Dr CHRIS MACHELL delves into the world of story adaptations in film as he explores The Thing and Peter Watts’ short story ‘The Things’: ‘Threading itself through film and literature as well as the bodies of its victims, The Thing renders culture itself as an abject body, absorbing, adapting and transforming.’
TRACY FELLS finds the weird, the wonderful, the down-right uncanny, and the harshness of reality in Melanie Whipman’s collection Llama Sutra: ‘To me, this collection should be read only for pleasure, but also for instruction. If you’re a fiction writer hoping to hook the interest of a competition judge then you should study this collection with an analytical eye, learn what makes a winning short story…’
PODCAST: In the third instalment of this series of Short Story Masterclass podcasts, Zoe Gilbert interviews award-winning author Alison MacLeod. In the podcast they discuss fiction and the here and now, ‘what if’ scenarios and holding a short story together…
DAVID FRANKEL has a look at the stories included in the 2016 BBC National Short Story Award Anthology: ‘each presents us with a character with a crystal clear voice that carries us briefly but completely into their world…’
JENNIFER HARVEY finds wondrous, imaginative melancholy in Cees Nooteboom’s short story collection The Foxes Come At Night: ‘Death is at the heart of this collection; it is the central idea upon which Nooteboom – as in so much of his writing – meditates. But it’s a philosophical focus that can put him at odds with some readers, and writers…’
MORGAN OMOTOYE finds much to admire in ‘Murderers’ by Leonard Michaels: ‘Michaels has skilfully succeeded in making us understand the narrator’s wanderlust, his craven desire for motion, velocity, escape from the spectre of death, but he has also made us feel slightly uneasy…’
KATE LUNN-PIGULA discovers the harsh reality of Kazuo Ishiguro’s short story collection, Nocturnes: ‘it isn’t shocking or political or sexy … It is gentle and mature: not the crazy anecdotes of up-and-coming rock stars, but dejected notes of people who haven’t fully realised their adolescent dreams. It’s a coming-of-(middle)-age collection concerned with life’s smaller anxieties…’
DAVID FRANKEL looks at Hubert Selby Jnr’s uncompromising story collection, Song of the Silent Snow: ‘Each of the stories offers a startling and vivid glimpse into the character’s life, the voices ranging from no-nonsense accounts of hard lives to poetic internal monologues…’
AIMEE McCAGUE attempts to see past the author we all know to the meaning of ‘The Library of Babel’: ‘Borges’ story tells of an infinite library, a universe in itself in which the inhabitants desperately search for meaning in the form of the mythical ‘Vindications’ that allegedly tell their future…’
SHAFIQAH SAMARASAM looks at the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories of Jhumpa Lahiri: ‘Her magnificent stories will echo in the lives of many foreign people because of the strength of her portrayal of their lives…’
