STORY: Read DAVID ALMOND’s short story ‘May Malone’. Almond’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies and illustrated books, and in two collections, Sleepless Nights and A Kind of Heaven, both published by IRON Press.
MASTERCLASS PODCAST: In the first of our Short Story Masterclass podcasts, Steve Wasserman talks to award-winning author Sarah Hall about killer stories and the sexiness of the short story form.
Managing Editor and founder of Labello Press, DEBORAH McMENAMY, talks of their maiden anthology, Gem Street, and of pulling words instead of weeds.
‘More Than a Magician is one of those short stories which I found impossible to digest after just one bite…’ JULIET WEST looks at the work of contemporary Welsh writer Brian George.
JOSE VARGHESE recommends Rohinton Mistry’s ‘Squatter’: Its scatological references are intricately related to the plight of a Parsi immigrant in Canada, for whom the frequent necessity to invent imaginary homelands becomes a ‘pain in the posterior’.
MIKE SMITH discusses his attraction to A. E. Coppard’s short story ‘The Higgler’: ‘It was the word itself – higgler – that attracted me. I don’t recall ever having heard it spoken, or seen it used in any other context…’
BELLA WHITTINGTON recommends Julio Cortázar’s ‘Cartas de Mamá’ – ‘a subtle, precise and peculiarly believable story about a young Argentine couple living in Paris.’
LELA TREDWELL recommends Adam Marek’s much-anticipated second collection of short stories, The Stone Thrower.
‘As soon as you see a picture, you know he’ll be good.’ In his essay, shortlisted for the THRESHOLDS Feature Writing Competition, C.D. ROSE tells of the life of Daniil Kharms.
AMANDA OOSTHUIZEN recommends There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby: ‘I was compelled to read with the same desperate energy that drives Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s characters to survive.’
