The Drover’s Wife
JENNIE RYAN roughs it in the Australian Outback with Henry Lawson’s short story, The Drover’s Wife: ‘…he told of a lived experience. His stories are populated with those who truly adopted and loved this new land…’
Walking Inside Ourselves
JENNIFER HARVEY peers beneath the surface of The Lagoon by Janet Frame: ‘…this is an essay about the way a writer sees the world, and the sensitivities a writer brings to experiences which may, at times, come close to madness…’
Looking for Jake
C.D. ROSE ponders on what makes a short story collection, whilst looking at the disparate stories in China Miéville’s Looking For Jake and Other Stories: ‘Miéville is a writer who has had little truck with genre and its resulting hierarchy of snobbery, moving from horror to science fiction to crime to comics to weird and back again, often mixing them all up…’
A Borges World
GEOFFREY HEPTONSTALL profiles the writing life of Jorge Luis Borges: ‘A Borges world is one of paradox and irony. In a few paragraphs, he is able to suggest possibilities that open doors into the infinite…’
Too Little Too Late
LUCY DURRANT profiles the life and writing of Jean Rhys: ‘When Jean Rhys was finally given the recognition she deserved, after nearly twenty years in obscurity, she reacted as blasé and bitterly as anyone who has read her stories might expect…’
Interview with Dan Powell
As Dan Coxon’s latest project – an anthology titled Being Dad: Short Stories about Fatherhood – gains crowdfunding, we talk to contributing author DAN POWELL about writing his memories into a story, his life as a hands-on dad, and his writing processes…
Bowen’s Beginnings
MIKE SMITH learns much from Elizabeth Bowen’s collected works on the art of beginning a short story: ‘The beginnings of stories, and not only short stories, was the first facet of fiction that I began to consciously study, rather than merely notice…’
An Interview with David Swann
THRESHOLDS Assistant Editor DAVID FRANKEL interviews author David Swann on his latest flash collection, Stronger Faster Shorter: ‘My fiction is usually too poetic, and my poetry’s too narrative-based. I think of ‘flash’ as some sort of ‘third space’ between poetry and fiction…’