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…’
KATE JONES profiles the career of Grace Paley: ‘The stories she left behind tell the tales of the everyday, ordinary people, often women, who live and breathe both on and off the page.’
Author ERINNA METTLER explores the various options available for publishing a collection of short stories today: ‘Sadly, many agents don’t take on short story collections because publishers won’t read them … No matter, this is the way it is, so we will have to find a way around it…’
In this essay, shortlisted for the 2016 Feature Writing Competition, SUSMITA BHATTACHARYA recommends Janice Pariat’s collection Boats on Land: ‘…an amalgamation of folklore, magic-realism and a celebration of the natural beauty of north-eastern India, which has not had much exposure to the rest of the country or the world…’
PODCAST: In the final instalment of this series of Short Story Masterclass podcasts, JAC CATTANEO talks with award-winning author Marina Warner about the domestic in fairy tales, rewriting and re-imagining myths, and balancing research with imagination…
MARGARET SESS-HAWKINS takes us back to the early 1900s with an exploration of the humour in P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series: ‘It is … the lighthearted tone, the sheer joviality of the writing. Look through any modern short story collection, peruse a serious literary magazine, and you would be hard-pressed to find such comedy…’
JOE CUSHNAN looks at the life of writer and actor James Ellis and his short story collection, Home and Away: Ten Tales and Three Dreams: “The story told at your mother’s knee and the nursery rhyme are, I submit, most people’s introduction to the big wide world of literature”
CLAIRE EDWARDS walks us through Raymond Carver’s classic short story, Cathedral: ‘It is as if he has brought the ancient Greek character Tiresias, whose blindness is compensated for by second sight, into the prosaic setting of a living room’.
CHRISTINE GENOVESE discusses Rosemond Lehmann’s use of personal memory in her short story, The Red-Haired Miss Daintreys: ‘…a meticulously structured masterpiece, teasingly disguised as haphazard recollections from childhood…’
