal Zeringue