Personal Anthology with Jonathan Gibbs

A Personal Anthology is a great website and newsletter, a goldmine of incredible stories, and an idea I wish I’d had.

Thanks to Lena Valencia, I’m new to the project by Jonathan Gibbs called A Personal Anthology, and if you are too then scrap your plans and find a comfortable place to sit. You might be a while.

Gibbs invites folks to compile their own anthology of a dozen of their favourite short stories, and write a short introduction to each. Many are available online, some are paywalled or only available in printed form. He’s been doing this for seven years, which in internet time is stunning.

Here’s a post Gibbs wrote around the fifth anniversary of the project, defining it and giving some insight into how it has grown and changed. I personally love the word cloud on the right of the page that lists the authors’ names, with the size of the text relative to the number of inclusions. From the post:

A Personal Anthology has one essential difference to Desert Island Discs. Guests on that programme find themselves cast away with eight separate, individual discs. What thrilled me about the idea of A Personal Anthology was the thought experiment of bringing twelve stories together as a single object, of imagining actually having that book of stories in my hand. My name on the front, my taste and editorial rationale the only glue holding it together.

He doesn’t define ‘short story’ for his contributors. Anything goes:

A.V Marraccini’s anthology […] includes a hip-hop concept album by clipping. alongside an algorithmically-generated novel by Joshua Rothes, Plato’s Symposium, “the complete opus of Samuel Delaney”… and a prayer nut

Lena Valencia, whose Personal Anthology led me to a couple of stories included in this post, included a Nick Cave song as her last entry, which, as a new Nick Cave fan, I thought was a killer choice. Here it is:

I’ve never had so many browser tabs open, and it’s helped build out my wish list of new books as well. The site is a goldmine of genius writing. It’s an idea I desperately want to steal for this website, and maybe if I can develop a clever variation and a larger audience here, I’ll do something like it.

Subscribe Form