LYNDA NASH teaches us some useful tips on submitting to short story competitions, advice learnt the hard way: ‘So why did my precious literary effort fail to make an impression? Did it fit the competition criteria? No. Did it open with a bang? Again, no. Did it have a less-than-self-indulgent plot? No, it didn’t…’
ERINNA METTLER takes an in depth look at the controversy around Sarah Hall’s short story ‘Mrs Fox’, after it was aired on BBC Radio 4: ‘When the broadcast was over, there was a brief flutter of outrage on social media. The gist of this was that Hall’s story was overly similar to the 1922 novella Lady Into Fox by David Garnett…’
READ and DOWNLOAD: In a very special post, Dr José Francisco Fernández gives us the Introduction to The New Puritan Generation – the first collection of essays to address the importance of the New Puritan movement, in order to understand this generation of writers…
In this essay, PATRICK YARKER learns something from ‘The Lesson’ by Toni Cade Bambara: ‘A college graduate, Miss Moore has returned with her knowledge, her sober clothes and her undisuadable dedication, to the streets of late-60s Harlem to help educate the next generation, much to its irked disdain…’
JULIET WEST ponders the role of women in George Saunders’ latest collection, Tenth of December: ‘I marvelled at the breakneck prose, the dark humour, the searing satire on Western consumerism. Yet, as I read, I began to experience an increasing sense of unease. At times, I felt as if I had landed in the fantasy world of a deviant male adolescent…’
‘The inaugural London Short Story Festival takes place from 20th to 22nd June, at Waterstones in Piccadilly, the largest bookshop in Europe…’ PAUL McVEIGH talks of the inspiration behind the Festival.
VICTORIA LESLIE recommends Mary Butts’ short story ‘With or Without Buttons’: ‘a haunting and skilfully structured story that, like its subject matter, proves that the smallest things can often produce big results. It is about gloves, and what you find when you go looking for trouble…’
‘The Charles Dickens that we largely remember is the novelist of instalments, who sympathised with the orphan’s plight and the poor man’s complaints [but] he also produced short ghost stories, which, by his death in 1870, constituted a huge collection…’ In this essay, SCOTT WILSON delves into Dickens’ Ghost Stories.
CARYS BRAY recommends the works of Robert Shearman: ‘I looked for clues to his fiction in his manner, and I came to the erroneous conclusion that his stories were jolly. I imagined page after page of ebullience and cheer; I wasn’t expecting horror…’
‘When we talk about editing short stories, and we do, a lot, we talk about cutting every word that doesn’t have to be in a story. But I’m not sure it’s always so simple…’ ANGELA READMAN examines the effects of Lish’s edits on Raymond Carver’s short stories.
