Masterpieces in miniature

Lucy Scholes on three dazzling practitioners of short fiction: Sarah Hall, Mary Gaitskill and Deborah Eisenberg

With their dark sensuality, Sarah Hall’s magnificent stories have always had an unsettling quality, but her new collection, Sudden Traveller (Faber, £12.99), is a particularly slinking, crepuscular beast. It opens with “M”, a nightmarish antithesis of her 2013 award-winning short story “Mrs Fox”, a dreamlike tale in which a husband watches in awe as his wife transmogrifies into a vixen.

In “M”, the protagonist, haunted by the sexual abuse she suffered as a child, wakes night after night in torment: “An extraordinary medieval agony is halving her body.” Eventually, she is transformed: her lips hardening into a beak, “a crack behind her, huge and dull and viscose, as the wings extend”. She swoops through the night sky, harpy as feminist vigilante, wreaking vengeance on men who prey on women, and offering a stealthy

“cure” to their victims: “Their bodies are reset, if not restored.”

Retribution also lies at the heart of “Who Pays”, another of Hall’s twisted fairytales. Deep in a Turkish forest, a group of women summon an incantatory, collective power (“Who sees? Who pays?” they ask. “Always the women”) to punish a predator whose future promises crimes more terrible than those he’s already committed. “They played together when she and he were small; she thought it was play. How can the weight of one man go on to break a country?”

In Mary Gaitskill’s novella, This Is Pleasure (Serpent’s Tail, £7.99), Quin – a 60-something sensualist and flirt – isn’t quite a predator, but he is facing multiple accusations of inappropriate behaviour. Gaitskill has long been interested in the power play inherent in sexual relationships (the film Secretary, about a dominant lawyer and his submissive assistant, was based on one of her short stories), so when it comes to probing the messy, murky topography of abuses of power and issues of consent, she’s definitely the woman for the job.

This Is Pleasure offers a different

spirit in architectural critic Jonathan Glancey, whose new book, The Journey Matters: TwentiethCentury Travel in True

Style, brings to life 20 very civilised journeys. A few he did himself, such as his 2001 trip by steam train through Inner Mongolia, but

the more historical voyages he imagines (in regrettably clunky first-person narration): eating a lamb cutlet on the Graf Zeppelin as he

take on the classic “he said/she said” narrative, each chapter alternating between Quin’s voice and that of his slightly younger friend, Margot. They’re both editors in New York (she made her name publishing a misogynistic book, Healing the Slut Within), and have been close for over 20 years. The novella doesn’t deny that Quin has abused his power, nor does it refute the suffering – “Heart pain. Real”, Margot realises – that Quin has caused the women now calling themselves his victims. But what makes This Is Pleasure so audacious is that it reminds us that sometimes we want to behave in ways we shouldn’t, so we do things but then we run from them, and it’s in the tension between the two that the truth is located. One doesn’t cancel out the other.

So, too, in Hall’s “The Grotesques”, the highlight of Sudden Traveller, the horror lies in the existence of multiple versions of the truth. A domineering mother won’t let her daughter, Dilly, be the narrator of her own life: “Mummy