Trevor's greatest skill is seamless characterisation: words that appear authorial are actually those of his protagonists

William Trevor was born in County Cork in 1928 and has lived in England since the 1950s. He gave up sculpture when he turned 30, became a copywriter, and wrote his first two novels and several stories largely on company time. These stories, composed "on a battered Remington typewriter in an office corridor in London" and set in England, were "driven by curiosity about the unfamiliar".

Unfamiliarity spurs Trevor's imagination; artists, for example, are almost entirely absent from his work. Consistency throughout his long career is often cited, but while his prose never strays far from a precise naturalism, distinct shifts are nevertheless discernible across his work. The Pinteresque cast to the dialogue in some of his earlier outings is absent from later stories. Since the mid-1970s, Irish settings have become more common – he explained in 1983 that he had been away long enough to develop the artistic distance he required – and over the subsequent decade, politics, particularly relating to the Troubles, gained prominence. The younger writer, despite displaying the compassion for his characters that has persisted throughout his career, was undoubtedly more willing to place the helpless in cruel situations where their timidity is ruthlessly exploited. Of these, the more oppressive examples include "The Penthouse Apartment" (1967), "Broken Homes" (1975), and "Being Stolen From" (1981), in which a woman is manipulated into returning an adopted child to its birth mother.

This suffocating story ends with the projection of a miserable, loveless future that's repeated in the title story of the collection in which it appears, The Ballroom of Romance (1972). One of Trevor's most brilliant stories, it describes the diminished prospects of Bridie, the 36-year-old daughter of a disabled mountain farmer. On Saturday nights she cycles to the Ballroom of Romance, a bleak, isolated hall where local men and women mingle with varying degrees of desperation. Bridie convinces herself that she loves Dano Ryan, an affable road mender. But when their desultory conversation reveals he will marry his widowed landlady she determines she will no longer visit the ballroom and, in the closing lines, reconciles herself to a union with middle-aged bachelor Bowser Egan, with whom she has sometimes dallied in the dark fields:

She rode through the night as on Saturday nights for years she had ridden and never would ride again because she'd reached a certain age. She would wait now and in time Bowser Egan would seek her out because his mother would have died. Her father would probably have died also by then. She would marry Bowser Egan because it would be lonesome being by herself in the farmhouse.

"The Ballroom of Romance" speaks of the same "paralysis" that Joyce identified in Dubliners; that is, a moral failure resulting in the inability to live meaningfully. The two writers share methods as well as themes: the critic Dean Flower notes that "both are masters of the subjective third-person and the ironic nuances of indirect discourse". Like Joyce (and to a lesser extent, Chekhov), Trevor contrives to bury his own voice within that of his characters, so that comments which first appear to be authorial are shown to emanate from them: "objective-sounding information," as Flower writes, "is really subjective … You never quite hear Trevor's voice." Read "The Ballroom of Romance" for the first time and you might think the final lines belong to an omniscient narrator. Read it again, and you realise the inflection is Bridie's: the words not a judgment passed down, but a realisation arrived at; an epiphany. The skill with which Trevor applies this technique is perhaps his greatest achievement as a writer; the irony is that he does it so well it's virtually invisible. "I think all writing is experimental," he told the Paris Review in 1989. "The very obvious sort of experimental writing is not really more experimental than that of a conventional writer like myself. I experiment all the time but the experiments are hidden."

Trevor's stories require careful reading for this reason, and because what is presented on the story's surface often conceals the truth. The tension between these positions is a key concern of Trevor's. Affairs, those most commonplace causes for deception, litter his work, and in the late 1970s and 1980s he became particularly interested in the subjectivity of history. "The News from Ireland" (1986), his story of the potato famine, is glutted with lies and deceptions, from a road to nowhere – an insulting labour project ill-suited to weak, hungry men – to the governess Miss Heddoe's self-deceiving assertion that "I do not know these things", denying unpalatable truths she had earlier begun to apprehend. Whereas other political works such as "Attracta" (1978) and "Beyond the Pale" (1981) show how the weight of history impinges on individual psychology, in "The News from Ireland" Trevor shows characters making personal choices that will reverberate throughout the following 150 years.

Trevor has said that "big house" stories appeal because their milieu is one of doom. Perhaps that's why, given the dying away of the Church of Ireland (Trevor is a Protestant) and the Catholic church's more recent loss of authority, priests have come to feature more heavily in his later work. A conversation between a Protestant and Catholic priest is the subject of his most recent great story, "Of the Cloth" (2000), which, although completely grounded in concrete reality, hovers at fable's borders in a way similar to John Cheever's "The Swimmer". It is a reminder that if Trevor's range of subjects has narrowed it has done so, as he described recently, in the manner of painters who "paint the same subject many times … in search of another angle, another viewpoint …" In 1989, he made another comparison with painting when he was asked to define the short story:

I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.

Next: JD Salinger

Salinger's style evolved over the years before his self-imposed silence, but his stories share an 'uncanny, hypnotic readability'

JD Salinger, who died in 2010, last published a piece of fiction in the 19 June 1965 edition of the New Yorker. He was 46. Other than Jean Sibelius it's difficult to think of another artist of such stature who maintained an elective silence for so long. Rare statements from the author suggest that during his reclusive half-century, spent largely in Cornish, New Hampshire, he continued to write about the Glass family, the New York clan that had, by the last decade of his public career, become the sole focus of his work. As yet, however, no new material has emerged.

The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, its singular narrator, Holden Caulfield, having previously appeared in several stories beginning with Slight Rebellion off Madison (written in 1941, published by the New Yorker in 1946). Catcher, after a slow start, came to be considered by many a landmark American text to rank alongside The Great Gatsby and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but it was with the shocking and strange 1948 story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, that Salinger first and properly arrived. Here Salinger's literary inheritance, from Ring Lardner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway (the pair met at the Ritz during the liberation of Paris), fuses with an existentialist tone absent from his earlier stories. As in For Esmé – with Love and Squalor (1950) we are presented with a psyche afflicted by wartime experience. Esmé's Sergeant X, a soldier who, like Salinger, has fought on the frontline all the way from Normandy to Bavaria, sits in the requisitioned house of a Nazi official, in the "harsh, watty glare" of a naked light bulb, and recollects an afternoon spent with a precocious girl in a Devonshire tearoom. This act of remembrance, prompted by a letter (Salinger's stories rustle with letters, and teem with precocious children) rescues Sergeant X from his despair. In the final line of Bananafish, by contrast, 31-year-old Seymour Glass shoots himself in a Florida hotel room beside his sleeping wife.

Over the next 17 years Seymour and his family colonised Salinger's imagination. After Teddy (1953), the story of a pre-teen genius and Zen Buddhist which is essentially a limbering up for what comes next, Salinger narrowed his focus to the nine members of the Glass family: ex-vaudevillians Bessie (Irish) and Les (Jewish Australian), and their children, Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Waker, Walt, Zooey and Franny. Aside from Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut (1948) and Down at the Dinghy (1949), Seymour's death is the event that haunts the Glass stories. "'This whole goddam house stinks of ghosts'" Zooey tells his mother, while Buddy writes to Zooey that although they've "talked and talked, we've all agreed not to say a word." In these stories, jarring with the manic suicide we encounter in Bananafish, Seymour emerges as a Christ or Buddha-like figure, an exemplar of the Zen philosophy Salinger became deeply attracted to in the late-1940s.

Salinger uses his alter ego Buddy Glass, the narrator of these stories, to smooth over the discrepancy, admitting in Seymour: An Introduction (1959) that the character in Bananafish is in fact more of a self-portrait. Buddy's increasingly non-narrative attempts to chronicle Seymour's life become challenging to read with Seymour: An Introduction and Hapworth 16, 1924 (1965), in which a short introduction by Buddy gives way to a 30,000-word letter written by a seven-year-old Seymour. Both are subtle, skilfully composed documents, but labyrinthine with digression and qualification, and denuded of narrative momentum. "I'm anything but a short-story writer where my brother is concerned", Buddy confesses, but knowing the effect is aimed for doesn't make it less arduous to read. As Arthur Schwartz wrote in 1963, "like Whitman's catalogues, such detail can become boring." Nevertheless Salinger was, as John Updike noticed in an otherwise unfavourable 1961 review of Franny and Zooey, at least trying to evolve, and his "refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers".

Indeed the 1957 story Zooey, disparaged by Mary McCarthy and Joan Didion (who called it "self-help copy") as well as by Updike, seems to me one of Salinger's best stories (although it "isn't really a short story at all", according to Buddy, "but a sort of prose home movie…."). Set entirely in the Glass family's Manhattan apartment on a November Monday in 1955, it describes Zooey's attempts to help his sister weather a paralysing spiritual crisis. It features one of fiction's greatest mother-son dialogues, an intricate dance of love sheathed in layers of hostility, while the story as a whole, as Janet Malcolm notes, has "a deceptive surface realism that obscures its fundamental fantastic character." The more time spent in that cluttered apartment – where Bessie wanders in her robe, Franny beds down on a couch, and the newspapers and buckets of a repainting job lie everywhere but the painters remain mysteriously absent – the more it feels like a zone outside normal reality; a Mount Olympus or, in Malcolm's description, "a mountain fastness." The story describes a day, to borrow a phrase used elsewhere by Buddy, of "rampant signs and symbols": the final conversation between Zooey and his sister, in which he impersonates Buddy while speaking from Seymour's still-connected telephone, brings the four most sensitive Glass children together in a complex and resonant act of love.

Salinger's long later stories contrast in many ways with the focused economy of his classic 1953 collection, Nine Stories, but all his best work has what David Lodge identifies as "the uncanny, hypnotic readability that is the hallmark of his writing". He can address profound subjects with prose that has, in Salinger's own phrase, "precisely the informality of underwear". Throughout the extended dialogues and within the restricted spaces he favoured – gridlocked limousines, tearooms, beds and bathrooms – the reader is held, both mentally and physically, by the power and humour Salinger was capable of before he – and Buddy – gave up on "the old horror of being a professional writer, and the usual stench of words that goes with it".

Next:Rudyard Kipling

George Orwell thought he was 'morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting', but Kipling's stories are both original and exciting

For George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling was "a jingo imperialist … morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting". Frank O'Connor thought him "a damned liar"; Craig Raine has bemoaned his "grating air of worldliness"; Edmund Wilson described his entire body of work as "shot through with hatred". For Barbara Everett he is "the easiest of great writers to find repellent".

But Orwell also admired Kipling; O'Connor considered him, albeit grudgingly, one of the great short-story writers; Raine calls him England's "greatest short-story writer … whose achievement is more complex and surprising than even his admirers recognise". Wilson states, "Kipling really finds new rhythms, new colours and textures of words, for things that have not yet been brought into literature … he is extraordinary as a worker in prose"; and Everett asserts that his work possesses "an extreme originality of technique, which deserves all the recognition it can get." You can't, it seems, be unalloyed about Kipling. He not only divides opinion; he subdivides it.

Kipling was just 23 when his first collection, Plain Tales from the Hills, was published in Calcutta and London. Many of these short, tough-hearted stories about civil and military Anglo-Indian administrators began life as "turnover" pieces in a Lahore newspaper. The economy they demanded persisted in his writing, becoming fundamental to his style. In his posthumously published autobiography, Something of Myself, Kipling wrote: "A tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked." The influence of Plain Tales is easily discernible in the work of Isaac Babel and Ernest Hemingway, who also worked as journalists. This passage from The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows (1884) is perhaps a single repetition away from signature Hemingway:

One of the Persians got killed in a row at night by the big well near the mosque a long time ago, and the Police shut up the well, because they said it was full of foul air. They found him dead at the bottom of it.

One of Kipling's most famous innovations is his use of dialect, which begins agonisingly with the 'Oirish' of Private Mulvaney in Plain Tales, but which he honed into a powerful storytelling tool. Without it, wrote Edmund Wilson, we wouldn't have had "either the baseball stories of Ring Lardner or the Cyclops episode in Ulysses", to which Raine adds the cockney pub conversation in A Game of Chess from The Waste Land. Meanwhile, Kipling's love of intricate hoaxes, which attains its artistic climax in the Jamesian revenge story Dayspring Mishandled (1928), prefigures Borges.

It is fitting that a narrator so concerned with imparting technical knowledge (how to build a bridge, what being shot is like, the way a boat sinks in calm water – what Pound called "Kipling's 'Bigod, I-know-all-about-this' manner") should have continually developed his technique throughout his career. Some critics maintain, as Raine has noted, that "whereas in the early work excision creates intensity, in the later stories it merely creates obscurity". Certainly ellipsis and ambiguity define Kipling's post-1900 work, which, if not modernist itself, travels on a modernist trajectory. Here, as WW Norton identifies, Kipling "brought to its strange perfection that narrative manner of implication, abstention, and obliquity of which the first considerable example is Mrs Bathurst".

This confounding story of 1904 begins with a detailed description of place – a burning hot beach near Cape Town – and a series of missed connections, both of which take on symbolic importance as four men engage in desultory conversation. They discuss a deserter, his connection to the eponymous Auckland hotelkeeper, and his death in a Bulawayo teak forest, burned to charcoal by lightning. Why did the dead man obsess over a newsreel image of Mrs Bathurst detraining at Paddington? Who is the charred figure found squatting at his feet in the forest? Several theories have been advanced, but Everett thinks decoding the story misses its point. John Bayley sees it as "a perfect artistic embodiment of unreliable narrators and partial views scattered Empire-wide, and also of the fact that most things in life never 'come out'". Its "ambiguous charge of human feeling," writes Everett, "is the very stuff of Kipling's greatest stories".

A similar cryptic energy inhabits They (1904) and The Wish House (1924), which the younger Kipling, beholden to Poe and Maupassant, would have made more shocking and less resonant. The first, written in the aftermath of the death of Kipling's daughter, describes an isolated country house in which the ghosts of dead children congregate. The second – shadowed, like all the stories written after 1915, by the death of his son, John Kipling, at the Battle of Loos– portrays a Sussex cook who visits a "token", or wraith, to take on the suffering of the man who rejected her. Thus her cancer becomes both physical manifestation of her disappointment and symbol of unconditional love. Typically of late Kipling, this moving and disturbing story poses more questions than it answers.

Repressed or thwarted love is a dominant theme in this period, from the strange sadism of Mary Postgate (1915), where a lady's companion appears to orgasm while watching a German airman – whom she may be hallucinating – die at the bottom of a country garden, to its most powerful evocation in The Gardener (1925). The story begins by describing how Helen Turrell's nephew, born of an unsuitable union, came to be in her care. Years after his death in the trenches, Helen travels to Belgium to visit her nephew's grave. The story turns on one word in its closing lines, easy enough to miss, which reveals that he is her illegitimate son, and that the story's third-person narration is in fact an expression of her self-deception. This realisation unlocks the story's freight of sadness, and explains the genteel, buttoned-down quality of its prose. Only once does this mask of reserve slip, when Helen ascends to the cemetery, like a soldier going over the top to face the enemy:

Culverts across a deep ditch served for entrances through the unfinished boundary wall. She climbed a few wooden-faced earthen steps and then met the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath. She did not know that Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her.

The effect, emerging from such nondescript passages, is pointedly dizzying. Kipling may be unfashionable. He is certainly at times objectionable. But at his best he is also indelible, and a much more exciting, original writer than his reputation allows.

Next: Danilo Kiš

Muddling the real and the fictional, the power of Kiš's stories lie in their ability to capture truth by doctoring history

In The Anatomy Lesson, a book-length essay published in 1978, the Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kiš divided the short story into two eras: "pre-Borges and post-Borges." Bearing this out, the last two of the three short story collections Kiš published during his lifetime, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976) and The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1983), represent a remarkable contribution to those fictions, existing somewhere between imagination and the concrete reality of the document. Just as Borges's stories thrive in the narrow strip dividing fact from fantasy, so does Kiš's work find an abnormal power in attempting to capture reality by doctoring the documentary truth.

That method might seem paradoxical, but all it means is that Kiš stands among those writers whose perception of reality, as Branko Gorjup has noted, differs from "those realists whose narrative technique hinges exclusively upon the use of mimesis". In this regard he's no different to James Joyce, Bruno Schulz or Kafka, who all bear significant influence on his work. If Kiš's project is in places more problematic than theirs, it's because of the explicitly historical subjects he tackles, such as the Holocaust and Stalin's purges. "The reader likes to know", he wrote, "whether 'it all happened' just as you describe it, whether you made any changes in the actual course of events; rare is the reader … who knows that 'it all' has never happened … anywhere but in the work itself, be it autobiography or biography, novel or story. The memoir is the last genre to give the illusion of objectivity."

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (translated by Duška Mikić-Mitchell), a story cycle describing the grisly ends of a series of forgotten (in fact, invented) Jewish Comintern revolutionaries, is where he mashes together fiction and fact in the most provocative way. The stories are constructed like unusually artful passages from history books, or excerpts from biographical dictionaries, the text busy with footnotes and qualifiers: "some sources attest"; "despite the meagre data covering his earliest years"; "testimony about him is contradictory". We huddle alongside Kiš, peering into the murky depths of each story, trying to make out details. So convincingly is this done that we need to be reminded, as Matt F Oja writes, that Kiš "is in fact unconstrained by considerations of literal truth: he has at his fingertips all of the places, dates, and facts down to the minutest details, because he is free to invent them as he likes. But instead he chooses to invent the very limits which the historian faces: insufficient written sources, contradictory eyewitness accounts, multiple possible interpretations of a single event."

In muddling the real and the fictional in this way, Kiš is not playing games for play's sake. A half-Jewish ethnic Serb born in 1935 in Subotica, then in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, his father and many members of his extended family were murdered in Auschwitz. He believed, as he told an interviewer in 1985, that "literature must correct History: History is general, literature concrete; History is manifold, literature individual. What is the meaning of 'six million dead' if you don't see an individual face or body – if you don't hear an individual story?" Before portraying the homicidal illogic of Stalinism, he addressed the Holocaust in an outstanding trilogy comprising the short story cycle Early Sorrows (1969) and the novels Garden, Ashes (1965) and Hourglass (1972), which followed the enchanted procedures of Bruno Schulz's "mythicisation of reality". "Schulz is my god", Kiš once told Updike.

Kiš was no monotheist, however. The channelling of a wide variety of writers is one of the defining features of his work. In his recent essay, Transmission and the Individual Remix, Tom McCarthy discusses this kind of "receiving which is replay, repetition", and Kiš himself asserted that "of all influences operating in the history of literature the most important is that of work on work". In other words, as Aleksandr Hemon points out, "Kiš does not borrow from other writers, he communicates with them". Two of his major themes – the struggle with history and the preservation of memory (for him not nearly the same thing) – find their closest echo, appropriately, in the greatest of such communicators, James Joyce. For Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape", and Kiš shares his belief that art is the only legitimate way of making sense of it. Also in Ulysses, at Dignam's funeral, Leopold Bloom stares at the graves and wonders gloomily how we can ever hope to remember the innumerable dead for longer than "fifteen years, say". If A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is a cenotaph – literally an empty grave – for the hidden victims of Stalin's purges, The Encyclopedia of the Dead (translated by Michael Henry Heim) is the same project continued along more blatantly metaphysical lines. Responding to Bloom's anxiety, the title story describes a Borgesian wing of the Swedish Royal Library that houses a book containing the biography of every ordinary life lived since 1789.

Theory lies close to the surface in Kiš's writing, but that writing, as Joseph Brodsky notes, "is essentially a poetic type of operation". Despite the veneer of objectivity his later stories required, the reader is never far from a detail that generates a disproportionate amount of descriptive light. In Simon Magus, the contingency of the early Christian church flows from an image of the apostles preaching in villages, "perched on wobbly barrels". In The Magic Card Dealing, as a murderer steals past a hospital porter – "a former Cossack who was so full of vodka that he rocked slightly while sleeping in an upright position, as though in a saddle" – the violence of the Stalinist era links arms with that of the red cavalry during the Soviet-Polish war, and so on back through time.

Kiš is one of the great European writers of the post-war period, but his reputation in English-speaking countries is not what it should be. His work was just beginning to become better known in the west when he died of lung cancer in Paris in 1989, aged 54, but the posthumous elevation of a Roberto Bolaño has not been his. Like the Chilean, whose work also manipulates biography and history, Kiš contends that fiction can access a level of truth unavailable to the historical record. Kiš often quoted Dostoevsky's judgment that "nothing is more fantastic than reality itself", and wrote in his essay, Advice to a Young Writer (1984), "Do not believe in statistics, figures, or public statements: reality is what the naked eye cannot see". Two years earlier, in the story Jurij Golec, he put it even better: "nothing is ever stable apart from the grand illusion of creation; no energy is ever lost there; every written word is like Genesis."

Next: Flannery O'Connor

O'Connor brings an enigmatic intensity to her gothic vision of the American South

Flannery O'Connor's stories plough a straight and often gory furrow from individual pride to disaster. Writing the way she did "because (not though) I am a Catholic", she described A Good Man is Hard to Find, the first of her two story collections, as "nine stories about original sin, with my compliments". This religious flavour, coupled with the great economy of her prose, and a tendency to focus on two characters inextricably and antagonistically tied to one another, might have made parables of her stories. But the unruly life she invests them with, not to mention her deliciously skewed sense of humour, stops them attaining the clearly defined edges of the purely instructional. "As with the work of any profound artist," Robert Towers notes, "an element of the mysterious – of the unspoken, the unacknowledged – hangs like a shining mist over all that has been consciously intended and consciously achieved."

The English professor Walter Sullivan once compiled a bloody catalogue. Of the 19 stories published in O'Connor's short lifetime (she died from a kidney infection in 1964 at the age of 39, having been diagnosed with lupus in 1950), nine end in one or multiple violent deaths, three in physical assault, one in arson, and two in theft. O'Connor's tongue was in her cheek when she said, "I can't write about anything subtle", but she knew a good joke has its roots in the truth. Her stories are baldly dramatic, and the Georgia she creates on the page – as individual a landscape as any in fiction – is summoned with few, very bold strokes. The sun is "a huge red ball … drenched in blood", a "furious white blister", a "white hole like an opening for the wind to escape through in a sky a little darker than itself". The "fat yellow moon" is seen in the branches of a fig tree "as if it were going to roost there with the chickens". O'Connor so loads her brush with pathetic fallacy that her landscape is alive, the scene nearly always hemmed in by lines of watching trees or woods that gape "like a dark open mouth".

The figures she plants in this landscape –farmhands, conmen, embittered intellectuals, bigots, Bible salesmen and killers – are equally vivid, and the situations they encounter yet more so. Speaking of the disjunction between her Catholic convictions and what she saw as her largely godless readership, O'Connor wrote that "[w]hen you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." The most famous example of this approach, O'Connor's quintessential story, is "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (1953), in which a family encounter the gang of an escaped convict, The Misfit, in the Georgia backwoods. As O'Connor has it, the story's meaning resides in a moment of grace enacted when the grandmother, up until the conclusion of the story solely foolish and self-serving, touches The Misfit's shoulder and tells him,

'Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!' She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest.

It's an indelible moment, yet despite O'Connor's own explanation it is interpretable in many different ways. O'Connor's ability to create characters and situations that resonate as powerfully as they do results in meanings that, as she herself acknowledged, ramify beyond authorial intention. A parable only possesses its surface meaning and actual meaning, but O'Connor's most accomplished stories can seem to point in all sorts of directions at once. Elizabeth Bishop succinctly captured this paradoxical trait when she pointed out that "[y]ou'd have to call 'A Good Man is Hard tßo Find' a 'funny' story even though six people are killed in it".

But if the potential meanings of O'Connor's stories are numerous and plastic, their internal logic is singular and concrete. O'Connor is so sedulous an observer of Chekhov's gun rule that if a family discusses a newspaper story about a killer on the loose, there is no doubt that he'll massacre them; if a bull is roaming the fields, its horn will soon be buried in someone's gut ("Greenleaf"); if a grandfather has bred his own obstinacy into a beloved granddaughter, he will beat her to death when she is obstinate towards him ("A View of the Woods"). The inexorability of O'Connor's plots can, as in these cases, invest her stories with the awful power of Greek tragedy, and indeed before giving readings of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" she'd say that, "like the Greeks you should know what is going to happen in this story so that any element of suspense in it will be transferred from its surface to its interior". If someone's first experience of O'Connor was "The Displaced Person" (1954), at the denouement of which three people passively watch a tractor roll down a slope and crush a fourth, the event would be unexpected and shocking. But the story is arguably more powerful when a familiarity with O'Connor's work makes this ending an awaited inevitability. The tangible menace that her stories exude isn't about "what", but "when".

When her control is less certain, as in "A Stroke of Good Fortune" (1949) or "A Late Encounter with the Enemy" (1953), such an approach can seem a gimmick, calamity arriving like the punchline to a poor joke. Failures like this explain why some critics consider O'Connor's art brilliant but narrow and predictable. But such instances are in the minority, and the late stories "Revelation" (1964) and "Parker's Back" (1965), suggest her talent was only deepening as her life ended. It's tempting to wonder what she might have done with more time, not least to see how the "Christ-haunted" South of her fiction would have been altered by the Civil Rights Act, passed a month before she died. Her position on race was ambivalent, but I tend to agree with Hilton Als that she was "not romantic enough to take Faulkner's Disney view of blacks – as the fulcrum of integrity and compassion. She didn't use them as vessels of sympathy or scorn; she simply – and complexly – drew from life". That same collision of the simple and the complex is what lies at the heart of her best work, a tight compact of the bold, the startling, and the mysterious.

Next: Frank O'Connor

The way he captured 'the tone of a man's voice, speaking' combines storytelling tradition with Chekhovian objectivity

Frank O'Connor, born Michael O'Donovan in Cork in 1903, strikes me as one of those unfortunate authors who's far from forgotten, but is so familiar a part of the Irish literary furniture that he's rarely much noticed. Often these days it's not his stories that are quoted, but passages from The Lonely Voice (1963), his book-length study of the short story. It's unsurprising that this book should prove so hardy: O'Connor was compelling when voicing an opinion. What Richard Ellmann calls the "assumptive tone" of his criticism can inspire, thrill and infuriate, but will never bore. "He was like a man who takes a machine gun to a shooting gallery," wrote Sean O'Faolain. "Everybody falls flat on his face, the proprietor at once takes to the hills, and when it is all over, and you cautiously peep up, you find that he has wrecked the place but got three perfect bull's-eyes."

If his criticism could be scattershot, his stories are the acme of patient craft. Speaking to a student journalist at University College Dublin in the early 1960s, O'Connor described a writing process that incorporated both extremes of his character: "I hate to write a story over a period of even two days because then I lose the mood. I write my stories as though they were lyrics … I like to get the essence, the spirit of a story down in about four hours – in any old rigmarole (I've got to catch it like a poem). And then I polish it endlessly. In my latest book there are stories I have rewritten 50 times."

This labour-intensive process gave his stories what he called, referring to Chekhov's work, their "bony structure", meaning an absolute solidity of construction. Yet their surface is all conversational ease, a story arriving from the next barstool along. O'Connor tellingly preferred to call his audience "listeners" rather than "readers", and believed passionately that the story should ring "with the tone of a man's voice, speaking". This effortless flow (achieved only after much effort) misleads some readers, as Benedict Kiely noted, into believing that O'Connor is "all surface and no depth". But in fact many of his best stories, including "The Uprooted", "In the Train", "Michael's Wife" and "The Mad Lomasneys", gain their great power from the way in which they combine the intimacy and familiarity of the oral tradition with a Chekhovian objectivity.

The balance between these two approaches shifts from story to story, but was present throughout O'Connor's career. It's there in one of his earliest and most famous stories, "Guests of the Nation", the title story of his 1931 debut collection. O'Connor had done "odd jobs" for the IRA during the revolutionary period, and fought on the Republican side in the Civil War, and 10 of the stories in his first collection were war stories. The obvious parallel here is Isaac Babel, who just a few years before had turned his experiences as a Soviet soldier on the Polish front into Red Cavalry (1925), and indeed O'Connor said that "the man who has influenced me most, I suppose, is really Isaac Babel". Yet their military stories are quite different, O'Connor sharing none of the heated relish Babel took in recounting violence. Instead, at the end of "Guests of the Nation" the narrator, having become friends with and then taken part in executing two British soldiers, stands looking out over "the little patch of black bog with the two Englishmen stiffening into it" and is gripped by the certainty that his youth, and whatever revolutionary fervour he had previously held, have both been destroyed. However many times it's read, the story's stark energy does not dissipate.

Where Babel and O'Connor are closer is the skill and emotion they bring to their child narrators, as well as a shared regard for Maupassant (both writers named stories for him). O'Connor's finest stories, though, aren't his portraits of childhood, or those that focus on what Julian Barnes terms his "bristly, fierce, manipulative" gallery of priests. They are the ones that most powerfully capture what he thought characterised the short story above all else: "an intense awareness of human loneliness". Supreme among these is "The Uprooted" (from his best collection, 1944's Crab Apple Jelly), which follows two brothers on a trip home for the Easter weekend. Quiet Ned, a schoolteacher, has been "failed" by Dublin: "He no longer knew why he had come to the city, but it was not for the sake of the bed-sitting room in Rathmines, the oblong of dusty garden outside the window, the trams clanging up and down, the shelf full of second-hand books, or the occasional visit to the pictures." Meanwhile the ordination of his more assertive brother, Tom, "seemed to have shut him off from the rest of the family, and now it was as though he were trying to surmount it by his boisterous manner and affected bonhomie. He was like a man shouting to his comrades across a great distance." Both men are living lives they find intolerable, their frustration only succeeding in sealing them deeper within their loneliness. The story, the most lyrical that O'Connor ever wrote, is also one of his most pessimistic. "We made our choice a long time ago," Ned says in response to Tom's suggestion that he marry a local girl. "We can't go back on it now."

"A good short story must be news," O'Connor said, and his vast body of work contains much that has, through emotional honesty and quality of observation, stayed news. Yeats said O'Connor was "doing for Ireland what Chekhov did for Russia", and whether describing gunmen in the bogs, the inhabitants of lonely farmhouses, or poor Rita Lomasney living wild while all the time becoming ensnared by bourgeois Catholic convention, his best stories attain a distinct psychological and emotional richness. There is a fine short story prize given in his name each year in Cork, but the greater monument remains his stories.

Next up: John Cheever

As National Short Story week draws to a close, Chris Power considers a master of the form who brings something shadowy and troubled – not to mention enchanted – to his depictions of suburban New York

When John Cheever's editor suggested an omnibus collection of his short stories, the writer was nonplussed. "Why do you want to do that?" he asked. "All those stories have already been published." The resulting book, The Stories of John Cheever (1978), became one of the bestselling short story collections of all time, winning its author a National Book award and a Pulitzer. But it didn't just buttress Cheever's uncertain reputation. As Robert Morace notes, it "revived interest in the short story on the part of publishers and readers, making it both commercially more viable and critically more respectable".

Cheever published 121 stories in the New Yorker between 1935 and 1981, and others in Esquire, Playboy and elsewhere. His collected stories runs to nearly 900 pages, despite its exclusion, at Cheever's insistence, of his entire first collection. Hemingway's cadences, clearly discernible in the early stories, slip from view around the time of The Sutton Place Story (1946), but much later, in The World of Apples (1966), the poet Asa Bascomb recites his personal pantheon before a Christian relic, ending with: "'God bless William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald and especially Ernest Hemingway.'" Throw in Chekhov and Flaubert, and Bascomb's list could be Cheever's. In addition to these, Elizabeth Hardwick notes, the "shadowy and troubled undergrowth of Cheever's stories brings to mind something of the temper of Melville and Hawthorne".

But, as Blake Bailey suggests in his extraordinary biography, Cheever absorbed his influences in such a way that identifying them adds little to the work. And if the workings of influence are obscure, in setting he really had no forebears: he became, by chance, the chronicler of Westchester, New York, just as it became the first large-scale suburban area in the world. His Shady Hill is a fictional territory to consider alongside Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or Thomas Hardy's Wessex. But while you might expect social commentary to trip across its manicured lawns, or satire to barge through the mushroom-coloured raincoats thronging its station platform, Cheever's suburban fantasias are a good deal stranger than that.

Proclaiming Cheever's strangeness should be a cliche, but for each generation the WASPiness of his settings seems to shroud his work in a phantom conservatism. Even if some of his most famous stories are fables about radios that transmit neighbours' private conversations (The Enormous Radio), or angels of death walking the streets of Manhattan (Torch Song), the casual observer's general impression remains one of cocktail hours, affairs and hungover Sundays. All those elements are there, of course, but rarely in ways one would expect. "[N]othing in Updike that isn't in Cheever first," writes Alan Bennett, but the similarities are in truth superficial; Updike is much less anomalous. Ben DeMott called Cheever's stories "dense in inexplicables", and Cheever himself told the Paris Review that fiction is "experimentation … One never puts down a sentence without the feeling that it has never been put down before in such a way … Acuteness of feeling and velocity have always seemed to me terribly important."

These words describe as well as any the atmospheres generated by Cheever's best stories, which include, I think, three of the best in the language. Each of these – Goodbye, My Brother (1950), The Country Husband (1954) and The Swimmer (1964) – also shares a profound duality. Cheever, as any account of his life explains, had duality at his core, and it veins the work. In Goodbye, My Brother, the scion of a New England family catalogues the faults of a disfavoured brother, Lawrence, before attacking him on a deserted beach. An early mentor found the narrative "troublingly uncertain". Cheever's response – "There was no brother; there was no Lawrence" – at once simplifies, complicates, and expands the story in several directions at once. The Swimmer is both the account of a man returning to his Shady Hill house via the pools of his friends and neighbours, and a dreamlike fable about a man stripped of everything. As with Kafka's Metamorphosis there isn't a single "true" reading – only two simultaneous realities.

Of these stories, though, it is The Country Husband (1954) that most perfectly accommodates this quality. It is, Edmund White tells us, the story that made Hemingway wake his wife in the middle of the night to read aloud to her. Here, everything is doubled. Surviving a crash-landing while on a business trip – the drama of which is completely ignored by his family – Francis Weed (the surname connoting both puniness and tenacity) returns to the idyll of home only to find a chaotic "battlefield". The babysitter is sick, and Francis falls in love with her young replacement. At a dinner party he recognises the French maid distributing drinks as a woman he saw stripped naked and spat on outside a Normandy village for collaborating with the Germans. The ambiguously named Shady Hill hovers between the end of summer and chilly autumn: "It was a frosty night when he got home. The air smelled sharply of change." I could go on; as Nabokov wrote, the story is "really a miniature novel beautifully traced, so that the impression of there being too many things happening in it is completely redeemed by the satisfying coherence of its thematic interlacings".

The story's justly famous closing lines take us away from a chastened Francis woodworking in his basement, and show us the curious evening rituals of Shady Hill:

"'Go home, Gertrude, go home,' Mrs Masterson says. 'I told you to go home an hour ago, Gertrude. It's way past your suppertime and your mother will be worried. Go home!' A door on the Babcocks' terrace flies open, and out comes Mrs Babcock without any clothes on, pursued by a naked husband … Over the terrace they go and in at the kitchen door, as passionate and handsome a nymph and satyr as you will find on any wall in Venice … The last to come is Jupiter. He prances through the tomato vines, holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains."

This widely quoted passage is exhibit A in the case for Cheever as, in Philip Roth's phrase, an "enchanted realist". But standing alone, this passage appears much more whimsical than it is. Nearly all its elements carefully reprise phrases and episodes from earlier in the story. Most importantly, that extraordinary final line echoes and transforms what a sentimental host tells the Weeds about his wife at the end of a party: "'She's my blue sky. After sixteen years, I still bite her shoulders. She makes me feel like Hannibal crossing the Alps.'" Reencountered here, is this mawkishness being reclaimed in an act of grace? Ironic mockery? Cheever's crowning achievement is the ability to be simultaneously generous and cynical, to see that the absurd and the profound can reside in the same moment, and to acknowledge both at the detriment of neither.

Next: Roberto Bolaño

Invested with a rare belief in literature's importance, his enigmatic stories encompass deep feeling and extreme violence

When he died of liver failure in Spain in 2003, aged 50, Chilean author Roberto Bolaño had published 13 books in just 10 years, and his third short-story collection was with his publisher. He also left behind several works in various stages of completion, including the enormous, engulfing novel 2666. His fame was burgeoning around the world at the time of his death, and posthumous publications continue to appear: remains of "a supernova of creativity," in Giles Harvey's description, "whose light is still arriving at our shores."

It is impossible to write about any one strand of Bolaño's work in isolation, because nearly all of it inhabits one sprawling intertextual territory. Speaking in 1998 he said, "I consider, in a very humble way, all my prose, and even some of my poetry, to be a whole. Not only stylistically, but also as a narrative." Enjoying contrariness, Bolaño rowed back from this statement elsewhere, but the recurrence of characters, themes and incidents in his work is undeniable. His alter ego Arturo Belano, for example, features in or narrates many of the short stories, as well as being a lead character in the novel The Savage Detectives, and the narrator of the novels Distant Star and – according to a note in Bolaño's papers – 2666.

Bolaño's stories take the form of fragments of memoir ("Sensini", "The Grub"), unsolvable detective stories ("Phone Calls"), or anxious transmissions from a region between dream and reality ("The Dentist"). Sometimes, as in "Gómez Palacio", they feel like all three at once. An account of a writer going to a remote town in northern Mexico to interview for a teaching post, the story establishes its strange air of lassitude and dread at once: "I went to Gómez Palacio during one of the worst periods of my life. I was twenty-three years old and I knew that my days in Mexico were numbered." The narrator discusses poetry with the director of the art school, has bad dreams (Bolaño's work is clotted with dreams), and stands in the room of his isolated motel "looking at the desert stretching off into the dark". Parked at dusk in the desert in the director's car, a situation with a vague sexual potential that perhaps neither party wants to realise, a man pulls in a few metres ahead of them. "It's my husband, the director said with her eyes fixed on the stationary car, as if she were talking to herself." The cars sit in silence. When the writer drives away the man in the other car "turned his back to us and I couldn't see his face." The director then tells the writer she was joking, that it wasn't her husband after all.

This admission at first works to defuse the tension, but as the scene lingers the anonymity of the faceless driver becomes more menacing. His identity and motives tantalise. Bolaño once said that if he hadn't been a writer he would have been a homicide detective, "the sort of person who comes back alone to the scene of a crime by night, unafraid of ghosts", and his stories make us detectives at the scene, too, although the culprit and often even the crime remain shrouded. This roadside scene is consummate Bolaño: an event suspended between mundanity and threat that endures in the memory.

In "Mauricio 'The Eye' Silva", Bolaño writes, "violence, real violence, is unavoidable, at least for those of us who were born in Latin America during the 50s and were about 20 years old at the time of Salvador Allende's death. That's just the way it goes." Violence, implied or actual, is an unbroken bass tone running through his work. "The Part About the Crimes", the longest section of 2666, is the most bluntly violent piece of writing I've ever read. Given this, his irony, the intertextual games that connect one distant corner of his fiction to another, and the recurring themes that form the churning centres of his work (exile, idealism, power relations, art), it's surprising to note how moving his writing can be. In "Last Evenings on Earth", B (presumably Belano) goes on a disastrous holiday to Acapulco with his father. They haven't been getting on, but when B looks down from his hotel window one night,

"he makes out his father's silhouette climbing the stairs. First his head, then his broad shoulders, then the rest of his body, and finally the shoes, a pair of white moccasins that B, as a rule, finds profoundly disgusting, but the feeling they provoke in him now is something like tenderness."

In the unfinished story "Colonia Lindavista", the narrator remembers the period when his family moved from Chile to Mexico City: "When I think back to that time, I see my parents and my sister, and then I see myself, and the little group we compose looks overwhelmingly desolate." These moments of tenderness and lament, so simply declared, arrive with an uncommon force, a function of Bolaño's ability to invest his stories with palpable significance, even though what is at stake may remain mysterious.

This is true even, or perhaps especially, when in summary they sound ridiculous. For example, in "Enrique Martín Arturo", Belano and the eponymous poet fall out over poetry. At some point Martín renounces it and goes to work reporting UFO sightings for a paranormal magazine. He re-establishes contact by sending Belano cryptic postcards, pays him a paranoid visit in the middle of the night to entrust him with a box of papers, and hangs himself. The reader is primed for conspiracy. But when, at the story's end, Belano opens the box and reads the papers, "There were no maps or coded messages on any of them, just poems, mainly in the style of Miguel Hernández, but there were also some imitations of León Felipe, Blas de Otero, and Gabriel Celaya. That night I couldn't get to sleep. Now it was my turn to escape." Yet in Bolaño's hands, what might have been a sardonic punchline is instead desperately mournful, a thing of beauty.

Bolaño can pull this off because of the conviction, universal in his work, that literature is as much about ethics as aesthetics: "It goes beyond the page," he told an Argentinian journalist, "… and establishes itself in the area of risk". In a short, playful essay about writing short stories he states, "the short-story writer should be brave. It's a sad fact to acknowledge, but that's the way it is." Beyond that, Bolaño exemplified the truth of every writer being a reader first: "Reading is always more important than writing", he said. His influences and idols included Poe, Perec, Nicanor Parra, Roque Dalton and Enrique Lihn, Kafka, Carver, Chekhov and Borges ("I could live under a table reading Borges"). "Basically," he once said, "I'm interested in western literature and I'm fairly familiar with all of it." Or, as Javier Cercas has him say in the novel Soldiers of Salamis, in which he appears as a character, "I read everything, even bits of paper I find blowing down the street."

Quotations from the stories are translated by Chris Andrews

Next: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

Still neglected by English readers, the Brazilian writer is one of the very greatest of the early modern era

The Brazilian Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is, to English-language readers, perhaps the most obscure of world literature's great short-story writers. Producing work between 1869 and 1908, Machado wrote nine novels and more than 200 hundred stories, more than 60 of the latter appearing after 1880. This date marks the point at which Machado metamorphosed from a writer of romantic trifles into a master of psychological realism, seemingly overnight. The Brazilian poet and critic Augusto Meyer compared the shift to the one between Herman Melville's earlier works and Moby-Dick.

The evolutionary leap is unquestionable, although the precise reasons for it are unclear. Indeed, many uncertainties surround the biography of Machado, who was an intensely private person. Perhaps it's no surprise that such a man should create a body of work that prizes the puzzle above the certainty. Meyer called ambiguity Machado's most prominent theme and the translators Jake Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu agree, seeing it as being "in part the result of his subjective, relativistic world view, in which truth and reality, which are never absolutes, can only be approximated; no character relationships are stable, no issues are clear-cut, and the nature of everything is tenuous." Machado writes with pleasurable clarity – he worked as a journalist for a time – but the straightforwardness of his stories is a camouflage for less obvious, more troubling cargo.

The theatre for nearly all these dramas of uncertainty is the Rio de Janeiro of the Second Empire (1840-1890), which sprawls from his pages as a humid, busy city full of intrigue, gossip and prejudice. Remarkably for a man who became a distinguished civil servant and founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Machado was the mixed race grandson of slaves (slavery persisted in Brazil until the 1880s), and received little more than an elementary education. Growing up poor on the outskirts of Rio gave him an outsider's eye on the bourgeois Carioca society he later joined. His work tirelessly satirises their human inadequacy, by turns savagely or with an ironic compassion. That someone of his background should become Brazil's greatest writer is, as one critic has noted, as if Tolstoy, rather than inheriting Yasnaya Polyana, had been born a serf.

Machado's most recent English translator, John Gledson, says the difficulty of translating him is capturing the right balance of distance, understanding and sympathy. Trapdoors to the unexpected open constantly in his work, from the sadism of "The Hidden Cause", or the bleak violence of "Father versus Mother", to the subtle play of what Michael Wood terms his "quiet, complicated humour". Reading him prompts thoughts of so many different writers that he can only be unique. Poe's chilling shadow falls across "The Hidden Cause" and "The Fortune-Teller". "The Alienist" glitters with Swiftian satire. Machado's shrewd, even devious work with the point of view of his narrators positions him alongside Henry James. Numerous stories anticipate the moral ambiguity of Chekhov's mature work, in particular "A Singular Occurrence". Machado's literary mapping of Rio reaches back to the St Petersburg of Gogol and Dostoevsky, and anticipates the Dublin of Joyce. Finally, some of his more obviously strange works (nearly all of it is strange to some degree, which is part of its brilliance) evoke Borges and Kafka. Given all this, it's little wonder that writer and critic Kevin Jackson would feel confident enough to claim that Machado "invented literary modernity, sui generis".

As wide-ranging as Machado may be in style, however, there are certain themes he continually returns to. Read enough of Machado's stories in succession and you will soon conclude that the most dominant among these is an obsession with time and its destructive passing. Almost all his stories take pains to establish themselves in the recent or more distant past. "She died in 1859", begins "The Cynosure of All Eyes"; in "Eternal!" the narrator tells us that "the whole incident took place 27 years ago". "I've never been able to understand the conversation I had with a lady, many years ago, when I was 17, and she was 30", begins "Midnight Mass". The story is an exquisite rendering of a failed attempt to recapture time, in this case an unconsummated sexual encounter. In "Mariana", a man is transported into the past while sitting before a portrait of his eponymous ex-lover. In "Dona Paula" an old woman becomes almost vampiric in the way she relives an old affair via her niece, who is engaged in a flirtation with the son of Dona Paula's ex-lover. But when her niece is absent, the older woman cannot recapture her own memories in a way that satisfies her:

But everything … was described with the cold and faded ink of an old chronicle, an empty skeleton of history that lacked a living soul. Everything occurred in her head. Dona Paula tried synchronising her heart and her head to see if she could feel something beyond a mere mental reproduction of her past, but despite all efforts to evoke the old feelings, none returned. Time had swallowed them.

What she is seeking can only be delivered, as Proust would define in Swann's Way 30 years later, by the action of involuntary memory. Her failure is shared by large numbers of Machado's characters, who are continually trying to find routes back into the past. In this way the telling and experiencing of stories – and by extension literature – becomes not a way of interpreting the world, but the world entire. At its most pessimistic, as at the conclusion of "Dona Paula", all pleasure lies in a past that proves impossible to meaningfully access.

This conception of a hollow, unreal present tied to a genuine but obliterated past finds a binary in Machado's interest in the duality of the self, and the exploration of characters whose outer and inner personae differ radically. In "The Diplomat" this idea is expressed through the description of a man's unexpressed passion for a friend's daughter. In "A Famous Man" a hugely successful composer of polkas is wracked by his inability to compose 'serious' music. But it is in an earlier treatment of this theme, 1882's "The Mirror", that Machado captures the phenomenon most memorably. Alone in a desolate plantation house, Jacobina, a sub-lieutenant in the National Guard, finds his reflection growing dimmer and less distinct. The only way to bring it back into focus, and thus cling to reality, is to spend a period several hours each day standing before the mirror in his uniform. Jacobina steps out of this strange, haunting story to take his place alongside Chekhov's Dmitri Gurov and Joyce's Gabriel Conroy, men whose fatally divided selves leave them trapped in a limbo between their public and private personae. Just as the characters belong together, so do their creators; writing about Machado in 2002 Michael Wood complained, "Everyone who reads him thinks he is a master, but who reads him, and who has heard of him?" Not nearly so many as he deserves.

Quotations from the stories are translated by John Gledson, Jack Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu

Next: Angela Carter

By harnessing the peculiar power of fairytales, Carter invested her stories with a vibrant emotional and intellectual energy

In an interview Angela Carter gave in 1991, not long before her death from lung cancer at the age of 51, she can be heard struggling with being called an "English writer". She was the least English of English writers, a postmodernist with no interest in social realism. Aside from Shakespeare, Defoe and Blake, her influences came from Europe and the new world: Poe and Melville, the symbolists and surrealists, Borges, Calvino and Joyce.

A writer of great range, she was perfectly capable of describing, as she did in The Quilt Maker (1981), "south London on a spring morning. Lorries fart and splutter along the Wandsworth Road. Capital Radio is braying from an upper window." But she preferred to delve into myth and legend, and the extreme psychic landscapes of "forsaken castles, haunted forests" and "forbidden sexual objects".

A fragment of fairytale glimmers in Carter's earliest work, The Man Who Loved a Double Bass (1962), where an inanimate object is treated as though alive, and helmets tucked beneath motorbikes gleam "whitely, like mushrooms or new laid eggs". In her first collection, Fireworks (1974), the seam thickens discernibly. The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter is a savage piece of incest-themed gothic; in the Ballardian Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest, a menacing magic begins to unfold after a girl is pricked (in fact, bitten) by a flower; in Reflections, a rambler arrives at "a short, crumbling flight of steps that led to a weathered front door, ajar like the door of a witch's house".

In 1979, two years after translating a selection of Perrault's fairytales, Carter published The Bloody Chamber, a series of "revisionings" of some of the best-known fairytales, including Bluebeard, Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast. The book is a supremely well-achieved critique and reformulation of stories that have been shaped by our society, and which shape it in turn. In the 1970s, myth and folklore was coming under fresh scrutiny in numerous ways – Bruno Bettelheim's Freudian reading in The Uses of Enchantment, Ann Sexton's poetry cycle Transformations, the incisive critiques of Jack Zipes– but nowhere is the strange, warped power of the originals harnessed so strikingly as in Carter's work.

By retelling these tales, wrote Lorna Sage, Carter was "deliberately drawing them out of shape … The monsters and the princesses lose their places in the old script, and cross forbidden boundary lines." In The Tiger's Bride, the beauty sheds her skin to reveal "beautiful fur". In The Company of Wolves, Red Riding Hood uses sexual pleasure – hers and his – to tame the wolf.

Alongside these inversions are stories in which the hidden content of fairytales is made explicit. In the title story, a redaction of Bluebeard, the narrator realises by her husband's gaze – "the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh" – that his lust will consume her, while in The Erl-King the objectified beloved discovers that "[t]here are some eyes can eat you". Carter told an interviewer in 1985: "I was using the latent content of those traditional stories, and that latent content is violently sexual."

Light is shed on The Bloody Chamber by another book Carter published in 1979, The Sadeian Woman, which argues that the two versions of the feminine De Sade presents – Justine, the victim, and Juliette, the victimiser – are both wholly male constructs, "and neither pays any heed to a future in which might lie a synthesis of their modes of behaviour, neither submissive nor aggressive, capable of both thought and feeling".

As Margaret Atwood writes: "The Bloody Chamber can be understood much better as an exploration of the narrative possibilities of De Sade's lamb-and-tiger dichotomy than as a 'standard' work of early-70s to-the-barricades feminism." At the time, Carter's nuanced position – as well as her assertion that women could be simultaneously attracted to and revolted by the predatory male – left her isolated. The New York Times labelled her "a rigid ideologue, fervidly feminist" while Andrea Dworkin dismissed The Sadeian Woman as "a pseudofeminist literary essay". To journalist Amanda Sebestyen, she was no less than the "high priestess of postgraduate porn".

Alongside an abiding fascination with folklore, in her last two collections, Black Venus (1985) and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993), Carter developed an interest in impressionistic biographies of historical figures, including Baudelaire's lover Jeanne Duval and Edgar Allan Poe. Most indelible of these is The Fall River Axe Murders (1987), her study of the allegedly murderous New England spinster Lizzie Borden. Here, the discord between Carter's forensic tone and fairytale details – a wicked stepmother who "oppressed her like a spell'; the detail that virginal Lizzie is menstruating on the day of the murders; talk of slaughtered pet pigeons baked in a pie – instils a heavy, malign tension. Carter, wickedly and perfectly, breaks off her account moments before chaos is unleashed, the story left like a blood blister about to burst.

Borden may be a dark expression of the empowered feminine, but for Carter that is preferable to what she called the "zomboid creatures in Joan Didion's novels", or the "dippy dames of Jean Rhys". Carter's ideal heroines possess sharp wits and "a certain cussedness, a bloodymindedness", as with the Moll Flanderseque protagonist of Our Lady of the Massacre (1979). In The Company of Wolves, just as the wolf is about to strike, his supposed victim "burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat". At the climax of The Bloody Chamber, it isn't the bride's brothers who come to the rescue, as in Bluebeard, but her resourceful mother, who guns down the sword-waving, Sadeian marquis with a shot from her dead husband's service revolver (try unpicking that symbolism, if you will).

Carter's methods are too chilly and removed for some; her characters, as one reviewer suggested, more "specimens for analysis". But thick as the stories are with theory, and ascetically opposed to the enveloping pleasures of what Carter dismissively called "bourgeois realism", they nevertheless pulse with energies that trigger an emotional as well as an intellectual response. The story that best embodies this ability to bridge theory and feeling is Ashputtle or the Mother's Ghost (1987), which first takes the form of a lecture before transforming into a profoundly powerful and mysterious vision of, in Marina Warner's phrase, "dark, archaic grief".

Carter thought of narrative as "an argument stated in fictional terms", and she certainly has, as AS Byatt said of Hans Christian Andersen, "designs on the reader". But any successful work of art must generate meanings beyond those it intends, and Carter's best work opens on to a territory that stretches far beyond her immediate aims. Even if we were living in a postfeminist utopia (and the recent Vida report on gender prejudice shows we're not, even in the liberal enclave of book pages and literary journals), these stories would remain as vivid as fresh blood on white snow.

Next: Guy de Maupassant

His prolific output of sensational stories for the popular press should not obscure the incomparable art of his best work

"He is a better writer than you think," Malcolm Lowry once said of Guy de Maupassant. This comment, made to David Markson, indicates the conundrum Maupassant presents to readers. A hugely influential writer of short stories, the sheer mass of his extremely uneven body of work – 300 stories, 200 articles, six novels, two plays, and three travel books churned out between 1880 and 1891 – can obscure his genius like clouds around an alp. Yet while many of those 300 stories fail to rise beyond the anecdotal, nearly a quarter are very good, and within them stands a core of indisputable classics. It shouldn't be doubted that Maupassant is one of the most important short-story writers to have lived.

It was to the detriment of Maupassant's work – although not his bank balance – that his career coincided with a demand from French newspapers for stories of around 1-2,000 words. Jostling with news and faits divers, these stories were by necessity laconic and attention-grabbing, and Maupassant, whose severe economy was a model for Hemingway, had a great facility for producing them. The irony, however, is that Maupassant's best works are much longer. The spareness, learned in his youth from the poet Louis Bouilhet, is still there – as in the opening of "Hautot & Son" (1889), where, as Sean O'Faolain writes, "the scene is brilliantly and swiftly painted, with three lines for the countryside and six for the sportsmen" – but the stories' scope helps avoid the glibness that can mar his shorter work.

When Bouilhet died another family friend, Gustave Flaubert, took on Maupassant's literary education, counselling his impatient charge to hold off from publishing until he was ready (although from 1875 several stories crept into print under pseudonyms). The fruit of this long labour was "Boule de Suif", which Flaubert lived just long enough to read and proclaim a masterpiece.

Set during the Franco-Prussian war, the story's first few pages vividly depict a country being overrun, with "fat and flabby businessmen waiting anxiously for the conquerors to come", and the bodies of German soldiers being dragged from rivers, victims of "secret acts of vengeance". This tension between cowardly self-interest and resistance is the bass motif above which Maupassant composes a sour fugue of hypocrisy and cruelty, as a group of Rouennais notables exploit then shun the prostitute of the title, whose hospitality they had previously enjoyed.

The bleakness of "Boule de Suif" is typical of Maupassant, who considered life "brutal, incoherent, disjointed, full of inexplicable, illogical and contradictory disasters". He is fascinated by seamy details, describing lovemaking just so he can get to the dribble of saliva flowing from a lover's mouth the next morning ("A Parisian Affair", 1881), or envisioning a barroom as an expressionist horror: "They wriggled their bellies and shook their bosoms, spreading about them the powerful smell of female flesh in sweat. The males squatted like toads in front of them making faces and obscene gestures" ("Femme Fatale", 1881). Henry James, with a mixture of envy and distaste, noted that he "fixes a hard eye on some spot of human life, usually some dreary, ugly, shabby, sordid one, takes up the particle, and squeezes it either till it grimaces or bleeds." Sean O'Faolain considered no one spared: "We see the prostitute, the beastly peasant, the timid bourgeois, the civil servant – his favourite subjects – in an unpitying light that exposes their wrinkled faces, their painted gums, their frayed cuffs, their shifty eyes, their hearts that have dried like peas."

While all this squalor is as unmistakable as a septic wound waved under our noses, there are darker, deeper currents moving within Maupassant's work. When you read him in quantity, and marinate in his worldview, a more ingrained desolation become apparent. In a superficially comic scene from the 1881 story "Madame Tellier's Establishment", a group of "local worthies", distraught at finding the brothel closed, walk down to the shore:

The foam on the crest of the waves made bright patches of white in the darkness which disappeared as quickly as they came, and the monotonous sound of the sea breaking on the rocks echoed through the night all along the cliffs. After the melancholy party had stayed there for some time, Monsieur Tournevau remarked: 'This isn't very cheerful, is it?'

Unable to lose themselves in carnality and frolics, the men must confront reality, which Maupassant presents as a yawning void filled with monotonous echoes. Through the shuttered streets of the town at their backs, meanwhile, roams a hostile pack of drunken sailors.

It is regrettable that Maupassant should be known less for indelible moments like this, and more for the twist or "trick" ending of "The Necklace" (1884), the final line of which arrives with the boom-tish of a club comedian's punchline. That story's great fame has had a distorting effect on the rest his work, abetted by every ignorant commentator – and there are plenty – who has identified it as typical.

Regardless of the inaccuracies that surround his reputation, Maupassant's influence is in reality so diffuse that there are few short-story writers of the past century who aren't in some way indebted to him. Often that influence is explicit. When the narrator of "Love", a short piece about a duck hunt, remarks that "[t]here is nothing that makes one more wary, more uneasy, nothing more frightening sometimes, than a swamp", the story develops an unexpectedly psychological dimension, immediately bringing to mind the swamp Nick Adams so sedulously avoids in Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River" ("In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it"). Aside from Hemingway, Henry James (whose "Paste" reworked the 1883 story "The Jewels"), Isaac Babel (one of whose greatest stories is simply titled "Guy de Maupassant"), Kate Chopin ("Here was life, not fiction," she said of his work) and Raymond Carver (who used Maupassant's "Guillemot Rock" as the seed for "So Much Water So Close to Home"), all bear a strong and clear influence. In addition, the theme and execution of "Le Horla" (in its much superior long version of 1887) foreshadows the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft, while Maupassant's harsh naturalism fed into the work of Céline, who also shared his view that life lacks any intrinsic meaning.

It's certainly difficult to find much meaning in Maupassant's final years, which were as lurid as any plot he ever concocted. By 1885 he was suffering memory lapses and eye problems, and would sometimes see his double sitting at his desk. These were early symptoms of the syphilis he most probably contracted during his hedonistic twenties (a period he recreates in an unusually touching story of 1890, "Mouche"). By late 1891 he was convinced his brain was pouring from his nose and mouth, and thought his urine was made of diamonds. "My mind", he told a friend, "is following dark valleys". He slit his throat in Cannes on New Year's Day, 1892, and spent the last 18 months of his life in a Parisian asylum. "M Maupassant is reverting to the animal", his doctor wrote a few days before his death, aged 42. "Not very cheerful, is it?" as Monsieur Tournevau might say.

Translations from the stories are by Sîan Miles and Roger Colet.

Next: Ivan Turgenev

Turgenev's work is imbued with sorrow but pulses with life, and bears powerful testimony to the fleeting beauty of existence

When Gogol died in 1852, Ivan Turgenev, the man whom many in Russia were calling his successor, was arrested for writing an obituary in praise of the great writer. In fact, the official reason was a pretext. Turgenev had already displeased the tsarist authorities with his series of sketches of rural Russian life, published in the journal the Contemporary between 1847 and 1851, and collected in 1852 as Sketches from a Hunter's Album.

This book, which it is claimed influenced Tsar Alexander II's decision to emancipate the serfs in 1861, comprises vignettes of peasant life as observed by a landowning hunter much like Turgenev. Not even Gogol had presented such rounded portrayals of serfs before. As the translator Richard Freeborn notes, while Turgenev would go on to greater things in both the short story and the novel, he was quite aware of the book's merits. At the time of publication he wrote:

"Much has come out pale and scrappy, much is only just hinted at, some of it's not right, oversalted or undercooked – but there are other notes pitched exactly right and not out of tune, and it is these notes that will save the whole book."

Of these, perhaps the one pitched most perfectly of all is Bezhin Lea. This masterful story begins with a description of a July day, and close rendering of the natural world represent one of the deep pleasures of Turgenev's writing. As Edmund Wilson writes, in Turgenev "the weather is never the same; the descriptions of the countryside are quite concrete, and full, like Tennyson's, of exact observation of how cloud and sunlight and snow and rain, trees, flowers, insects, birds and wild animals, dogs, horses and cats behave, yet they are also stained by the mood of the person who is made to perceive them".

Returning home at the end of this glorious day the hunter becomes lost, and as night falls he passes through a landscape of endless fields, standing stones and terrifying gulfs. The mood is that of fairytale, but rather than supernatural beings, the hunter eventually finds only a group of boys guarding a drove of horses. They are gathered around a fire telling ghost stories. Throughout his story Turgenev, the committed realist, repeatedly balances the unreal, the ghostly, with the simply human, fantastical terror with everyday pathos and empathy. The little ring of storytellers, gathered in a small patch of flickering light on a vast plain, effortlessly coexists as concrete setting and existential symbol. At the story's end, when the narrator reports that one of the boys died the following year, he moves quickly to defuse any supernatural tension. As Frank O'Connor notes, Turgenev did not want "the shudder of children sitting over the fire on a winter night, thinking of ghosts and banshees while the wind cries about the little cottage – but that of the grown man before the mystery of human life".

Although Turgenev did occasionally explore supernatural themes, particularly towards the end of his life, his greatest achievements in the short story have love and youth as their main themes. He was at his best when writing autobiographically, and two of his finest stories, the novella First Love (1860) and Punin and Baburin (1874), draw deeply on his own memories. Near the end of his life, Turgenev said of First Love: "It is the only thing that still gives me pleasure, because it is life itself, it was not made up … First Love is part of my experience." This long and beautiful story powerfully evokes both a teenage boy's experience of love, and the complex sorrow of an older man looking back on his youth. The story unfolds over a summer when the narrator, Vladimir Petrovich, becomes one of a number of suitors clustered around Zinaida, whose mother is an impoverished princess using her daughter as bait to lure a wealthy husband. This story sees the first full flowering of Turgenev's ability to create and move between distinct, remarkably vivid characters and points of view, displaying what VS Pritchett calls the "curious liquid gift which became eventually supreme in Proust".

If this liquid sense infuses Turgenev's work as a whole, its point of origin is the individual phrase. Wilson writes: "Turgenev is a master of language, he is interested in words in a way that the other great 19th-century Russian novelists – with the exception of Gogol – are not." Constance Garnett, whose translations introduced most of the great 19th-century Russians to English readers, considered Turgenev to be the most difficult of them to translate "because his style is the most beautiful". "What an amazing language!" Chekhov wrote when rereading Turgenev's 1866 story The Dog. Whether writing of ponies groomed until they are "sleek as cucumbers" or the "steam and glitter of an April thaw", the large edifices of his stories are always built brick by brick, with immense and detailed care. In Death, from the Sketches, he describes the scene of a terrible accident:

"We found the wretched Maxim on the ground. Ten or so peasants were gathered round him. We alighted from our horses. He was hardly groaning at all, though occasionally he opened wide his eyes, as if looking around him with surprise, and bit his blue lips. His chin quivered, his hair was stuck to his temples and his chest rose irregularly: he was clearly dying. The faint shadow of a young lime tree ran calmly aslant his face."

That last detail is a master's touch, all at once visually anchoring the scene, conveying nature's indifference to Maxim's plight, suggesting the border between existence and oblivion, and underlining the solitariness of the moment of death as the observer notes a detail that Maxim never would. Turgenev may not have written quite as often as Tolstoy about the actual moment of dying, but was perhaps equally skilled at summoning the twin currents of dread and banality it so often encompasses.

Turgenev is a poet of disappointment, whose rapturous descriptions of youth are always filtered through an older consciousness aware that it "melts away like wax in the sun". The stunning evocation of childhood in Punin and Baburin begins with the words "I am old and ill now". In an essay of 1860, Turgenev divides heroes into prevaricating Hamlets and mad Don Quixotes, who get things done. As that distinction suggests, action in his work is often troublingly problematic – Baburin's costly outspokenness before his masters, Harlov's fatal destruction of his home in Turgenev's version of King Lear, A Lear of the Steppes– while inaction proves no more profitable (witness the pathetic figure described in The Diary of a Superfluous Man). Yet for all this sorrow and anguish, which led Henry James to speak of Turgenev's collections as "agglomerations of gloom", his stories pulse with a life as vivid as any in literature. In Fathers and Sons, one of the great novels of the 19th century, Turgenev writes of a character's "quiet attentiveness to the broad wave of life constantly flowing in and around us". It's this that his work channels, a wave that carries us ineluctably to our end, but that also contains all the powerful, fleeting beauty of existence. As Vladimir Petrovich says of love, so Turgenev seems to think of life: "I wouldn't want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I'd never experienced it."

• Translations from the work are by Isaiah Berlin, Richard Freeborn, Constance Garnett and Michael R Katz.

Next: Sherwood Anderson

In his story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, midwest maestro Sherwood Anderson lavishes love on a collection of grotesques whose lives have been distorted by an inability to communicate

Certain locations belong to certain writers. Kafka stalks the streets of Prague; Fitzrovia pubs call Julian MacLaren-Ross to mind; Dublin, to the understandable frustration of its other writers, is Joyce. When I lived in the flat expanses of the American midwest I would drive through mile after mile of cornfields, a landscape that always made me think of Sherwood Anderson and his collection Winesburg, Ohio.

Even as Anderson's once-great reputation plummeted, the book, published in 1919, continued to exert a pronounced effect on the American short story throughout the 20th century. His prose carries flavours of Whitman and Twain, and the distinctive, comma-rejecting rhythm of Gertrude Stein. Above them you detect those he influenced: the Hemingway of In Our Time, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Raymond Carver among many others. Sometimes he writes very badly, but when he writes well his discursive style envelops you completely, without fanfare.

Winesburg, Ohio is a story cycle set in a small town in the 1890s. Each story concentrates on a different "grotesque" who inhabits the town, people whose lives have become distorted through an inability to communicate. For Anderson these "grotesques" are not monsters to be feared, but creatures to be pitied and loved. Many of them feel compelled to explain themselves in some way to a young man called George Willard, the closest thing the book has to a hero. George matures over the course of the collection, and in the final story leaves Winesburg behind. The effect of the book is to cumulatively produce an atmosphere of uncomfortable but compelling intimacy. Throughout, hands appear as symbols of the desirability and difficulty of human contact, and it was hands that Edward Wilson Jr used to precisely describe the feeling of reading it: "We are at once disturbed and soothed by the feeling of hands thrust down among the deepest bowels of life – hands delicate but still pitiless in their exploration."

Anderson's grotesques speak to walls, embrace pillows, and shout their private thoughts to empty cornfields. George Willard's mother "wanted to cry out with joy because of the words that had come from the lips of her son, but the expression of joy had become impossible to her". Alice Hindman kneels beside her bed and "in her prayers whispered things she wanted to say to her lover". Desperate at the thought of dying alone, she runs into the street and offers herself to the first man she meets. But the man fate delivers is elderly and deaf, and she collapses at his feet in shame. The scene, Beckettian in its bleakness, is also indicative of the book's sexual charge. As John Updike wrote, "There are more naked women in Winesburg than one might think."

Winesburg's freight of loneliness is so great that it seems more symbolist than realist. Christopher Benfey was only half joking when he called it the "Purgatorio" in a midwestern trilogy beginning with Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology (1915) and ending with Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920). Anderson's realism is a highly unorthodox one that often slips into myth, a quality transmitted directly into the work of Eudora Welty. His small American town exists in a perpetual twilight where men and women, beset with loneliness, wander the streets hungry for connection. Their stories have been described as possessing an "aura of charged stillness", a term that could also be applied to the quietly bleak paintings of Edward Hopper. But there's something of Giorgio de Chirico's eerily unpeopled precincts here, too, where reality flickers into something else then back again:

The garden that had been so mysterious and vast, a place that with Seth beside her might have become the background for strange and wonderful adventures, now seemed no more than an ordinary Winesburg back yard, quite limited and definite in its outlines.

This transformative capability of life drives The Man Who Became a Woman (1923). A feverish story, on one of its numerous levels, of repressed homosexuality, it concerns a young groom who one night hallucinates that he has become a woman. Two other grooms attempt to rape him, but he flees naked into an abandoned slaughterhouse yard where he undergoes a traumatic burial and rebirth in the skeleton of a horse. This rich, astonishing story, which resists a single interpretation and is more ambitious than anything in Winesburg, lands somewhere between Huckleberry Finn and Ovid.

But Anderson's best story, the one that Irving Howe believed "most deserves to be placed among the great stories of the world", is The Egg (1920). Here the twin themes of universal human loneliness and the souring of the American dream combine to bleak, funny and moving effect. The narrator tells us his father was happy when he had "no notion of trying to rise in the world", but marriage and general American competitiveness get to work on him, and impel him towards a series of failures. First comes the chicken farm:

One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many and tragic things that can happen to a chicken. It is born out of an egg, lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see pictured on Easter cards, then becomes hideously naked, eats quantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of your father's brow, gets diseases called pip, cholera, and other names, stands looking with stupid eyes at the sun, becomes sick and dies.

This miserable cycle of despair and failure is epitomised by the egg, and it is an egg the father later uses in a farcical attempt to entertain a customer in the failing diner he has opened beside an isolated railway station. Railing against his ruined ambitions, the father hurls eggs at the customer and comes upstairs to where his wife and son are cowering. He has an egg in his hand and, his son thinks, "he had some idea of destroying it, of destroying all eggs, and that he intended to let mother and me see him begin". But instead he collapses in tears, and the boy watches his mother stroke his father's bald head.

It is a tender moment unlike anything else in Anderson's work, but later, in the darkness, when the boy hears his parents having sex, we are reminded of the earlier line that "hens lay eggs out of which come other chickens and the dreadful cycle is thus made complete". Yet it is possible to suppose that the father's failure has provided the boy with the impetus to prosper. In an unusual moment, the boy sees the bald stripe across his father's head as "a broad road, such a road as Caesar might have made on which to lead his legions out of Rome and into the wonders of an unknown world", and it is possible to believe that the narrator's route to freedom lies via the demonstrative mistakes of the father. This is one of those rare stories that once read continues to grow in the memory, and with each reading produces new meaning.

Anderson wrote the vast majority of his good work between 1916 and 1926, and most of his readers had abandoned him years before his unfortunate death in 1941 (he developed peritonitis after swallowing a cocktail stick). But regardless of his inconsistencies and his long decline, stories such as I Want to Know Why (1919), I'm a Fool (1922) and the problematic but brilliant Death in the Woods (1933) demand to be read by any lover of the form. There's plenty to explore beyond Winesburg's city limits.

Next: Juan Rulfo

Rulfo is one of the greatest Latin American writers. His spare, startling short fiction, set in tumultous post-revolutionary Mexico, possesses an elemental, universal quality

At the turn of the millennium, the Uruguayan daily El País asked writers and critics to vote for the greatest Latin American novel. The winner, by a clear margin, was Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, the book Jorge Luis Borges called one of the best works of Hispanic literature, or indeed of any literature. If the paper had asked its voters to choose the greatest Latin American short story collection, Rulfo's The Plain in Flames would probably have come second only to Borges. Remarkably, these two books, published in 1953 and 1955, constitute two-thirds of Rulfo's entire bibliography, despite the fact that he lived until 1986. "In my life there are many silences," Susan Sontag quotes him as saying. "In my writing, too."

The silences yawn in Rulfo's writing. Its rhythms seem to slow time, and reality's edges fray into a strange gulf. In a story such as They Have Given Us the Land, where a group of peasants trudge across an arid plain, four pages seem to become a vast expanse. It is a negative space, lacking "the shadow of a tree, not even the seed of a tree, not even a root of anything". We are in the central-western Mexican state of Jalisco, Rulfo's birthplace and the territory in which all his startling, bleak fictions unfold. He was born in 1917, and his father and uncle were both killed in the fallout from the Cristero war, in which priests and Catholics tried to overthrow the officially atheist government that formed following the Mexican revolution (1910-1920). Rulfo wrote of his childhood – part of which he spent in an orphanage – that he often saw corpses hanging from posts, and that he spent all his time reading, "because you couldn't go out for fear of getting shot". His work, unsurprisingly, is focused on poverty and violence.

As well as always being situated in Jalisco, all Rulfo's short fiction – written in the 1940s and 1950s – is set in the tumultuous post-revolutionary period of his childhood. It was a time when the countryside emptied as the peasants made their way to the cities, their migration the result of lawlessness, failed land reform and government corruption. In Comadre Hill, the narrator's neighbours "would disappear among the oaks, never to be seen again". "From the ranches", Rulfo writes in Paso del Norte, "the people were coming down to the villages; the people from the villages left for the cities. In the cities the people got lost; they dissolved into the people." If it is sometimes easy to forget or ignore this context, it is partly because Rulfo forgoes any details beyond the immediate confines of the story. Additionally, the haunted quality of settings like the forsaken town of Luvina, which originate in his childhood experience of rural depopulation, situate them in an eerie border zone between life and death, reality and surrealism, that feels less like a specific era than a psychological or spiritual state of being.

As a result of this, many of Rulfo's stories possess an elemental, universal quality. In You Don't Hear Dogs Barking, a father carries his wounded son on his shoulders and repeatedly asks him if he can see the village they're looking for. It is night, and the father can't see where he's going. Samuel Beckett might have devised this scenario, with its blend of absurdity, morality and indeterminate horror. As is true of all Rulfo's best work, the story is pared back to the point of starkness, and invested with a crackling energy. In Tell Them Not to Kill Me!, a bold and brilliant cousin to Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry stories, the impact of this energy is immediate and forceful. In Talpa, by contrast, where a dying man's wife and the brother who is cuckolding him make a long, arduous pilgrimage, the effect is more gradual, as a malignant remorse wells in the unfaithful man like the "yellow water" that spills from his brother's sores:

I had never felt life to be slower and more violent than when we were walking among such an accumulation of people; as if we were a swarm of worms all balled together under the sun, wriggling through the cloud of dust that imprisoned all of us on the same road and had us all corralled. Our eyes followed the dust; they stuck to the dust cloud as if they were bumping into something they couldn't get through. And the sky always grey, like a heavy grey spot crushing us from above.

In stories such as It's Because We're So Poor and the political satire The Day of the Collapse, Rulfo displays his talent for dramatic monologue, a technique he appears to have learned from William Faulkner (who also set his work in a single territory that blended realism and the phantasmagorical). Rulfo brought this technique to a state of extremity in his novel Pedro Páramo (1955), the forerunner of which is perhaps his greatest story, Luvina. In Luvina, an educated and exhausted old man sits in a cantina, warning a young traveller about the town he is heading towards. Like Ivan Turgenev's Bezhin Lea, or Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor, Luvina begins with a transition from the everyday world to a stranger plane, as the harsh landscape lying beyond the cantina is described:

The earth is steep. It slashes everywhere into deep ravines, so far down that they disappear, that's how far down they go. People in Luvina say dreams rise out of those ravines; but the only thing I ever saw rise up from there was the wind, whirling, as if it had been imprisoned down below in reed pipes. A wind that doesn't even let bittersweet grow: those sad little plants can barely live, holding on for all they're worth to the side of the cliffs in these hills, as if they were smeared onto the earth.

A mule driver brings the man and his family to Luvina, then rides off, "as if he were fleeing from a place of the devil". Though the town appears deserted, there are people there, but only old men and "abandoned women" who spy on the newcomers. The dead, we are told, can be seen, "passing by like shadows, hugging the walls of the houses, almost dragged along by the wind". Is the town cursed? Is it purgatory? Is the teller of the story, as he gets more drunk, speaking metaphorically or telling tall tales when he says that the dead walk the streets, or that the children born there instantaneously become men and "disappear"? The story presents a series of puzzles and potential interpretations, while Rulfo, typically, gives the reader no clues beyond the man's speech and two short, tight-lipped paragraphs of third-person narration.

Luvina is the last stop before Rulfo crosses, definitively, from this world to the next. Pedro Páramo is, as a friend aptly described it, "a journey into death but not out of it". If Rulfo's short stories are bare structures that we must scour for meaning, reading Pedro Páramo is like hunting for a key in a building that is collapsing around you. You can read Rulfo's slight but dense body of work in a couple of days, but that represents only a first step into territories that are yet to be definitively mapped. Their exploration is one of the more remarkable journeys in literature.

Translations from the work are by Ilan Stavans with Harold Augenbraum.

Next: Edgar Allan Poe

Full of both concrete and hallucinatory detail, Porter's slender output includes some of the very best American stories

Katherine Anne Porter lived a long life but published sparingly. Her bibliography is patchy despite its slightness – 27 stories and one novel – and yet a handful of her stories rank among the best in American literature, fired by a voice and quality of insightfulness that no other writer shares. Her style, a particularly lucid strain of modernism, was formed from channels cut by Henry James, Willa Cather and James Joyce, and made its own pronounced impression on her fellow southerners Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers. But there is something set deep within her writing that bears no marks of influence, and is not found elsewhere. This unique quality is surely the reason why she can make a serious claim for greatness from a relatively modest platform.

Porter grew up poor, scion of a once grand Louisianan family shunted by circumstance to rural south Texas. Like John Cheever, she devoted considerable energies to convincing people of her august lineage. This makes her sequence of "autobiographical" stories (which feature Porter's fictional alter-ego, Miranda) even more remarkable an achievement, because they are not drawn from life as they appear to be. When she was 30, after a brief, radicalising spell in New York, Porter travelled to Mexico to witness and to an extent participate in the cultural revolution under Álvaro Obregón. Her first stories, written in the early 1920s, take Mexico as their setting.

"Flowering Judas" (1930) took longer to emerge, and is the most extraordinary of Porter's Mexican stories. It blends religious faith, political belief and eroticism in a narrative that feels at once concrete and hallucinatory. Laura, a young, idealistic American, is committed to socialism, but still "slips now and again into some crumbling little church" to pray. The labour leader Braggioni, whose body "swells with ominous ripeness", tries each night to seduce her. Disillusioned, Laura sees Braggioni as a betrayal of the revolutionary ideal, and at the same time realises that her idealism is romantic nonsense. Yet she still runs Braggioni's errands, smuggling pills into prison for a fellow revolutionist who uses them to kill himself. In the story's final sequence Laura dreams that the suicide returns to punish her act of betrayal, each strand of the story combining in a charged and horrific vision.

Betrayal, which as Charles Baxter has observed "gives off a very particular hum" in Porter's work, defines another of her masterpieces, "Noon Wine" (1937). The story describes a failing Texas dairy farm and the hiring of a stranger, the taciturn Swede Mr Helton, whose industry turns around the fortunes of the Thompson family. A decade later another stranger arrives at the farm gate, the bounty hunter Homer T Hatch, who is intent on running Mr Helton to ground for a crime he committed in North Dakota 10 years before. Mr Thompson, however, doesn't want to let him go. The confrontation between Thompson and Hatch is one of the great scenes of American literature: menace throbs beneath a veneer of civility, and the mood shifts queasily between humour, pettiness and grave threat. When Thompson kills Hatch he is cleared by a jury, but cannot shake his sense of guilt. Like the unfortunate peasant in Guy de Maupassant's "A Piece of String", he spends days travelling the countryside explaining what happened to his neighbours but failing to convince them, or himself, of his innocence. His great act of betrayal is to involve his wife in this process, a decision that demeans her and leads to his suicide. An explanation for the extraordinary power of "Noon Wine", which has often and understandably been described as a modernist Greek tragedy, is given by Porter in a 1956 essay: it is "a story of the most painful moral and emotional confusions", she writes, "in which everyone concerned, yes, in his own crooked way, even Mr Hatch, is trying to do right".

Thompson's suicide is described with a haunting simplicity: "Taking off his right shoe and sock, he set the butt of the shotgun along the ground with the twin barrels pointed towards his head. It was very awkward. He thought about this a little, leaning his head against the gun mouth". The passage exemplifies the command Porter shows when writing about death. She nearly died after contracting Spanish flu in Denver in 1918, and in her fictionalised account, the 1939 story "Pale Horse, Pale Rider", death appears to Miranda in a fever dream as a stranger who "leaned far towards her and regarded her without meaning". In the surging stream of consciousness narrative "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" Porter goes further still, to the threshold of death and beyond:

Her heart sank down and down, there was no bottom to death, she couldn't come to the end of it. The blue light from [the] lampshade drew into a tiny point in the centre of her brain, it flickered and winked like an eye, quietly it fluttered and dwindled. Granny lay curled down within herself, amazed and watchful, staring at the point of light that was herself; her body was now only a deeper mass of shadow in an endless darkness and this darkness would curl around the light and swallow it up.

The passage prompts – and earns – comparison to Tolstoy, who, more than any other writer, keeps returning to the moment of death in his fiction (think of that "black sack into which an invisible, invincible force" is thrusting Ivan in "The Death of Ivan Ilyich").

As Granny Weatherall lies dying her mind roves the past, which in Porter's work is an involute and inescapable territory. All of her characters find themselves tightly enmeshed in personal and collective memory, an active force that limits and often determines their actions. To escape this hold, it seems, requires escaping life itself; in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" it is only when Miranda is on the brink of succumbing to her illness that she discovers "There were no longer any multiple planes of living, no tough filaments of memory and hope pulling taut backwards and forwards holding her upright between them". Porter's most complete exploration of this theme is "Old Mortality" (1937), a long, tripartite story exploring the myths families construct around themselves, and the tension younger family members experience as they try to break free of them. At the story's end Miranda rejects the oppression of tradition, but the final line – arriving like a blow – describes "her hopefulness, her ignorance", and implies that her supposed escape is only the next wave of myth making in process. As this suggests, Porter is a fatalist, which explains why her endings so often feel absolutely necessary. "The reader expects," the novelist Penelope Gilliatt once noted, "some counter-twist on the last pages, but no such trick. The end is a true end, and the truth of its acceleration comes when you read any of her finest stories a second time."

Which is not to say Porter's stories are programmatic. They are too intensely realised for that. They possess, in Robert Penn Warren's memorable description, "rich surface detail scattered with apparently casual profuseness", but beneath it rests "the close structure which makes such detail meaningful". Porter denied the deliberate presence of symbolism in her work – "I never consciously took or adopted a symbol in my life", she told an interviewer in 1963– but intention, whether or not she was speaking truthfully, is beside the point here. Great stories generate their own meanings, and take on new life in the mind of each reader. Porter's stories are of the past, but they remain active and alive.

Next: Dambudzo Marechera

A writer who considered fiction a 'form of combat', his work is complex, challenging – and uniquely potent

"Like overhearing a scream", is how Doris Lessing described reading the Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera's 1978 book The House of Hunger. Comprising a novella and a series of satellite stories, it marked the arrival of an extreme and unusual talent that was cut short by death from Aids-related illness in 1987. As China Miéville has noted, Marechera demands "sustained effort from the reader, so that the work is almost interactive – reading it is an active process of collaboration with the writer – and the metaphors are simultaneously so unclichéd and so apt that he reinvigorates the language".

Marechera described his writing as a form of "literary shock treatment", and the majority of his works are written in a sometimes difficult stream–of–consciousness style that owes a significant debt to European modernism. He has been called the "African Joyce", but the description is somewhat glib. After all, if you compare anyone with Joyce you had better specify which Joyce you mean. With its deliberately confused timelines, disorienting shifts between external event and internal process, and predilection for the grotesque, much of Marechera's writing lies somewhere between the night-town episode of Ulysses and JG Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition.

Written in English, his second language (his first was Shona), Marechera's prose exudes tension. He considered English a form of combat, a process of "discarding grammar, throwing syntax out, subverting images from within, beating the drum and cymbals of rhythm, developing torture chambers of irony and sarcasm, gas ovens of limitless black resonance".

Marechera grew up in troubled times. In 1965 Ian Smith's government issued the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), beginning a 15-year struggle that would end with Rhodesia becoming independent Zimbabwe in 1980. Throughout this period a civil war split the country into competing factions attempting to create white, black, democratic, Marxist and authoritarian states. In Marechera's work this state of affairs is represented by student spies working for the government, terrorist cells, violently suppressed street protests, and a general atmosphere of instability and threat.

Marechera's characters are typically outsiders. He was separated from the inhabitants of his township by education (he won a scholarship to the first Rhodesian public school to admit black pupils), separated from his homeland by exile, from his fellows at Oxford by racism, and finally, on his return to Zimbabwe after independence, from those who had fought while he lived in London. As he writes in Black Sunlight, "Steve Biko died while I was blind drunk in London. Soweto burned while I was sunk in deep thought about an editor's rejection slip." Oxford, Black Oxford, meanwhile, is a scabrous assault on the way Marechera (who was a wild and ill-disciplined, albeit brilliant student) was belittled by both the university tutors and his fellow students. The story begins and ends with bitterly ironic visions of beauty and hope, but the despair at its centre suggests that these intermittent moments of joy are remnants of an optimism that is being ground away by adverse reality.

The gap between the chaotic world of Marechera's fiction and his own life is small, although the manner in which he writes is far from typical autobiographical fiction. Rather, the works become struggles between what one critic describes as "competing identities". Often the narrator undergoes extraordinary transformations, like those found in the Polish author Bruno Schulz's stories, although with the accent more on dread than wonder. At the end of Protista, the narrator, who appears to have crossed from life into death, encounters a man from his village who drowned some time before:

Yesterday I met Barbara's father in the valley.
'I'll get you in the end, you rascal!' he screamed.
But I bit the silver button and turned myself into a crocodile and laughed my great sharp teeth at him.
He instantly turned himself into mist, and I could only bite chunks of air.

This folkloric element, effective as it can be, is untypical in Marechera; more often a character's reality is called into doubt in a way closer to the modernist crisis of the self. The effect is disquieting, and can, as in The House of Hunger, be little short of horrifying:

A doorway yawned blankly into me: it led to a smaller room: numb, dark and also utterly empty. I could not bring myself to touch the walls to prove that they were really there… For some reason I began to wonder if I was really in there; perhaps I was a mere creation of the rooms themselves. Another doorway brooded just ahead of me.

Nightmare visions and chaotic boundaries between fantasy and reality also characterise The Slow Sound of His Feet. In this short, devastating masterpiece, the narrator, an artist, struggles to come to terms with the consecutive violent deaths of his father and mother. Memory and reality are skilfully handled, with five successive mentions of waking up or opening and closing eyes blurring the line between dream and reality. The narrator tries and fails "to paint the feeling of the silent but desperate voices inside me".

Of the many potent motifs in Marechera's work, the most definitive one is this inability to find one's voice. When the narrator's mother is shot dead in The Slow Sound of His Feet, his sister's hand, "coming up to touch my face, flew to her opening mouth and I could feel her straining her vocal muscles to scream through my mouth"; when the children bury their mother the sun is "screaming soundlessly"; in Protista, the narrator, attacked by the ghost of a drowned boy, cries out, "but I could not hear my own voice", while The Transformation of Harry ends with "something shrill" tearing into the narrator's ears:

Startled, I looked up. Philip and Ada were also staring.
The maddening high-pitched needles were coming from Harry.
But he was not making any sound.

The heart of Marechera's work, as these examples suggest, is a bleak territory. "Life", as he puts it in The House of Hunger, is like "a series of hunger-scoured hovels stretching endlessly towards the horizon". African critics attacked him for this attitude, Juliet Okonkwo writing in 1981 that his "excessive interest in sex activity, his tireless attempt to rake up filth, is alien to Africa – a continent of hope and realisable dreams". Marechera's position? "If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you."

Marechera is a challenging writer. Even supporters like John Wyllie, a reader for the publisher Heinemann who thought Marechera "a sort of African Dylan Thomas only much more intelligent than Thomas ever was", despaired after trying to recommend changes to one particular work: "I have worked through Black Sunlight three times and now feel that I need to go away into the nice quiet Irish countryside and have a nervous breakdown". But what some see as wilful or naive complication is, for Marechera, an honest accounting of his reality. It can be confounding, sometimes tedious, but also exhilarating, and often reads like no other writer you know. As Marechera's alter ego in The Black Insider states, "To write as though only one kind of reality subsists in the world is to act out a mentally retarded mime, for a mentally deficient audience". This uncompromising stance is a cogent challenge to conventional narrative styles, a declaration that the most convincing versions of reality might not be smooth or fluent, but chaotic and fractured.

Next: Edgar Allan Poe

He's no prose stylist, but the psychological territory mapped by his tales set a fictional compass still in wide use

"I cannot think of any other author", said Harold Bloom of Edgar Allan Poe, "who writes so abominably, and yet is so clearly destined to go on being canonical." But for each writer who has disparaged him, from Henry James to Yeats, Lawrence to Auden, there is an array of works that bear his influence: stories and novels not only by horror specialists like HP Lovecraft and Stephen King, or by writers of detective fiction such as Arthur Conan Doyle, but by Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Edith Wharton, Thomas Mann, TS Eliot, Joyce, Faulkner, Borges, Eudora Welty, Nabokov and Bolaño. Like the obsessions that so often lead to the annihilation of Poe's narrators, his influence cannot be escaped.

When Poe began writing stories in earnest in the early 1830s, the gothic genre, by far the most popular in the periodicals of the day, was, in artistic terms, distinctly hackneyed. Responding to sniffy charges of "Germanism", in the preface to his first collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Poe averred that "terror is not of Germany, but of the soul", and one of the primary reasons for the longevity of his stories lies with their ability to present stock scenarios (live burial, the doppelgänger, possession) in ways that tap into far more profound wells of horror than most gothic authors – or horror writers generally – locate. These atmospheres transcend his sometimes turgid prose, and the finales described as the "campy, floozy 'Boo!' business at the end", by offering destabilising visions of madness, obsessive love, cruelty and endemic menace.

Ever since Marie Bonaparte's pioneering study from a Freudian perspective, published in 1934 (which, wrote Richard Wilbur, "though absurd in all the expected ways … comes up with many constants of imagery and narrative pattern"), Poe's works have often been considered proto-psychological. As Benjamin F Fisher notes, this way of reading them "finds excellent symbols in the spiralling staircases and downward spirals into ocean depths or mouldering sub-cellars of ruinous mansions and abbeys" they abound in. Similarly, while individual stories might take place in London (The Man of the Crowd), off the coast of Norway (Descent Into the Maelström), or a "chain of wild and dreary hills that lie westward and southward of Charlottesville" (A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, the only story Poe set in his native Virginia), the vagueness of many of the settings reinforces the sense that it is really internal, psychic landscapes they are describing.

This idea is underlined by Poe's repeated presentation of buildings as metaphors for the human mind. In The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), his most controlled, concentrated story, he describes a rotting mansion with a crack running through it. Likewise the incestuous Usher twins, Roderick and Madeline, are two halves of a divided self that, once separated, disintegrates. In William Wilson (1839), Poe's superb take on the doppelgänger myth, the boarding school where the narrator and his uncanny double Wilson first encounter one another has "no end to its windings – to its incomprehensible subdivisions". Just as the two boys seem to represent the competing natures of a single psyche, so within the school building it is "difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two storeys one happened to be". Hidden away like an unpleasant notion, Wilson rooms in one of the "many little nooks or recesses" that entail "the odds and ends of the structure". The gap here between Poe's fiction and later theories of repression, or the narrator's "wild, confused and thronging memories of a time when memory herself was yet unborn" and the Freudian unconscious, is irresistibly narrow.

Poe's genius in William Wilson is to tell the story not of a good protagonist bedevilled by an evil twin, but of a corrupt man tormented by a vision of his better self. How like our own internal lives, haunted by the better decisions and kinder acts of our ideal selves. As Poe's biographer Kenneth Silverman points out, doubling is a recurring feature of Poe's work, from the Usher twins and William Wilson to the sleuth C Auguste Dupin and his arch enemy in The Purloined Letter, Minister D–. The occluded name invites the possibility – never distant in Poe – that Dupin's adversary is in fact an alternate version of himself.

Poe's three Dupin stories, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and The Purloined Letter, created the template for detective fiction that Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie would use for their most famous creations, Conan Doyle saying of Poe's detective stories that "each is a root from which a whole literature has developed". Dupin is a man, in Peter Thoms's phrase, with the "ability to read the mysterious space of the city". He is a decipherer of symbols, and it is this ability that Borges – who cites Poe throughout his work – transplants into Erik Lönnrot, a detective who considers himself "a pure thinker, an Auguste Dupin", whose murder investigation revolves around the secret name of the Hebrew god.

Lönrott's quest turns out to be a dead end, the case an elaborate trap. Unlike the Dupin of The Purloined Letter, he cannot outwit his criminal counterpart. Jacques Lacan made much of the fact that in Poe's story every character is driven to act by a letter (or "signifier") whose contents are unknown, and the blankness of the purloined letter is just one of many significant absences to be found in Poe's work. Why, in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, were the two victims rearranging the contents of an iron chest at three in the morning? In The Cask of Amontillado, what is the insult for which Montresor enacts his hideous revenge on Fortunato? What is the incomprehensible horror the narrator neglects to describe in The Pit and the Pendulum? These, like the uncertainty of setting discussed earlier, almost goad readers to supply their own meaning. "Poe believed", writes Louise J Kaplan, "that truly imaginative literature locates its deepest meaning in an undercurrent. The surfaces of his tales are always deceptions", requiring effort to "detect the embedded secrets". There is also another possibility: that these absences bid the reader to supply their own meaning, to interact with and map their own guilt, urges and frustrations onto the stories.

Two of Poe's most famous stories, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat (both 1843), revolve around the same absence: the motive for the murders they describe. "I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him", the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart tells us, while death in The Black Cat arrives suddenly and unexpectedly, apparently as much a surprise to the murderous narrator as to us ("I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain"). Both stories are monologues, both describe maniacal states, and both contain passages of unusually blunt prose, as striking as a folk tale's: "The night waned; I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs".

The echoes of these distinctive, reliably unreliable voices, which foreshadow the stream-of-consciousness technique, can be heard, as shouts or whispers, in works by authors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Nabokov, Thomas Bernhard and Roberto Bolaño. In his Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories, Bolaño writes: "The honest truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe, we would all have more than enough good material to read", and his By Night in Chile can be considered a homage. The book is a novel-length monologue by a right-wing priest, Father Urrutia Lacroix, who is also the pseudonymous literary critic H Ibacache. It is a supposed confession, the rant of a man haunted by his former self, and over the course of the book Urrutia proves as slippery as Poe's earlier creations, while his narrative contains the distinctly gothic vision of a husband torturing political prisoners in the basement while his wife entertains guests upstairs. Like Poe's central works, Bolaño's novel enacts the battle of the divided self, placing us on a steep pathway descending from surface respectability into darker drives and longings.

Next: Clarice Lispector

This darkly addictive Brazilian writer is more concerned with perceptions of objects than conventional plot structures

In The Apple in the Dark, the novel Clarice Lispector completed in 1956, she writes about a man "abashed in front of the white page". His task is "not to write down something that already existed but to create something that would then come to exist". This challenge is one all Lispector's work confronts as it cuts away, sentence by sentence, at conventional conceptions of reality. Again and again she and her characters – the latter often against their will – penetrate beyond the everyday into what she describes in one story as "stranger activity". Her vivid and mysterious bibliography is the fascinating record of this process.

In Brazil (her family, fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms, emigrated from Ukraine in 1921 when she was still an infant), Clarice Lispector became that unusual combination: an avant-garde artist who is also a household name. Fame arrived in the 1960s, two decades after she published her first book and a decade before she died, aged 56, from ovarian cancer. She had no particular desire for fame, just as she had no particular desire to be identified as an experimental writer. She never understood why readers found her work opaque, while the fact that she consistently attempted new things in her writing was, for her, simply necessary to her aim: "In painting, as in music and literature, what is called abstract so often seems to me the figurative of a more delicate and more difficult reality, less visible to the naked eye."

The difficulty is plainly discernible, the delicacy less so. "Probing the way in which consciousness perceives objects," one of her translators writes, "Lispector creates a world of exciting and terrifying perceptions." This world does not exclude tenderness or humour, but it is often coloured by an existential horror; as a reader of The Buffalo reported, "the whole story seemed to be made of entrails". In Love (1952), a Rio de Janeiro housewife, Ana, is jolted from her complacency by a glimpse from a tram of a blind man chewing gum, the mechanical movement of his jaw making him "appear to smile then suddenly stop smiling, to smile and stop smiling". Ana flees the tram and takes refuge in the city's Botanical Garden, but the way she perceives the world has altered radically:

"And suddenly, uneasily, she felt she had fallen into a trap. In the Garden a secret labour was being done that she was starting to perceive. On the trees the fruits were black, sweet as honey. On the ground there were dry seeds full of circumvolutions, like little rotting brains. The bench was stained with purple juices. The waters rustled with intense softness. The luxurious legs of a spider were fastened to the tree trunk. The crudity of the world was restful. And death was not what we thought."

As those last lines suggest, Ana's nightmarish vision is not so easily characterised as nightmare alone. Lispector's relationship with religion was complex but she had a mystic's regard for any level of perception that transcended blinkered normality, no matter how dreadful the revelation. Epiphanies of the Joycean type are a constant throughout her shifting body of work, but they are unusually raw and vertiginous. In one story the narrator declares that she "suddenly saw the chasm of the world. What I saw was as anonymous as a belly split open for an intestinal operation"; elsewhere a woman breaks a tooth and "instead of going to the dentist, she threw herself out of the apartment window". Lispector's biographer Benjamin Moser compares her to Kafka, in that her investigations often locate, in a spiritual sense, "locked doors, blocked passageways and generalised punishment". This moment-to-moment uncertainty makes reading her stories, in Caetano Veloso's description, "a dangerous adventure".

This sense of adventure applies not only to Lispector's concepts: it is endemic at the level of the sentence too. Paradoxes and sudden shifts lie in wait, and inattentive readers can rapidly lose their way. A story like The Hen and the Egg begins plainly enough – "In the morning I see the egg on the kitchen table" – but quickly spirals off into something like a prayer, a philosophical meditation, a language game and an absurdist monologue, flipping between grace, humour and unease. Moser draws a parallel between it and the "cubist portraits in words" attempted by Gertrude Stein. In The Fifth Story, another masterpiece, a woman prepares a mixture of sugar, flour and gypsum to kill the cockroaches that emerge in her apartment each night "like evil secrets" (cockroaches, a recurring symbol, appear even in Lispector's books for children). The story begins five times, the line "I was complaining about the cockroaches" becoming an embarkation point for a series of hypnotic and troubling explorations of death and morality.

The structure of The Fifth Story echoes Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. In the Exordium, that book's opening section, Kierkegaard presents us with a man who tells himself the Old Testament story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac four times, each version changing the emphasis as a cubist painting might simultaneously present a face from multiple perspectives. The man is trying to understand the story, but the repetition suggests the failure of the attempt. For Zadie Smith this curious beginning to Kierkegaard's treatise is "a rehearsal: it lays out a series of rational explanations the better to demonstrate their poverty as explanations", and Lispector's narrator, too, is hunting a meaning that continues to elude her. When she views the "huge and brittle" dead cockroaches from her "frigid height as a human being", she is like a cruel god observing slaughtered innocents, her motives increasingly unknowable even to herself. "Using her experimental technique," writes K David Jackson, "Lispector has created another kind of labyrinth of stories, as in a hall of mirrors or a recurring dream full of the statues of death."

Labyrinths proliferate, both in Lispector's work and in critical responses to it. Her translator Giovanni Pontiero notes that "she is less interested in conventional plot structure than a labyrinth of perceptions". Blake Butler finds her sentences "wired with psychosis, fixated on some kind of understanding of the dark maze of every day". In the late story In Search of Dignity (1974), a woman becomes lost first in the endless corridors of the Maracanã stadium, and later in the suddenly unrecognisable streets of Rio. Lispector's fiction swarms with such moments of threatening intensity. The feminist theorist Hélène Cixous, who took up Lispector's work in the 1970s as a prime example of what she calls "écriture féminine", identifies "an intense worry" running through her work. In its blend of high tension and domestic settings (the most common Lispector character is the housewife) it recalls elements of Katherine Mansfield, whom Lispector adored, and Virginia Woolf, whom she read only after reviewers noted similarities between them.

In fact Lispector was often compared with writers – Woolf, Joyce, Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre – whom she then went on to read for the first time. The critics' attempts are understandable: the more singular a writer, the more they try to find comparisons that ensnare the work. But read enough Lispector and you realise she has a habit of slipping these nets; she both is and is not a feminist, a postmodernist, an absurdist, a mystic. Rather than find an existing style that suited her project, she embarked on an individual quest to locate, as she put it in her first novel, "the symbol of the thing in the thing itself": the word that doesn't merely gesture towards something, but becomes it. Twenty years later, in 1962, she told an audience at the University of Texas that "there are some young writers who are a bit over-intellectualised. It seems to me that they are not inspired by, shall we say, 'the thing itself', but by other literature, 'the thing already literalised'." In her writing she was prepared to dispatch with all else – even words themselves – to get at this essence:

"Since one feels obliged to write, let it be without obscuring the space between the lines with words … The word fishes for something that is not a word. And when that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be thrown away with relief."

Translations from the work are by Benjamin Moser, Giovanni Pontiero and Alexis Levitin.

Next: Jean Rhys

Alice Munro is so routinely called one of the greatest living short story writers that the accolade risks dulling the brilliance of her work, and certainly obscures its strangeness. While the typical setting of her stories is her native small-town southwestern Ontario although numerous exceptions can be found among her 12 collections and one sort-of-novel their content is anything but prosaic. Munro slices through domestic surfaces into the emotional and psychological turmoil beneath. As one of her narrators says of her hometown, "People's lives in Jubilee, as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable, deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum."

On 15 May 1939, when Isaac Babel was arrested on false charges and taken to Moscow's Lubyanka prison, the NKVD also confiscated 15 manuscript folders, 11 notebooks and seven notepads. "They did not let me finish," he told his common-law wife, and it will never be known what their contents might have added to his relatively modest corpus of three story cycles, two plays, film scripts and assorted fragments: in 1988 the KGB officially announced having no record of these papers. That they issued the statement at all is testimony to the persisting impact of Babel's violent, beautiful, troubling short stories.