PETER JORDAN examines Ezra Pound’s influence on the ending of ‘Up in Michigan’ by Ernest Hemingway: ‘Indeed, ‘Up in Michigan’s’ final paragraph might just be the place to look if you want to see where Hemingway made the leap from young budding writer to potential literary superstar…’
CLAIRE SAVAGE discovers a writer’s yearning in ‘Illumination’ by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: ‘…amidst Ní Dhuibhne’s story-book rabbits and poetic prose, something unsettling ripples, unseen, like the suspected mountain lion thought to roam the hillside…
VICTORIA HEATH looks at the story that made her want to write, ‘First Love, Last Rites’ by Ian McEwan: ‘The ‘it’ is often referred to more sinisterly as the ‘creature’ and it’s the crux that McEwan uses to turn this story from that of a starry-eyed relationship into something darker and far more interesting…’
AMANDA OOSTHUIZEN recommends Simon Van Booy’s collection Love Begins in Winter: ‘I’ve returned to some of these stories several times, and I always find surprises. In that respect, it is the literary equivalent to great music, but written in prose that is elegant, spare and startling…’
We are pleased to bring you the foreword to Writing Short Stories, by acclaimed author Kate Clanchy: ‘The short story, in contrast, shines a harsh light on every word you write and neither gives you a shape nor forgives you for getting the shape wrong…’
The 2015 THRESHOLDS Feature Writing Competition is now open for entries, until Wednesday 06 May, 11:59pm (BST). £500 first prize. 2x £100 runner-up prizes. FREE to enter…
PETER JORDAN profiles the life and writing of Anton Chekhov: ‘…no writer gets closer to articulating the human condition. It took me a long time to understand what he was doing, I still don’t fully understand, I simply know that when reading his work I feel some emotional shift…’
G. F. PHILLIPS examines the creative and destructive elements of class, gender, work and home in Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’: ‘an embedded narrative, ever-present, impinges on the lives of Lawrence’s industrial workers, so that the domestic squabbles are nearly always about work-related problems…’
READ and DOWNLOAD: In a very special post, Dr José Francisco Fernández gives us the Introduction to The New Puritan Generation – the first collection of essays to address the importance of the New Puritan movement, in order to understand this generation of writers…
‘The Charles Dickens that we largely remember is the novelist of instalments, who sympathised with the orphan’s plight and the poor man’s complaints [but] he also produced short ghost stories, which, by his death in 1870, constituted a huge collection…’ In this essay, SCOTT WILSON delves into Dickens’ Ghost Stories.
