Alice Munro

Five of the best Alice Munro short stories

The greatest examples of the late writer’s uncanny ability to capture the many complexities of life range from stories of sex to loneliness

Lisa Allardice

Tue 14 May 2024 16.45 EDT

It is almost impossible to recommend a handful of Munro short stories. Over a writing career that spanned decades and led to many accolades, including the Nobel prize for literature, she produced countless stories, often set in southern Ontario, where she grew up and to where she returned in later life. Few writers captured the lives of “ordinary” people with as much grace and empathy – not to mention technical genius – as Munro. Her stories are anything but ordinary.

Five of the best

Five of the best body horror novels

This article is more than 2 months old

Tackling social issues with often grisly violence, you’ll need a strong stomach for these stories by authors from Han Kang to Stephen King, but they make an indelible impact

Monika Kim

Thu 18 Jul 2024 12.00 BST

Body horror is a genre that features the mutilation or transformation of the human body. Always graphic and usually grotesque, its trademark terrors range from dismemberment to cannibalism, which some authors use as a vehicle for political commentary or social critique.

In my novel, The Eyes Are the Best Part, Ji-won is a seemingly normal college student whose life unravels after her father’s departure and the arrival of her mother’s creepy new Caucasian boyfriend, George. After eating a fish eye for luck during a traditional Korean meal, Ji-won develops a morbid obsession with George’s blue eyes, culminating in acts of violence that confront the white male gaze in a very literal fashion.

If you have the intestinal fortitude for body horror tales, here are five of my favourites.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Yeong-hye is stuck in a nightmare. Against her family’s wishes, she has become a vegetarian. When her family physically forces her to eat meat, they set in motion a series of events that will change her life for ever. Han Kang’s writing is beautiful and evocative, and her ambitious novel tackles mental illness, consent, misogyny and autonomy.

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Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

Murata’s novel is compulsively readable in spite of the many disturbing themes it covers. Natsuki, who is neglected by her family, seeks meaning in her existence after a series of traumatic events cause her to question gender norms and societal expectations. Bizarre and unpredictable, Earthlings features plenty of unsettling moments and will stay fixed in your mind long after you turn the last page.

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Misery by Stephen King

Novelist Paul Sheldon finds himself in a dire situation after waking up from a car accident that left his legs completely shattered. He’s been found by superfan Annie Wilkes, who decides to hold him captive while he rewrites the ending of his bestselling romance series to her liking. Annie goes to great lengths to make sure that Paul behaves – and can never leave. A classic, must-read horror novel with plenty of moments that will leave you squirming.

Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang

In this debut novel, we follow an unnamed protagonist working at Holistik, a beauty and wellness store. Her work begins to take over her life, even as she starts to uncover terrible secrets about the cult-like company. Natural Beauty is a sinister and entertaining exploration of the cost of assimilation, toxic beauty culture and capitalism.

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Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

Irina is a photographer who focuses on taking explicit images of average-looking men. After being offered an exhibit at a respectable London gallery, she revisits old photographs and begins to descend into madness, leading her down a path of destruction. This dark and unsettling novel looks at power, gender roles, class and sexuality, and is sure to be a hit with fans of Bret Easton Ellis.

• The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim is published by Octopus.

  
  

THE GUARDIAN

Andy Borowitz recommends the best Comic Writing

Do you have to be cruel to be comedic? It often helps, says bestselling humour writer, Andy Borowitz. He picks his favourite comic novels.

Interview by Eve Gerber
Marc 16, 2012

You’ve just turned the tale of a brush with death into a bestselling ebook that is by turns tragic, romantic, profound and just plain gross. Tell us about An Unexpected Twist and how you twist everything into comedy.

Richard Hirst's Top 5 Robert Aickman Stories

Richard Hirst's Top 5 Robert Aickman Stories 10.13.2014 The Hospice (in Cold Hand in Mine)  Fans of Aickman tend to have a soft spot for the first of his stories they encountered, the one which ushered them into the heady territory of Aickmanland. For my money ‘The Hospice’ – my own personal gateway story – represents Aickman at his most unsettling, all the more so because it contains, on the surface, so little in the way of anything which appears to approach outright horror. Maybury, a travelling businessman, gets lost whilst driving through the outskirts of suburban Midlands and takes shelter in a remote hostel. Inside, seated in a dining hall of stale opulence, he is surrounded by seemingly doped-up guests and served mounds of indigestible food. Things take an disquieting twist when Maybury notices one of the guests is chained at the ankle to a radiator. The phrase ‘Kafkaesque’ is often used for shadowy and potent bureaucracy, but ‘The Hospice’ is Kafkaesque in that it evokes a nameless terror which is more abstract, and much more frightening, than anything as simple as a ghost.

Five of the sexiest scenes in literature

Stuart Jeffries picks notable passages from classic novels

Stuart Jeffries
Saturday 23 July 2016 06.15 BST

I

t’s difficult to write a good sex scene. There’s the risk of wittering about vaginal frilliness as Updike did in his Memories of the Ford Administration or producing something like one of those complicated fist fights in Dashiell Hammett where you can’t quite work out which limb is putting whose windpipe in a chokehold. Here are five that do better.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer

“‘You’re the thinnest person I’ve ever slept with,’ she said. ‘It’s like making love to an ironing board.’” This postcoital remark may seem an odd thing to select to stand up my thesis (Ladies! Excuse me!), but Laura’s happy teasing of Jeff and his gallant response (he suggests there is probably a poor ex-Soviet republic where that is the greatest compliment a woman can pay a man and that’s where he plans to permanently live) typifies the winningly joyful vibe of Dyer’s description of a bit of slap and tickle at the Venice Biennale. “She sat back twisting his nipples rubbing herself in his face. His face gleamed with her smell.” Can something gleam with smell? Sure, why not?

Dyer contrives a scene as unexpectedly erotic, if less glumly premised, as that in which Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie make love following their child’s death in Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Maybe it’s something about Venice.

But then Dyer, wonderfully, clinches the spiritual significance of sex. “The word that insistently came to mind, afterwards, as they lay in each other’s arms was unusable, in a way that ‘cock’, ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck’ were: communion.” How lovely that, even if in our postmodern world in which clever people such as Jeff and Laura have talked words into meaninglessness, they can still get it on in a way that’s not about domination and possession.

À la Recherche du Temps Perdu
Proust

À la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust

Picture the scene. Albertine is asleep in bed and the narrator, Marcel, is masturbating against her side. “It seemed to me at those moments,” writes Marcel, “that I possessed her more completely, like an unconscious part of dumb nature.” Albertine becomes a mere plaything of the rich, sick aesthete – vegetable rather than lover. This scene, like so much of the bleak encounters in Proust’s great novel, is powerful for dramatising an inhumane vision of life and sex, one that denies the dream of communion in favour of sex as possession or destruction of the other.

Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov

Here’s my theory: just as the most effective horror movies leave the horror unvisualised (The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity etc), the best sex scenes are ones that leave the sex undescribed, so you can do the imaginative work.

One morning, Nabokov’s narrator meets again the diverting woman in the grey suit in a Parisian hotel corridor. Every word is – if you’re in the mood for a bit of the other – sexual. She’s “waiting for the elevator to take her down, a key dangling from her fingers.” Her husband, she confides, has gone fencing. She leads him back to her room where “because of our sudden draft a wave of muslin embroidered with white dahlias got sucked in, with a shudder and a knock, between the responsive halves of the French window, and only when the door had been locked did they let go of that curtain with something like a blissful sigh; and a little later I stepped out on the diminutive cast-iron balcony beyond to inhale a combined smell of dry maple leaves and gasoline …”

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

Just beyond the compost heap in some communal gardens in London, virgin Nick is getting kissed by Leo, a stranger he met in the personal ads (it’s the 80s, there is no Grindr). “He thought he saw the point of kissing, but also its limitations – it was an instinct, a means of expression, of mouthing a passion but not satisfying it. So his right hand, that was lightly clutching Leo’s waist, set off, still doubting its freedom, to dawdle over the plump buttocks and then squeeze them through the soft old denim.” I don’t think there’s a better scene in literature for dramatising the randy hero philosophically musing while in the throes of passion and then doing something practical to enhance his and his lover’s pleasures.

Nick and Leo’s sex, appealingly, isn’t just liberating, but funny: “[T]here was something hilarious in the shivers of pleasure that ran up his back and squeezed his neck, and ran down his arms to his fingers – he felt he’d been switched on for the first time, gently gripping Leo’s hips, and then reaching round him to help unbutton his shirt and get it off and hold his naked body against him. It was all so easy. He had worried the night before that there might be some awful knack to it …” In a world in which good sex is so often reduced to ungraspable technique (cf the 1965 film The Knack …and How to Get It), how pleasing to read a passage that depicts it otherwise.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

“I had touched her before, to wash and dress her, but never like this,” narrates Sue, a lady’s maid. “So smooth she was! So warm! It was like I was calling the heat and shape of her out of the darkness – as if the darkness was turning solid and growing quick, under my hand.” What gives this passage such erotic power is how both Sue and Maud, her mistress, are blindsided by desire. At the start of the book, Sue has been lured to work as a lady’s maid by a swindler called Gentleman who aims to marry and ruin the heiress Maud, before dumping her in an asylum and making her fortune his own. Like you do. Sue will get a cut of the fortune if the plot is successful. In the above scene, Sue is ostensibly coaching naive Maud in what she must do on her wedding night after, as planned, marrying Gentleman. Instead, Sue forgets her role in the plot as she explores Maud’s body. She brings Maud to orgasm and then, against her scheming, falls sweetly for the woman she planned to help destroy:

“She began to shake. I supposed she was still afraid. Then I began to shake, too. I forgot to think of Gentleman, after that. I thought only of her. When her face grew wet with tears, I kissed them away.

“You pearl,” I said. So white she was! “You pearl, you pearl, you pearl.”

Well, it worked for me.

THE GUARDIAN

Five scandalous affairs that changed History

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton

5 SCANDALOUS AFFAIRS THAT CHANGED HISTORY

History is filled with great, enduring love stories, from Napoleon and Josephine to Prince Edward and Wallis Simpson. And then there are those somewhat more unseemly courtships. The ones that began in the shadows as steamy affairs or adulterous liaisons, the consummation of which has produced some of the great love children of literary, political, film and music history. Here are some of history’s most consequential trysts:

1. Mary Godwin & Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Sordid Details: One of the great unions of literary history began in 1814, when the 16-year-old Mary Godwin and the dreamy, but very married, 21-year-old romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley met in secret at the grave of Mary’s famous suffragette mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. There, as Mary later recounted, the two touched each other with the “full ardour of love,” an ardor that would eventually leave the aspiring writer pregnant and Shelley estranged from his wife.

Five Greatest Movie Characters

Five Greatest Movie Characters

001

Indiana Jones

APPEARANCES: All four Indiana Jones adventures (1981-2008)CREATORS: George Lucas, Lawrence KasdanPERFORMER: Harrison FordDEFINING MOMENT: The flicker of recognition that crosses Indy’s face when Belloq (Paul Freeman) suggests they are alike... Tied with the pained, “Do I really have to do this?” look he gives just before he shoots the Arab swordsman.FASCINATING FACT: It is common knowledge that Indiana Jones was originally called Indiana Smith, but changed to Jones at Spielberg’s behest. Yet the reason Spielberg wanted the seemingly negligible name change was to distance Raiders from Nevada Smith, a 1966 Steve McQueen Western.

002

James bond

APPEARANCES: The James Bond seriesCREATOR: Ian FlemingPERFORMERS: Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel CraigDEFINING MOMENT: Probably varies by Bond — Moore unzipping Solitaire’s dress with a magnet would sum him up, for example, while Brosnan adjusting his tie after driving a tank through a wall nails him. But it was probably 007’s first film that laid out the marker for the next 50 years, when he shoots Professor Dent (“That’s a Smith & Wesson, and you’ve had your six”) with the insouciance of a man who’s just had a bid accepted on eBay.FASCINATING FACT: The Ian Fleming series of novels and shorts have been almost entirely mined for titles, but these remain available: Risico, The Hildebrand Rarity, The Property Of A Lady, and 007 In New York. They might remain unmined. 003 Han Solo APPEARANCES: Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Return Of The Jedi (1983)CREATOR: George LucasPERFORMER: Harrison FordDEFINING MOMENT: Granted, Vader had the better wardrobe (black cape, motorcycle leathers), but Solo’s scruffy-looking smuggler still takes the gundark’s share of Star Wars cool. Shooting first (sorry George) and cracking wise, he’s every inch the space cowboy. The Quintessential Solo is heartfelt as well as cocksure, though, and never more so than in Ford’s famously ad-libbed response to Leia’s, “I love you,” in Episode V: “I know.”FASCINATING FACT: In Lucas’ early drafts of The Star Wars, Solo’s character was Ureallian: a noseless, green-skinned, slime-covered alien with large gills, who trapped Wookiees. Not quite so romantic now, is it?

004

Batman

APPEARANCES: Batman (1966), Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), Batman Forever (1995), Batman & Robin (1997), Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), The Dark Knight Rises (2012)CREATORS: Bob Kane, Bill FingerPERFORMERS: Adam West, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian BaleDEFINING MOMENT: It really should be from Christian Bale’s Dark Knight, when he is going fist to face with the Joker as Gordon (Gary Oldman) looks on fretting, “Who’s in control?” Good question.FASCINATING FACT: Fans sent 50,000 protest letters to Warner Bros. after Tim Burton announced the casting of Michael Keaton as Batman.

005

Ellen Ripley

APPEARANCE: The Alien quadrilogy (1979-1997)CREATORS: Walter Hill, David Giler, Ron Cobb, Dan O’BannonPERFORMER: Sigourney WeaverDEFINING MOMENT: With a survival instinct to match her xenomorphic nemesis, Ripley is one of nature’s rationalists. Indeed, had they followed her hard-nosed attempt to uphold quarantine rules and prevent the stricken Kane being brought back on board — “If we let it in, the ship could be infected” — the Nostromo crew, if not Kane, would remain a whole lot healthier.FASCINATING FACT: In the process of considering Meryl Streep for the role of Ripley, Ridley Scott was stopped in his tracks by the sight of Weaver in thigh-high boots, bursting into his office, half an hour late for her audition. EMPIRE