STORY DISCUSSION: Author MARY O’DONNELL discusses the importance of place in the short story: ‘…That’s what’s needed when we consider ‘place’. A knowledge of it as intimate as our own skin, and a sense of how to get behind that skin as we turn the wheels of imagination and bring into being a work which will be all the more memorable for having been defined by place.’
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…’
In a special Christmas post, we bring you James Joyce’s festive short story ‘The Dead’: ‘Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest…’
JOHN VERLING loses himself in The Essential James Joyce at Christmastime: ‘I’d never thought of Joyce as a page turner, but I read ‘The Dead’ in double quick time, totally taken aback by its depth yet its simplicity…’
‘A deeply unsettling tale, a psychological horror which is all the more disturbing because it is so finely wrought…’ JULIET WEST explores Truman Capote’s haunting short story ‘Miriam’.
In his essay, MIKE SMITH discusses the short stories of James Joyce, from the collection Dubliners: ‘Instead of being led, or driven, by authorial enthusiasm this writing told of flawed individuals who failed to rise to traditional heroics…’
