‘These tales are not classic ghost stories to be read aloud by candlelight at the fireside. They are unlikely to keep you awake at night, twitching at the creaks and groans of an empty house. But they will linger long after reading, as they haunt the deepest recesses of your psyche and buried fears…’ TRACY FELLS takes us into the beating heart of these ghostly tales.
MIKE SMITH compares two stories from James Salter’s collection Last Night: ‘The trajectories of both narratives, although not quite parallel, run close enough for the reader to be aware of the similarities between them. It is as if the author has been testing the same theory under alternative conditions…’
JONATHAN PINNOCK explores the humour in Nick Parker’s The Exploding Boy and Other Tiny Tales: ‘…the humorous writer has a whole kit of additional tools to bring to bear on a subject. Even the serious ones. Especially the serious ones…’
STEPHEN DEVEREUX sees the modern world reflected in Joseph Conrad’s tragic story of a shipwrecked migrant: A lesser writer might have been content with the telling of a story of how a poor uneducated girl overcomes the xenophobia of a rural community, but Conrad has only just begun.
JENNIE RYAN gives a taste of Ian McEwan’s short story ‘Butterflies’, from his collection First Love, Last Rites: ‘Ian McEwan powerfully evokes both the desolation of the urban landscape of London in the early 1970s and its equally emotionally desolate inhabitants.’
TESS ST.CLAIR-FORD finds the life of Carson McCullers reflected in her remarkable short stories: ‘It is the themes of “love and aloneness” that are the defining bedfellows of McCullers’ stories. Always present in McCullers’ work is an overwhelming sense of sadness, of place, of loss and of threads left untied…’
ALEX RUCZAJ explores the shapes and patterns of story writing: ‘In Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderful lecture on the shapes of stories, he draws curve after curve on his blackboard, showing the story arc – the ‘beautiful shapes’ that all traditional stories follow…’
EMILY BULLOCK experiences the shock of connection in the writing of F.X. Toole: ‘During my research I was constantly asked the question, Why Boxing? And my reply was: Have you ever read Rope Burns?’
MARJORIE LEWIS-JONES recommends the short stories of Australian author Mark O’Flynn: ‘His short stories simmer with suburban uneasiness, dislocation and melancholy, and voices that are both familiar and eccentric. They also tap the rich vein of comedy that lurks beneath life’s awkward and painful moments…’
ASHLEY STOKES, editor of the Unthology series from UnthankBooks, talks to us about what he is looking for in short story submissions: ‘When sifting through the submissions pile, we often come across the same one told over and over again. Recently, it’s been a middle-aged couple, on holiday in the Med, and one of them slopes off and has a crafty joint and thinks about a younger, more carefree self. Great storytellers take risks…’
