VICTORIA LESLIE recommends Mary Butts’ short story ‘With or Without Buttons’: ‘a haunting and skilfully structured story that, like its subject matter, proves that the smallest things can often produce big results. It is about gloves, and what you find when you go looking for trouble…’
‘The Charles Dickens that we largely remember is the novelist of instalments, who sympathised with the orphan’s plight and the poor man’s complaints [but] he also produced short ghost stories, which, by his death in 1870, constituted a huge collection…’ In this essay, SCOTT WILSON delves into Dickens’ Ghost Stories.
CARYS BRAY recommends the works of Robert Shearman: ‘I looked for clues to his fiction in his manner, and I came to the erroneous conclusion that his stories were jolly. I imagined page after page of ebullience and cheer; I wasn’t expecting horror…’
‘When we talk about editing short stories, and we do, a lot, we talk about cutting every word that doesn’t have to be in a story. But I’m not sure it’s always so simple…’ ANGELA READMAN examines the effects of Lish’s edits on Raymond Carver’s short stories.
STEPHEN DEVEREUX searches for Helen Harris, a quiet revolutionary in short story writing: ‘Short stories have characters, right? This one doesn’t. And one of them is the central character, yes? Not in this story. And short stories have plots, don’t they? Well there’s a plot of sorts, I suppose…’
CLAIRE THURLOW presents a thoughtful profile on the life and writing of short story master Alice Munro: ‘Compared to Chekhov for her flair with the genre, Munro reveals essential truths about ourselves in an unsentimental, yet deeply humane way…’
Runner-up in the Thresholds Feature Writing Competition: GILL THOMPSON recommends the short fiction of Katherine Mansfield: ‘The very best short story writers, and Katherine Mansfield is clearly one of these, can distill a profound theme into a word or phrase…’
Runner-up in the Thresholds Feature Writing Competition: DAN POWELL recommends Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s graphic short story collection The Push Man and Other Stories: ‘Each time I return to my well worn Drawn and Quarterly edition, I am struck by their undiminished capacity to unnerve…’
We are delighted to announce the results of the 2014 THRESHOLDS International Short Fiction Feature Writing Competition…
‘It was one of the most powerful pieces of writing I had ever come across and, despite the beauty of the language, I found myself unable to re-read it for a long time…’ Thresholds editorial assistant DAVID FRANKEL recommends the stories in David Foster Wallace’s collection Oblivion.
