JANIS LANE examines tragedy in Rose Tremain’s short stories from The American Lover collection: ‘These tragedies are threaded throughout, ranging from high drama and death, to minor inconveniences, such as the departure of a spouse or lost love. The uniting factor is the characters’ vulnerability, and, often, a lack of control over their own destinies…’
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…’
VIDEO INTERVIEW: Acclaimed Danish author DORTHE NORS in conversation with Professor Alison MacLeod, at the University of Chichester, 2016.
CHARLOTTE OSBORN finds raw honesty in ‘Cold Pastoral’ by Marina Keegan: ‘…a story about the distorted perception of love, the impact of loss left on the living, and the curse of impenetrable jealousy…’
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…’
SOPHIA KIER-BYFIELD explores the similarities between the short form and photographs: ‘…the essence of the person or scene is entirely dependent on the viewer’s response. So much is left unsaid, so much more to tell that can’t be told. Similarly, short stories offer us something restricted, abruptly ended, or open to interpretation. When it comes to these forms, so much more lies beneath or beyond what we see and read…’
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’.
