As a ghost haunting a house, you must figure out ways to scare the families living there enough to make them move out. As a petty thief in Renaissance Italy you must rise the ranks to become a crime Lord and steal the original Mona Lisa. The ambassador of a small country spends his final moments of life in conversation with his assassin.

Emotional impact … Akhil Sharma. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images “We Didn’t Like Him” by Akhil Sharma (2013) A character discovers they have the ability to visit the past and future, but at the risk that they'll lose something valuable. Cheever is known as a chronicler of the suburbs, but in this story the leafy neighbourhood of Shady Hill, a recurring location in his fiction, blends the domestic with something much stranger, almost magical. The story is comic (its title mirrors William Wycherley’s 1675 comedy of manners The Country-Wife), but darker currents work beneath its surface and it builds to a stunning finale that is one of the most rapturous passages Cheever ever wrote. “An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad (1897) In the midst of a plague-ridden Venice, an inspector begins a series of unethical experiments to find a cure.After their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, a group of women spend the rest of their road trip waiting for help. A character is sold the "Best Year of Their Life" by an illustrious company, with the caveat that they must die afterward. A hermit's caretaker passes away, forcing her to make trips outside to interview a new candidate for the job.

The reality of apartheid, and later the effects of its aftermath, dominates Gordimer’s fiction. Here her narrator, who has escaped the tension of Johannesburg to play at farming in a rural suburb, becomes enraged when, following the death and autopsy of one of his workers’ brothers, the authorities return the wrong body for burial. Despite his efforts to achieve justice, the story’s final, bitterly ironic lines reveal that he is blind to his own racism. “Big Two-Hearted River” by Ernest Hemingway (1925) A granddaughter attempts to connect with her long-lost grandmother by cooking through the family cookbook. A door-to-door salesperson struggles to make ends meet and acts out in a moment of desperation with the next person they talk to. Poe is a master of the “unreliable narrator” – a voice that speaks with devastating spontaneity and is utterly convincing – that has come to be a staple of much suspense and horror fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries. Unhampered by the literary pretensions of certain of Poe’s other, longer stories, totally committed to its unrepentant pathology, and its visceral celebration of this pathology, “The Tell-Tale Heart” is the very essence of Poe, as Poe is himself the very essence of the American gothic tradition. Joyce Carol Oates “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce (1890)Alice Munro once said: “I want the story to exist somewhere so that in a way it’s still happening … I don’t want it to be shut up in the book and put away – oh well, that’s what happened.” Atwood articulates the same position in this fun, thought-provoking story that begins with a man meeting a woman, then offers variants of what happens next. Any ending that isn’t death, she concludes, is false, and the interesting part of stories isn’t what happens, but how and why. “Going to Meet the Man” by James Baldwin (1965) The thing that is most striking about this story, aside from its restrained, grave beauty, is that it should manage to be so moving. On one level it is a dryly detailed and topographically exact portrait of a small town in the American midwest, but on another it is a devastating threnody for lost love. Gass was one of the great prose stylists, and the writing here is typically smooth and pellucid, conjuring its effects by stealth and unflagging control. Simply, and by simple means, a masterpiece. John Banville “American Express” by James Salter (1988) Sarah’s father sends her from Canada to Grenoble as a way of ending her relationship with a married professor, but she ends up on the French Riviera. There she meets Roy, an ex-prison inspector, and rashly moves in with him. The story’s charge arises from a combination of wit, the awfulness of the relationship’s collapse, and Gallant’s profound grasp of the psychology of love affairs. She talks about her characters in a way that makes you feel your own perceptiveness is being worked like a muscle. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)