Mrs Fox, by Sarah Hall (winner of the BBC National Short Story Award)

Continuity of Parks, by Julio Cortázar

Feathers, by Raymond Carver

The Ice Baby, by Carys Bray

It, by Adam Wilmington, winner of the 2013 Manchester Fiction Prize

A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor (from the collection of the same name)

The Company of Wolves, by Angela Carter (from The Bloody Chamber; just basically read the whole book! There used to a half-decent pdf online, but it seems to have vanished: this one is peculiar, but will do at a pinch. Do buy the book, though… or at the very least take it out of the library.)

My Polish Teacher’s Tie, by Helen Dunmore (probably the most uplifting story ever written; from Ice Cream)

These next two are available online if you want to subscribe to The New Yorker (or perhaps already do); at time of writing it’s a dollar a week to do so.

The House of the Famous Poet, by Muriel Spark (in The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories)

A Perfect Day for Bananafish, by J.D. Salinger (from Nine Stories)