DORA D’AGOSTINO recommends Laura van den Berg’s short story ‘Antarctica’: ‘As I read, I couldn’t help but think that, though years and continents may separate us, artists are still inspired by death, grief, heartache, loss, joy, surprise, birth, and everything in-between to create something new that speaks directly to us…’
JULIA ANDERSON tells us of her admiration for Joanna Campbell’s ‘When Planets Slip Their Tracks’: “Every story in When Planets Slip Their Tracks is significant; there is nothing weak or wordy here…Every one of these twenty-four short stories tugged on all of my emotions…”
MADELEINE MCDONALD discusses the influence of city life on the stories of Rainer Brambach: ‘This is a collection where the author stands back, observing, inviting readers to eavesdrop alongside him and draw their own conclusions.’
PROFESSOR CHARLES E. MAY explores the short fiction of Rudyard Kipling: ‘Kipling was perhaps the first English writer to embrace the characteristics of the short story form whole-heartedly, and that thus his stories are perfect representations of the transition point between the old-fashioned tale of the nineteenth century and the modern short story…’
HAYLEY N. JONES explores identity and mortality in one of Ali Smith’s short stories: ‘On the surface, ‘Writ’ appears to be a quiet, unassuming story: a woman comes home to find her fourteen-year-old self in her house…’
FARAH AHAMED examines the feminist roots of Shashi Deshpande’s short stories: ‘What we want to reach at finally is the telling, the breaking of silence.’
MIKE SMITH finds he is misled by the unsettling horror of ‘The Old Man’ by Daphne du Maurier: ‘Daphne du Maurier has the reputation of being a writer of unsettling, even scary stories. Hitchcock’s famous horror movie The Birds was based on her short story of the same name, and it’s worth noting that he felt he had to tone down the ending…’
NICOLA DALY recommends the title story of Claire Keegan’s debut collection, Antarctica: ‘You may, at this point, feel you know where the story is going. The scenario seems a familiar one: a married woman longs for passion and excitement before middle-age take its toll. We journey with the woman as she makes a trip to an undisclosed city for an annual shopping trip. However, the story is shrouded in mystery and Keegan has a way of leading the reader up a certain path only to suddenly take us on a detour…’
Editor of Unsung Shorts, GARY BUDDEN, takes us into the weird depths of speculative fiction: ‘There is one sub-genre particularly well-suited to the short form, that goes under a number of names: the weird tale, the strange story, the New Weird, interstitial fiction, and many more…’
PROFESSOR CHARLES E. MAY examines the battle between romance and realism in Daniel Defoe’s ‘A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal’: ‘Short fiction lies between the romance convention of presenting marvelous events and the realistic convention of presenting events as if they actually happened’.
