The Drover’s Wife
JENNIE RYAN roughs it in the Australian Outback with Henry Lawson’s short story, The Drover’s Wife: ‘…he told of a lived experience. His stories are populated with those who truly adopted and loved this new land…’
Walking Inside Ourselves
JENNIFER HARVEY peers beneath the surface of The Lagoon by Janet Frame: ‘…this is an essay about the way a writer sees the world, and the sensitivities a writer brings to experiences which may, at times, come close to madness…’
Looking for Jake
C.D. ROSE ponders on what makes a short story collection, whilst looking at the disparate stories in China Miéville’s Looking For Jake and Other Stories: ‘Miéville is a writer who has had little truck with genre and its resulting hierarchy of snobbery, moving from horror to science fiction to crime to comics to weird and back again, often mixing them all up…’
Something Wild
MORGAN OMOTOYE finds the wildness in this modern-day fairy tale: ‘Thomas McGuane’s short story ‘Stars’, published in The New Yorker in June 2013, is about Jessica Ramirez, an astronomer. This ‘star gazer’, when we first meet her, is on an early morning hike, her surroundings full of bewildering awe…’
Crying with Laughter
GINA CHALLEN discusses the comedy in Franz Kafka’s short story writing: ‘There is a wealth of humour in Kafka; it all depends on how you read him…’
Unpacking Sergei Dovlatov’s Suitcase
ALAN McMONAGLE takes a look inside Sergei Dovlatov’s collection The Suitcase and finds the author hidden within the pages: ‘One day in the early 1980s, the Russian émigré-writer Sergei Dovlatov opened the door of a seldom-used closet in his Forest Hills apartment in New York City…’
The End
PETER JORDAN examines Ezra Pound’s influence on the ending of ‘Up in Michigan’ by Ernest Hemingway: ‘Indeed, ‘Up in Michigan’s’ final paragraph might just be the place to look if you want to see where Hemingway made the leap from young budding writer to potential literary superstar…’
Retreating into Writing
CLAIRE SAVAGE discovers a writer’s yearning in ‘Illumination’ by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: ‘…amidst Ní Dhuibhne’s story-book rabbits and poetic prose, something unsettling ripples, unseen, like the suspected mountain lion thought to roam the hillside…
Cast in Stone
VICTORIA LESLIE examines the themes that lie within A.S. Byatt’s metamorphic story ‘A Stone Woman’: ‘This story is unequivocally about change, but also about notions of stasis and permanence…’
Coming Out in Print
STEPHEN DEVEREUX finds hints of Tennessee Williams’ personal life in his story ‘The Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin’: ‘This close brother and sister relationship has been frequently re-enacted in Williams’ plays and has provided a rich pasture for psychoanalytical critics to graze…’