ALISON GIBBS examines how characters are shaped by politics in Nadine Gordimer’s short story, ‘The Catch’: ‘While Nadine Gordimer was known for both her fiction and her outspoken opposition to apartheid in her native South Africa, she always insisted that politics was not the driving motivation for her stories.’
ALISON ARMSTRONG explores the dark and sometimes violent world of Breece D’J Pancake’s short stories: ‘The hard-hitting stories are set in rural West Virginia, where the characters labour to survive in a blighted landscape of failing farms, industrialised remnants of mines, and nature struggling to reassert itself.’
ROSEMARY GEMMELL looks at Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: ‘When a work of fiction receives the comment that “such a story ought not to be written”, it surely begs the reader to find out why, especially when the critic claims “it was enough to drive anyone mad”.’
Shortlisted in the 2018 Feature Writing Competition PETER JORDAN examines the influence of dyslexia and the paintings of Cezanne on the short stories of Ernest Hemingway: ‘The defining qualities of Hemingway’s minimalist writing — short sentences, short paragraphs, the short concrete word over its longer equivalent, mistrust of subordinate clauses, omission, and suggestion — here perfectly characterise dyslexic writing…’
Shortlisted in the 2018 Feature Writing Competition NICOLE MANSOUR looks at the short fiction of Sam Shepard: ‘His words evoke anticipation, the unknown that lies ahead of all of us. To me they also suggest something of the power of the present moment, about not tying oneself too tightly to any one of those loose ends but rather letting oneself simply unravel in whatever way fate intends…’
Shortlisted in the 2018 Feature Writing Competition SAM REESE looks at the short fiction of Mary McCarthy: ‘Well aware of the relationship between narrative and identity, McCarthy uses the vital compression of the short story form as a way to offer an alternative view of the roles available to contemporary women…’
FARAH AHAMED, runner-up in the 2018 Feature Writing Competition, explores the shifting nature of political and historical events in short stories by R.K. Narayan and Ivan Vladislavic: ‘Every society feels it has evolved a greater understanding of a truth and seeks to entrench this belief, forgetting that in time new realisations will lead to a new dismantling, discarding and repositioning to find a hard-won balance that will also prove temporary…’
ERINNA METTLER, runner-up in the 2018 Feature Writing Competition, recommends Margaret Atwood’s short story, ‘The Bog Man.’: ‘I believe the key to Atwood’s pact with the horny old devil lies in the notion of the ideal reader; the persona all writers have in mind when they commit pen to paper…’
FIRST PLACE: ‘Meditations On Motherhood’ by KATE FINEGAN – the winning essay in the 2018 THRESHOLDS International Short Fiction Feature Writing Competition…
