RD: Like the fictions of Clarice Lispector or Lydia Davis or Janet Kaufman, these vignettes seem to slant in to a character’s depths—the surreal focus on the moment, the sort of free-floatingness of the character nevertheless slices into the psyche of self in relationship or self alone with insight. Do you set out to use time in close-focus while aiming to mine psychological depth, or how do you approach that kind of excavation of character?
TH: I am incredibly honored to have my fictions mentioned alongside Clarice Lispector and Lydia Davis—and must seek out Janet Kaufman’s work! I really don’t set out with any aims at all, I just try and get something down the way I hear it in my head. I often write very fast, which for me seems to dampen down my inhibitions and allows me to write in a more surreal fashion. If it works, if something actually emerges from this that speaks to even one other person, I consider that a miracle.
RD: In the delicacy of the language and the almost-constant use of present tense, and compelling syntax too, I seem to hear echoes of Helene Cixous, Marguerite Duras—are you drawn to language-centered writers like those, do you look to translations or to other languages to shake up syntax or rhythm, to experiment with language?
TH: Interestingly, I have never read anything by those two writers, but I feel that yes, I am quite obsessed with writers who have a deep love for language, that is vital for me. I am increasingly drawn to writers like Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett, who use language for something other than its accepted meaning, for its rhythms, for some other kinds of significance. I adore reading fiction in translation—the short stories of Georges-Olivier Chateareynaud and Cees Noteboom, for example—I hate being so English-centered, I wish I could read in other languages...
I read a short story collection per month for review for The Short Review, and, after 2 1/2 years, I can see that if you look at my reviews, you would have a hard time pinpointing what exactly it is in a short story that thrills me. I have been bowled over by science fiction and thrilled by the highly experimental, deeply moved by realist stories, and blown away by tiny flash fictions and much longer stories. If you really want to get an idea of what I love to read, check out my latest review, of Janice Galloway's extraordinary and category-defying Collected Stories, and at the bottom is a list of all the reviews I have written.2010 sees the launch of The Short Review 2.0. What does this mean? It means we want to hear from you. Let's talk: about reviews, interviews, short stories, writing... come and join in the conversation on our new discussion forum.
This Month: From flames to madmen, ruins, relics, Indians and happy shades - reviews of debut collections by Alice Zorn, Daniel A Hoyt, Midge Raymond, Andrew McNabb and Hassan Blasim (translated into English for the first time) alongside Alice Munro's first collection from 1968, and Sherman Alexie's third collection and A L Kennedy's fifth, Tales of the DeCongested's second anthology and the Atlantis Collective's first.
And interviews with A L Kennedy, Alice Zorn, Dan Hoyt, Midge Raymond, Andrew McNabb, Hassan Blasim...
AND
Competitions: 3 very different books to give away this month: The Madman of Freedom Square by Hassan Blasim, The Body of This by Andrew McNabb, and Short Circuit: A Gudie to the Art of the Short Story, edited by Vanessa Gebbie (see below). Find out how to win>>
And On the Blog: The Short Review is delighted to be a stop on the Virtual Book Tour for Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story. Says Short Circuit ed Vanessa Gebbie: "On one level, a reader looks for entertainment – to be taken out of themselves for a while, by following a complicated plot. The reader who actively seeks that experience, sustained for the length of time it takes to read a novel, who then switches to read a good short story, expecting it to deliver something similar, will be disappointed. " Read the rest of the blog post here >>
Margaret Atwood is blogging about her upcoming world tour for her new book, Year of the Flood - we will be seeing her in a few weeks. Apparently she is setting off today and traveling from Canada to the UK by boat:"Packing for departure for the UK — Graeme Gibson and I are crossing by boat, thanks to Cunard, and I will preview The Year of the Flood during those days. The first dramatic and musical event is in Edinburgh on August 30 — Orville Stoeber the composer will perform in it. Then comes Manchester — two stars from Coronation Street are in the event! — and then London, Bath, Bristol, Ely, Cardiff, not in that order. All are fundraisers for the RSPB and for BirdLife International — It’s wonderful how people have been helping out. Click The Tour on this website to see all stops — the countries are different colours. Kingston Ontario is poised to go — September 23 at the Writers’ Festival — they have thrown themselves into the spirit, and are even designing recycled newspaper shoes, says Rumour! I will post updated info on the UK tour next."
"My rather lofty idea then was that the main character in the collection was the country of Zimbabwe itself, and I wanted the reader to see it grow or regress through each story. But that approach was too artificial, too forced, and in the end, the stories simply fell into place on the basis of which one I managed to finish editing first .."Alan McMonagle, author of Liar, Liar:
"Stories are revelations, discoveries, confessions, little explosions. They attempt to be of reality and, at the same time, to stretch reality. ... Many of my efforts eschew the classic moment of epiphany. So early into a writing career I'm happy for my characters to "emerge." It's that Flannery O’Connor thing of people being the way they are despite what has happened as opposed to because of what has happened.."
"I am immensely grateful to the people buying my book. I am puzzled by the huge popularity of chick lit. I don't think this attitude is snobbishness or envy. The law of averages would indicate some people ought to like chick lit. But so many? It must surely make a difference to a population or a civilization that so many like, nay love, this level of writing, and are to that extent usually turned off by other forms of literature"Read it all and more right here.
and by the astonishing fact that I sent three flash stories and a poem to a lit zine yesterday and they'd like to publish all of them! Well, very nice. Will post the links as they happen.
Where to begin? What a week! The biggest short story news surely must be today's announcement that Canadian writer Alice Munro has won this year's Man Booker Prize. An award-winning short story writer, a recent article in the Canadian National Post newspaper reports that Munro pokes fun at the attitude to short stories in a new story of hers, Fiction, in which the main character discovers she is a character in a book."When she finds out it's not a novel, it's a collection of short stories, she's horrified," says her editor, Doug Gibson. In the story, Munro writes, "It was as if the author was hanging on the gates of literature rather than fully admitted inside because she was only writing short stories."The Man Booker judges, Jane Smiley, writer; Amit Chaudhuri, writer, academic and musician; and writer, film script writer and essayist, Andrey Kurkov, said:
‘Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.'While those of us who understand very well the power of the short story would take issue with the "and yet" - we should hold our tongues and just celebrate this wonderful news that a stunning and inspirational writer has been recognised! Alice Munro's new collection, Too Much Happiness, will be published in October. Can't wait. Visit Alice Munro's Wikipedia page for more information.
, the Wales Book of the Year award English-language shortlist is announced, and it is novel-free: two short story collections and a collection of poetry, and all by female authors. Deborah Kay Davies' debut short story collection, Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful, a short story collection from award-winning novelist Gee Williams, Blood Etc, and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch's second collection of poetry, Not in These Shoes. Congratulations to all. The winner will be announced on June 15th.
The $10,000 prize – named in memory of the writer Danuta Gleed, and administered by the Writers' Union of Canada – toasts the nation's best English-language debut short fiction collection.
Well, he sort of does short stories. His new book, Nocturnes, is a collection of five such "things". Ishiguru doesn't seem wholeheartedly comfortable with the idea that he has actually written a short story collection! He said to the Guardian's Decca Aitkinhead on Monday:"Well I'm not quite sure what you're supposed to call it," he admits. "I've been resisting calling it a collection of short stories because sometimes novelists do publish collections of short stories, and they're basically a rag bag of stories they've had sitting around for the last 30 years. Whereas this book I actually sat down and wrote from start to finish.Yes, true, from the author interviews on the Short Review, only a few authors seem to have done it this way, having a collection in mind and writing it.
"I don't know what proper short story writers would think of this, but I've gone about this in the way a novelist would. I don't claim to be a short story writer, and I have no idea if I'm doing it properly; I'm just writing this almost like a novelist. It sounds very pretentious, but you know some music forms, like sonatas, you get five what seem like totally separate pieces of music but they go together."I have added the Bold - proper short story writers? I found this fascinating. He's written five short stories, yet still doesn't claim to be a short story writer. He seems to see himself as a novelist stumbling into foreign territory. But surely, the definition of a short story writer is just... someone who writes short stories. Or is it not? Aitkenhead tries to clarify:
Food for thought - when is a set of short stories not a short story collection? Is Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kittredge, recent winner of the Pullitzer for Fiction, a short story collection or a novel-in-stories, and what exactly is a novel-in-stories but a short story collection?So it definitely isn't a novel? "No, it isn't a novel. I didn't want the stories to interweave as they would in a novel. So yes, they're short stories. But I've always said I don't want them published separately, I don't want them split up. I think that's a bit unreasonable of me because they would probably work alone, but I personally always thought of them as a single book. It's just a fictional book that happens to be divided into these five movements." He pauses for a moment to reconsider, and smiles apologetically. "I don't like these musical analogies, because it sounds wildly pretentious. Maybe it's better to say it's more like an album, and you don't sometimes want a track released as a single."
"Well it's certainly a much smaller market, there's no doubt about it. I did ask people beforehand - because I was curious, I wanted to know, in a slightly mercenary way. I said what is the short story market compared to the novel market? And in America I was told it's between a third to a half of what I would sell as a novelist. Here in this country more like a quarter." And that didn't put him off? "Well no, because I've always wanted to have a short story collection.""I've always wanted to have a short story collection". Well said, Mr Ishiguru. Now you do. Read the full interview.
The first round of voting has ended and I'm delighted that two short story collections we spotted first, Alison MacLeod's Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction and Sophie Hannah's The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets, are in the final Ten of Spread the Word's Books to Talk About. Two short story collections in the top ten is excellent news for short story lovers!
Continuing in the spirit of not talking about myself, I have the great honour of hosting Mark Budman, editor of flash fiction lit mag Vestal Review (for which I used to work as a First Reader) and author of the newly-published novel, My Life at First Try, published by Counterpoint Press. Here is Publishers Weekly's review of the book:This blazingly fast and funny semi-autobiographical novel follows a Russian man's comically earnest pursuit of the American dream. As a child, Alex, living in 1950s Siberia with his parents and grandparents, sees a picture of his American-born second cousin, Annie, and he believes he has found his destiny. Throughout his formative sexual experiences, he fantasizes about Annie, who embodies the exoticness of Western culture and the wholesomeness of the American dream. By the late 1970s, when Alex's parents decide to decamp for the U.S., Alex packs up his wife and their young daughter, too, and after the trio land in upstate New York, Alex goes to work at the IBM-like HAL Corporation while his wife, Lyuba, an internist, takes longer to settle in. At first, Alex is content with his new freedom-loving democratic identity, but as his children grow and Lyuba becomes more independent the dream begins to lose its sheen. The novel is hilarious, eye-opening and, by the end, a little depressing. It's tough not to have Alex's buoyant energy rub off on the reader.
M: I like the economy and the energy of flash. The ability to say a lot with a few words. As for your question if it was a conscious choice, writing is part art and part science. So you can plan but you need to improvise. Yes, I wanted the chapters to be short, but sometimes they spilled beyond my intended boundaries.
One of the best aspects of the festival was the post-reading pub conversations, complete with sandwiches and free drinks for the authors, every night. Nattering about the short story, about books and about writing, every night; I was in heaven. Many congrats to Pat Cotter and the Munster Literature Centre for the smooth organisation and varied line-up, I highly recommend next year's festival, and hope that it doesn't clash with that other short story extravaganza, Small Wonder, which caused Clare and several others to have to jet off to England. The world has so few short story festivals, we should be allowed to attend both, no?'These stories are acute, meticulous, memorable. Tania Hershman is definitely a writer worth watching.'I greatly appreciate someone like Toby, who is busy promoting his own books, taking the time to read my stories and to encourage a beginning author who is just stepping onto the path. I only hope that if I am in a similar position, I will be able to be as generous with my time and my words.
In lieu of discipline, Moore has obsessiveness, which is not the same thing. "I was obsessive with writing, but I wasn't ever disciplined. Because if you're obsessive you don't need discipline. You just do it all the time. Why would you impose a regimen, when this is your love?"and
Keret says he has tried writing novels, but found it more difficult and likens it to trying to "explode slowly." Writing stories, on the other hand, is relatively straightforward. "It's much easier than living."Full interviews here and here.
"I very consciously organized the order of the stories, with the one page fictions teaching the reader that Black Tickets was an unusual book"Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets
"I chose what I consider my best stories – and those with some kind of thematic development."Jai Clare, The Cusp of Something
"I constantly worry about boring the reader. I think this psychology helps me developing a more captivating plot and pace"Xujun Eberlein, Apologies Forthcoming
"When writing Bodies in Motion, my advisor, looking at an early draft, said that I seemed to be writing for white people, because I was doing a lot of explaining of Sri Lankan culture.That really startled me,..."Mary Anne Mohanraj, Bodies in Motion
"It honestly blows my mind to imagine what my junior-year-of-high-school self would have thought had someone told him the story he was writing would be published twenty years later in a collection by Knopf... and that it would be his eighth book"David Levithan, How They Met
"Jennifer [the publisher] also strongly encouraged me to make the story Bare the first story, so the first four words of my collection are 'I shaved my balls...'."Dave Housley, Ryan Seacrest is Famous
"It was interesting to see the different ways in which my stories "talked" to each other according to the order in which I placed the rest of them – creating different rhythms of mood or style or situation.."Elizabeth Baines, Balancing on the Edge of the World
The author [Hanif Kureishi] also said that when he goes to his desk each morning to commence writing, he thinks to himself: "Why am I doing this? Shall I commit suicide."
