Three Uneasy Pieces
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…’
Shame and the Modern Ache
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…’
The Tragedy of Dorothy Edwards?
FRANCES GAPPER explores the life and writings of Dorothy Edwards: ‘Hovering awkwardly on the fringe of the Bloomsbury Group, virtually penniless and dependent on a friend for accommodation, Dorothy Edwards lacked the two things Virginia Woolf considered vital for a woman writer of fiction: money, and secure private space…’
Blurred Boundaries
K.S.DEARSLEY probes the hidden depths in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Prussian Officer’:’…any reader expecting to find explicit sex will be disappointed. Lawrence’s writing is far more subtle, working by the power of suggestion, so you could make a case to say that the only sex in the tale is what the reader’s imagination brings to it…’
Chalk Mother
HANNAH BROCKBANK tells us why she admires ‘Chalk Mother’, an intense character driven short story by Liza Cody: ‘The environment crackles with connection and purpose but the daughter cannot fully be part of it. Instead, she frets about missing school. This important image transcends physical description and shows us what makes the narrator tick and what situations allow her to connect with the world…’
No Mean Feat
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…’
Rushing Through The Darkness: The BBC Short Story Award
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…’
You Already Know This
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…’
Stories of Music and Nightfall
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…’
A Foreign World
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…’