Festive Story: Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Blue Carbuncle’
FESTIVE STORY: Rounding off the THRESHOLDS year, we bring you a festive treat in the form of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Christmassy short story ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’…
Capote’s Christmas
ANUSHREE NANDE recommends Truman Capote’s ‘A Christmas Memory’: ‘Capote is a master of evocative simplicity that makes even the ordinary shine and sparkle until you feel like you know the characters intimately…’
Short Story Masterclass with… Kevin Barry
PODCAST: Jac Cattaneo talks with award-winning author Kevin Barry about the short story’s lack of room for maneuver, the timing and rhythm of stories, mystery in your writing, and the relationship of memory to imagination…
Captain Knot
MIKE SMITH has a close look at Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s short story ‘Captain Knot’: ‘Q is a straightforward writer in many ways, but his simple, accessible language carries subtleties of meaning that raise questions we, rather than he, are to answer…’
Defining the Ballardian
KATE KRAKE explores the mammoth influence of J.G. Ballard: ‘We tremble at the draconian control of the Orwellian. We muse over the strange nightmares of the Kafkaesque. Some among us might even risk the dark, unknowable madness of the Lovecraftian. But what of the Ballardian…?’
A Cold Hand: The Stories Of Robert Aickman
FRANCES GAPPER discusses the life and stories of Robert Aickman: ‘Aickman thought the ghost story akin to poetry in its compression and intensity, and his work has been described as ‘English Eerie’ and ‘English Kafka’…’
Everything Makes Its Mark: the Stories of Shelagh Delaney
DAVID FRANKEL rediscovers the forgotten short stories of Shelagh Delaney: ‘the vitality of her stories comes from her extraordinary talent for dialogue. She captures the rhythm of rapid conversation between characters – the firing back and forth and its underlying humour…’
Happy African Feminist
ANDISWA ONKE MAQUTU explores the feminist and patriarchal themes of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck: ‘It is a collection exploring migration: its freedoms, the way it opens new worlds, new ways of seeing an old and familiar world, the protection of the new world, and also the limits it places on Africans…’
The Horror of the Past and the Terror of the Present
DR. WALEED AL-BAZOON recommends Hassan Blasim’s ‘The Iraqi Christ’: ‘…a seismic, ground-breaking short story collection that leaves in its reader’s mind – long after the final page – powerful after-shocks. In the title story, Blasim explores, with devastating force, the consequences of two different wars upon his country…’
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Well-Springs of Story
CHARLES E. MAY looks for the birth of the modern short story in ‘A Lodging for the Night’ by Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘…its source is in language, the narrative impulse, and what it depicts is not reality but the perception of reality made by one in the process of making a story…’