Compassion in a Cold Pastoral
CHARLOTTE OSBORN finds raw honesty in ‘Cold Pastoral’ by Marina Keegan: ‘…a story about the distorted perception of love, the impact of loss left on the living, and the curse of impenetrable jealousy…’
Built Upon Deception
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…’
Happily Married
NICOLA DALY recommends the title story of Claire Keegan’s debut collection, Antarctica: ‘You may, at this point, feel you know where the story is going. The scenario seems a familiar one: a married woman longs for passion and excitement before middle-age take its toll. We journey with the woman as she makes a trip to an undisclosed city for an annual shopping trip. However, the story is shrouded in mystery and Keegan has a way of leading the reader up a certain path only to suddenly take us on a detour…’
The Weird Tale
Editor of Unsung Shorts, GARY BUDDEN, takes us into the weird depths of speculative fiction: ‘There is one sub-genre particularly well-suited to the short form, that goes under a number of names: the weird tale, the strange story, the New Weird, interstitial fiction, and many more…’
The Beginning of the Short Story in England
PROFESSOR CHARLES E. MAY examines the battle between romance and realism in Daniel Defoe’s ‘A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal’: ‘Short fiction lies between the romance convention of presenting marvelous events and the realistic convention of presenting events as if they actually happened’.
Reading Saadat Hassan Manto in an Age of Dislocation
FARAH AHAMED considers the life and work of Saadat Hassan Manto: ‘His characters are not defined by the way they look, but by what they are doing in the present moment. His descriptions are not sensory observations but rather unsentimentally observed settings for particular events.’
Under The Surface
SOPHIE REID reveals the unsettling depths in Daphne du Maurier’s short stories: ‘… they offer complete worlds, ask questions, and leave you wanting more. Many explore themes of what it is to be human, the darkness in our minds, and the darker sides of life.’
A Littery and Eddicated Man
MIKE SMITH delves into Stacy Aumonier’s short story ‘A Man of Letters’ and discovers where this writer’s intellectual standards really lie: ‘He sets himself a difficult task, because his eponymous hero is a working class chap with atrocious spelling and a weak grasp on language…’
The Golden Contract
In this longlisted essay from the 2016 Competition, TRACY FELLS wonders whether she would accept Roald Dahl’s Golden Contract in ‘The Great Automatic Grammatizator’: ‘With fiction Dahl could pinpoint, with cringing accuracy, what makes us tick. He knew our darkest fears, worst nightmares and exposed our secret desires in all their gluttonous glory…’
How to Kill a Man
In this longlisted essay from the 2016 Competition, SCOTT WILSON discovers the best way to kill a man in Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s ‘In a Bamboo Grove’: ‘Murder is the ultimate crime and, as readers, we are routinely transfixed by stories that feature clever killers. These killers often exhibit a style of creative and lateral thinking that is strangely mesmerising to read or watch…’