Penelope Fitzgerald is primarily known as a novelist and biographer, and as a consequence her short stories are often overlooked. Fitzgerald herself played down her work in this form: ‘I've never been able to write short stories. In my whole life I've only written three, and then only because I was asked to. It took me almost as long to finish one as to write a novel’ (HA 472). Reviewers have been more enthusiastic, seeing Fitzgerald's short fiction as a distillation of her talent, constituted of ‘that blend of truthful observation and deadpan comedy that stamped everything she wrote’. Continuities with the novels certainly exist. Fitzgerald's tragicomic wit, art of compression, taste for the macabre and the ‘illusion of total specificity’ are all present in her short stories, as are the themes of misunderstanding, disappointment and loneliness. Yet reading the stories is a recognizably different experience to reading the novels. The sense of disruption of the accepted order of things is concentrated in the stories to the point of menace; the enigmatic presence of the author is sufficiently pervasive that the reader, though immersed in plot and character, can never quite forget that the stories have been written; and the moral, emotional or intellectual kernel of each story, often explicitly foregrounded, is invariably displaced, overshadowed or turned to irony by an unexpected and unfathomable turn. Fitzgerald's short stories, then, produce effects specific to the form, but the question asked so often of the novels applies here too: how does she do it? This chapter suggests that the secret lies in Fitzgerald's uncanny ability to know precisely how much or how little to reveal (tellingly, her preferred title for her collection of short stories was Not Shown). This ability underpins three particularly distinctive devices in Fitzgerald's short fiction: the way in which seemingly minor details come to assume major significance; brief interjections or interruptions in the flow of narration that alter the reader's perception of a story's realism; the strange process by which charismatic minor characters divert attention from the ostensible theme or motif of the story and leave the most lasting impression.