INTERVIEW: In this exclusive interview, Alison MacLeod talks with Zoe Gilbert about three of her recent short stories – collected in all the beloved ghosts – inspired by Anton Chekhov, discussing the subtle humours of his work, his lightness of touch and his anti-heroic view of human nature.
TOBY PARKER REES looks at life and death in Thomas Bernhard’s laconic short story collection, The Voice Imitator: ‘The qualities of the individual stories are important – they are funny, quietly affecting and beautifully composed – but it is the accrued silence between them that gives The Voice Imitator its heft…’
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL explores the film adaptation of ‘The Dead’, one of James Joyce’s most celebrated short stories: ‘Although he was American, Huston had Irish citizenship and famously loved the country. It is surely apt, then, that the words of his final film should have come from one of Ireland’s most renowned writers, but more than that, that those words are a reflection on the inevitable falling of vitality into mortality…’
Author MARY O’DONNELL guides us through an excision of the exclamation mark in fiction: ‘So, how to perform what I call an Exclamectomy? For most of us, it’s actually a question of becoming more aware of the sound of things, and of the voice in which a phrase is uttered…’
KATE SMITH dives into the uncomfortable world of a short story by Julie Orringer: ‘‘Pilgrims’, the story that opens Julie Orringer’s collection How to Breathe Under Water, is remarkable and satisfying in its own right, and, once you’ve read the whole collection, to re-read ‘Pilgrims’ is to hear not only the clarity of its own notes but something of those of the stories to come…’
CHRISTINE GENOVESE finds the uneasiness of Patrick White’s last three stories: ‘To me he’s one of the world’s great writers of magic realism with a touch of mysticism. His writing style is trenchant and studded with surprises…’
STORY: We are delighted to bring you CECILIA DAVIDSSON’s short story ‘Sunflowers’, translated for the first time into English. ‘Cecilia Davidsson is a writer and senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Linnaeus University in Växjö in the southern part of Sweden…’
ARIELLA DIAMOND gives a personal response to Rob Doyle’s short story collection This is the Ritual and examines its relationship to Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘The influences of Ulysses on this collection of stories is hard to ignore and, in its way, it is a kind of homage to the King of Modernism, it is a step forward into the future of Ulysses and I love every inch of it…’
USCHI GATWARD explores the hidden depths of Dorothy Parker’s short story ‘The Standard of Living’: ‘If we didn’t know we were reading Parker, we’d know at least that we were reading irony. Annabel’s and Midge’s leisure is a temporary state, lasting the whole of Saturday afternoon – although, with that ‘stretched’, its horizons seem limitless…’
SOPHIA KIER-BYFIELD finds home comfort and more than a little irony in Thomas Morris’ collection: ‘For the characters in We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, home is the small Welsh town of Caerphilly. A winding strip of dual carriageway, cutting through the curves of the Rhondda Valley, tethers this place to the locality I have come to call home…’
