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…’
JANIS LANE discovers the magic of Magic Realism on the streets of Montmartre, in the Marcel Aymé short story ‘The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls’: ‘The worlds Aymé creates are characterised by the familiar sights of town and country, where strange and unusual habitants exist alongside regular people who, in turn, often act absurdly. Storylines follow a straightforward narrative, but contain elements of the fantastic while also retaining a logical thread…’
NICOLE MANSOUR finds the power of protest in this Comma Press anthology: ‘In the twenty short stories that follow, the history of British protest is revealed through well-researched and historically accurate fiction, and this continuum, this flow between movements, is strikingly uncovered…’
Carmen Machado’s short story ‘The Husband Stitch’ evokes both physical and emotional responses for KATE JONES: ‘Even within her chosen title, Carmen Maria Machado sets a scene for a story which is bound to question, provoke and, if you are any sort of feminist, anger…’
MIKE SMITH finds a short story hidden in the pages of Arthur Miller’s autobiography: ‘I got the distinct sense that I was reading a very good, well-structured and polished short story … a story beautifully told, with a clear beginning…’
TOBY PARKER REES looks at life and death in Thomas Bernhard’s laconic short story collection, The Voice Imitator: ‘The qualities of the individual stories are important – they are funny, quietly affecting and beautifully composed – but it is the accrued silence between them that gives The Voice Imitator its heft…’
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL explores the film adaptation of ‘The Dead’, one of James Joyce’s most celebrated short stories: ‘Although he was American, Huston had Irish citizenship and famously loved the country. It is surely apt, then, that the words of his final film should have come from one of Ireland’s most renowned writers, but more than that, that those words are a reflection on the inevitable falling of vitality into mortality…’
KATE SMITH dives into the uncomfortable world of a short story by Julie Orringer: ‘‘Pilgrims’, the story that opens Julie Orringer’s collection How to Breathe Under Water, is remarkable and satisfying in its own right, and, once you’ve read the whole collection, to re-read ‘Pilgrims’ is to hear not only the clarity of its own notes but something of those of the stories to come…’
CHRISTINE GENOVESE finds the uneasiness of Patrick White’s last three stories: ‘To me he’s one of the world’s great writers of magic realism with a touch of mysticism. His writing style is trenchant and studded with surprises…’
ARIELLA DIAMOND gives a personal response to Rob Doyle’s short story collection This is the Ritual and examines its relationship to Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘The influences of Ulysses on this collection of stories is hard to ignore and, in its way, it is a kind of homage to the King of Modernism, it is a step forward into the future of Ulysses and I love every inch of it…’
