SARAH RACHEL BEART looks finds intimacy and redemption in Trezza Azzopardi’s short story ‘Sticks and Stones’: ‘Azzopardi never imposes, but invites us to watch the protagonist in his confused flux, eventually work things out for himself…’
MIKE SMITH continues his explorations of the stories of H.E. Bates: ‘I recently stumbled upon a copy of H. E. Bates’ 1955 short story collection The Daffodil Sky & other stories. On the cover is a quotation from a reviewer: “contains some of the best tales he has written”.’
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL takes us to war-time Shanghai for a closer look at Eileen Chang’s story, ‘Lust, Caution’: ‘Chang’s prose is direct and efficient, yet evokes well-springs of emotion, historical trauma, and shared cultural memory…’
Get your notebooks and laptops ready – it’s the launch of the 2018 Thresholds International Short Fiction Feature Writing Competition…
PODCAST: In the fourth instalment of this year’s Short Story Masterclass podcasts, Jac Cattaneo talks with award-winning author, Dame Penelope Lively, about the relationship between the past and the present, the nature of memory and the unknowability of other people…
ELEANOR WALSH explores the feminist traits of ‘The Limping Bride’, a powerful short story by Samrat Upadhyay: ‘The most striking tension in the story is the stark disparity between what we as the reader learn about Rukmini’s character, and the other characters’ perception of her…’
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL looks at the limitations of film in the adaptation of Steven Millhauser’s Eisenheim the Illusionist: ‘Working in the ‘dark realm of transgressions’, Millhauser’s Eisenheim undermines the distinction between reality and illusion…’
STORY DISCUSSION: Author MARY O’DONNELL discusses the changing themes in seasonal stories:’The difference between the then of O. Henry, and the now of contemporary writers, is that we write in a highly nuanced moral atmosphere, so nuanced that the building of ‘uplifting’ lessons into our stories is often avoided…’
TEIKA BELLAMY explores the concept of otherness in Cassandra Parkin’s fairy tales: ‘Throughout my childhood and a large part of my early adult life I didn’t like my name. It was so obviously foreign, ‘other’, and as most children and young adults come to understand, being different is not desirable.’
LOUISE MURRAY explores Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales: ‘Look beneath the surface and simplicity of the narrative, and the reader will find concealed there a deep complexity which complements the ornateness of prose – a complexity of morality, of feeling and of soul.’
