STEPHEN HARGADON finds subtlety, power and wit behind the familiar scenery in Elspeth Davie’s short story ‘Allergy’: ‘…there is a richness here, a resonance, an ability, keen and tender, to look at the world from odd angles, to see the extraordinary, the mystical, in the daily churn of human commerce…’
DORA D’AGOSTINO champions the little girl who refuses to be silenced in Grace Paley’s story ‘The Loudest Voice’: ‘Shirley Abramowitz, the grammar-school aged, spunky and unabashed main character of the story, now an adult, is recalling the first time she felt important, when everything and everyone conspired for her to be quiet and compliant.’
JULIA HICKEY explores the life and writing of the novelist and short story writer, Phyllis Bentley: ‘Once upon a time, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a bespectacled child dreamed of becoming a writer. The child was the offspring of middle-class parents. He was a master dyer. She was the daughter of a mill owner who finished cloth.’
MARGARET SESSA-HAWKINS reviews 2017’s Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology: ‘The stories in this collection are also bound together by how grounded they are in a particular moment, how exquisitely the prose captures the emotions and surroundings of a specific point in time…’
EMILY DEVANE looks at Alice Munro’s expansive short story ‘The Beggar Maid’ and sees within all the hallmarks of a novel in miniature: ‘Most remarkable, though, is the scope of the story, which takes us from the couple’s first meeting to a chance encounter many years later. Munro achieves novel-like resonance in short story form. It is a masterclass of technique.’
A. POYTHRESS explores the psychological landscape of Daisy Johnson’s startling collection, Fen: ‘Jonson’s command of language is something else. It’s stark, plain, and recognisable to those of us who remember the patterns of thought that haunted us when we were trapped in our own small towns growing up…’
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL takes us back to the post-war film noir of Graham Greene’s ‘The Basement Room’: ‘One might expect the perspective shifts to dilute the effect of an unreliable narrator, but the result is actually the opposite, confusing the objective truth of the story’s event with the subjective perspectives of the characters…’
LAURA MORGAN explores the changing communities of Canada’s east coast in the insightful stories of Alistair MacLeod: ‘I can imagine MacLeod being in a car when the back wheels lost traction on a dangerous bend, and how he knew, even before the lurch in his stomach ebbed, that he had to communicate to others this experience…’
