Pretty Story Bag: 7 Sweet Tales to Carry Along

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A brother and sister uncover an old letter from their parents that makes them question everything about their family history.

Diane had to go through the one thing she had foreseen and was afraid of – and there was nothing I could do to help. A character discovers they have a terminal illness and decides to let people figure it out with a guessing game.A middle-class family works to start the first intergalactic newspaper company using all the money in their savings. Two ballerinas carpool to their next lesson together and uncover some surprising information on the way. Only afterwards did I discover that this was in fact a piece of densely textured reportage, but it taught me so much about how to write a short story that I will always see it as one. A young man, Werner Hoeflich, trapped by a fire, escapes by leaping from the window of his New York apartment, across the intervening gap and in through the window of the adjacent building. It has the richness of a novel, the raw and dirty grip of life and was, for me, a revelation. Fine language and a deftly conjured mood are all well and good, but fiction – of whatever length – should thrill. Mark Haddon “The Window Theatre” by Ilse Aichinger (1953) A dramedy about a separated couple raising their kids under the same rough, waiting for the day they'll all go to college.

If you love JG Ballard, you should read Anna Kavan. Few novelists, Ballard said, “could match the intensity of her vision”, and that same intensity fuels her stories. The narrator of “A Bright Green Field” claims to encounter the same, unnaturally vivid field of grass wherever she goes. It’s an unlikely candidate for a bete noire, but Kavan’s descriptions of a mountain town in the gathering gloom, loomed over by “the sheer emerald wall that was the meadow”, create an atmosphere of powerful unease. “Extra” by Yiyun Li (2003) James Joyce explores the turbulence and humiliation of adolescence. Photograph: Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet/Getty Images “A Bright Green Field” by Anna Kavan (1958) A department store sales person runs into an old high school classmate who threatens to reveal information that could lose them their job.A character discovers they have the ability to visit the past and future, but at the risk that they'll lose something valuable.

A pregnant teen faces the reality that her life is going to be much different from her high school peers. A character's home is split in two by a sudden Earthquake. They must work to find a way to the other side, where something valuable is. A series about the experiences of an acid trip, and the ways it shapes people's lives before and after. As a ghost haunting a house, you must figure out ways to scare the families living there enough to make them move out.

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After spending a summer abroad in Europe, you come home to find your hometown in ruins and must uncover the truth. William Trevor has influenced me more than any other writer, and it’s impossible for me to name one story by him that is an absolute favourite. I can, however, name 20 to 30 stories that I return to often. One of these is “After Rain”. A woman travels alone to recover from a love that has ended too abruptly, but the wish that solitude could exorcise loneliness is as faulty as the wish that love could exorcise disappointment brought by love. The story to me is like an eye drop for the mind. It doesn’t offer a resolution to life’s muddiness, but it offers a moment of clarity. Yiyun Li “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” by William H Gass (1968)

Cheever is known as a chronicler of the suburbs, but in this story the leafy neighbourhood of Shady Hill, a recurring location in his fiction, blends the domestic with something much stranger, almost magical. The story is comic (its title mirrors William Wycherley’s 1675 comedy of manners The Country-Wife), but darker currents work beneath its surface and it builds to a stunning finale that is one of the most rapturous passages Cheever ever wrote. “An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad (1897) A character finishes creating the first time travel machine, only to discover it can only move in two-minute increments. Alice Munro carries us deep inside particular moments. Photograph: Alice Munro./Alamy “The Siren” by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1961) A granddaughter attempts to connect with her long-lost grandmother by cooking through the family cookbook. In the midst of a plague-ridden Venice, an inspector begins a series of unethical experiments to find a cure.A sailor banished to a year-long journey to atone for his crimes must reconcile with what he's done. A family dynasty threatens to fall apart when an illegitimate child steps into the picture with a list of demands. A famous saying gets credited to the wrong person, but no one will believe them when they correct people.