JOE CUSHNAN looks at the life of writer and actor James Ellis and his short story collection, Home and Away: Ten Tales and Three Dreams: “The story told at your mother’s knee and the nursery rhyme are, I submit, most people’s introduction to the big wide world of literature”
CLAIRE EDWARDS walks us through Raymond Carver’s classic short story, Cathedral: ‘It is as if he has brought the ancient Greek character Tiresias, whose blindness is compensated for by second sight, into the prosaic setting of a living room’.
‘It’s worth turning aside here, from what the story is about, to how it is written … Morrison nudging his narrator into our consciousness, subtly turning a third person narrative into a first person one…’ MIKE SMITH looks at the gentle humour and softer voice of Arthur Morrison in ‘Charlwood with a Number’.
C.D. ROSE discovers the writing of Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov for the first time: ‘It is one of the most perfect stories I have ever read, doing exactly what a short story can do best, and what only a short story can do: encapsulate lifetimes in minutes…’
STEPHEN HARGADON both profiles the writing life of Julian Maclaren-Ross and recommends his storytelling voice: ‘He is slangy and colloquial, there is much dialogue. This is true. But it is not the whole of his immense gift … His stories are full of crisp, rhythmic exchanges…’
‘Elizabeth Bowen’s commitment to the short story was extraordinary. Best known for her novels, she has said, according to Lee, that she would give up any of these for her short stories…’ AIMEE GASSTON draws us into the life and writing of Elizabeth Bowen.
K.S. DEARSLEY on the short stories of Dorothy Richardson: ‘We are the narrators of our own stories. The tales we tell ourselves about who we are construct our identity, they are how we make sense of the world…’
MIKE SMITH writes about A.E. Coppard’s ‘My Hundredth Tale’ and autobiography in fiction: ‘…what struck me, reading ‘My Hundredth Tale’, were the truths, about writing, about living in poverty, and about relationship…’
DAVID BUTLER scrutinises the knottiness of Colin Barrett’s prose in the collection Young Skins: ‘…he explains that, rather than character or plot, the first impulse to write a story, and the focus of interest, remains squarely with language…’
KENNETH STEVEN recommends ‘Clay’ by Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon: ‘When you read Grassic Gibbon’s stories, you feel that cold sore in the ends of fingers and feet, because he succeeds in putting the very smell of that soil on the page…’
