The writer and film critic chooses his favourites. He will discuss his latest short story collection, "The Body in the Mobile Library" (Lightning Books, £9.99), at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 14 August (edbookfest.co.uk)
The Autograph Man
Smith's second novel is the least liked of her work, and some are unconvinced by the ventriloquised Jewishness of her autograph collector, Alex-Li Tandem. But I love the unstoppable garrulity and comedy that pours out of this book and its very prescient, pre-social-media world of celebrity obsession.
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De Profundis
Oscar Wilde, 1905
When you're used to the dapper lightness and poised wit that comes so naturally to Wilde, it’s an extraordinary experience to arrive at the explicit seriousness of this, his extended rebuke from Reading Gaol to his duplicitous lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. It is moving and majestic, while sacrificing nothing of elegance or delicacy in the prose.
The Mars Room
Rachel Kushner, 2018
A great prison novel: brilliant, vehement and scary. It is the story of Romy, a former table dancer in a club called The Mars Room, who is now doing time in a women's correctional facility in California for murdering her stalker, and it is made clear to her that she will likely never see her young son again.
Collected Stories
Roald Dahl, 2006
It's still amazing to me how many people don't know of Dahl's genius as the author of adult short stories, although some of these had 1970s TV fame with their adaptation as the "Tales of the Unexpected". One of the nastiest, tastiest and funniest is Royal Jelly.
Father Sergius (1911) from The Complete Short Stories, Volume 2
Leo Tolstoy, 2001
A black-tragicomic masterpiece: a tempestuous, conceited young prince, idolising the tsar and the supposed virginity of his fiancée, is astonished to learn that they have had an affair. He retreats to become a monk, renamed Father Sergius, and his increasing renown as a holy man leads to chaos.
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