Compassion in a Cold Pastoral
CHARLOTTE OSBORN finds raw honesty in ‘Cold Pastoral’ by Marina Keegan: ‘…a story about the distorted perception of love, the impact of loss left on the living, and the curse of impenetrable jealousy…’
Shashi Deshpande: The breaking of silence
FARAH AHAMED examines the feminist roots of Shashi Deshpande’s short stories: ‘What we want to reach at finally is the telling, the breaking of silence.’
Built Upon Deception
MIKE SMITH finds he is misled by the unsettling horror of ‘The Old Man’ by Daphne du Maurier: ‘Daphne du Maurier has the reputation of being a writer of unsettling, even scary stories. Hitchcock’s famous horror movie The Birds was based on her short story of the same name, and it’s worth noting that he felt he had to tone down the ending…’
The Stories of Objects
SOPHIA KIER-BYFIELD explores the similarities between the short form and photographs: ‘…the essence of the person or scene is entirely dependent on the viewer’s response. So much is left unsaid, so much more to tell that can’t be told. Similarly, short stories offer us something restricted, abruptly ended, or open to interpretation. When it comes to these forms, so much more lies beneath or beyond what we see and read…’
Happily Married
NICOLA DALY recommends the title story of Claire Keegan’s debut collection, Antarctica: ‘You may, at this point, feel you know where the story is going. The scenario seems a familiar one: a married woman longs for passion and excitement before middle-age take its toll. We journey with the woman as she makes a trip to an undisclosed city for an annual shopping trip. However, the story is shrouded in mystery and Keegan has a way of leading the reader up a certain path only to suddenly take us on a detour…’
The Weird Tale
Editor of Unsung Shorts, GARY BUDDEN, takes us into the weird depths of speculative fiction: ‘There is one sub-genre particularly well-suited to the short form, that goes under a number of names: the weird tale, the strange story, the New Weird, interstitial fiction, and many more…’
The Beginning of the Short Story in England
PROFESSOR CHARLES E. MAY examines the battle between romance and realism in Daniel Defoe’s ‘A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal’: ‘Short fiction lies between the romance convention of presenting marvelous events and the realistic convention of presenting events as if they actually happened’.
For the Voiceless and the Invisible
SUSAN JAMES profiles the life and work of Ann Petry: ‘She wrote about black lives, but her characters weren’t heroes or martyrs. They were flawed. They struggled, and they were often desperate…’
Two Ears, Three Lucks: A Profile of Grace Paley
KATE JONES profiles the career of Grace Paley: ‘The stories she left behind tell the tales of the everyday, ordinary people, often women, who live and breathe both on and off the page.’
Reading Saadat Hassan Manto in an Age of Dislocation
FARAH AHAMED considers the life and work of Saadat Hassan Manto: ‘His characters are not defined by the way they look, but by what they are doing in the present moment. His descriptions are not sensory observations but rather unsentimentally observed settings for particular events.’