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…’
DR CHRIS MACHELL on short story adaptations: this month Machell delves into Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, as well as the more recent, subsequent adaptation into brutal video game, Spec Ops: The Line.
KAREN WRIGGLESWORTH reflects on the authentic voice of New Zealand writer Witi Ihimaera: ‘It was just like immersing myself in a hot thermal bath at Rotorua, closing my eyes, and simply listening to the voices of the local people going about their day all around me…’
FRANCES GAPPER explores the life and writings of Dorothy Edwards: ‘Hovering awkwardly on the fringe of the Bloomsbury Group, virtually penniless and dependent on a friend for accommodation, Dorothy Edwards lacked the two things Virginia Woolf considered vital for a woman writer of fiction: money, and secure private space…’
DIANA CAMBRIDGE profiles the life and writing of American author Sue Kaufman: ‘It’s forty years since she jumped from the balcony of the eighteenth-floor New York apartment in which she lived with her husband and son. When she died, she was fifty, and had written five novels – one of which, Diary of a Mad Housewife, was made into a film – and a collection of fifteen short stories, The Master and Other Stories…’
