Small Wonder Festival Highlights 2017
LOREE WESTRON is getting ready for the Small Wonder Festival at Charleston House. Here, she provides a brief overview of the festival and looks at some of the highlights visitors can expect…
Story: An Armenian in Dublin by Mary O’Donnell
STORY: We are delighted to bring you ‘An Armenian in Dublin’, a short story from Irish author Mary O’Donnell: ‘Galo and me have made our way home from the town’s newest watering hole, the Bogota Bar, which describes itself in the local paper as “a meeting point for all things Latino —music, dance & the best of vino!” Someone had hung castanets on the walls, along with pictures of flamenco dancers, and posters of bulls…’
Short Story Masterclass with… Adam Marek
PODCAST: In the first instalment of the sixth series of our Short Story Masterclass podcasts, Zoe Gilbert interviews award-winning author Adam Marek, discussing the distinction between the fantastic and the surreal, childhood influences, and where stories start and how they develop…
Story: Cecilia Davidsson’s ‘High Mountains, Deep Valleys’
STORY: We are delighted to bring you CECILIA DAVIDSSON’s short story ‘High Mountains, Deep Valleys’, translated for the first time into English: ‘We drive into Grimsdalen after putting seventy Norwegian kronor into a roadside box by the barrier, and as the landscape opens up I hear Nils from the back seat saying something in a gruff voice. He’s not spoken a word since we got into the car this morning…’
Gothic Imagination in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL examines Roger Corman’s gothic adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: ‘House of Usher is perhaps Corman’s most interesting adaptation in that, departing quite drastically from Poe’s narrative, it still captures the excess of Poe’s gothic aesthetic. Retaining the histrionics of Poe’s story, Corman’s House of Usher represents Poe’s imaginative hyper-reality with vivid, saturated colour, a wildly over the top central performance from Vincent Price, and a pulpy, kitsch sensibility…’
Seen in Mirrors
MIKE SMITH finds a short story hidden in the pages of Arthur Miller’s autobiography: ‘I got the distinct sense that I was reading a very good, well-structured and polished short story … a story beautifully told, with a clear beginning…’
Interview: Alison MacLeod on Anton Chekhov
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.
The Voice Imitator: Thomas Bernhard’s Existence Machine
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…’
A Light Fringe of Snow
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…’
How to Perform an Exclamectomy
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…’