Tag Archives: Short Stories

May 25, 2015 · 10:44 am

Review: Don’t Try This at Home by Angela Readman

I received an advanced review copy of this title from And Other Stories.  They are a small not-for-profit literary press with am impressive selection of books.  Please visit their website for a complete list of great titles: andotherstories.org

My Review:
Dont-Try-This-at-Home-_-cover_-FINAL1-300x460This is a quirky, bizarre collection of tales that also deal with serious social topics.  Child custody, divorce, and gender issues are all explored with an accompanying twist of magic or fantasy.  In one story a mum who works at a chip shop is tired of her mundane life; it is only when she transforms herself into a hip-shaking Elvis that she feels happy and fulfilled.  This story is an interesting commentary on gender identity and the ways in which we suppress our true selves when we try to conform and fit in.

Some of the stories seem downright absurd.  In the title story, “Don’t Try this at Home ”  a woman wants to spend more time with her husband, so she chops him in half.  When the couple needs more money, she chops him in quarters and eighths so he can work more at various jobs.  When one of his other halves has an affair the woman has mixed feelings about her decision to chop up her husband into so many different persons.

I particularly enjoyed the last three stories.  They featured individuals that are misunderstood by their family, friends and neighbors.  In “Keeper of the Jackalopes,” a man lives in a run down trailer with his six-year-old daughter and taxidermies animals for a living.  Business has been very slow so they rely on food tossed into dumpsters behind grocery stores for their meals.  The loyalty that the little girls shows towards her father is very touching and it is this little girl’s advice at the end of the story that helps him deal with some sad issues in his life.

DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME is a fantastic and entertaining group of stories with memorable characters.  I highly recommend that you add this collection to your summer reading list.

About The Author:
Angela-Readman-_Photo-by-Kevin-Howard-460x250Angela Readman’s stories have appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines, winning awards such as the Inkspill Magazine Short Story Competition and the National Flash Fiction Competition. In 2012 she was shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Award for ‘Don’t Try This at Home’ – an award she would go on to win in 2013 with the story ‘The Keeper of the Jackalopes’. Readman is also a published poet.

 

 

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April 24, 2015 · 9:56 am

Review: Black Vodka by Deborah Levy

This is a collection of stories first published by And Other Stories in the U.K. and later published by Bloomsbury in the U.S.

My Review:
Black VodkaThe stories in this collection are full of outcasts, lonely people who linger on the fringes of society: a hunchback, an orphan, a mentally ill drunk and refugees.  The characters, despite the fact that they occupy a small space in these brief narratives, demand an emotional and empathetic reaction from the reader.

The first page of the title story, “Black Vodka”, poignantly captures the feelings of someone who is bullied, made to feel like an outsider and a misfit for his entire life.  The narrator, who has a hump on his back between his shoulder blades says, “I was instructed in the act of Not Belonging from a very tender age. Deformed. Different. Strange.”  He is now a successful ad executive working on a campaign for Black Vodka.  We cheer him on when a woman named Lisa, an archaeologist by trade, takes a keen interest in him and wants to “excavate” the eccentricities of his body in a way that does not degrade or humiliate him.

“Cave Girl” is an interesting commentary on personal identity and the fact that many people desire to be someone else, literally to be in someone else’s body.  Cass declares to her brother that she wants a sex change.  But she does not want to become a male, she wants to stay as a female but wants to become a different type of female.  Cass wants to be “light-hearted” and “airy” and she also wants to change her physical features so that she has blue eyes.  When Cass shows up looking and acting like a completely different person.  Her brother and all of the males in the neighborhood fall over themselves to give her attention and shower her with gifts.  But is Cass really better off as this seemly happy, yet shallow and “airy” new person who is always smiling but never has any real opinions?

It is amazing that so many issues, which as human beings we are forced to encounter every day, are raised in BLACK VODKA: relationship struggles, identity crises, loneliness, and isolation are all explored; I highly recommend this small yet thought-provoking book.

About The Author:
D LevyDeborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their “intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination”, including PAX, HERESIES for the Royal Shakespeare Company, CLAM, CALL BLUE JANE, SHINY NYLON, HONEY BABY MIDDLE ENGLAND, PUSHING THE PRINCE INTO DENMARK and MACBETH-FALSE MEMORIES, some of which are published in LEVY: PLAYS 1 (Methuen)

Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991.

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April 16, 2015 · 12:42 pm

Review: Young Skins by Colin Barrett

In I received an advanced review copy of this collection of short stories from Grove Press through Edelweiss.

My Review:

Young SkinsThis collection of stories is a bold glimpse into the daily struggles of young people trying to carve out some type of existence in their small Irish town.  The rural Irish town of Glanbeigh is short on opportunities but has plenty of pubs and nightclubs in which the local population can get into lots of trouble.  The opening lines of the collection perfectly capture the setting and the mood of each story:

My town is nowhere you have been, but you know its ilk. A roundabout off a national road, an industrial estate, a five-screen Cineplex, a century of pubs packed inside the square mile of the town’s limits.  The Atlantic is near; the gnarled jawbone of the coastline with its gull-infested promontories is near. Summer evenings, and in the manure-scented pastures of the satellite parishes the Zen bovines life their heads to contemplate the V8 howls of the boy racers tearing through the back lanes.

I am young, and the young do not number many here, but it is fair to say we have the run of the place.

In the first story, “The Clancy Kid,” Jimmy is sitting in a pub nursing a hangover from the previous night’s festivities by sipping a beer.  In his state of intoxication the night before,  Jimmy has also had a tryst with his ex-lover, Marlene.  We learn later in the story that his feelings for her run deeper than he is willing to admit.  Jimmy’s friend Tug, the town bully, helps him get the lady’s attention in a most unusual way.

“Calm with Horses,” is more of a novella than a short story that is included in the collection.  Arm and Dympna are making a living in this small town by dealing drugs and Arm is the “muscle” of the operation.  Even though he makes a living through the use of violence, Arm does have a softer, more understanding side which comes through when he is taking care of his autistic son.  At several times throughout the story he tries to help other people out of their miserable situations; but it is this unwavering and even naïve support of his friend that leads to Arm’s own downfall

In “Diamonds,” the main character tries to move away from his small town but he finds nothing but work in a pub which exacerbates his status as an alcoholic.  The details in these stories, which are oftentimes omitted in the brevity of short stories, makes the tales brilliant.  For example, it’s not the loss of his job, relationships or health that drives this character to straighten out his life.  It is the death of his beloved cat Ruckles, who accidentally ingests some of the narrators drugs, that forces him to reexamine his life.  And we are deftly reminded of Ruckles former existence throughout the story.

The principal at his former high school offers the narrator a job as a groundskeeper which position comes with housing and a small stipend.  The principal is cleverly called “The Sentimental Authoritarian” because he has a romantic nostalgia for the past but also demands that the main character do his job properly and stay sober.  But, ironically enough, after he meets a woman at an AA meeting, his tenuous grasp on sobriety immediately goes out the window.

The prose, the flawed characters and the ugly, yet realistic setting are all characteristics which make Barrett’s writing intense and vivid.   YOUNG SKINS is a must-read for those who love short stories and contemporary Irish Literature.

About The Author:
Barrett, Colin (c) Lucy Perrem 2013Colin Barrett was born in 1982 and grew up in County Mayo. In 2009 he completed his MA in Creative Writing at University College Dublin and was awarded the Penguin Ireland Prize. His work has been published in The Stinging Fly magazine and in the anthologies, Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails (Stinging Fly Press, 2010) and Town and Country (Faber and Faber, 2013).

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April 12, 2015 · 12:00 am

Review: The Settling Earth by Rebecca Burns

I received an advanced review copy of this collection of short stories from the author.

My Review:
The Settling EarthAll of the characters in these short stories are connected by their sense of alienation and misery while living an emigrant’s life in the hot, dusty colony of New Zealand in the 19th century.  The book begins with Sarah, whose parents have given her away to an older man named William Sanderson who drags her off to live on his isolated farm in New Zealand.  Sarah is lonely, homesick and stuck in an unhappy marriage.  She seems to be wandering around her home in a daze, either not fully aware of her surrounding or in denial of her situation.

William himself is also the focus of one of the stories in the book and he doesn’t seem to want to live in New Zealand any more than his wife does.  In order to relieve his stress and find an outlet for his frustrations, he likes to visit a brothel in Christchurch.  William is also a bigot and has a severe dislike for the Maori natives.

Several characters from the brothel also have their own stories.  The owner of the brothel, having left England and started her business, tries to look after her “girls” as best she can.  But, despite the fact that precautions are taken,  several of them still manage to get pregnant.  The women in the brothel are just as sad as Sarah and trapped in a lonely and demeaning life.

The saddest, and most heart-rending story in the collection, is that of Mrs. Gray who takes in the babies of unwed mothers.  These fallen women and their children are judged harshly and shunned by the colony.  It is ironic that many of these women have come to the colony for a fresh start but the colony also rejects them because of their perceived sins.  Mrs. Gray believes that she is helping these women and her babies, but the help that she is giving these women is not what they are expecting.

THE SETTLING EARTH is a well-written group of stories, full of downcast and moving characters.  My only complaint about the book, if indeed it can be called a “complaint,” is that just when I became fully invested in a character the story would end. This collection could easily have been made into one, continuous, thought-provoking book;   I would love to see what a talented author like Rebecca Burns could do with a full-length novel.

About The Author:

Rebecca Burns is an award-winning writer of short stories, over thirty of which have been published online or in print. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2011, winner of the Fowey Festival of Words and Music Short Story Competition in 2013 (and runner-up in 2014), and has been profiled as part of the University of Leicester’s “Grassroutes Project”—a project that showcases the 50 best transcultural writers in the county. In November 2014 she won the Black Pear Press short story competition with her story, “Seaglass”. Her piece is the title story in the Black Pear Press anthology, “Seaglass and Other Stories” – available from December 2014 at http://blackpear.net/2014/12/28/wonde…

Rebecca’s debut collection of short stories, “Catching the Barramundi”, was published by Odyssey Books in November 2012 and is available to order from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Barram…. In March 2013 it was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Award.

The Settling Earth is Rebecca’s second collection of short stories.

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March 12, 2015 · 7:50 am

What Makes for a Successful Short Story? Guest post by author Rebecca Adams Wright

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the challenges of writing short stories. A good friend of mine who “thinks in novels” was wrestling with a story for a workshop application and asked for my help in cutting down her text. Workshop guidelines specified a maximum length of 6,000 words, and, at the time she requested my help, her story was hovering around 12,000 words. We spent a lot of time discussing what lines should be cut, what lines were critical to the story’s emotional and structural foundations, and what fundamental element made us realize that this text was a short story, instead of, say, a novella that would simply dissolve as that much language was pared away.

Our conclusion was that a successful short story is, essentially, an exercise in quickness and economy. If a novel is a sprawling mansion, a novella is a respectable ranch and a short story is a microhouse. The microhouse still need a roof and a floor and a way to get in—otherwise it isn’t a house at all, and visitors (readers) will be sorely disappointed—but the builder can’t waste any interior space. This means that in a short story by a good writer, every sentence will serve to propel the plot or reveal some new aspect of a character or offer a meaningful glimpse of the story’s emotional core. In a story by a great writer, one sentence will do all three.

I’m very aware of this need to stick to essentials when I’m drafting a story. Concision is one of the great challenges of short fiction but, to a writer like me, who slogs through first drafts and then lights up when it comes time to revise, also one of the great pleasures. My short story “Tiger Bright,” which is about 4,400 words in my collection The Thing About Great White Sharks and Other Stories, was originally 5,500 words. I was pleased to slash that story by nearly a fourth because the words I cut weren’t contributing to the story, they were obscuring it.

There is a real satisfaction that comes with eliminating unnecessary sentences and opening up contemplative space around the most important questions, images, and sensations in a story. One reason we engage with literature is to better understand ourselves and the people around us. When I am writing a short story and constantly asking myself “is this a critical line? What does it tell us about Mrs. X? What does it contribute to crisis Y?” I’m solidly engaged with the human motivations, desires, and experiences that brought me to literature in the first place.

Still, as my friend and I lamented, justifying each line can be difficult. It’s easy to fall in love with my own cleverness and grow attached to a particular turn of phrase. But there’s no room for mere cleverness in the microhouse. Empty lines, even pretty ones, are just extra soap dishes and third sets of sheets—clutter. A writer has to know when to stop culling, of course, so that the microhouse of story doesn’t become a featureless wooden box, cold and uninviting, and that is its own challenge. But done right, this distilling process crafts memorable narratives. Short stories may be small spaces, but, as my friend and I reaffirmed (in its final form her story weighed in at 5,300 absolutely critical, heartbreaking words) no less essential for their size.

-Rebecca Adams Wright

Thanks so much to Rebecca for her thoughtful post.  Rebecca is on tour with her new book The Thing About Great White Sharks.  Click the TLC Book Tours Banner below to learn more.

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