HANNAH RADCLIFFE looks at the Northern lives in Martyn Bedford’s collection, Letters Home: ‘ Perhaps what I found most poignant when reading this collection of stories were the things that were not spoken between characters; the words that fall between the cracks. Time and time again, characters seem to slip past one another, their true intentions never quite vocalised…’
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL looks at decaying masculinity in John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’: ‘The Swimmer is as much as an attack on the self-involved counter-culturalism of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation as it is on self-satisfied wealthy suburbia…’
MORGAINE DAVIDSON braves the chilling worlds and haunted rooms of Eight Ghosts: ‘What is it we love about ghost stories? What is the source of their charm, their pervasiveness; that peculiar place they hold in the collective unconscious? Perhaps our curiosity is to blame. We are, after all, an inquisitive species…’
STEPHEN HARGADON finds subtlety, power and wit behind the familiar scenery in Elspeth Davie’s short story ‘Allergy’: ‘…there is a richness here, a resonance, an ability, keen and tender, to look at the world from odd angles, to see the extraordinary, the mystical, in the daily churn of human commerce…’
EMILY DEVANE looks at Alice Munro’s expansive short story ‘The Beggar Maid’ and sees within all the hallmarks of a novel in miniature: ‘Most remarkable, though, is the scope of the story, which takes us from the couple’s first meeting to a chance encounter many years later. Munro achieves novel-like resonance in short story form. It is a masterclass of technique.’
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL takes us back to the post-war film noir of Graham Greene’s ‘The Basement Room’: ‘One might expect the perspective shifts to dilute the effect of an unreliable narrator, but the result is actually the opposite, confusing the objective truth of the story’s event with the subjective perspectives of the characters…’
LAURA MORGAN explores the changing communities of Canada’s east coast in the insightful stories of Alistair MacLeod: ‘I can imagine MacLeod being in a car when the back wheels lost traction on a dangerous bend, and how he knew, even before the lurch in his stomach ebbed, that he had to communicate to others this experience…’
SARAH RACHEL BEART looks finds intimacy and redemption in Trezza Azzopardi’s short story ‘Sticks and Stones’: ‘Azzopardi never imposes, but invites us to watch the protagonist in his confused flux, eventually work things out for himself…’
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL takes us to war-time Shanghai for a closer look at Eileen Chang’s story, ‘Lust, Caution’: ‘Chang’s prose is direct and efficient, yet evokes well-springs of emotion, historical trauma, and shared cultural memory…’
Get your notebooks and laptops ready – it’s the launch of the 2018 Thresholds International Short Fiction Feature Writing Competition…
