SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL looks at the film adaptation of Graham Greene’s short story ‘The Third Man’: ‘It’s certainly rare for authors to capitulate to the changes made to their adaptations, much less admit that those changes improved on the original work.’
KAY GILMORE reports on this year’s CITIZEN: THE NEW STORY event where a range of writers attempt to adress the questions ‘who are we?’ and ‘where do we belong?’
STORY DISCUSSION: Author MARY O’DONNELL discusses the importance of place in the short story: ‘…That’s what’s needed when we consider ‘place’. A knowledge of it as intimate as our own skin, and a sense of how to get behind that skin as we turn the wheels of imagination and bring into being a work which will be all the more memorable for having been defined by place.’
DAVID BUTLER finds cruelty in the pages of Katherine Mansfield’s stories: ‘I would argue that Mansfield’s aesthetic is frequently more disquieting, even cruel – in the sense that her acquaintance D. H. Lawrence called Dostoevsky’s talent cruel…’
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL looks at Annie Proulx’s short story, Brokeback Mountain: ‘Proulx’s describes the environment as a fundamentally masculine space where its value is measured in its utility rather than its beauty. In contrast, Lee’s visuals tend towards the romantic…’
STORY DISCUSSION: Author MARY O’DONNELL discusses the nature of speculative, futuristic fiction: ‘Writing short stories set in the future carries the exact same responsibility as writing short stories set in the present or past. The only difference is that one must convince the prospective reader that the world into which they’ve been invited has some relevance and possibility for them, that it catches a trigger-point of their imagination and allows them to consider such scenarios in all seriousness…’
JAQUELINE SAVILLE finds the weird and wonderful in two of Neil Gaiman’s short stories: ‘The detail of the everyday backdrop makes each story feel grounded in reality, there’s an emphasis on how mundane it all is – pension day, gardening, an imagined infidelity, the Yellow Pages – then the whole situation, and more importantly the reader’s expectations, get flipped by the introduction of one piece of weird…’
LOREE WESTRON is getting ready for the Small Wonder Festival at Charleston House. Here, she provides a brief overview of the festival and looks at some of the highlights visitors can expect…
PODCAST: In the first instalment of the sixth series of our Short Story Masterclass podcasts, Zoe Gilbert interviews award-winning author Adam Marek, discussing the distinction between the fantastic and the surreal, childhood influences, and where stories start and how they develop…
STORY: We are delighted to bring you CECILIA DAVIDSSON’s short story ‘High Mountains, Deep Valleys’, translated for the first time into English: ‘We drive into Grimsdalen after putting seventy Norwegian kronor into a roadside box by the barrier, and as the landscape opens up I hear Nils from the back seat saying something in a gruff voice. He’s not spoken a word since we got into the car this morning…’
