G.F. PHILLIPS considers the impoverished voices in Carver’s short stories: ‘It is a world that conjures up the people’s goal as a means of achieving some kind of ‘American Dream’ in a land made for freedom and plenty. His characters think, speak and act out their shapeless lives, and yet, they adopt a common language…’
WRITING EXERCISE: SHAUN LEVIN, creator of the Writing Maps guides for writers, looks at movement in short stories and how to check you’re getting enough: ‘Kafka manages, in a 181-word story, to include an account of: 1) what is happening, 2) questions regarding what might actually be happening, and 3) a mention of what had been happening before all that is happening started…’
C.D. ROSE ponders on what makes a short story collection, whilst looking at the disparate stories in China Miéville’s Looking For Jake and Other Stories: ‘Miéville is a writer who has had little truck with genre and its resulting hierarchy of snobbery, moving from horror to science fiction to crime to comics to weird and back again, often mixing them all up…’
MIKE SMITH learns much from Elizabeth Bowen’s collected works on the art of beginning a short story: ‘The beginnings of stories, and not only short stories, was the first facet of fiction that I began to consciously study, rather than merely notice…’
It’s the last weekend in September and that means one thing to us at Thresholds: The Small Wonder International Short Story Festival.
GINA CHALLEN discusses the comedy in Franz Kafka’s short story writing: ‘There is a wealth of humour in Kafka; it all depends on how you read him…’
‘Some short story collections open with a very strong story that takes you by surprise, to the point of wondering whether the writer will, as we read the stories that follow, live up to the expectations thus raised…’ JOSE VARGHESE finds much to admire in A.J. Ashworth’s ‘Sometimes Gulls Kill Other Gulls’.
Neil Hargreaves talks to us about Cut a Long Story (CUT) – a wonderful new e-publishing social network, developed by writers for writers.
ALAN McMONAGLE takes a look inside Sergei Dovlatov’s collection The Suitcase and finds the author hidden within the pages: ‘One day in the early 1980s, the Russian émigré-writer Sergei Dovlatov opened the door of a seldom-used closet in his Forest Hills apartment in New York City…’
ERINNA METTLER discovers the intricacies of a novel in stories from author Elizabeth Strout: ‘…when you combine the two tales, and the judgements you made about Olive in the first story, each story becomes something bigger than itself…’
