MARCELLA O’CONNOR shows us that Bowen’s ‘The New House’ isn’t as straightforward as it first appears: ‘a closer reading reveals that it is actually a radical literary experiment where the setting is used to tell the story of a man’s phantom pregnancy…’
JENNIE RYAN discusses the life of acclaimed science fiction writer Ray Bradbury: ‘Over the next decade, Bradbury continued contributing to many of the popular ‘pulp’ magazines, but he also started submitting to some of the more literary publications, including The New Yorker…’
‘Aimee Bender is a writer who turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, and vice versa…’ In this Author Profile piece, DEBBIE KINSEY looks at the influences behind Aimee Bender’s writing life.
MOA LINDUNGER explores the themes of home and cultural identity in the short stories of Adnan Mahmutovic: ‘What we find in this collection, is a myriad of stories of home in which its smells, textures and people are mythologised and romanticised, at times in absurdum – generally known as nostalgia…’
‘On Wednesday 20th March 2013, I lost a friend. I’d never met him but he’d made me laugh, cry, be fearful and shocked. He had been with me as I hid under the covers in my childhood, and opened a door into the world of horror stories.’ KATE MURRAY remembers the short stories of James Herbert.
SYLVIA PETTER’s Author Profile introduces us to Australian writer Janette Turner Hospital: ‘A spouse reluctantly accompanies her husband on sabbatical from a Canadian university to a town in Southern India. While he does research on the iconography of the temple in Trivandrum, she taps out a short story on a manual typewriter…’
This year’s Edge Hill University Short Story Prize has been won by the seemingly unstoppable Kevin Barry for his collection Dark Lies The Island.
“For me the short story is my first love… I think that the genre has become more popular in recent years, particularly as more people are reading online, so they want more intense reads and the short story fits this perfectly – long may it continue.”
‘You could say Julio Cortázar was destined to write from the moment he was christened with the name Julio, after the French writer Jules Verne.’ HUGH FULHAM-McQUILLAN takes us through the life and works of Julio Cortázar.
‘The whole point of fiction should be to allow the reader to experience life from inside different people’s skins’. MILES SALTER interviews Michel Faber and considers the many worlds of his fiction.
‘After reading just one story, ‘Hollow’, Andre Dubus wrote: ‘I wish someone could have saved him’. Joyce Carol Oates compared him to Hemingway; Jayne Anne Phillips – a fellow West Virginian – to the Joyce of Dubliners…’ In this Author Profile, SEAN MARTIN shows us the brief writing life of Breece D’J Pancake.
