Food in Exile
FARHANA SHAIKH explores the homeliness of food in Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut collection: ‘In Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies food is more than just sustenance, it is purpose, priority and preoccupation…’
Happily Married
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…’
Short Story Masterclass… with David Constantine
In the latest instalment of our Short Story Masterclass series, K. J. Orr talks with DAVID CONSTANTINE about competing narratives, literal metaphors, realisations for a writer and much more…
Touch
‘I was slow coming to this book, but then good books, like lovers, have a way of finding you…’ In his essay, shortlisted for the 2013 THRESHOLDS International Feature Writing Competition, TOM VOWLER explores Graham Mort’s short story collection Touch.
There Once Lived a Woman…
PAULINE MASUREL discusses how Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s collection of Scary Fairy Tales swerves ‘between the realist-expected and the magical-surreal – often involving equally powerful forces such as disease, alcohol, vandalism, war and mental illness.’