ASHLEY STOKES, editor of the Unthology series from UnthankBooks, talks to us about what he is looking for in short story submissions: ‘When sifting through the submissions pile, we often come across the same one told over and over again. Recently, it’s been a middle-aged couple, on holiday in the Med, and one of them slopes off and has a crafty joint and thinks about a younger, more carefree self. Great storytellers take risks…’
Professor CHARLES E. MAY examines the love story of ‘Brokeback Mountain’ by Annie Proulx: ‘The fact of the matter is: Jack and Ennis love each other – with tenderness, passion, and concern – and people who love each other in this way – regardless of their gender – desire to be physically close…’
PATRICIA DUFFAUD examines the short stories in Juan Goytisolo’s The Party’s Over – Four Attempts to Define a Love Story: ‘We feel the heat, we see and smell the “piles of pressed grapes fermenting in the sun” and we are there, trapped with the characters inside their lives…’
‘From the story’s opening, there has always been violence lurking at the periphery, like the many tentacled horrors of a story by Lovecraft…’ MORGAN OMOTOYE explores the darkness and beauty of Denis Johnson’s short story ‘Two Men’.
G. F. PHILLIPS examines the creative and destructive elements of class, gender, work and home in Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’: ‘an embedded narrative, ever-present, impinges on the lives of Lawrence’s industrial workers, so that the domestic squabbles are nearly always about work-related problems…’
ALEX MAIR finds the upheavals of the Edwardian era reflected in the short stories of Saki: ‘To dip into a Munro story is to step across the threshold of good taste, and enter into a darkly satirical universe; one filled with strange beasts, terrifying aunts, blood-thirsty animals, talking hens and angry, unyielding, god-like weasels.’
MIKE SMITH unearths the moral dilemmas of Marc Le Goupils’ short story ‘The Cross-Roads’: ‘Laid almost reverently in the wheelbarrow, with a soft pillow to support her head, the gypsy woman is trundled from place to place in search of somewhere she can die, at someone else’s expense…’
‘By the time these pieces were published, he had established a life in the world of literature and journalism, a life of editing with a reputation for impeccable taste and criticism…’ J.K. FOX finds quiet elegance and profundity in Francis Wyndham’s The Other Garden and Collected Stories.
MARCELLA O’CONNOR shows us that Bowen’s ‘The New House’ isn’t as straightforward as it first appears: ‘a closer reading reveals that it is actually a radical literary experiment where the setting is used to tell the story of a man’s phantom pregnancy…’
‘A story for our times, ‘Hard Times’ by Ron Rash should be required reading for politicians…’ KATH McKAY recommends the heartbreaking writing of Ron Rash.
