In a special Christmas post, we bring you O. Henry’s wintry tale ‘The Cop and the Anthem’: ‘When wild geese honk high of nights, and when women without sealskin coats grow kind to their husbands, and when Soapy moves uneasily on his bench in the park, you may know that winter is near at hand…’
VICTORIA HEATH looks at what makes a great first line, by examining Best British Short Stories 2015: ‘…this is a place where the best of British is collected, and each of these stories must have hooked, from the very first word, the members of the SALT Publishing editorial board…’
SUSMITA BHATTACHARYA discovers a city through the eyes of its resident writers in the Nottingham UNESCO bid anthology These Seven: ‘It is a unique exercise in delving into the everyday lives of people in this city, making Nottingham sparkle and breathe and come to life…’
MIKE SMITH writes about A.E. Coppard’s ‘My Hundredth Tale’ and autobiography in fiction: ‘…what struck me, reading ‘My Hundredth Tale’, were the truths, about writing, about living in poverty, and about relationship…’
DAVID FRANKEL finds unsettling qualities in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Mrs Bathurst’: ‘Written in 1904, ‘Mrs Bathurst’ is a story that doesn’t fit readily with a modern reader’s expectations of Rudyard Kipling. There is no imperialism or the fairy tale charm of The Jungle Book. Instead, it is filled with unease and an air of melancholy that set it apart from all but a very few of his other stories…’
In this downloadable essay, Professor of Creative Writing VASILIS PAPAGEORGIOU discusses artistic research and the mechanisms that have grown around our work in the academic system.
DAVID BUTLER scrutinises the knottiness of Colin Barrett’s prose in the collection Young Skins: ‘…he explains that, rather than character or plot, the first impulse to write a story, and the focus of interest, remains squarely with language…’
CHRISTINE GENOVESE discusses Rosemond Lehmann’s use of personal memory in her short story, The Red-Haired Miss Daintreys: ‘…a meticulously structured masterpiece, teasingly disguised as haphazard recollections from childhood…’
MARCELLA O’CONNOR takes a look at the writing of flash fiction, in particular, that of Stuart Dybek: ‘Although flash fiction has gained recognition among writers themselves, criticism and theory have been slow to catch up and Dybek’s flash fictions are often relegated to the poetry section of literary magazines…’
G.F. PHILLIPS considers the impoverished voices in Carver’s short stories: ‘It is a world that conjures up the people’s goal as a means of achieving some kind of ‘American Dream’ in a land made for freedom and plenty. His characters think, speak and act out their shapeless lives, and yet, they adopt a common language…’
