JOSE VARGHESE recommends Rohinton Mistry’s ‘Squatter’: Its scatological references are intricately related to the plight of a Parsi immigrant in Canada, for whom the frequent necessity to invent imaginary homelands becomes a ‘pain in the posterior’.
MIKE SMITH discusses his attraction to A. E. Coppard’s short story ‘The Higgler’: ‘It was the word itself – higgler – that attracted me. I don’t recall ever having heard it spoken, or seen it used in any other context…’
BELLA WHITTINGTON recommends Julio Cortázar’s ‘Cartas de Mamá’ – ‘a subtle, precise and peculiarly believable story about a young Argentine couple living in Paris.’
LELA TREDWELL recommends Adam Marek’s much-anticipated second collection of short stories, The Stone Thrower.
AMANDA OOSTHUIZEN recommends There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby: ‘I was compelled to read with the same desperate energy that drives Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s characters to survive.’
Podcast: Recorded at the 2011 Small Wonder Festival, ALI SMITH reads two short stories by Muriel Spark, and shares her passionate engagement with Spark’s work.
VICKI HEATH: ‘Hershman’s uncanny use of the minutiae works with such power that these stories are still hovering in my thoughts, though I finished reading the collection days ago…’
Our TWITTER FOLLOWERS recommend their favourite short story collections: ‘From the ‘quirky voice’ of Miranda July, to the ‘underrated’ words of Frederick Barthelme…’
KATE PRUDCHENKO examines the true life stories in James McKenna’s Black Range Tales.
In her essay, shortlisted for the THRESHOLDS Feature Writing Competition, JADE BROUGHTON looks at the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories.
