The Short Review

2012 - Year of the... Short Story?

2012-01-18T16:19:00.001Z

So, there's been a lot of public cries here in the UK of 2012 as "the Year of the Short Story". We here at Short Review towers sigh a little when we hear this kind of thing. With our binoculars, and our microscope, we have not seen any waning of the short story over the past 5 years of our existence, no slowing down of the numbers of short story collections we get offered for review - so we would like to suggest an alternative title for 2012, "The Year Mainstream Publishers Re-Discovered What We All Knew About The Short Story Already"! Catchy?

Anyway, we certainly celebrate any upsurge in short-story-related activity and there does seem to be quite a bit here - from The Telegraph newspaper's Short Story Writing Club to a "short story newspaper" as reported in The Bookseller, Random House's Random Shorts (more coming soon on that) and Penguin Shorts.

One of the most exciting developments is that Bloomsbury is publishing 5 short story collections in the first five months of 2012! We thought we'd better find out a bit more, so we put some questions to Bloomsbury fiction editorial director Helen Garnon-Williams:

The Short Review: We were very excited to hear that Bloomsbury is publishing 5 short story collections during the first 5 months of 2012, surely a record for any UK publisher! Can you tell us a little about each collection? Are they debut collections? UK-based authors?

Helen Garnon-Williams: We are thrilled to be launching five completely wonderful and very different short story collections out into the world this Spring. One collection comes from America, one from a Canadian author living in England, and three others from British writers. There are four debuts and one long-awaited collection from a Booker-nominated novelist.

The first collection, Diving Belles and Other Stories, is by Lucy Wood. Set in Cornwall, where Lucy grew up, her stories combine the magical elements of folklore with everyday, domestic environments. Dazzling, mischievous and beautiful, her collection has already drawn praise from the likes of Michel Faber, Phillip Hensher and Jon McGregor. And Lucy is still only 26, which is, frankly, a little terrifying.

In February, we are publishing Jon McGregor’s breathtaking first story collection This isn’t the sort of thing that happens to someone like you. Two of the stories in this collection have been shortlisted for the BBC National Short story Award, and in both cases they were named as runner-up. Set in the flat and threatened fenland landscape these delicate, dangerous and sometimes deeply funny stories tell of things buried and unearthed, of familiar places made strange and of lives where much is hidden and tender moments are hard-won. They are absolutely astonishing.

In March we are delighted to be publishing Homesick, by Roshi Fernando. Roshi has won the Impress Prize and been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Prize, and in this stunning collection of linked stories about Sri-Lankan families in South London, she traces the fine lines of politics, tradition and community, exploring questions of belonging and home in finely-honed and powerful prose.

In April, we are publishing DW Wilson’s debut collection Once You Break A Knuckle, from which his BBC National-Short-Story-Award-winning The Dead Roads comes. Dave Wilson is a remarkable young writer and we are incredibly excited to have him on our list. His stories, set in the remote Kootenay Valley in western Canada, crackle with tension and are propelled by jagged, cutting dialogue, as they describe good people doing bad things.

And finally, we have I Am An Executioner by Rajesh Parameswaran, an incredibly exciting young American writer whose work has already appeared in McSweeney's, Granta and Zoetrope, and whose darkly funny, wildly original stories about the power of love, and the love of power form a glittering, savage and elegant first collection. ·

TSR: What those of us who write short stories hear very often from literary agents is that publishers feel they can't sell collections of stories. Bloomsbury clearly feels differently - do you have any plans for special marketing campaigns for these collections that are focused on the fact of them being short stories?

HGW: I’m afraid that there does, unfortunately seem to be more than a grain of truth in this maxim. Whereas in the States, short story collections can easily reach the Number One spot on the New York Times bestseller list (Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth being a case in point), in the UK we very rarely see short story collections selling in large numbers - unless they are linked collections, published as novels, like A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing and Jennifer Egan’s fantastic A Visit from the Goon Squad.

But, ironically, or so it seems from my perspective as an editor anyway, more and more writers are turning to the short story form – indeed, most of the authors I work with seem to spend a sometimes alarming amount of their day on twitter! – and I think it is where some of the most original and exciting fiction is to be found today. And, in a world where opinion and debate are distilled into 140 characters, where life seems to be moving at an ever faster pace and our appreciation of the ‘short’ is growing every day, it seems a fair assumption that more readers are being drawn to short stories, to perfectly-crafted little worlds into which they can escape, where they can be surprised, and moved and transported in the course of a tube journey or a lunch break.

And then of course there are the electronic-opportunities that arise with short stories – where single stories can be separated out and read on smartphones and e-books and in electronic magazines. At Bloomsbury we have always been committed to publishing literary fiction of the highest quality, and we have a great tradition of short-story publishing. We have published collections by Mavis Gallant, Tobias Wolff, TC Boyle, Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford, Jay McInerney, William Boyd and Nadine Gordimer – all of whom are wonderful writers in whatever form they choose to write in.

So, another reason for us to take on these short story collections, in particular those by debut writers, is because we believe that they are at the start of incredibly promising literary careers, and whether they go on to write novels, or more story collections, we wanted to commit to them as authors at this stage.In publishing these collections closely together we wanted to announce the arrival of a collection of hugely talented writers. And by launching them in the same period it has allowed us to draw strength in numbers, as it were: we have produced a beautiful sampler (both electronically and in print form), containing a story from each of the collections that we have sent out to the media, booksellers and festival organizers.

We have been able to blow our trumpet about our Year of the Short Story, which has, in turn led to coverage and previews for each of the authors and their books. Various publications are interested in running the stories over the coming months, and festivals and libraries are excited by the idea of a kind of short-story roadshow, where people can listen to groups of short-story writers talking together. By publishing them together and confidently, as opposed to the perhaps rather apologetic way that short story collections can sometimes be published, our hope – and our intention – is that the collections will be noticed in a way they might otherwise not have been.

TSR: What is it that you love in a short story? What does a great short story do for you?

HGW: In stories, as in novels, the first thing that I am drawn to is always voice – I am struck by voices that feel original, and confident and that instantly draw you in. Story collections can be a treat because they often contain so many different voices and they really showcase the craft that goes into creating convincing characters and narrators. I also love the elegance of the short story: the precision and skill needed to hold it together successfully. But most of all, I love the story in a story: whether this is narrative that lasts for half a page or for 30, for me, the best short stories are those that make you feel like you have read an entire novel, with all the emotional investment, and intellectual and emotional pay-off that that involves.

Thank you so much, Helen - we at Short Review Towers are feeling the love! We look forward to reading - and reviewing -these collections (read a sample here) and certainly hope that 2012, 2013, 2014 and on and on continue to be years of the short story!

The Story Prize announces its finalists

2012-01-13T10:26:00.003Z

The prestigious $20,000 Story Prize, awarded annually to a short story collection published in the US has announced the finalists for 2011:

The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo (Scribner)
We Others by Steven Millhauser (Alfred A. Knopf)
Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books)

We have reviewed Edith Pearlman's stunning collection already (and Steven Millhauser's previous collection, Dangerous Laughter) - and the other two are on our pile - and frankly I don't envy the judges, having to decide between these three. I'd rather not have to! The winner will be announced in March. Good luck to all! Keep an eye on the Story prize blog for more about the prize and the finalists.

Happy Fourth Birthday to The Short Review!

2011-11-07T17:40:00.001Z

Happy birthday! This month The Short Review turns four years old.

439 story collections and anthologies reviewed, by our forty or so reviewers worldwide, and over 250 authors interviewed... We all do what we do for love of the short story and to spread the word about as many short story collections as possible so readers can get hold of them, demand them from their local bookshops or libraries, buy them as presents.

Four years on, we are so overwhelmed with offers of collections to review that we have had to declare a hiatus in accepting new review copies so that we can catch our breath! A good sign, we think. A very good sign! How could you help us celebrate our birthday? Tell someone about a short story collection you love. Tell ten people. Spread it around!

This month's issue includes an unprecedented seven reviews of multi-author anthologies, which means that we are bringing you short stories by more authors than ever before! From women aloud to the bride stripped bare, the gold boy and the emerald girl, the best british and european fiction, what doesn't kill you if you're with the bears or on the Paris metro in nineteen seventysomething... and...

... Giveaways - In honour of our birthday - and of the UK's National Short Story Week - we are giving away NINE books: 4 of the books we are reviewing this month - and an extra 5 short story collections! You could win Best British Short Stories 2011, Best European Fiction 2012, the National Short Story Week charity audiobook anthology Women Aloud - and Affirm Press's Long Story Shorts set of six short story collections, which includes Barry Divola's Nineteen Seventysomething.

Visit the Competitions page to find out how to win.

Shortlistees for the BBC National Short Story Award 2011

2011-09-09T19:56:00.001+01:00

Huge congratulations to Short Review author Alison MacLeod, one of the five shortlistees for this year's BBC National Short Story Award, announced tonight! Her fellow honorees are: Jon McGregor, MJ Hyland, KJ Orr and DW Wilson. More information here - and you can listen to all the shortlisted stories on BBC Radio 4 next week!

A quick word about speed

2011-09-06T14:40:00.000+01:00

One of the most interesting things for me, as editor of The Short Review, is seeing how different authors answer our standard author interview questions. The first question "How long did it take you to write all the stories in your collection" often brings forth comments along the lines of Bret Anthony Johnston's in this month's issue: "I’ve always known that I’m a slow writer, but man oh man; looking at it this way really highlights it to an embarrassing degree." How long did it take Johnson to write Corpus Christi? Five years. Is this extraordinarily slow? Is there reason for his embarassment. Well, according to our survey, absolutely not.

So, to make Bret - and frankly all of us writing short stories - feel better, let's take a quick look:

Mary Akers: Let’s see, I wrote the first story back in 1997, and the last story in 2007, so the math is easy. Ten years.

Allison Amend: The earliest story was written in 1997; the last was written expressly for the collection in 2008.

Paolo Bacigalupi: The first, Pocketful of Dharma was written in 1998, the last was written in 2007, so... 9 years?

Rusty Barnes: These stories were written between 1999 and 2006.

Kevin Barry: They’d been slowly oozing from my fetid little brain onto the computer screen for the best part of seven years.

Alan Beard: Thirteen years since my first collection (Taking Doreen out of the Sky), and that took twelve years to complete.

Aimee Bender: About six years.

Regi Claire: To be honest, quite a few years (my guess is six)!

Ramola D: I think the stories that ended up in this collection were written across about twelve years.

Lise Erdrich: I could say twenty years, since that is when they first started to get published here and there.

Deborah Kay Davies: It took about 10 years altogether.

Charles Lambert: I wrote the oldest story here (Beacons) over fifteen years ago and the most recent (Something Rich and Strange) last year.

Kelly Link: Altogether, I wrote these stories over the course of fifteen years.

Alison MacLeod: Eek. Should I admit this? A ‘debut’ collection makes the author sound so new, almost virginal, but the truth is the stories in the collection were written over a period of twenty years.

Clare Wigfall: Almost a decade.

Tamar Yellin: About twelve years.

Okay, I could go on and on...but I think you get the point. There are a number of authors who wrote all their stories in a year or two (or even six months, Warren Adler, and four months for Rob Shearman) but the majority, who didn't have a collection in mind as they wrote, took years and years. Are you a hare or a tortoise? What does this mean? What pithy conclusion can be drawn?

Perhaps just this: it takes as long as it takes. Yup.Let's leave it there.

Help Save Short Stories on BBC Radio!

2011-07-18T13:00:00.001+01:00

Following swiftly in the footsteps of the first short story festival in Bristol, UK, ShortStoryVille, which was hugely successful - comes the distressing news that BBC Radio 4, which until recently broadcast a short story in the Afternoon Reading programme 5 days a week, which was then reduced to 3 days a week - and now will be only once a week. This is the BBC - who only a few years ago was proud to announce the BBC National Short Story Award, and on their website say:

The BBC National Short Story Award, managed in partnership with Booktrust, continues to serve as a reminder of the power of the short story and to celebrate a literary form that is proving ever more versatile in the twenty first century, enjoyed not just on the page, on air and increasingly on every sort of screen, but also in flash fiction events, short story festivals and slams. The short story has moved beyond the revival of recent years and is now experiencing a golden age.

BBC Radio 4 is the world's leading broadcaster of short stories and a staunch and long-time supporter of the form. Short stories are broadcast every week, attracting over a million listeners.

BBC- you are a "staunch and long-time supporter", don't let us down now!

The Afternoon Reading has for many many years been a showcase not just for well-known writers but for new voices - on a personal note, it was my first "big break", the first time I felt I was taken seriously as a writer, coupled with the joy of hearing my story brought so wonderfully to life. Not only that, the payment the writer receives is no paltry sum and has formed a significant part of my writerly earnings in the years since.

There are many, many writers, listeners and readers who are very concerned about this development. Writer Susie McGuire and Ian, organiser of the UK's National Short Story Week, have formulated the following:

The new Controller of Radio 4, Gwyneth Williams, will be a guest on FEEDBACK on BBC Radio 4 next week. How very timely.
Would you add your name to a letter/question to ask her?
Would you pass on this email to other writers who care about the health of the short story…?

The more of us, & the better known the writers who sign it, the more likely it is to have some effect.

If so, please find below a short, polite question, proposed by Ian of http://www.nationalshortstoryweek.org.uk

Reminder: info on her decision to cut the short story’s presence on Radio 4 outlined here http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2011/07_july/10/radio4.shtml

If you’d like to add your signature, please email YES to
ian AT shortstoryweek DOT org DOT uk

& cc to me: info AT susiemaguire DOT co DOT uk

NB – It would be really helpful if you could reply within 24 hours so that the question can be lodged as soon as possible. This is by no means the *only* action interested parties can take, but it’s a start, and I hope you might add your weight to it with this (and further suggestions are welcomed)
thanks
Susie

*******************
Proposed question:
We were surprised and disappointed to learn of the decision to reduce the short story output on Radio 4 to once a week from next spring. Radio 4 has been a great champion of the short story for many years. It is one of very few places in the UK where both new and established writers can have their short stories broadcast to a large audience, and where radio listeners can enjoy readings of the short story form. This move comes at a time when interest in the short story is growing, but paid opportunities for short story writers are still scarce. Could Gwyneth Williams please explain:
1) what has led her to make this decision?
2) whether the short stories on Radio 4 extra will be new commissions or repeats of existing recordings?
3) how this decision fits with the BBC’s sponsorship of the National Short Story Award (and indeed if this will continue?)

If you are moved to do so, please take action, following the instructions outlined above. Signatories so far include:

Clare Wigfall

Sara Maitland

Philip Pullman

Nicholas Royle

Vivian French

James Robertson

Michael Holroyd

Jane Rusbridge

Dr Charles Smith

Sarah Hall

Sarah Hilary

Vanessa Gebbie

Jill Dawson

Lucinda Byatt

Maggie Gee

Sarah Sheridan (Soc of A, Scotland)

Tania Hershman (Ed, The Short Review)

Helena Nelson (publisher, Happenstance)

Morag Joss

Lola Perrin

Jules Horne

Suzanne Bellenger

Richard Beard (Nat Academy of Writing)

Ali Bacon

Nicky Parker, (Publisher, Amnesty)

Dan Powell

Ian Cundell

Kathleen Langley

John Courtney-Grimwood

Wendy Ann Greenhalgh

Alison Wells

James Wall

K E Bergdoll

Linda Cracknell

Jonathan Pinnock (also see his FB links)

Sarah Salway

Alison MacLeod

Louis Winters

Emily Dubberly

Karen Whiteson

Griff Griffiths

Sara Schofield

Ian Macpherson

Stella Burchill

(and counting...)

Please join us!

ADDENDUM: There is now an online petition here - please sign!

2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize Shortlist

2011-07-11T12:34:00.001+01:00

More congratulations are in order - to the six short story collection shortlisted for the seventh Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize, three of whom are Short Review authors, I'm delighted to say. The €35,000 will be awarded at the Frank O'Connor Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland, in September.

Here is the shortlist -with links to the three we've already reviewed. Good luck to all!

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li
Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod
Saints and Sinners by Edna O’Brin
Death is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca
The Empty Family by Colm Tóibin
Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood

Congrats - Edge Hill Short Story Prize

2011-07-08T10:00:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Short Review author Tom Vowler whose short story collection, The Method, won the Readers' Prize at the Edge Hill Short Story Prize awards last night! You can read our review of the book here. Congratulations also to Graham Mort, whose collection, Touch, won the overall Edge Hill Prize. A great night for short stories!

2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize Longlist

2011-06-28T14:05:00.000+01:00

The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize has just announced its longlisted short story collections. As ever, it is a great list to start with if you're looking for some great reading material! As they say on their website, the award "is living up to its international credentials with a long list containing twelve UK writers, twenty-six Americans, four Irish, eight from Canada, two from India, two from Bulgaria and one each from Japan, Nigeria, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, China, Nepal and Spain, spanning four continents."

The non-voting chairman of the 2011 jury is Patrick Cotter, curator of the Award. The voting members of the jury are poet and novelist Thomas McCarthy who served also on the 2006 jury, Kinsale-based novelist and short story writer Alannah Hopkin and Guardian short story blogger Chris Power. This jury will announce a short list in July prior to the award ceremony in September during the Cork International Short Story Festival.

The longlist is as follows (with links to those collections The Short Review has already reviewed):

Clark Blaise The Meagre Tarmac Biblioasis USA

Summer Brenner My Life in Clothes Red Hen Press USA

Jo Cannon Insignificant Gestures Pewter Rose Press UK

Uttara Chauhan Blue Blood Penguin India Canada

Michael Christie The Beggar's Garden HarperCollins Canada Canada

Richard Cumyn The Young in Their Country Enfield and Wizenty Canada

Anthony Doerr Memory Wall Fourth Estate USA review coming soon

Doug Dorst The Surf Guru Riverhead Books USA

Deyan Enev Circus Bulgaria Portobello Bulgaria

Danielle Evans Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self Riverhead Books USA

Stuart Evers Ten Stories about Smoking Picador UK

Edward Falco Burning Man Southern Methodist University Press USA

Siobhan Fallon You Know When the Men Are Gone Amy Einhorn Books USA

Roshi Fernando Homesick Impress UK

Karen Joy Fowler What I Didn't See Small Beer USA review coming soon

Vanessa Gebbie Storm Warning Salt UK review coming soon

Sue Gee Last Fling Salt UK

Ben Greenman Celebrity Chekhov Harper Perennial USA

Linda LeGarde Grover The Dance Boots University of Georgia Press USA

Tina May Hall The Physics of Imaginary Objects University of Pittsburgh Press USA review coming soon

Alan Heathcock Volt Graywolf USA

Ava Homa Echoes from the Other Land Tsar Canada

Valerie Laken Separate Kingdoms Harper Perennial USA

Yiyun Li Gold Boy, Emerald Girl Random House/ Fourth Estate China

Michael Kardos One Last Good Time Press 53 USA

Gitanjali Kolanad Sleeping with Movie Stars Penguin India India

Sean Mackel The River Guildhall Ireland

Alexander MacLeod Light Lifting Biblioasis Canada

Andre Mangeot True North Salt UK

Javier Marías While the Women are Sleeping Chatto and Windus Spain

Rob Mimpriss For His Warriors Gwasg y Bwthyn UK review coming soon

Mariko Nagai Georgic BkMk Japan

Prem Nath Crowded Rooms Penguin India India

Courttia Newland A Book of Blues Flambard UK review coming soon

Edna O'Brien Saints and Sinners Faber Ireland

Daniel Orozco Orientation Faber USA

Sue Orr Random House New Zealand New Zealand

E.C.Osondu Voice of America Granta Books Nigeria

Kelcey Parker For Sale By Owner Kore USA

Miroslav Penkov East of the West Farrar, Straus & Giroux Bulgaria

Anne Perdue I'm a Registered Nurse Not a Whore Insomniac Canada

Andrew Plattner A Marriage of Convenience BkMk USA

Dawn Promislow Jewels Tsar Canada

Shann Ray American Masculine Graywolf USA

Mary Rechner Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women Propeller USA

Susannah Rickards Hot Kitchen Snow Salt UK

Suzanne Rivecca Death is Not an Option Norton USA

Moya Roddy Other People Wordsonthestreet Ireland

Ethel Rohan Cut Through the Bone Dark Sky Books Ireland

Gretchen Shirm Having Cried Wolf Affirm Australian

L.E. Smith Views Cost Extra Fomite USA

Christine Sneed Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry University of Massachusetts Press USA

Fiona Thackeray The Secret's in the Folding Pewter Rose Press UK

Rabi Thapa Nothing to Declare Penguin India Nepal

Colm Tóibín The Empty Family Viking Penguin Ireland

Matthew J. Trafford The Divinity Gene Douglas & McIntyre Canada

Jessica Treadway Please Come Back to Me University of Georgia Press USA

Paul Tremblay In the Mean Time ChiZine Publications USA

Valerie Trueblood Marry or Burn Counterpoint USA

Salley Vickers Aphrodite's Hat Fourth Estate UK review coming soon

Ferdinand Von Schirach Crime Chatto and Windus Germany

Tom Vowler The Method Salt UK

Susi Wyss The Civilized World Holt USA

Scott Prize winners and Edge Hill Short Story Prize shortlist

2011-05-11T09:25:00.000+01:00

May is clearly a bumper month for short story collection news! First, congratulations to A J Ashworth, Jon Pinnock and Cassandra Parkin, the three winners of this year's Salt Publishing Scott Prize for debut short story collections. Their collections will be published in November, the UK's National Short Story Week. We look forward to our review copies!

And congratulations too to Short Review author Tom Vowler, whose collection, The Method, has been shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, alongside collections from Helen Simpson, Polly Samson,Graham Mort and Michele Roberts.Winners announced in July, good luck to all!

Short Story Month 2011: The Collection Giveaway Project

2011-04-20T11:33:00.001+01:00

I was thrilled to receive an email from Erika Dreifus of the Fiction Writers' Review, about this new intiative for Short Story Month 2011, in May. Here's what it's all about:

Inspired last year by the Emerging Writers Network—who inaugurated May as Short Story Month three years ago—and the Big Poetry Giveaway for National Poetry Month, Fiction Writers Review is excited to launch our second year of The Collection Giveaway Project: a community effort by lit bloggers to raise attention for short story collections. Warm thanks to FWR Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus, who suggested FWR as a home for this project last year and will not only be participating on her own blog, but will also be helping FWR run the project right here.

To participate in Short Story Month 2011: The Collection Giveaway Project , here’s what to do:

(1) Post an entry on your blog recommending a recently published short story collection (or two, or three).
The post can be long or short, a review or merely a rave. The one requirement is that you, the blogger, have read and loved the book(s) in question.
(2) Offer a copy of the book (or each book) as a giveaway to one lucky person who comments on your blog.
You can choose the winner through a drawing, or by the wittiness of his/her remarks, or by whatever criteria you choose.
NOTE for blogger-authors: You can absolutely give away a copy of your own collection—but in an effort to keep this as much about community as publicity, please also offer to give away a second book that isn’t one of yours.
(3) Announce the winner(s) on May 31, 2011, and arrange to send out copies of any books you are giving away.
If you’re participating, drop Erika an email at erika [at] fictionwritersreview.com to let us know. We’ll add you to the list of participating blogs/sites and link to you from this frequently updated page on our site.
Check back May 1 for the official launch, but we’ll update the list throughout May!

Edge Hill Prize 2011 Longlist Announced

2011-03-30T11:32:00.002+01:00

The longlist has just been announced for Edge Hill University's Short Story Prize 2011. This is the fifth year of the prize, the UK's only literary award for a published collection of stories - won last year by Jeremy Dyson, who is one of this year's judges, together with Stuart Maconie and Marcus Gipps. You can read our interview with prize organiser Ailsa Cox here. The shortlist will be unveiled in May.

Here is this year's longlist, with links to those we've reviewed, so you can check out some of what the fuss is all about!:

Martin Bax - Memoirs of a Gone World (Salt Publishing).
Alan Beard - You Don't Have to Say (Tindal Street Press). review coming soon
Peter Bromley - Sky Light and Other Stories (Biscuit).
Jo Cannon - Insignificant Gestures (Pewter Rose Press).
Roshi Fernando - Homesick (Impress Books).
David Gaffney - The Half-life of Songs (Salt Publishing).
Vanessa Gebbie - Storm Warning, Echoes of Conflict (Salt Publishing). review coming soon
James Kelman - If it is Your Life (Penguin).
Andre Mangeot - True North (Salt Publishing). review coming soon
Jay Merill - God of the Pigeons (Salt Publishing).
Magnus Mills - Screwtop Thompson (Bloomsbury).
Graham Mort - Touch (Seren).
Nik Perring - Not So Perfect (Roast Books).
Susannah Rickards - Hot Kitchen Snow (Salt Publishing). review coming soon
Michele Roberts - Mud, Stories and Sex and Love (Virago).
Polly Samson - Perfect Lives (Virago). review coming soon
Helen Simpson - Inflight Entertainment (Random House).
Fiona Thackeray - The Secret's in the Folding (Pewter Rose Press).
Tom Vowler - The Method and Other Stories (Salt Publishing).
Susie Wild - The Art of Contraception (Parthian).

Scott Prize shortlist announced

2011-03-01T14:56:00.000Z

The shortlist for Salt Publishing's 2011 Scott Prize for unpublished debut short story collections has been announced. Says Salt: "This prize forms part of Salt’s commitment to the short story and to our mission to discover and nurture new talent from around the English-speaking world." The shortlist is:

Adam Prince (Knoxville, US): The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men
Andrea Ashworth (Lancashire, UK): Somewhere Else, or Even Here
Cassandra Parkin (E. Yorks, UK): New World Fairy Tales
Guy Ware (London, UK): Witness Protection
John Haggerty (CA, US): The Other Half of Graceland
Jonathan Pinnock (St Albans, UK): Dot (.), Dash (-)
Julie Mayhew (Herts, UK): A Little Death
Michael Downs (Baltimore, US): The Greatest Show
Nicole Reid (IN, US): If You Must Know
Virginia Gilbert (Dublin, Ireland): Abroad

Many congratulations to all the shortlisted authors! Winners will be announced in April and The Short Review looks forward to reviewing the winning collections when they are published.

Best British Short Stories 2012 Wants to Hear From You

2011-02-10T12:54:00.000Z

(cross-posted with TaniaWrites)

I mentioned a while ago on my personal blog that Best British Short Stories is back, resurrected by my publisher, Salt Publishing, and edited by Nicholas Royle. He has just finalised the list of stories for the first edition, the 2011 edition, which will be published in April 2011 (see the list here - I'm delighted that it includes No Angel by Bernie McGill, which I chose as 2nd prize winner in the Sean O'Faolain competition), quite a mammoth task, he is to be applauded! And now he wants to know what British short story writers are up to this year.

He told me he wants short stories published "anywhere, could be in American publications or wherever. And not just literary mags – anthologies, newspapers, online etc." But before you get excited and start firing off your beautiful publications to him, he cautions: "People need to be selective, ie not like I was when sending to Giles Gordon & David Hughes for Best Short Stories, way back." If all of us bombard him with everything we have published this year, he will be swamped. So wait, think about it, be choosy. And check out the anthologies Nicholas has already edited (to start with, read The Short Review's review of '68: New Stories from Children of the Revolution).

And then, when you're ready, send them to:

n.royle@mmu.ac.uk or hard copies to Nicholas Royle at Manchester Writing School, Geoffrey Manton Building, MMU, Rosamond St West, Manchester M15 6LL

Short Review Author Among Story Prize finalists

2011-01-21T16:11:00.001Z

The $20,000 Story Prize, run by Larry Dark (who Sarah Salway interviewed for us here), is an very prestigious annual book award for short story collections written in English and published in the U.S. during a calendar year. It was won last year by Wells Tower for his collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

The Prize has just announced its three finalists for 2010: Short Review author Suzanne Rivecca for her collection, Death is Not An Option, Yiyun Li for Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and Anthony Doerr for Memory Wall. Congratulations to all! Winner announced March 3rd.

But that's not all - following the announcement of the finalists, Larry today posted the longlist, and this is an excellent place if you're looking for new short story collections to check out! It's a great resource for us, too - we have reviews in the works of half the collections on the list, will be checking out the other half. Congratulations to all!

National Short Story Day in the UK

2010-12-21T12:38:00.000Z

You don't need to be in the UK to celebrate the first National Short Story Day, today, December 21st, the shortest day of the year! Instead of going on again and again about how wonderful short stories are (which we tend to do anyway, monthly...), here is a Twitter widget thingy which tells you who is recommending what for NSSD - you don't need to be registered on Twitter to click the links. Happy reading!

National Short Story Week in the UK!

2010-11-25T17:23:00.002Z

Nov 21st - 28th has been designated by a group of short story lovers as the UK's first National Short Story Week. We at the Short Review are delighted, of course, although every week is short story week for us! Check out their website to see what's happening. And as part of the festivities they asked 9 short story writers including Short Review authors Alison MacLeod, Adam Marek, Sarah Salway and Tom Vowler ( and myself include - TH) to play a game of "consequences", each adding 100 words to a story until a complete 900 word story emerged. Here is the result!

Consequences

by Tania Hershman, Alison MacLeod, Adam Marek, Julie Mayhew, Jonathan Pinnock, Valerie O'Riordan, Sarah Salway, Tom Vowler, Susie Wild

Too many things. She grabs a pencil and an old envelope. Repeat prescription. Road tax. Library books overdue. Pay cheque in. No, too late for that. The kids will be waiting for her already. Damn. Where are the sodding keys?

The doorbell rings. She freezes. If she doesn’t make any sound, they will go away. Please. Go. Away. Now.

The doorbell rings again. Insistent. Won’t take no. The car is on the other side of the door.

“Hello?” she says.

‘May I come in?’

‘Well, actually, I’m in a bit – ‘

He’s in her kitchen. Hint of tobacco smoke. Late 20s. Mediterranean? ‘You haven’t changed,’ he says, taking hold of her chin. There’s a faint accent.

‘Let go!’ she says, pushing him away. ‘Do I know you?’

He reaches into his pocket. He throws the box down onto the table.

‘Go on,’ he says. ‘Open it.’

Again she goes to protest, to insist he leaves, but the lilt of his voice, his sanguine demeanour, suggests this would be unreasonable on her part.

‘What is it?’ she says, looking at the table.

‘You don’t remember, do you? At all.’

There is a hint of something forming, fragments of a memory gathering at the edges of her mind. A holiday. One of those hedonistic affairs where groups of friends convene on a superficially picturesque island, standards and judgment discarded for a fortnight, lost in a maelstrom of excess. Fifteen or so years ago. The young woman she’d been then embarrasses her now. The box, no bigger than the man’s fist, is carved from redwood, its lustre heightened by the kitchen’s fluorescent
lighting. She touches it with the tip of a finger, pushes it an inch or two.

The man lights a cigarette, exhales dramatically.

‘I’d rather you didn’t smoke in here,’ she says.

He pushes the box back towards her. ‘It’s not going to bite,’ he laughs.

The phone rings. ‘That’ll be my kids. I have to go. I’m sorry.’

‘I’ve travelled a long way,’ he says. ‘You have me worried that you really don’t remember me. Please tell me you’re just playing?’

She picks up the phone, and before she gets it to her ear, he says, ‘You’re the one that asked me to come.’

‘I’m on my way to get you both now,’ she says into the phone. ‘I’m leaving right this second.’

‘Both who?’ her daughter says.

‘What do you mean? Is your brother not with you?’

‘Mum,’ she says, ‘have you been smoking crack again or something?’

The man pushes the box right up to the edge of the table in front of her. ‘It’s very important you open this now,’ he says.

‘Anyway I’m not coming home. You promised I could stay at Laura’s.’ Her daughter hangs up before there’s an argument.

She turns back to him. ‘Why have you come now?’ she asks.

‘So you do remember.’

She opens the box, and stares at the silver key inside.

‘But aren’t you too young to have been there?’ The memories are so deep it aches. Then it hits her. Maria’s little brother. It used to be funny when he’d hang around them. She puts the key on her open palm as if weighing it. But if he’s here now, then… ‘Where’s Maria?’ she asks. She has a sick feeling that she knows the answer, and isn’t surprised when he shakes his head, gestures towards the key.

‘I don’t want it now.’ She’s not that stupid girl any more, thank god, so he’s wrong. It will bite. Hard.

He shrugs. ‘It’s your turn.’

In her head, she hears herself agree, she hears herself move towards him, she holds his hand. In her head, everything is clear: there is no kitchen, there are no children, no overdue library books, no house, no car. Her breathing slows, crawls, the air moving in and out, she feels each small inhalation as even time waits. ‘Now,’ he's saying to her, ‘right now,’ and the silver key is in her hand, the silver key that she had not remembered she was supposed to remember. ‘Do it!’ says this man off to one side, out of the corner of her eye. ‘Your turn, your turn...’ and in her head she knows that he is right, the only right thing in her pale and miserable life.

It is three months to the day since the accident. It feels like three hours. Each day as she wakes, the memory of it arrives like a hammer blow to her head. He won’t be downstairs, shovelling muesli into his mouth and rapping – badly – with his earphones in.

Yet there are days when she can almost trick her brain.

Katie has said they should clear out his things together. She said it again this morning when she found her in his room with her face buried in his T-shirt. It was bucketing down outside, but her twelve-year-old daughter, his little sister, marched across the room and heaved up the sash. ‘It stinks in here.’

The key is hot in her palm. ‘Maria... that night... She said it was a game. A party game. Like Truth or Dare, or...’

‘Consequences?’ His smile is courteous, patient even, but his eyes are hard.

She hesitates. She feels wrong footed and cross; her mind cloudy from his interruption, a lack of sleep, a mother’s grief. She thinks that there have been enough consequences for hedonistic teenage behaviour lately. Enough bad effects caused by misjudged booze-fuelled games. She buries the key inside its redwood coffin, pushes it back across the table and glares at him: ‘I can’t just leave.
I can’t just drop everything.’

He is still smiling at her. He does not move.

The day was just yawning into existence as they disembarked. On shore the walk is exactly as she remembers – the same narrow island path, the same parched shrubs, the same toothy boulders hiding the same heavy door. It is here that he passes her the small silver key, gives her shoulder that insistent nudge. It is here that she takes her turn.

And this is what it must feel like to die; to see your life rewind. Here she is, transplanted back into a moment that made the world turn differently. She takes the drink from the man. It is not a difficult decision. She simply says ‘yes’ to an elixir for grief, something to colour this pale and miserable life.
She sees the look on the man’s face; it is the same as it was back then, when he was a boy. There is outward encouragement and bonhomie, but it cannot mask the disgust, the fear. She is just like Maria, she is giving in. She is choosing this above everything else. Soon all thoughts of overdue library books and a child who doesn’t want to come home and a child who will never come home and the blame, soon they will be diluted. Soon, they will disappear.

She twists; she ducks away beneath his arm.

"No!" He turns, slips on the seaweed-slick stone and falls. She kneels. With her free hand she pinches his nose – years of getting the children to take their medicine – and pours. He spits, swallows; his eyes dilate. He says, “What –” and stops.

On the way home, she unwinds the car window and hurls the silver key into the roadside ditch. The wind whips it away. In the back-seat, he's sleeping, lulled like a baby by the engine vibrations. She leaves him in the emergency room, blinking uncertainly. She will not feel guilt.

She sits in her son's bedroom and cries. She remembers the moment his fingers stilled, the nurse touching her shoulder and squeezing. The room smells like nothing she wants; Katie was right. The evening thickens and she sits and remembers as rain drums through the open window and onto the wooden floor. She will remember: that's her consequence.

Fringe magazine calls The Short Review "juicy"!

2010-10-08T14:55:00.000+01:00

A lovely write-up on the excellent Fringe magazine's blog today, and a mini-interview with me about how The Short Review came about. Here's an excerpt:

Finding short fiction worth reading is no easy task for the average reader; outside of the annual Houghton Mifflin Best American Short Stories anthology, the publishing world gives readers little direction as to where to find the best contemporary short fiction. The Short Review, an online literary review magazine and blog, seeks to fill this gap.

The Short Review is more an online journal than blog. Each monthly issue reviews ten short story collections, and interviews the authors if possible. Collections may be new, older, or classic. Reviewers are short fiction writers themselves. The reviews are lengthy and rife with juicy excerpts and thoughtful impressions.

Read the rest of the blog post here...

UK National Short Story Week - what's it about?

2010-09-06T15:33:00.001+01:00

The UK is to have a National Short Story Week for the first time this year, and TSR asked its founder and director, Ian Skillicorn, what it's all about and what his wildest dreams for NSSW look like!

The Short Review: Tell us a bit about yourself and your team.

Ian Skillicorn: I have been involved in writing and producing for most of my working life, having started my career in Italy in the early 90s. In 2006 I set up Short Story Radio to promote the short story form and short story writers. We broadcast audio short stories via the website and our podcast and we have tens of thousands of listeners from around the world. I also produce marketing podcasts for authors and give talks on writing for audio.

When I had the idea for National Short Story Week I approached a number of people to form a steering group for the week. The role of the steering group is to provide advice and support, and to help promote National Short Story Week. The members of the steering group are all people I have worked with. They are professionals whose talents and opinions I respect, and I know that each of them is passionate about the short story form. Lisa Armytage is an actor with over 30 years experience in film, TV, radio and theatre. She has narrated short stories for radio, and also writes short stories. Jane Bidder writes novels and short stories under the pen name Sophie King and also teaches creative writing. Robert Kirkwood is the producer/presenter of the Talking Books programme on Insight Radio (RNIB). Sue Moorcroft is a writer of novels and short stories as well as non-fiction. Pat Richardson was Fiction Editor at Best magazine for over 16 years and now runs her own writing and editing consultancy. Bogdan Tiganov is a talented young writer who is in the process of setting up an independent publishing venture.

TSR: Where did the idea for NSSW come from? Is it inspired by something else happening around the world?

IS: During the time that I have been producing audio short stories I have met and worked with hundreds of writers from around the UK and overseas. The short story form is very popular among writers, especially within writers' groups, but time and again I have heard from writers about how few opportunities there are to find a commercial outlet for short fiction. However, I believe there is a market for short stories - my own experience of Short Story Radio has taught me that. A national awareness week seemed like the ideal way to connect short story writers with potential readers and listeners. I'm not aware of a similar short story event anywhere else, but of course there are already high profile and successful literary events in the UK such as World Book Day, National Poetry Day and National Storytelling Week. I think a week is the ideal length for an awareness campaign of this nature, as it gives organisers the chance to reach participants over a number of days, and participants the opportunity to attend more than one event.

TSR: What is the essence of NSSW? What will be happening?

IS: From the outset the intention was for National Short Story Week to be a grass roots initiative. My role, and that of the steering group, is to promote the existence of National Short Story Week to the public and interested parties. People and groups around the country are then free to organise an event that best suits them. I've recently heard from a number of people who have already organised events. These events include a short story display in a city library; a talk to a writing group by an award winning short story writer; a reading group which, in November, will choose and discuss a short story anthology instead of a novel; an open mic short story event and two short story collections especially commissioned to celebrate National Short Story Week.

On the website we have lots of ideas for how National Short Story Week can be celebrated - depending on whether you are a writer, reader/listener, publisher, library or bookshop. See the ideas here.

TSR: What would the best NSSW look like in your wildest dreams?

IS: My hope is that National Short Story Week will meet its aims, which are to get more people writing, reading and listening to short stories, and to create creative and commercial opportunities for people and organisations involved in the short story form. I don't want to think in terms of wildest dreams as that sounds to me like something that is unlikely to happen, and I believe that the aims of the week are achievable. This will be the UK's first National Short Story Week, so all those aims may not be reached in 2010, but we will have started the ball rolling!

I hope that people all over the UK, of all ages and backgrounds, will get involved in the week - readers and listeners will discover writers and writing that they otherwise wouldn't have known about; writers will find new outlets and enthusiasm for their work (which in turn will be fulfilling, motivating and perhaps even make them some money!) and more people will consider reading or listening to short stories on a regular basis.

Reaction to the idea of a National Short Story Week has certainly been extremely positive and I really think this could become an enjoyable and beneficial event in the literary calendar. It's great to see that people have already started to organise events, even though the week is not for another three months. But now is the time to get organising and promoting events - and the National Short Story Week online calendar can help with that.

TSR: What's the best way for short story lovers to get their non-short-story-loving friends intitated into the joys of short fiction?

There are lots of ways to introduce your friends to the joys of the short story. If you are considering buying a novel as a gift why not choose a short story anthology or collection instead? You can find information about the latest short story publications on the National Short Story Week website (and of course on The Short Review!). We also have a recommended reading list and some best-selling writers have contributed to the website by telling us what their favourite short story is.

Suggest to friends that they listen to a short story on Radio 4 (you can also listen via the iPlayer), or on the websites of Australia's ABC or America's NPR. Get them to download an audio short story to listen to on the way to work or during a long journey (search iTunes for free podcasts). Listening to a short story on the train could be a pleasant change from listening to music. If there is an open mic short story night near you, drag a friend along. They are often held in a pub so your friend may not need too much convincing...

TSR: What are 3 of your favourite short story collections or individual stories?

IS: My all time favourite writers of short stories are Katherine Mansfield, Truman Capote and Jean Rhys. All three were able to communicate so much in so few words, and their stories and characters stay with you long after you have finished reading - the essence of the perfect short story!

Over the past few years I have worked with a large number of talented short story writers, members of the Verulam Writers Circle spring to mind. I must also mention the work of members of our steering group - I've recorded short stories by Sue Moorcroft which have been enjoyed by listeners to radio stations all over the country, and I often buy books by Sophie King as presents for family - I have recorded some of her work too. I think Bodgan Tiganov's work deserves a larger readership and I am sure he will find it. I currently have The Ice and Other Stories by Kenneth Steven on my bedside table.

Edge Hill Winners and Frank O'Connor shortlist

2010-07-10T23:28:00.000+01:00

It was a win for the TV writers at the 2010 Edge Hill Short Story Prize ceremony this year: Jeremy Dyson, co-creator of The League of Gentlemen, scooped the main £5000 prize for his short story collection, The Cranes that Build the Cranes. The press release said this about the collection:

"Brimming with black humour and the promise of something sinister just around the corner, the collection explores the dark depths of the human condition, offering tales of death, disaster and - just occasionally - redemption, which captured the imagination of the judges"

Congratulations to Jeremy, who said:

"...if you have it in your heart then write short stories and make sure you get them out there, enter competitions, send to magazines and make sure people read them....I'd just like to thank Edge Hill for running this award, it is hugely important and highlights that the short story is publishable and it is popular. It is the oldest form of writing and I hope that people recognise and celebrate this."

The Short Review echoes that! And congrats too to Short Review author Rob Shearman - well-known as a writer for Doctor Who - whose new collection, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, won the inaugural £1000 Readers' Prize, judged by A Level students from the North West. Said Shearman:

"To win the Readers' Prize means so much to me because it raises the profile of what the short story is all about - it is readable and fun and builds a complete world. Knowing that my collection appealed to the younger generation is also thrilling because they are the writers of our tomorrow."

And, in an exciting week for short story collections, the shortlist for the 2010 Cork City - Frank O'Connor Short Story Award has just been announced:

1. If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (Picador UK, 2010) by Robin Black (review coming soon)

2. Mattaponi Queen (Graywolf Press, 2010) by Belle Boggs

3.Wild Child (Bloomsbury, 2010) by TC Boyle

4.The Shieling (Comma Press, 2009) by David Constantine (read our review here)

5.Burning Bright (HarperCollins, 2010) by Ron Rash

6. What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009) by Laura van den Berg (read our review here)

The winner of the €35,000 award will be announced at the Frank O'Connor Short Story Festival in mid-September. Congratulations and best of luck to all!

UK National Short Story Week

2010-06-25T20:04:00.000+01:00

It's about time! Well done to Lisa Armytage, Sophie King, Robert Kirkwood, Sue Moorcroft, Pat Richardson, and Bogdan Tiganov for not waiting til the UK government declared it but just going ahead and doing it anyway! The US may have National Short Story Month, but now at least the UK has National Short Story Week: Nov 22nd-28 2010.

What's the plan? The organisers say:

The aims of National Short Story Week are:
1) to get more people reading and listening to short stories;
2) to get more people writing short stories;
3) to develop creative and commercial opportunities for individuals and organisations involved in the short story genre.
National Short Story Week is intended to be a grass roots, "bottom up" event. The role of the publicity campaign managed by Short Story Week C.I.C. is to enable individuals and organisations to organise their own events on a national, regional or local level.

Good for them! As I always say, it's International Short Story Day every day here at the Short Review, but I know that some people need a little bit of a nudge/shove in that direction. We'll do everything we can to support NSSW of course. Roll on, November!

Short Story Month

2010-05-21T18:36:00.000+01:00

May was declared National Short Story Month in the US by Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network a few years ago, and, wonderfully, others have followed his lead. Doesn't matter whether you are US-based, here's a great excuse to celebrate the short story even more than we do already! A few links to get you started:

Emerging Writers Network - reviews and discussions of short stories

Fiction Writers Review - a giveaway in honour of SSM!

Canada's National Post's Short Story Month - Q&As with writers

BookFox's Short Story Month posts - excellent short story discussions

NextRead - reviews of short story collections for Short Story Month

SeattlePI - article about SSM

Reading the Short Story - blog discussing short stories

Let me know if you've got another link for me to add...

And if that's not enough - just check out all the short story collections and author interviews we've amassed in 2 1/2 years over at The Short Review, of course!

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From digital to... vinyl??

2010-05-05T10:14:00.000+01:00

What an interesting month for short stories! First. Ether Books announces their new iPhone app to great fanfare - " Publisher Ether Books gives short stories new lease of life on an iPhone" declares the Guardian, " Publishing venture bets on iPhone short stories" says Reuter. This is a great new initiative, let's hope it brings short stories a wide audience.

And then... Nathan Dunne steps back in time to unveil Underwood Stories - on vinyl! The Short Review thought we'd better ask him a bit more about it:

TSR: Who are you and where did the idea for Underwood come from?

ND: My name is Nathan Dunne.I live in London. I studied art history at Cambridge University and completed a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. My non-fiction book Tarkovsky (Black Dog Publishing), about the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, came out in 2008. About a year ago I was stranded in Bangkok airport on a flight-delay and I saw a man carrying a portable gramophone. He had a bag full of old records and would dust each one off meticulously before playing it. On seeing this I was reminded of what we've lost in the digital age - a love for the object. Rather than something that you hold in your hands, packaging has been reduced to just another image. There's nothing physical left.

I've always loved short stories and avidly listen to writers reading their work on podcasts. But somehow podcasts always leave me cold. So I had the idea of writers reading short stories onto records as a way of preserving them, as a way of creating a different way to experience stories and remember them. Records are all about the experience: you've got to lay them down on the turntable, drop the needle and then change the side when it’s done. This attention to detail is what I'd love to see happen to the short story. Sitting around in a group and listening to the perfect crisp-crackle of a record simply doesn't compare to a CD or mp3.

TSR: Why short stories? What, to you, makes a great short story?

ND: Short stories create an entirely different world to a novel or novella. They offer up unique opportunities for narrative and constrain character development within a limited setting or wordcount. This is extremely exciting because it is so hard to get right. However, when the writer does succeed in creating a powerful story the experience brings a tide of pleasure so rarely felt. Short stories are also perfect for the medium of vinyl. When read aloud they are short enough to fit on a single side of a record and having a physical object creates a sense of occasion when listening rather than an audiobook simply popping up amid the shuffle on your iPod. The point of a record is that it is a combination of unique sound and beautiful packaging. It makes you slow down, sit back and pay attention to the words. Writers deserve that and the short story as a form deserves that. For me a great short story is one that reveals how surreal and absurd everyday life can be.

TSR: In this age of iPods and digital everything vinyl records are beautiful but are you really expecting people to be able to play them? Is it easy to get them made these days?

ND: While the world is digital there are more records being produced now than ever before. Major record companies have begun to re-release classic albums on vinyl and new bands are increasingly producing vinyl records in addition to CDs. If you don't believe me go into any HMV and look at the large vinyl section on offer. This is only a recent development which has grown up in the last couple of years. The reason for this, as I understand it, is that with the ease of downloading people are hungry to broaden the way music relates to their lives. In the past bands were always associated with their album artwork and much of that identity has been weakened with digital. Although you may be able to download an image of an album cover the experience of leafing through liner notes and squinting at blurry photographs just isn't the same without the physical object. It is very easy to get records made today. In the UK more than half a dozen production plants produce records while in Europe there are many more.

TSR: You are planning 2 records a year, will you be open to submissions?

ND: Yes we are open to submissions. We are looking to pair writers up together with one on each side of the record. This way both stories will make sense together and we can commission artwork that reflects this.

TSR: What are the last three short story collections you read?

ND: Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan
Tales of Belkin by Pushkin
On the Edge of the Cliff by V.S. Pritchett

Thanks, Nathan. Underwood Books is launching its first issue on May 19th in London, featuring stories by Toby Litt and Short Review author Clare Wigfall. Much luck to the vinyl-peddlers and the iPhone app!

Cork City - Frank O’Connor Short Story Award Longlist

2010-04-27T18:01:00.000+01:00

Here's the longlist of short story collections for the 2010 Cork City - Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, now in its sixth year. Say the organisers:

"The longlist is almost evenly split between women and men this year with 28 men and 26 women. The strength of the short story in the United States is reflected by that country’s overwhelming number of 21 longlistees. This year is also noted for a surge of entries from Asia, accounting for one fifth of all titles. There are three Irish nominees this year including Nuala Ni Chonchuir, the first author to be longlisted for the third time."

Congratulations indeed to Nuala, who is a Short Review reviewer as well as a reviewee! We have reviewed a number of these collections already, links provided. The shortlist will be announced on July 6th.

1	Temsula Ao (India)	Laburnum	Penguin
2	Richard Bausch (USA)	Something is out there: Stories by Richard Bausch	Alfred A. Knopf
3	Martin Bax (UK)	Memoirs of a Gone World	Salt
4	Pinckney Benedict (USA)	Miracle Boy and Other Stories	Press 53
5	Louis de Bernières (UK)	Notwithstanding	Harvill Secker
6	Belle Boggs (USA)	Mattaponi Queen: stories	Graywolf Press
7	T.C. Boyle (USA)	Wild Child	Bloomsbury
8	O Thiam Chin (Singapore)	Never Been Better	MPH Publishing
9	Kunzang Choden (Bhutan)	Tales in Colour and Other Stories	Zubaan – Penguin
10	Craig Cliff (New Zealand)	A Man Melting	Vintage – Random House
11	Venita Coelho (India)	The Washer of the Dead	Zubaan – Penguin
12	Nuala Ní Chonchúir (Ireland)	Nude	Salt - also longlisted for the Edge Hill prize
13	David Constantine (UK)	The Shieling	Comma Press also longlisted for the Edge Hill prize
14	Jameson Currier (USA)	The Haunted Heart and Other Tales	Lethe Press
15	Brian Joseph Davies (Canada)	Ronald Reagan, My Father	ECW Press
16	Deyan Enev (Bulgaria)	Circus Bulgaria	Portobello Books
17	Anne Finger (USA)	Call The Ahab	University of Nebraska Press
18	Patrick Gale (UK)	Gentleman’s Relish	Fourth Estate also longlisted for the Edge Hill prize
19	Angelica Garnett (UK)	The Unspoken Truth	Chatto and Windus – Random House
20	Holly Goddard Jones (USA)	Girl Trouble	Harper Perennial
21	Perry Glasser (USA)	Dangerous Places	BkMk Press
22	Alyson Hagy (USA)	Ghosts of Wyoming	Graywolf Press
23	Dhruba Hazarika (India)	Luck	Penguin
24	Mark Illis (UK)	Tender	Salt also longlisted for the Edge Hill prize
25	Barb Johnson (USA)	More of This World or Maybe Another	Harper Perennial *review coming soon*
26	Lorraine M. López (USA)	Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories	BkMk Press, *review coming soon*
27	Thomas Lynch (USA)	Apparition and Late Fictions: a novella and stories	Jonathan Cape – Random House *review coming soon*
28	Paul Magrs (UK)	Twelve Stories	Salt *review coming soon*
29	Martin Malone (Ireland)	The Mango War: and other stories	New Island
30	Owen Marshall (New Zealand)	Living as a Moon	Vintage – Random House
31	Donal McLaughlin (Northern Ireland)	An Allergic Reaction to National Anthems	Argyll Publishing
32	Lori Ostlund (USA)	The Bigness of the world	University of Georgia Press
33	Manoj Kumar Panda (India)	The Bone Garden and Other Stories	Rupantar
34	Wena Poon (Singapore)	The Proper Care of Foxes	Ethos Books
35	Dawn Raffel (USA)	Further Adventures in the Restless Universe	Dzanc Books
36	Mahmud Rahman (Bangladesh)	Killing the Water	Penguin
37	Ron Rash (USA)	Burning Bright	Ecco; Harper Collins
38	Peter Robinson (UK)	The Price Of Love: And Other Stories	McClelland and Stewart
39	Anne Sanow (USA)	Triple Time	Pittsburgh University Press
40	Sarah Selecky (Canada)	This Cake Is for the Party	Thomas Allen Publishers
41	Bubul Sharma (India)	Eating Women, Telling Tales: Stories about Food	Zubaan - Penguin
42	Robert Shearman (UK)	Love songs for the shy and cynical	Big Finish also longlisted for the Edge Hill prize
43	Sam Sheppard (USA)	Day out of Days	Alfred A. Knopf
44	Anis Shivani (USA)	Anatolia and Other Stories	Black Lawrence Press
45	Louise Stern (USA)	Chattering: Stories	Granta
46	Kalpana Swaminathan (India)	Venus Crossing	Penguin
47	Justin Taylor (USA)	Everything here is the best thing ever	Harper Perennial
48	Ruth Thomas (UK)	Super Girl	Faber and Faber
49	Laura van den Berg (USA)	What the world will look like when all the water leaves us	Dzanc Books *review coming soon*
50	David T. K. Wong (China)	Chinese Stories in Times of Change	Asian Stories - Muse
51	Tiphanie Yanique (US Virgin Islands)	How To Escape From A Leper Colony	Graywolf Press
52	Michele Roberts (UK)	Mud: Stories of Sex and Love	Little Brown
53	Helen Simpson (UK)	In-Flight Entertainment	Cape
54	Billie Livingston (Canada)	Greedy Little Eyes	Random House Canada

Edge Hill Short Story Prize Longlist Announced

2010-04-20T20:41:00.000+01:00

The Edge Hill Short Story Prize, now in its third year, is the UK's only literary award that recognises a published collection of short stories, and this year they have announced a longlist of 18 titles, which will be whittled down to a shortlist. Ailsa Cox, the organizer of the prize, gave us a sneak peak behind the scenes last year here on the blog and Chris Beckett, last year's winner and one of this year's judges, talked about his relationship with UK magazine Interzone here.

The longlist of 18 contains 9 authors we've reviewed, so click on the links to find out more about what TSR's reviewers thought. Good luck to all!

Regi Claire - Fighting It (Two Ravens Press).
David Constantine - The Sheiling (Comma Press).
Jeremy Dyson - The Cranes that Build Cranes (Little Brown).
Jane Feaver - with Love Me Tender (Random House).
Patrick Gale - Gentleman's Relish (Harper Collins).
Sian Hughes - The Beach Hut (Biscuit Publishing).
Mark Illis - Tender (Salt Publishing).
A.L. Kennedy - What Becomes (Jonathan Cape).
Tom Lee - Greenfly (Harvill Secker).
Michael J Farrell - Life in the Universe (The Stinging Fly).
Ben Moor - More Trees To Climb (Portobello).
Nuala Ní Chonchúir - Nude (Salt Publishing).
Philip O Ceallaigh - The Pleasant Light of Day (Penguin).
Robert Shearman - Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical(Big Finish)
Charles Stross - Wireless (Little Brown).
Craig Taylor - One Million Tiny Plays About Britain (Bloomsbury).
Douglas Thompson - Ultrameta (Eibonvale Press).
Simon Van Booy - Love Begins in Winter (Beautiful Books).

Short Lit Bits March

2010-03-19T17:05:00.000Z

Short-stories-on-film #1: Electric Literature has released a new video, for Matt Sumell’s story, Little Things, animated by Vance Reeser. Sumell is the first "emerging" writer to feature in EL alongside the big names.

Congratulations #1: to Comma Press and to Short Review author Hassan Blassim, whose collection, The Madman of Freedom Square, is longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize.

Going the self-publishing route #1: "Two-time PEN/Faulkner winner and National Book Award finalist ...John Edgar Wideman will be releasing his latest collection of short stories via Lulu, a self-publishing company that releases submitted work either as an e-book or printed-on-demand. Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind, available starting March 14, will be one of few works from an already established author to bypass the mainstream industry entirely..." says The New Podler Review of Books.

Congratulations #2: to Short Review author Stefanie Freele whose collection, Feeding Strays, is longlisted for the ForeWord Review's Book of the Year award in the Short Fiction category.

Couldn't-they-find-real-short-story-writers? #1: "Leading British novelists have created short stories to accompany portraits of unidentified Elizabethan courtiers, musicians, soldiers and writers for a new exhibition at Montacute House nr Yeovil in Somerset for the National Portrait Gallery" says the Telegraph.

Good news for short stories#1: "The Atlantic Renews Commitment to Short Stories... The Atlantic is going to start publishing fiction again. So no more of those newstand-only summer fiction issues (which were good, though, especially the 2008 one that highlighted emerging authors). Instead, a supplement will accompany the May issue that will include half a dozen short stories and -- obligatory for all American magazines, for every single issue -- an essay from the ubiquitous Joyce Carol Oates." More here from BookFox.

Congratulations #3: To Alberta author Stuart Ross, whose short story collection, Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, is shortlisted for the Alberta Readers' Choice awards, says the Northumberland News.

Scott Prize Winners

2010-03-02T16:25:00.000Z

Salt Publishing have announced the winners of their inaugural Scott Prize for Short Fiction. Congratulations to
the four authors whose debut short story collections will be published later this year:

Patrick Holland (Australia): The Source of Sound
David Mullins (US): Longing to Love You
Susannah Rickards (UK): Hot Kitchen Snow
Tom Vowler (UK): They May Not Mean To But They Do

The shortlist:

Ben Cheetham: The Hate Club (UK)

Alexandra Fox: Roundabouts (UK)

Miriam Hastings: Demon Lovers (UK)

Patrick Holland: The Source of Sound (Australia)

Sandra Jensen: A Sort of Walking Miracle (Ireland)

Laurence Klavan: Family Unit and Other Fantasies (US)

Wes Lee: This Animal Kingdom and Other Stories (NZ)

Mary McCluskey: Gift to the Dark Gods (UK)

David Philip Mullins: Longing to Love You (US)

Susannah Richards: Hot Kitchen Snow and Other Stories (UK)

Tom Vowler: They May Not Mean To But They Do (UK)

Joel Willians: Buy Ma Biscuits or Kiss Ma Fish (UK)

Sunday Times Short Story Prize Longlist

2010-02-21T15:41:00.000Z

The first annual Sunday Times short story competition, at £25,000 for a single story now the most lucrative prize in the world for writers published in the UK, has announced its longlist, with several Short Review authors featured. Good luck to all!

Here's the full list:

• Richard Beard - James Joyce, EFL Teacher
• Nicholas Best - Souvenir
• Sylvia Brownrigg - Jocasta
• John Burnside - Slut's Hair
• Will Cohu - Nothing But Grass
• Joe Dunthorne - Critical Responses To My Last Relationship
• Petina Gappah - An Elegy for Easterly
• Jackie Kay - Reality, Reality
• A.L. Kennedy - Saturday Teatime
• Adam Marek - Fewer Things
• Charles Mosley - Constraint
• Chris Paling - The Red Car
• Ron Rash - Burning Bright
• Simon Robson - Will There Be Lions?
• Kay Sexton - Anubis and the Volcano
• Helen Simpson - Diary of an Interesting Year
• C.K. Stead - Last Season's Man
• Rose Tremain - The Jester of Astapovo
• Gerard Woodward - Legoland
• David Vann - It's Not Yours

Short Lit Bits Jan/Feb

2010-02-11T19:05:00.000Z

Entertaining tidbits from the world of short fiction..

In Memoriam #1: JD Salinger dies aged 91. "His stories presented readers with an utterly natural, strange and often disturbing landscape. Few writers since have come close to capturing the narrative completeness Salinger achieved. Nothing is out of place, in other words. " True/Slant. As a tribute, The New Yorker publishes 12 of his stories from back issues.

Great short story quote #1: "Short stories seem so harmless. What are they even about? People who have a hard time talking to other people, usually. But great ones — the ones that don't just reflect life but actually conjure it in full force — can mess up your head and heart. " Entertainment Weekly on Amy Bloom.

Get 'em for free#1: Waterstones.com is offering customers a free Ian McEwan short story as an e-book ahead of the release of his latest novel. Loyalty cardholders can download part one of Psychopolis from the retailer's website. The story was originally published in McEwan's short story collection In Between the Sheets and is about a lovestruck Englishman living in Los Angeles.
Great short story quote #2: "Short stories, she says, "are a great form. Not as people often think — little chips or a string of anecdotes — they have breadth and depth and are difficult to write. They're very demanding and very different from a novel, with its endless darkness, endless climb." Amy Bloom on short stories, Hartford Courant

Congrats #1: Penn State University English and creative writing professor Eugene Cross has won the annual $5,000 Dzanc Prize from Dzanc Books. The award supports both his creative writing and his efforts to build a series of creative workshops for refugees from Nepal, Sudan and Bhutan living in his hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania. Alongside his workshops, Cross hopes to complete his short story collection, "Fires of Our Choosing." Dzanc Prize

Short story rage: "Today I was asked if I would write a short short story. It would be part of a Fringe Festival – dread words – and would go up on some walls in an exhibition of similar short short stories, but without my name attached to it. .. in the mad world of those with well-meaning but lunatic desires for egalitarianism in absolutely everything my fifty years writing 43 books, learning my trade and re-learning it, practising my craft, hoping to improve, reading the best to learn from them, putting out words in a careful order every day of my life, working with the talent I was given by God - none of that matters a jot...." Susan Hill in the Spectator.

Who knew? #1: "F.X. Toole, a cut man who became a literary sensation at the age of 70 with the short stories that inspired the Oscar-winning movie MILLION DOLLAR BABY, has been named the winner of the Boxing Writers Association of America’s 2010 A.J. Liebling Award...The acclaim for Toole’s gritty, evocative short story collection ROPE BURNS served as the final reward for a knockaround guy who spent so much of his life as an unpublished — and frustrated — writer. " Boxing Blog.

Celeb endorsements #1: "Timothy Hutton - Literary Sex god... Hutton has recently tweeted his affinity for Deborah Eisenberg’s short-story collection, Twilight of the Superheroes." ChristianKaneFan Blog

Musicians jump on short stories bandwagon #1: "Israeli death metallers SALEM have revealed the album artwork and final tracklisting on the group’s upcoming seventh full-length album entitled “Playing God And Other Short Stories.”" MetalUnderground.com

This is the way to do it: "Scotch and Short Stories It's kinda like a book club but with a little more Ron Burgundy."

Musicians jump on short stories bandwagon #2: "Keyboardist Franz Nicolay Leaves The Hold Steady...This will presumably open up his schedule to more solo material, like his 2009 album Major General and his upcoming short story collection Complicated Gardening Techniques". Prefix mag

We heartily agree #1: "Let’s Declare the 2010s the Decade of the Short Story...According to The Guardian, 2009 was the year of the short story. I’m going to have to agree with them. After all, Oprah chose a short story collection for her book club for the very first time, Alice Munro won the Man Booker International, Elizabeth Strout’s short story collection was awarded the Pulitzer, and great short story collections were published. One Story’s subscriptions are higher than ever, which surprised us–after all, the economy is forcing all of us to tighten our wallets." Save the Short Story

We'd love to read this if we had a translator #1: "Multi-awarded writer and winner of the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature (Short Story in Hiligaynon) Prof. Alice Tan-Gonzales launched her [collection] entitled “Sa Taguangkan sang Duta kag Iban Pa nga Sugilanon (In the Womb of the Earth and Other Stories)” at the UPV Art Gallery on December 4, 2009 at UPV Iloilo City Campus.The collection of short stories is, according to Prof. Gonzales, her answer to the demoralizing opinion expressed by some from the metropolitan center that writing in the regional languages is dying . It is her hope that this small collection would impel a rush of literary activity and publication among talented Hiligaynon writers in the region, some of whom, she said, are hiding in the shadows of “unpublishedness” and anonymity. The News Today

Short stories save the economy and up your street cred #1: "In these trying times of economic uncertainty, many of us are looking for ways to maximise efficiency and return on investment, while minimising risk and limiting the possibility of failure....Fear not, intrepid investors! The library has the perfect solution – Short Stories. That’s right, audience, you heard me. For decades regarded as the poor cousin of ‘real books’, these polished little beauties offer all the excitement and intrigue of a novel, but with so many added advantages......They sound posh. Literary, even. “What are you reading?” “Oh, this? It’s just a little collection of short stories by one of my favourite authors.” “Ooohh, posh!”" Christchurch City Libraries Blog

What a Shame #1: "Cardiff-based author Jo Verity won the Richard and Judy Short Story award in 2003 with The Bells, a year before they launched their wider book club....As a result of the exposure, Welsh publisher Honno bought her first novel, but she says she was surprised by the lack of attention following her Richard and Judy success. “After winning, I thought that people would beat a path to my door, but there was absolutely nothing,” Verity recalls. “I think it was because no one wants to read short stories.”" WalesOnline

A Rare Find #1: "Occasionally from the nation's cultural attic come rare finds, like this wondrous new collection of Kurt Vonnegut short stories. This collection holds 14 previously unpublished short stories written after World War II when Vonnegut was back home after witnessing the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war." Post Gazette

Congrats #2: "Kalamazoo author Bonnie Jo Campbell has garnered another honor for her short story collection “American Salvage.” On Saturday, she was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction" Kalamazoo Living

Great short story quote #3: "If you are feeling particularly ants-in-your-pants-y, and don’t have much time to read, grab a short story collection and put your 20 minute attention span to good use. That episode of Dancing with the Stars can wait." Tulsa Library Blog

Best short story-related blog post title #1: "Voice, yoga, sex and short stories". Hannah, just breathe...

Great short story quote #4: "Last night at dinner, my friend Scott explained to someone, "Becky writes short stories--short stories are to the point, but you don't always know what the point *is*." Such a good summation of the strengths and weaknesses of stories." Rose-coloured: Talking Stories blog.

Happy 150th, Chekhov! #1: "ANTON CHEKHOV once told a friend that he expected to be forgotten within seven years of his death. He could not have been more wrong. Whenever the art of the short story is discussed his is the name most often mentioned." Irish Times

Starting young #1 "Adora Svitak, 12, describes herself as an "educator, poet and humanitarian." After publishing her first book of short stories, "Flying Fingers", at age seven, she dedicated all profits from sales in China to a Tibetan orphanage and raised $30,000 to help children threatened by massive floods in Vietnam in 2007. Now, Svitak is attempting to raise $10,000 for Save the Children's relief efforts in Haiti through her Twitter account". Huffington Post.

Musicians jump on short stories bandwagon #3 & Short Review Authors #1: "Singer-songwriter Nelly Furtado has optioned the film rights to Anthony De Sa's linked story collection, Barnacle Love [reviewd on TSR here]. The deal was arranged by Sean Daily at Hotchkiss and Associates, on behalf of The Bukowski Agency." Quill and Quire.

Congrats #3 & We'd love to read this if we had a translator #2: "Short story writers have won all of the 2010 Rancage Literary Awards, which recognise outstanding literature written in local languages. The Rancage Cultural Foundation has selected this year’s award winners, given annually to Sundanese, Javanese, Balinese and Lampung literary figures for their creative excellence and dedication to preserving local literary traditions." The Jakarta Post

Get 'em for free #2: "Todd Brendan Fahey, author of the novel Wisdom's Maw [Far Gone Books, 1996]--surrounding the CIA's LSD experiments, known as Project MK-ULTRA--has opted to disperse his collection of black satire, "Dogshit Park & other atrocities," freely over the Internet." pr.com

Happy 150th, Chekhov! #2: "his stories are full of people who espouse views very similar to the above – enlightened misfits, philanthropic gentry, civilised professionals (often doctors like himself) holding a candle for reason, justice and all the rest. But the stories themselves invariably subject this posture to challenges that cast doubt over its relevance, even its basic validity, so that to pin down an authorial point of view becomes impossible." The Guardian

No Age Limit #1: "The Bookbite survey of 1,162 people over 60 suggested they were increasingly confident with the internet and they were using it to find information about an older medium - books. More than 55% said the internet was a crucial part of their lives, while 31% were keen to go online to publish short stories and join book clubs." BBC News

Short stories on film #1: "a short story by British author Eleanor Farjeon, is being adapted into a Japanese/Korean animation feature film. The Union Cho animation studio plans to release The Moon - Tsuki ga Hoshii to Ōjo-sama ga Naita comical fairy-tale fantasy in Spring of 2011. Farjeon first published the original story in The Little Bookroom, the 1955 short story collection that earned the author the first Hans Christian Andersen Award and the Carnegie Medal." Anime News Network

Happy 150th Birthday, Chekhov! #3: "As worldwide celebrations marking the 150th birthday celebrations of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov continue, a CD of some of his most renowned works is being launched. Short Stories by Anton Chekhov Bk.2, narrated by Russian-born actor Max Bollinger, features the dramatic stories Anyuta; The Helpmate; Ivan Matveyitch; Polinka; and Talent. Featuring music from Pytor Tchaikovsky, the stories are based on the original translations by Constance Clara Garnett, a 19th century expert of Russian literature, and are produced by Interactive Media." Pressport

Who knew? #1: "Everyone pretty much assumed John Hughes didn’t quit writing when he quit Hollywood, and eventually some archive would burst open with nearly 20 years of stockpiled Hughesian goodies. But good luck finding anyone outside the late filmmaker’s inner circle who knew he’d been publishing in our midst all along — not as John Hughes, alas, but as the pseudonymous, prolific short-story craftsman JL Hudson. Like, really short. But also, as a few newly published samples prove, pretty damned excellent." Movieline

Congrats #3 & Short Review Authors #2: "Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which we reviewed here, is a finalist for the National Book Award.

What David Sedaris Read this Year #1: "ometimes, I do sit down and read with my eyes. This year, I came across several short-story collections I exceptionally love,....My four favorite collections, arranged alphabetically, were: “Irish Girl,” by Tim Johnston, “Too Much Happiness,” by Alice Munro, “Do Not Deny Me” by Jean Thompson, “Everything Ravaged Everything Burned,” by Wells Tower"." New Yorker Book Bench

Short Review Authors #3: Andrew Porter's short story collection, The Theory of Light and Matter, is now available in paperback.

Short stories that go that little bit further

2010-02-08T13:00:00.000Z

This month's issue includes a review of Ox-Tales, the four-book fundraising set of short fiction loosely inspired by Air, Fire, Earth and Water published by Oxfam, Britain's biggest charity. This is just one example of a short story collection which spreads itself further than just the reader's enjoyment.

When I started compiling this blog post, I thought there might be a few - but then the list kept growing. At The Short Review, we encourage everyone to read short story collections, however you might get hold of them, but in this case, we feel justified in saying: Go buy these books!

100 Stories for Haiti: Greg McQueen's instant response to the tragedy in Haiti was to call for submissions for a very speedily-produced anthology of short short stories from authors across the globe, including many Short Review authors and reviewers [and me... TH] to raise money to help the survivors of the recent earthquake. The book will be published shortly, and all proceeds will be donated to the Red Cross.

The whole ethos of Madras Press, a new US-based small press, is to publish "individually bound short stories and novella-length booklets and distribute the proceeds to a growing list of charitable organizations chosen by our authors." Madras' first four beautiful-produced books have just been published: The Third Elevator by Aimee Bender, whose proceeds are donated to InsideOUT Writers; Bobcat by Rebecca Lee, whose chosen charity is Riverkeeper; Sweet Tomb by Trinnie Dalton, proceeds benefiting the Theodore Payne Foundation; and A Mere Pittance, by Madras Press founder Sumanth Prabhaker, proceeds going to Helping Hands: Monkey Helpers for the Disabled.

These books make wonderful presents - and for writers, submissions are now being accepted!

Masters of Technique: The Mongoose Anthology of Chess Fiction is the first chess fiction anthology of contemporary stories, ever published. Mongoose Press has collected the best work from twelve of the most talented chess fiction writers of the past decade. In these rich and compelling stories, chess shines as a sophisticated metaphor, and fans of the game will applaud how chess is woven with technical accuracy into every narrative. All profits from Masters of Technique: The Mongoose Anthology of Chess Fiction, help support multiple chess charities.

Speaking with the Angel is an anthology of 12 short stories by the likes of Nick Hornby, Melissa Bank, Dave Eggers, Helen Fielding and Zadie Smith, with £1 being donated from every copy to TreeHouse, a charity helping children with autism.

A few months ago, we reviewed Freedom, the short story anthology from Amnesty International which commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and raises money for Amnesty's work. Said our review: "When Amnesty International commissioned writers to celebrate the anniversary of the UDHR, they might have compiled a collection of articles, of reportage, of case studies. But choosing the short story form was, in my opinion, a brilliant idea. The greatest short stories don't just tell you something, they slip you beneath someone else's skin. And to really feel what the UDHR represents, what atrocities it is attempting to prevent, that is where we need to be."

Another book we reviewed was the One World anthology, stories from Malaysia, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, South Africa, Botswana, Bangladesh, US, Cameroon, Wales, Greece, Zimbabwe, Kenya, India, Australia. All authors' royalites are donated to Médecins Sans Frontières.

The Girls Night In series of anthologies raise money for the charities War Child and No Strings - they have raised £1 million since 1999! Their latest books are Kids Night In 3 , short stories for children, and Girls Night In 4.

Megan Wynne's creative writing students in Skerries, Ireland, recently published Stories to Remember Us, with all proceeds being donated to Remember Us, a social support group for young people with special needs and their families.

Punk Fiction, which we reviewed here, is an anthology of short stories inspired by punk, with £1 from each copy sold will be donated to the Teenage Cancer Trust.

Sexy Short for Chefs, "a tasty collection of sumptuous short stories mixed with delicious recipes" with a forward by Anthony Worrall-Thompson, is the latest in the Sexy Shorts range of fund-raising anthology - this one donates £1 per copy to the Breast Cancer Campaign.

Also donating the proceeds to a breast cancer charity, the National Breast Cancer Foundation, this Australian anthology, Thank for the Mammories, is comprised of "entertaining stories from some of the world's most popular female authors celebrate bosoms great and small".

In 2007, Irish publishers Poolbeg brought out the anthology Thirty and Fabulous to celebrate their 30th birthday. All royalties were donated to Women's Aid.

Although this title is now out of print, it's worth of a mention. In 2004, heart scientist Stanley Salmons, a professor at Liverpool University's Department of Human Anatomy and Cell Biology, published a collection of 23 short stories, Alexei's Tree, to raise money to support children in disaster zones. Money raised from the book was donated to the David Baum International Foundation, a charity that is training doctors at home and abroad to cope with the needs of children in deprived areas of the world.

Bridge House Publishing have announced that they will produce an annual charity short story anthology. The first will be a collection of animal stories for adults, to be published this year, with proceeds donated to Born Free.

Inspiration for anyone who wants to publish a fund-raising anthology! If you know of any more, please let us know in the Comments.

Short Circuit's Virtual Book Tour Lands Here!

2010-01-07T18:47:00.000Z

We normally only talk about short story collections here at the Short Review, but we're making an exception in order to take part in the Virtual Book Tour for an excellent new book.

Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story, edited by Short Review author and reviewer Vanessa Gebbie (Words from A Glass Bubble), and published by Salt Modern Fiction, is a collection of articles, essays and interviews on different aspects of the short story by working short story writers - including many Short Review authors and reviewers such as Clare Wigfall, Sarah Salway, Nuala Ni Chonchiur, Alison McLeod, Adam Marek, Elizabeth Baines, Elaine Chiew, Alex Keegan and David Gaffney (and myself - in the interests of full disclosure - TH).

Win yourself a free copy of the book - see the end of this post for more details.

While this is a book aimed at those writing short stories and we know that many of The Short Review's readers are also writers, I asked Vanessa the following question: Vanessa, this book is called A Guide to the Art of the Short Story, and since TSR is all about inspiring people to read more short stories, what do you think the book can do for readers? Can it help them get better acquainted with the short story and enhance the reading experience? If so, how?

VG: Excellent question! And as Short Circuit is, above all, honest, here’s the honest answer. Will non-writers rush out in their thousands to buy a book on how to write? I doubt it. A few may pick it up if their writer-partners wax lyrical about this wonderful new ‘how-to’ book. And I’d love to think that, because it is an engaging read, some readers will find in it the stuff of enjoyment anyway.

I am told time and time again that Short Circuit is a ‘brave’ book. And I can’t help but shake my head. Why is it ‘brave’? It takes a straight look at the writing craft and the application processes of that craft for 24 different writers – all writing today, all being published today, all winning prizes today. It is not an academic treatise. I do not see how on earth creative writing is an academic pursuit – much as there are factions in the literary world who would like to make it so. It ain’t!

"If I write about ball-lightning that comes from between a woman's legs when she's aroused, will friends, privately, think I'm weird?" (From Alison MacLeod's essay, "Writing and Risk-Taking")

Having said that, I think we must be equally honest about the variety of processes in the act of reading – engaging with the products of creative writing. 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.

How often have we heard the complaint, ‘but nothing much happens…’? I think the reader who may say this is missing the point. What ‘happens’ in a short story ‘happens’ to some extent in that space between the reader and the writer, the space reserved for the reader’s reactions, emotional responses, understanding, empathy. And it ‘happens’ too in the reader’s head. In their allowing themselves to be pulled right into the story and - as Graham Mort puts it so well in his essay - ‘completing’ it.

"I think people who enjoy short stories have a special gland, one that responds to the unexpected with little bursts of pleasure chemicals."(From Adam Marek's essay, "What My Gland Wants - Originality in the Short Story")

There’s a film just out of Cormac McCarthy’s great novel, The Road. Already tipped to be nominated as one of the films of 2010, The Road seems to polarise readers. I’ve heard intelligent, searching readers complaining, “But nothing much happens…” while others say it is the best thing they’ve read, couldn’t put it down, life-changing.

Maybe we’re coming close to understanding one of the issues here. I’ll let Carys Davies take up the thread. At the end of her contribution to Short Circuit, she says: "Cormac McCarthy’s The Road…possesses - with its intense and beautifully rendered present set between a cataclysmic past and a tentative, tantalising future – all the qualities of a brilliant short story," and I’d add the words, ‘IF it is read as intended, read with the active engagement demanded of any good short story.’

I think, if any reader picked up Short Circuit and flicked through the essays, they’d be blown sideways by the challenges faced by writers of successful short fiction. And they might just pick up some of the gems recommended by the contributors, to see what all the fuss is about...

Thanks so much, Vanessa! For a chance to win a free copy of Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story, visit the Competitions & Giveaways Page. For more information about the book and about the rest of the Virtual Book Tour, visit TheArtoftheShortStory.com.

Short Lit Bits Dec 2 - eBooks and Audio

2009-12-08T12:44:00.000Z

New website Spoken Ink is a great addition to the short story audio download sites. Short stories read by professional actors - including stories by Short Review authors Vanessa Gebbie, Kevin Barry, Hassan Blasim (review coming soon), James Salter and Oscar Wilde, as well as many more contemporary and classic authors.

Short Review author Adam Maxwell has a free eBook of comic "festive tales", The Night Before The Christmas Before I Was Married, which sounds like just what is needed to perk us all up with all the seasonal chaos!

Short Lit Bits December 1

2009-12-07T16:58:00.000Z

ICongratulations to Short Review author David D. Levine, whose collection, Space Magic, has won the Endeavour award, open to both story collections and novels.

"In short, the story is growing on us again" proclaims Margaret Drabble, one of the judges of the BBC National Short Story Award in The Times today: "There are strong signs that the story is still alive and responding to encouragement." Hear, hear!

As the year draws to a close, it is "Best of..." season:

7 short story collections are among the 25 books to make the LA Times Favourite Fiction of 2009: Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis (review coming soon), It’s Beginning to Hurt, by James Lasdun, Love in Infant Monkeys, by Lydia Millet, Once the Shore by Paul Yoon, The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

More best of....The AV Club lists its 10 Best Short Story Collections of the 00s, including Short Review authors Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners and Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things. What are your Top Ten?

And more... NPR's The Best Five Books to Share with Your Friends includes The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis.

And finally, Vulpes Libris' Favourite Books of 2009 include A C Tillyer's collection, An A-Z Of All Possible Worlds (review coming soon), SHORT Fiction 3, the third edition of the annual short fiction magazine from the University of Plymouth, as well as Short Review author Elizabeth Baines' new book, Too Many Magpies.

Route is offering Who’s The Daddy is a mini-collection themed around father/daughter relationships, as a free eBook. Read the three stories here.

The Atlantic magazine, which published short stories monthly until 2005, will sell short stories on the Kindle, reports the New York Times, which says the Atlantic will publish two stories a month this way.The first two stories are by Christopher Buckley and Edna O'Brien.

Short Review author Petina Gappah, whose collection, An Elegy for Easterly, recently won the Guardian's First Book Award, talks about her writing in The Guardian.

Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, an eight-part dramatic TV series about three young doctors, based on the short story collection of the same name, which won the 2006 Giller Prize, by Vincent Lam, will air on January 10th on the Movie Network, says Straight.com.

Guest post: Amnesty International's Nicky Parker talks about why she chose short stories to celebrate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

2009-12-03T17:13:00.000Z

Amnesty International's anthology, Freedom: Short Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, contains 36 stories by some of the best short story writers alive today, each inspired by an article from the Declaration. Find out how you can win yourself a copy on the Competitions page.

We are delighted to have Amnesty International's UK Publisher, Nicky Parker, who tells us why she chose fiction for this and two other books published by Amnesty for younger readers.

TSR: What made you decide that fiction was the way to commemorate the anniversary of the declaration of Human Rights and why?

Nicky Parker: We need to go back in time a few years! At one time at Amnesty UK we published only our classic human rights reports and also human rights education books for schools – all of it very useful. But personally I’ve always tended to find fiction more inspiring than non-fiction and was convinced that it could have a role to play in Amnesty’s publishing. There’s something about fiction that – when it really works, when it captures the reader’s imagination absolutely and hooks you in – enables you to get under the skin of someone else, no matter who they are, what their gender, race, age, culture or even the time in which they live. And empathizing with imaginary characters, bizarre though it seems, means that we start to understand them as whole human beings. We lose some of the prejudices that all of us carry with us on one level or another. Literature has a phenomenal power to undercut bigotry and encourage mutual understanding.

Initially we tested the relatively ‘soft’ area of children’s books, partly because when I started in Amnesty’s publishing team I had three young children and was reading to them every day. Also, I love children’s fiction. My oldest daughter was about 9 or 10 years old and very much into Harry Potter. Then, on a whim, I read her To Kill a Mockingbird, even though I knew that she was a little young for it. I did all the voices, of course, and reading aloud is always such a comfortable experience. I still remember getting to the end of the book and asking her what she thought of it. Her response was a deeply appreciative sigh: “Whew! It’s even better than Harry Potter!”.

So, with that partly at the back of my mind, we at Amnesty started to work with children’s publishers, trying to identify young children’s fiction that in some way encouraged an awareness of human rights. Initially we simply recommended and sold these books on to our supporters, but their eagerness to buy was so clear – and sales were so good – that it encouraged us to explore working at a co-publishing level with those publishers. And so the first of our UDHR trilogy was born when the children’s publisher Frances Lincoln suggested that we co-publish a picture book for young children, each right to be interpreted by a different illustrator. I thought it could work well, but never anticipated such a phenomenal response. It seems that the concept of explaining human rights to children in such a simple and beautiful way struck some kind of chord around the world – in the first six months the book We Are All Born Free sold nearly 200,000 copies in 32 languages.

And that reflects another great thing about fiction: readers don’t usually feel threatened by it in the way that they may do by non-fiction - especially non-fiction on human rights themes, which many people regard as ‘political’ and will not touch. Yes, human rights are political, of course, but only in the sense that their upholding and violation both touch and are integral to all human society. Human rights don’t take sides. And fiction undercuts this perception of ‘politics’ very subtly and very successfully.

From We Are All Born Free, it was a simple progression to Freedom and also FREE?, for both of which we asked authors to write short stories inspired by different human rights. We tried to cover all age ranges, so that We Are All Born Free is for ages 6 plus, FREE? is for age 11 to 15 and Freedom is for adults.

TSR: What do you feel that short stories can do for a reader that other forms can't? (Hard question, I know!) And, more specifically, what can short stories do when talking about the issues that Amnesty deals with?

NP: I have to say that the initial idea of commissioning an anthology of short stories was entirely a pragmatic response to the question of how to write about all 30 rights in the UDHR! But of course there is more to it than that. The best short stories are like jewels: they cut to the quick and do away with all extraneous words and ideas. And they can deal perfectly with the abstract themes of human rights. They can take the abstract legal terminology of the human right, as expressed in the full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and communicate a human experience that expresses that right or its violation both succinctly and movingly.

Then of course there is the fact that Amnesty is a movement that is founded on stories. The reason that we have supporters all over the world – over two million of them – who are willing to write letters and send emails, is because they are moved to action by the personal stories of hundreds and thousands of inviduals whose human rights are under threat. At Amnesty we are dealing with these true-life stories day in and day out – they form the basis of all of our campaigns - so it makes sense to use the short story form to engage with the ethos of what we are about.

And all over the world people tell stories – we have probably done so since humans evolved. So a collection of stories can resonate anywhere with perfect sense. Short stories can be bleak (the best ones often are) but there is an immense satisfaction in hearing or reading a good story, and I think that’s common everywhere.

An anthology of stories means that the reader can dip in and out. You can’t possibly read the whole thing at once – the power and richness of all the stories would be far too much to absorb. But in returning to the anthology, again and again, you can be struck by how differently each writer has approached the interpretation of one of our fundamental human rights. This helps to build on our understanding of the multi-faceted nature of human rights, the many areas of human life that are too often violated around the world, but also on the great generosity of spirit and foresight that led to the creation of this legal framework.

Personally I was very lucky in my Irish grandmother, who was one of those wonderful people who tell stories all the time and I used to go round to her house just to listen. She claimed they were all true – of course! – and although I noticed that they did tend to change between retellings, I believed them implicitly. They offered a sanctuary from my very strict home and school life. This is something that fiction does so well – it can be a great comfort in that it can lift us imaginatively out of our own stresses, but a great teacher in allowing us figuratively to enter into the lives of others.

TSR: How did you approach writers to be involved in the project? What was their reaction to the commission?

NP: Amnesty is such a well-known organization and so highly respected that it opens doors, which is a great starting point. On top of this, our work is relevant to writers and they know this. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights deals explicitly with the right to freedom of expression, without which writers are scuppered. It is possible to look at practically any country governed by a brutal regime and see writers who have been imprisoned or otherwise censored to prevent them from expressing their views. Often they are the first people to be threatened, because governments are frightened of their power to move people to action through the written word.

So the writers whom we approached recognised their affinity with Amnesty’s work and I think that made them more willing to give of their time and talent. Beyond that, some of them expressed concern about what was quite an abstract commission – to write about a human right – but others positively jumped at the chance. I would assume that commissions on a theme could be extremely difficult, but human rights have the virtue both of being abstract and of applying to all of us, so this made it a little easier to ask for a story without being prescriptive – saying ‘ please can you write about the right not to be tortured’ is possibly a little easier than asking an author to write about torture. The writer can approach it from so many different angles – the bleakness and horror of violation of the right, for example, or the joy of when it’s upheld.

There was some discussion here about giving authors details of actual cases of individuals at risk, both to inspire their stories and to provide them with information about how human rights violations affect individuals. On the whole, though, we were uncomfortable with this. It carries with it the horrible possibility of exploiting someone whose life has already been hugely damaged – to take advantage of that damage, without asking the individual, seemed wrong. In the end, a couple of writers were sent case studies and did use them for their stories. We then had to check with people who had worked with the individuals concerned whether it would be alright to publish these stories or not – or whether it might jeopardise their safety or further humiliate them. It was a difficult experience and I’m glad that in most cases we avoided this situation.

The other aspect of the commission was, of course, whom to approach. It’s true to say that we did ask some authors – superb writers – who are probably bombarded with requests of this nature and who declined. Others proved remarkably willing. Some of them are big names in the west, others less so – but we were really keen to include writing from as many countries as possible. One thing we found is how hard it is to identify good writers if their work hasn’t yet been translated into English (or if it’s not available in the west), and then how difficult to track them down! I spent many months in search of elusive people. One whom I still regret not being able to pin down is the wonderful Indian writer Vishwapriya Iyengar, whose extraordinary story The Library Girl made me spend months trying to trace her to see if she would write one for us.

TSR: There are stories that are "inspired" by the same clause in the declaration but that come at the subject very differently. Was this part of the aim of the book?

NP: This was difficult for us. The original idea was to have one story per human right, but the reality was that a couple of writers offered us stories on rights that had already been picked by other authors. Nadine Gordimer, for example. And it became a very tricky decision whether or not to use stories that were on the face of it covering duplicate subject matter, but of course as soon as you read them they treated their subject so differently. And the other aspect of this is that it was important to us to include writing from all over the world. We wanted the book to be truly international and to reflect different experiences and cultures. I was really glad that Mohammed Naseehu Ali agreed to write for us – but he wanted to write on the theme of slavery, which Marina Lewycka had already taken. It was clear that he already had an idea. Ultimately it seemed more important to incorporate any ‘duplicate’ stories, than to pigeonhole writers into themes that weren’t their first choice. And if you look at those two stories they are worlds apart and reflect two equally realistic aspects of modern slavery. In a way it seemed more honest to us to show these different experiences than to restrict the telling to one interpretation only.

TSR:. There are a number of stories in the book that weren't commissioned especially for this, how did you find those?

These are the stories by Liana Badr, Hector Aguilar Camin, Alan Garner, Nadine Gordimer, Juan Goytisolo, Patricia Grace, Rohinton Mistry and Joyce Carol Oates. There’s a different rationale behind the choice of each of these. In part, of course, they came about because we had asked each of these authors if they’d be willing to write something for the anthology. They were willing but did not have the time, so offered us these stories, most of which had already been published. To some extent our reasoning for including them was their quality: Nadine Gordimer’s story, for example, is a superb example of the genre that also deals very pertinently with human rights.

But there were other reasons too, partly determined by the authors’ countries of origin. We were extremely keen to have a story from the middle-east, and although Palestinian Liana Badr’s had been published in Arabic, it had not been translated – which we thought was a good reason for including it. Similarly with Hector Aguilar Camin from Mexico, whose work has hardly been translated into English at all, and yet is highly regarded in his native country. The Maori writer Patricia Grace is hardly known in the UK, but her stories are superb and I was extremely keen to include one if at all possible. Alan Garner is a personal hero of mine and although our initial approach had been to ask if he could write around the right to a country (because his novels and stories are extraordinarily rooted in landscape), in fact he offered us his retelling of a Russian folk tale. We could see the validity of including something that was totally different to all the other stories in the book – and, of course, what the folk tale does, very subtly, is remind us of cultural heritage, which is so often crushed or forgotten. Also, folk tales are universal and probably the roots of story-telling.

We have similar reasons for including the stories by Oates, Mistry and Goytisolo – with Oates, she’d written it originally for a university magazine with a tiny circulation; Mistry’s was too relevant and well-written to exclude; and Goytisolo’s is actually extracts from his forthcoming novel, which his translator brilliantly tied together into a convincing story for us.

TSR: One last question: what has the response to the book been so far, as a collection of fiction and as a commemoration of the UDHR?

There has been a terrific response with regards to Amnesty's whole trilogy of UDHR books - Freedom and the two books for children. People appreciate the fact that through literature we have made these fundamental human rights imaginatively accessible to all ages, from very tiny upwards. Reviews for all three have been very good and sales, again for each of them, have wildly exceeded any of Amnesty's non-fiction. Freedom has sold over 12,000 copies in the UK since its launch at the end of August, which is presumably a good achievement by any standards for an anthology of short stories. Various national magazines have serialised some of the stories from the collection, perceiving that they are of genuine interest to their readers. And Mainstream's Foreign Rights department have had great success in selling rights to publish the collection, so that - despite the difficulties inherent in translating this many short stories, with all their linguistic power and idiosyncracies - it will also (to date) be published in Turkey, Poland, the US, Canada, Portugal, Serbia and Montenegro, Italy and Australia.

Thank you so much, Nicky, and we wish the Freedom anthology and the other two books much continued success. read the review of Freedom: Short Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - and you can win yourself a copy. Visit the Competitions page to find out how.

Petina Gappah wins the 2009 Guardian First Book Award!

2009-12-03T11:46:00.000Z

Huge congratulations to Short Review author Petina Gappah, whose collection, An Elegy for Easterly, has won the 2009 Guardian First Book Award, "the second short story writer to win the award in its 10-year history, " says The Guardian today, "the first being Yiyun Li in 2006. Gappah's collection of 13 stories, An Elegy for Easterly, tells of the lives of people, rich and poor, caught up in events over which they have little control."

Continues The Guardian: "The Guardian's literary editor, Claire Armistead, who chaired the judging panel, said she was thrilled to name Gappah as winner, particularly since 2009 is the year of the short story. There had been some wonderful first books, she said, and 'Petina Gappah's humane and disarmingly funny mosaic of life in Zimbabwe is undoubtedly one of the very best.'"

Congratulations, Petina! Read our review of An Elegy for Easterly, an interview with Petina about the collection, and the rest of the Guardian article.

PS I didn't know 2009 was The Year of the Short Story! Oops, it's nearly over. Let's do it again next year.

Congratulations, Regi!

2009-11-23T11:10:00.000Z

Regi Claire, whose short story collection, Fighting It, we just reviewed in The Short Review and who is published by Two Ravens Press, is shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award, Scotland's major literary awards, alongside AL Kennedy, whose short story collection What Becomes is on my review pile, and Janice Galloway, whose Collected Stories is also waiting for me. Congratulations, Regi, and Two Ravens Press, and more power to the short story!

Short Lit Bits November

2009-11-21T22:40:00.000Z

Electric Literature will begin a new venture in microserialization by tweeting Rick Moody's new story, Some Contemporary Characters, from Monday, November 30th to Wednesday, December 2nd. Follow at @ElectricLit.

Ray Bradbury has signed on with White Oak Films with the idea of creating a miniseries of six 1-hour episodes, all based on different short stories of Bradbury’s, says Screenrant.

Bonnie Jo Campbell was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction for her short story collection, American Salvage but sadly didn't win. More on MLive.com

The Wall Street Journal tells us that brevity can be a virtue: " From Alice Munro to Lydia Davis, short-story writers get fresh attention". Read more.

Simon Van Booy's short story collection Love Begins in Winter, winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, has been shortlisted for the 17th Bad Sex award, says the Guardian.

Los Angeles-based Wordtheatre, which lines up actors to read short stories, "a pairing that shows both in a flattering light," is opening in London, according to the LA Times Jacket Copy blog.

Granta Books has acquired UK & Commonwealth rights to a new novel and collection of short stories by Chris Adrian, author of Gob's Grief and The Children's Hospital, says Booktrade.info

John Grisham releases his first short story collection, Ford County. Read more in the Madison County Journal.

The Creative Writing Corner blog talks about short stories vs novels: ""I'm more likely to read a short story from end-to-end rather than a trashy novel precisely because it's a significant waste of time, whereas the short fiction is a minor waste of time.""...

Read or listen to an interview with a master of short stories, William Trevor, on BBC Radio 3: "I really am a short story writer who also writes the occasional novel, not the other way round."

Guest post: Rose Metal Press interviews itself on short short stories and hand-stitched chapbooks

2009-11-05T10:13:00.000Z

We are delighted to have the wonderful Rose Metal Press, independent publishers of "hybrid genres specializing in the publication of short shorts, flash and microfiction; prose poetry; novels-in-verse or book-length narrative poems and other literary works that move beyond the traditional genres of poetry, fiction and essay to find new forms of expression".

They have just opened their Fourth Annual Short Short Chapbook contest to submissions, deadline Dec 1st: "25-40 pages of short short stories under 1000 words", and if you want a reason to submit - or to make sure you buy the winner - we have reviewed the winners of the first three contests: Claudia Smith's The Sky is a Well, Geoffrey Forsyth's In the Land of the Free, and, most recently, Sean Lovelace's How Some People Like Their Eggs.

Rose Metal Press is a wonderful example of two people publishing the writing they love, not for any financial gain, but just because it should be a beautiful book. They have even published The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, if you need some pointers.

Here, RMP co-founders Kathleen Rooney and Abby Beckel interview each other about what they do.

Kathleen Rooney: Hey, Abby Beckel, co-founder of Rose Metal Press, did you know that E. M. Forster says that “The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists?” Does Rose Metal Press assume the existence of such a spectator? If so how?

Abby Beckel: Well, Kathleen Rooney, co-founder of Rose Metal Press, I don’t know about the perfect spectator, but we do assume the existence of the perfect reader. More accurately, we publish our books with a sense of hopefulness about the existence of the kind of reader who likes to be challenged and take chances and have their ideas about genre stretched in unexpected ways. The good news is that it’s not just an assumption and a hope—those readers do exist! We get so much great feedback from readers and reviewers, letting us know that they are happy that Rose Metal provides an outlet for innovative hybrid genre writing.

Abby Beckel: Since you referred to what we do as creating works of art, can you elaborate on the ways Rose Metal Press views books themselves as art forms, literature as art, and what’s possible as far as combining books and literature with other arts?

Kathleen Rooney: Sure. We publish all kinds of books—novels-in-verse, anthologies, prose poetry collections, and chapbooks of short shorts—but the thing they all have in common besides being in hybrid genres is that they are all subject to the utmost in rigorous quality control. And by that, we mean not just that the contents of the books are well edited and proofread, but that the books themselves are held to exacting standards as objects. Back when we started out in 2006, you and I decided that even though we suspected we’d want to publish many more, we would limit ourselves to publishing just three books a year. Partly we stick to that limit to allow the press to stay in the black, and partly we stick to it to preserve our ability to focus on both the press and our day jobs, but we also chose that limit because we estimated that that was the amount of time we’d need—at least four solid months per book, and usually more—to not merely edit the writing and plan the promotion, but also to put together each book as an art object, kinda. And in retrospect, this limit has helped us to make our design, layout, paper, and cover art the best they can be. Way to go, past selves.

Kathleen Rooney: Speaking of books as beautiful delivery devices for literature, why does Rose Metal Press love short shorts, and why run a limited edition chapbook contest just for them each year?

Abby Beckel: When you and I were starting the press and trying to decide how best to manifest our idea to publish and promote innovative writing in the form of hybrid genres, short shorts jumped out at us as a genre ripe with potential as something of a flagship genre for us: they were and are increasing popular both for readers and writers; they appeal to audiences beyond the literary community; they provide lots of options for interesting design choices; and most importantly, despite all those things, they have very few publishing homes. Rose Metal’s first book was an anthology of short shorts by Emerson College alums titled Brevity & Echo that was the brainstorm of fiction writer and Rose Metal Press board member Pamela Painter. (Emerson College was one of the first writing programs to offer dedicated courses on writing short shorts.) That book continues to be a crowd pleaser and has been used in classes at a number of colleges and universities.

That was the beginning of our tango with flash fiction. It’s been a committed relationship ever since. By starting an annual chapbook contest for short shorts, we saw an opportunity to stretch the boundaries of not only genres, but publication form. Chapbooks have traditionally been the realm of poetry, but the brevity of short shorts makes a manuscript of them work well as a chapbook. We get lots of amazing and inventive and affecting collections each time we do the contest. The short short is growing and changing and every year we see innovations in the forms and styles and subjects that flash writers tackle.

The chapbook form also allows us to really focus on creating a literary object of beauty. Each year we letterpress the chapbook covers by hand at the Museum of Printing [link: http://www.museumofprinting.org] in North Andover, Mass., on an old Vandercook press. We choose specialty endpapers and have the book hand-bound, sometimes hand-sewn. Two of our chapbooks have won spots in the New England Book Show for design. It’s really gratifying work creating a chapbook package that projects the heart and talent of winning authors’ stories.

Abby Beckel: The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction represents Rose Metal’s first foray into books about a genre rather than original work in hybrid genres. How do the Field Guides fit with the vision of the press and are there more plans for academic exploration of genres in the future of the press?

Kathleen Rooney: As you know because you were there, we didn’t set out to necessarily publish work for academic use, but we were open to that as a possibility, as long as the academic explorations were themselves in some way hybrid. As you also know, the Field Guides weren’t our idea, and they weren’t even ideas hatched by the same set of people. But when Tara L. Masih approached us about the flash fiction guide, and then shortly thereafter, F. Daniel Rzicznek and Gary McDowell pitched us the prose poetry one, we were impressed on both fronts by how these editors were interested in making texts that would be suitable for classroom use, but that would not have to be used in a classroom—they’re books that don’t try to define or pin down the respective genres, but just to examine and illustrate and discuss them in a creative, personal, and wide-ranging style.

To answer the second part of the question, it’s hard to say how precisely they’ll fit with what the press publishes in the future—we may publish additional academically inclined books if the right ones come our way, but then again we might not. The next couple of books we put out, including the fantastic and weird Color Plates by Adam Golaski, are going to be single-author projects, but if somebody approaches us with another anthology idea we can’t refuse, we won’t refuse it. That’s one of the many kickass things about running a very small press: nobody gets to tell us what we can or can’t do. And I can’t wait to see what else we publish next.

Neither can we! Thank you Kathleen and Abby. Find out more about Rose Metal Press and the Fourth Annual Short Short Chapbook contest and you could be clutching a beautiful, hand-bound book of your own.

An Elegy For Easterly the only short story collection shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award

2009-10-31T18:34:00.000Z

Huge congratulations to Petina Gappah, whose short story collection, An Elegy for Easterly, is shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award - the only story collection on the list. Find out what all the fuss is about - our review is here and an interview with Petina is here. Good luck!

A week of short story collection events in the UK

2009-10-20T10:53:00.000+01:00

What a wonderful week for short story events, featuring authors whose collections we have reviewed or are about to. If you are in the UK, what riches there are!

Oct 21st

Alison MacLeod (15 Modern Tales of Attraction) and Panos Karnezis (Little Infamies) chat about short stories at the Lancaster Lit Fest, chaired by Carys Davies (Some New Ambush)

Also: the launch of Matter Magazine Issue 9 in Sheffield, also featuring Alison MacLeod (15 Modern Tales of Attraction) and Adam Marek (Instruction Manual for Swallowing)

Oct 23rd

The launch of Hassan Blasim's collection, The Madman of Freedom Square (our review coming soon), at the Calder Bookshop, 51 The Cut, London. More about this on the Comma Press website.

Oct 24th - a whole day celebrating short stories as part of the The Short Weekend at the Manchester Lit Fest:

The Launch of When It Changed - Science Into Fiction anthology
Geoff Ryman, Patricia Dunker, Liz Williams, Dr Tim O'Brien; Prof Steve Furber and Adam Marek (Instruction Manual for Swallowing)
Friends Meeting House, Manchester.

Bernard MacLaverty & Atef Abu Saif

Hassan Blasim (The Madman of Freedom Square) & David Constantine (The Sheiling (our review coming soon))

Chris Beckett (The Turing Test) ; James Lasdun (winner of the First National Short Story Award)

Paint a Vulgar Picture event

Find out more about The Short Weekend at the Manchester Lit Fest. I'm sure there's more going on that I missed, do let us know. Have a great week!

Guest post: Chris Fowler, author of 11 Short Story Collections, Talks Stories

2009-10-05T13:12:00.000+01:00

The Short Review is delighted to welcome Christopher Fowler - whose tenth short story collection, Old Devil Moon, won the Edge Hill 2nd Prize 2008 and had seven other nominations, and his eleventh, The Horrors, features 14 new stories and is scheduled for summer 2010. Christopher talks about what a great short story is for him :

"Feelings, as Antonia Byatt recently noted, are ruining short stories. Detailed descriptions of emotional states don’t take the place of a good story well told.  I don’t believe everyone can write – it’s not something you simply become passable at producing, like watercolours. A short story needs to surprise and entertain, but also needs an element that rings true; recognisable humanity. The opening of John Collier’s The Devil George And Rosie starts ‘There was a young man who was invariably spurned by the girls, not because he smelt at all bad but because he happened to be as ugly as a monkey.’ You want to read on.

My favourite short story volume is the anthology Black Water, edited by Alberto Manguel, a veritable encyclopedia of great tales. The book contains a famous story; David Garnett’s’ Lady Into Fox’, where the plot is actually embedded in the title.  Tennessee Williams said ‘I don’t want realism. I want magic…I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth.’ I think tiny moments of magic can reveal great truths.

Short stories should be pleasurable to read. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp, a sailor buys a genii and has to sell him for less than he paid – which proves impossible. Stories are much more enjoyable when the main character is having a terrible time. Panic breeds action, and action adds pace – when I read tales in which a lonely woman stares out of a window at the rain, my heart sinks, because I know we are off to a slow start. It’s often the case that the reader is way ahead of the writer.

John Sladek wrote a story called Anxietal Register B which consists of a form to be filled in by the reader. Good ideas satisfy immensely. For this reason, I’m sure, Roald Dahl is often cited as the perfect short story writer, but in truth he’s part of a long historical line, from Poe to Saki, from E F Benson to Somerset Maughan. Dahl is easy to read; no crime, this – for some reason, certain writers go out of their way to be unreadable in short form. I’ve been guilty myself, once writing a story in futuristic phonetic teen slang.

A short story doesn’t need the kind of structure one would expect in a novel. It may even end before the main event. In J G Ballard’s The Watchtowers, ominous towers guard a frightened populace, and only begin to open and reveal their purpose in the last line of the story. The point of the plot is to highlight the effect that a police state has on ordinary people. In Shirley Jackson’s celebrated The Lottery, villagers stone a character to death, but there is no explanation provided that will allow us to comprehend their cruelty. The point of the story is that real cruelty is inexplicable. So the plot does not directly provide the reader with satisfaction. Rather, it is the author’s delivery method for the idea. In Daphne Du Murier’s The Birds, no explanation for the avian behaviour is given, and therein lies its power.

Of course, a plot is a skeleton; it is hidden under the skin. It needs characters and scenario to function. The perfect plot is one which emerges from the other two factors. "Don’t look now," says John to his wife, "but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotise me." John and Laura have lost a child, and are in Venice. John has a secret ability he has failed to recognize. The two old girls will ignite a terrible tragedy. Daphne Du Murier’s brilliant short story Don’t Look Now’ combines the three elements to perfection because they rely on each other. If the couple had not gone to Venice, if John had not been so blind, everything would have been different – but how often in life do we ask ourselves what would have happened if we’d only behaved differently?

A plot can’t simply be imposed on its characters, because free will must be exercised – but of course people are willfully blind, or too optimistic, or cruel, and this affects outcome. Kenneth Tynan once said that you don’t need to know why two people fall in love, you just need to know that they do.

The unexpected is important. It’s the element in any story that makes you want to describe it to others. ‘You’ll never guess what happened today’ is a phrase which begs the other person to undermine any surprise. I’m not a fan of trick endings unless they come naturally – we never see the best ones coming. In Don’t Look Now, the elements of the ending are put in place early on, and still we fail to spot the climactic tragedy. Mystery writing, in particular, is about the fair withholding of information. I stress ‘fair’ because it would be a cheat to reveal at the end that the protagonist is a dog, unless you can read the story a second time and see that it’s obvious. Hiding is not the same as withholding.

In Du Murier’s Adieu Sagesse. This plot concerns a dull 60 year-old banker with three daughters and a wife obsessed with appearance and status. He owns an old boat that has never been sailed, and lovingly tends it. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that he’ll soon give his family the finger before taking off for the open sea. After all, the title can be translated as Goodbye Common Sense. But instead of a closing scene in which the old man sails into a calm and glorious sunset, Du Murier makes him sail off into stormy grey seas. The suggestion is that it won’t be plain sailing, but at least he’s got away. It’s more realistic. 

In my last collection I wrote a story called Cupped Hands after reading a newspaper report about African towns with no natural water supply. How do they survive? They have the water delivered in tankers. What if someone stole the truck? Why would they do that? Well, suppose they needed to leave town fast and there was no other vehicle? Suddenly I knew the story was there, because a moral problem had been created. The guy can save himself by stealing the truck, but will doom the stricken town.

So far I’ve had over 150 short stories published in ten collections. I’ve yet to write the perfect short story."

There are some who would beg to disagree, Chris! Read our review of Old Devil Moon and check out Christopher's website for more about his writing.

Simon Van Booy Wins 2009 Frank O'Connor award and Chris Beckett gets a two-novel deal

2009-09-21T10:43:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Simon Van Booy who is this year's winner of the 35,000 Euro Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for his collection, Love Begins in Winter! We will be reviewing the collection in the October issue, so hold your horses... In the meantime, for more about the winner read this article in today's Irish Examiner.

"I was very nervous coming to Cork for the Frank O’Connor Festival," said [Simon]. "But I stopped being nervous when I read the other short-listed books. I was shocked by the quality of the work, and I knew I had no hope of winning."

Also: congratulations to Chris Beckett, who won this year's Edge Hill Short Story Prize for his collection, The Turing Test. He has just signed a two-novel deal with the Corvus imprint of Grove Atlantic, and the first book will be The Holy Machine, published in the US by Prime. This is excellent news - even though the deal is for two novels, we hope Chris will carry on writing short stories!

Read our interview with Chris about the award and about his 20-year relationship with Interzone magazine.

Short story news roundup

2009-09-14T16:32:00.000+01:00

Some exciting news from Short Story World. First, Electric Literature, the new lit zine that is available in print, as an eBook, or for your Kindle of iPhone, and pays its contributors a wonderful $1000 per story (!) has taken an exciting step into the world of animation and asked animators to create a very short film based on one line from each of the pieces they published in Issue 1. Here, for example, is Luca Dipierro's take on a sentence from Lydia Millet's Sir Henry:

]

There is one more animation on the Electric Literature YouTube page as well as a trailer for Jim Shepherd's Your Fate Hurtles Down at You. I love the idea of animating short stories... see what you think.

Another very welcome newcomer is Madras press, based in the US. This is what they are all about - and they are publishing the wondrous Aimee Bender as one of their first authors, which is always a great thing!

"Madras Press publishes individually bound short stories and novellas and distributes the proceeds to a growing list of charitable organizations chosen by our authors.

The format of our books provides readers with the opportunity to experience a story on its own, with no advertisements or unrelated articles surrounding it; it also provides a home for stories that are often arbitrarily ignored by commercial publishing outfits, whether because they’re too long for magazines but not trade-book length, or because they don’t resemble certain other stories. These are clumsy, ill-fitting stories made perfect when read in the simplest possible way.

Published in regular series of four, our books also serve as fundraising efforts for a number of charitable causes and organizations. Each of our authors has selected a beneficiary to which all net proceeds generated from the sales of his or her book will be donated; these include organizations dedicated to environmental protection, community development, human services, and much more.

On October 1, our online bookstore will open, at which time you'll be able to order from our first series of titles:The Third Elevator, by Aimee Bender
Proceeds to benefit InsideOUT Writers

Bobcat, by Rebecca Lee
Proceeds to benefit Riverkeeper

Sweet Tomb, by Trinie Dalton
Proceeds to benefit the Theodore Payne Foundation

A Mere Pittance, by Sumanth Prabhaker
Proceeds to benefit Helping Hands: Monkey Helpers for the Disabled

Each book will cost about as much as a greeting card, and will come with your name (or a name of your choice) transcribed in an ex-libris panel on the inside front cover."

A lovely idea, not only boosting the short story, but raising money for worthy causes at the same time. Founding editor Sumanth Prabhaker told me they will be accepting submissions from oct 1st and "We operate on a purely volunteer basis, so that the only cost subtracted from the sticker price of online purchases is for manufacturing. Acquisitions, editing, design, production, and marketing are all done at no cost. Taking inspiration from the Concord Free Press, we are foregoing commercial distribution and working directly with bookstores and consumers." Good luck to them!

Thirdly, going head to head with the BBC National Short Story Award, but with a bigger cheque, the brand new Sunday Times Short Story Prize will award £25,000 (no, you haven't read that wrong) "for a single short story in Britain and Ireland. " Says the announcement:

"The prize, backed by EFG Private Bank, is the latest sign that the genre is once again thriving after many years of falling popularity. The contest is open to authors who have already had work published in Britain and Ireland, and is intended to attract well-established writers as well as relative unknowns."

Now, this is welcome news indeed, as is anything that intends to get more people reading short stories (falling popularity? You're just looking in the wrong places).

However, as with the BBC award, this is not judged anonymously, which bothers me. It always bothers me. Is it about the writing or about the name above the writing? An interesting discussion on Facebook ensued, with Nicola making the excellent point that since this is open to published stories, it can't be anonymous since some of the (six) judges may have read some of the stories submitted and know who they were written by. Very good point. So: just accept unpublished stories. That solves that one.

What do you think? We all know that it is hard enough to read something without simultaneously looking up the author's bio, let alone reading something by a "big name". You just can't really read it in a vacuum. But you can at least attempt that. If it is going to be "award for best previously-published story" then that is something else.

I'm not complaining, not really. Just thinking out loud. £25,000 will mean an enormous amount to any writer unless they are Dan Brown, I highly doubt any writer of literary fiction (if this is what the prize is aiming at) makes that from their books. Yes, the best short story should win. But I say that anything that might stand in the way of that goal should, if at all possible, be removed.

Thoughts??

The Sept issue is here

2009-09-04T09:10:00.000+01:00

This month's Short Review is up. What's in it, you ask??

We bring you false relations, damaged goods, repetition patterns, quick repair, stories like donut holes, stories named for rivers, things that are cold to the touch, people who always want something, the collected stories of the Armitage family, and our first review of an ebook which leaves the reader, Radiohead-style, to decide what they'd like to pay. And, as ever, author interviews with almost everyone we review.

Controversially, perhaps, we've added the Literary Fiction category to the Find Something to Read By Category page. Difficult one, this. Might cause trouble. Who is to say what is Lit Fic and what isn't? Hmm. What do you think?? Leave a comment.

Also: Surprise yourself! Check out our non-complete list of short story collections published in 2008 and so far this year (almost). More than you thought, eh?

Pop in and have a read.

Short story collection shortlisted for Guardian First Book Award

2009-08-30T09:40:00.000+01:00

Huge congratulations to Petina Gappah whose story collection, Elegy for Easterly, has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the only short story collection on the list! Said our reviewer (yes, it was me):

There are those who write fiction in order to educate, to say "This is how things are done, this is what you must know, read and learn". But in my opinion, education is not the primary aim of fiction. Fiction must, above all, bring the reader a gripping story, characters that we want to follow, to see what happens to them. This is where Petina Gappah excels: first and foremost, she tells great stories, and, almost incidentally, we learn as we read. We learn about Zimbabwe, the rhythms of its language, the corruption of its politics, the AIDS epidemic, the relations between neighbours and friends, between rich and poor, between Africa and the rest of the world, between parents and their children. These stories are full of atmosphere, of cultural detail, and we drink it in, because we are so taken with the story and the characters. Gappah has hooked us.

Read the rest of the review of the book and an interview with Petina:

I did not have a collection in mind at all, especially because very early on in my writing career, someone pretty high up in publishing had told me that there was no interest in story collections. So I wrote stories as a way of flexing my writing muscle, and to find my "voice", with no thought of collecting them in a single volume, until my agent Claire Paterson, at the time we were looking for publishers for my novel, suggested putting them together in a single manuscript. I was stunned when Faber offered to publish them. This went against all that I had heard about publishers' loathing of short stories.

Congratulations!

Edge Hill Prize Winner Chris Beckett talks about his 20-year relationship with Interzone magazine.

2009-08-03T10:48:00.001+01:00

Chris Beckett beat the big names to scoop this year's Edge Hill Short Story Prize for his imaginative, rich and compelling short story collection, The Turing Test, (read the review here). Almost all the stories were published in UK science fiction magazine Interzone over the past 20 years, and I was intrigued by Chris' comment in the book about how the magazine editors' "constructive rejections" of his first stories spurred him on. So, in addition to our regular author interview, I asked Chris a little more about this:

The Short Review: The science fiction magazine Interzone and its editors have played a major role in your writing career. Can you tell me how this began?

Chris Beckett: I've always written science fiction stories since I was a teenager, but I didn't see myself as specifically a science fiction writer. In the late 80s I started writing more science fiction and looking around for outlets. I discovered Interzone which was then, as it is now, the main SF magazine in the UK. I think I must have submitted 3 or 4 stories to them before they accepted one, but they used to write really thoughtful, constructive rejection letters with helpful feedback ('they' being the then Interzone editor David Pringle and his associates). It was the constructive feedback that kept me going and it was very possibly that which cemented my commitment to science fiction as a writer.

My first story to be accepted (there or anywhere else) was called A Matter of Survival and it imagined a world in which men and women lived in seperate states and were effectively at war (where did that come from!) Its strongest advocate on the Interzone editorial board was Lee Montgomerie, then a deputy editor, who really liked it. I discovered later that Lee assumed it had been written by a woman (you can't tell from 'Chris'). For my part I assumed incorrectly that Lee was a man. Curious that this confusion should have occurred around a story that was all about gender.

From then on I continued to submit stories to Interzone regularly. I can't overemphasise how helpful Interzone has been to me, and continues to be to me, as a writer. A writer needs a community within which his/her stuff will be read, commented on, evaluated, compared to the work of others, reacted to. Interzone and its readers provided this. It was thanks to Interzone that I kept at my science fiction writing and began to develp my own individual way of using science fiction conventions to say the things I want to say. I honestly do not know what path my writing would have taken without it.

Interzone, now under the editorship of Andy Cox, continues to provide a platform for new writers as it did in the eighties. I don't think it makes much money. I don't think its readership is huge. But it is performing a great service. I publish stories too in the US magazine Asimov's these days, but I continue to send stories regularly to Interzone (my next to appear there is called Johnny's New Job: it is a satirical look at the way that social workers are demonised following a child death), and it still provides me with an audience that will not only comment on my stories (not always favourably of course) but, more than that, will be aware of my other stories and of the kind of writer I am. It's invaluable.

I should add that Roy Gray, one of the members of Interzone's current editorial team, is an absolutely tireless publicist and networker on behalf of Interzone and its authors. It was him that first encouraged me to attend science fiction conventions (I only went to my first about five or six years ago), through which I have built up a network of friends and contacts, including, for instance, Andrew Hook of Elastic Press who published The Turing Test and John Jarrold my agent. What I have learned (slowly - I am a slow learner) is that writing itself may be a solitary activity, but you can really only grow and unfold as a writer if you are part of a community.

TSR: You say the editors gave thoughtful, constructive rejection letters. Any writer longs for a constructive rejection letter rather than a simply impersonal "Thank you for your... it's not for us..." Could you tell us a little but about what made the rejections constructive, what they suggested etc...? And how did this cement your commitment to SF?

CB: Well the letters weren't always very long, but they always said at least one thing that I could do differently. A couple of them went into some detail and made several suggestions. To be honest I can no longer remember their suggestions now, but I do know that they gave me something to work on, so that I felt that I was progressing, and also gave me some sense that Interzone would eventually publish something of mine. If you just get a standard polite rejection you can't tell if you were even close to being published, and you can't tell whether they just thought your story was rubbish, or just not quite what they were looking for. (They weren't rubbish, those very early stories, I don't think, but they certainly weren't up to publication standard. The Interzone editors were quite right about that.)

How it cemented my commitment to SF? Well it kept me at it, and gave me a reason for keeping at it until in due course I found a way of writing SF that allowed me to write about what I want to write about. SF suits me and nowadays it just feels to me that its the way I tell stories. But I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had received equally encouraging and constructive feedback from (say) a magazine publishing mainstream fiction (I don't like the word 'mainstream' but can't think of another for the moment!). Would I have developed in a different way and found another way of writing? I really don't know.

Having said that, though, I do sometimes try and write non-SF stories but I always come back to SF, so maybe I was always meant to be an SF writer really.

TSR: Finally, the old chestnut: What does winning the Edge Hill prize mean to you? You have been writing for a long time, you are far from a beginner, with several books under your belt. Is there something that a prize like this can do for someone who isn't a novice, who is firmly committed to their writing. apart from the nice cheque?!

CB: It is a huge thing for me, Tania..

Almost no one outside the SF world will have come across my fiction, and even within the SF world I am not exactly famous. I have always believed that my stories were good stories (good stories full stop as well as good SF stories) but that was largely a matter of faith. Here was some external validation for me: three judges, none of whom is an SF fan, chose my book over a Booker prizewinner and over four other writers of literary fiction, all published by major publishers, all of whom have won prizes and accolades for their work. I just can't tell you how great it feels to have ones own sometimes shaky self-belief validated in that way. It is a huge thing.

I have been writing for a long time and I have published a good many short stories and three books (with a fourth to come out next year), but they have all been with small presses and for a small audience, sometimes very small. Now I have a wider audience, both inside and outside of the SF world and a more prominent platform on which to build for the future.

Commercial publishers are very cautious about taking on books which seem risky, and that is particularly hard for writers like me whose work is a bit out of the mainstream (not only in the sense that it is SF: even within the SF field it is a bit out of the mainstream, and not the kind of thing that publishers have been going for recently). I am hoping that perhaps writing will now generate a significant income for me which will allow me to spend more time on it that I have been able to do up to now?

We want our stuff to be read and to be recognised and to be liked. It is partly vanity of course, and I'm certainly as vain as the next person, but as I said before, it's not just that. We write because we feel a need to communicate. We want someone to hear and to understand, just as is the case when we talk about things that really matter to us.

Thanks so much to Chris for talking to us, congratulations to him for his win, and may we all be fortunate enough to find an editor whose "constructive rejections" spur us on! Roy Gray of Interzone explains that his is not an isolated case: "As I said in the Dominic Green special 'For me Interzone discovers authors in generations; so the eighties IZ brought us from Baxter to Stross via, Brown, Brooke, Egan, Ryman etc. In the nineties we went from Ballantyne to Liz Williams via Beckett, Molly Brown and Reynolds,'" he told The Short Review. "So Chris's contemporaries are Alastair Reynolds, The Guardian's £1 Million SF author, Tony Ballantyne and Liz Williams. Only Alastair is a full time professional. The others still have 'day jobs'."

Read the review of The Turing Test here, and Chris answers our standard author questionnaire here.

Wake Up Booker! The Indy Praises Short Story Collections

2009-07-31T12:08:00.000+01:00

In today's Independent newspaper, in an article entitled "Short-haul fiction, long-term benefits", Boyd Tonkin says:

Here's a star-spangled shortlist of leading writers who have published, or soon will publish, works of fiction since the last Man Booker contest: Kazuo Ishiguro, AL Kennedy, Ali Smith, Will Self, Chimamanda Adichie, Alice Munro. None of them could have featured on this week's long-list. Of course, the final name gives the game away. Canada's doyenne of the story that packs an entire life, and world, into 20 pages might already have won the Man Booker International Prize for career achievement. But the annual competition still shuns volumes of short fiction. Which means as well that first-rank debut collections, such as (this year) Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, never stand a fighting chance. Should that rule now change?

Yes, Boyd, yes! He says:

In the Manchester-based Comma Press and Salt Publishing in Cambridgeshire, Britain has two high-performing specialist imprints with a robust commitment to the briefer forms.

These two publishers are the ones publishing many of the short story collections we have reviewed.

Oh, Boyd! Sending much love to the Indy today. I will leave you with his parting shot:

"The only rule is to write originally and well - whether the result takes two, five or twenty thousand words."

Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes. Read the full article here.

Dzanc's Best of the Web 2009

2009-07-20T15:22:00.000+01:00

Dzanc Books is one of those independent publishers that makes short story lovers cheer and jump up and down. Not only does Dzanc publish great books (read reviews of Roy Kesey's All Over and Yannick Murphy's In A Bear's Eye), they are literary activists, doing all they can to spread the word about great writing and help writers. Dzanc executive director and publisher Dan Wickett founded the Emerging Writers Network in 2000 and puts an enormous amount of energy into the EWN's blog, running a Short Story Month last month with so many posts talking about short stories that they are now publishing a selection of them as a book! Dzanc annually awards the Dzanc prize for Excellence in Literary Fiction and Community Service, and is now offering Creative Writing Sessions through which writers are mentored by other writers. Yes, they are quite fabulous.If this weren't enough, their second annual Best of the Web anthology was published on July 1st, and we here at the Short Review are delighted to be hosting a guest blog by M. Thomas Gammarino, one of the featured authors, as part of the one-day virtual book tour.

First, a little about the book:

Guest-edited by Lee K. Abbott, this print anthology compiles the best fiction, poetry, and non-fiction that online literary journals have to offer in an eclectic collection in the manner of other broad-ranging anthologies such as Pushcart and Best American Non-Required Reading. This is the first substantial attempt at creating an annual print compilation of the best of material published online.
This year's contributor's include: Waqar Ahmed, Arlene Ang, Michael Baker, Marcelo Ballve, Marge Barrett, Carmelinda Blagg, Benjamin Buchholz, Blake Butler, Jimmy Chen, Amy L. Clark, Amber Cook, Bill Cook, Michael Czyzniejewski, Darlin’ Neal, Matthew Derby, Ryan Dilbert, Stephen Dixon, Alex Dumont, Claudia Emerson, D.A. Feinfeld, Marcela Fuentes, M. Thomas Gammarino, Cassandra Garbus, Molly Gaudry, Anne Germanacos, Matt Getty, Todd Hasak-Lowy, Karen Heuler, Ash Hibbert, Philip Holden, Roy Kesey, Hari Bhajan Khalsa, Tricia Louvar, Peter Markus, Michael Martone, Heather Killelea McEntarfer, Lindsay Merbaum, Corey Mesler, Laura Mullen, Joseph Olschner, Jeff Parker, Elise Paschen, Elizabeth Penrose, Kate Petersen, Glen Pourciau, Sam Rasnake, Jonathan Rice, Tom Sheehan, Claudia Smith, Lynn Strongin, Terese Svoboda, Jon Thompson, Davide Trame, Donna D. Vitucci, Helen Wickes, Kathrine Leone Wright, Jordan Zinovich.

Dzanc has a special promotion whereby you can get both Best of the Web anthologies... more about that later. Now, over to Thomas talking about the short story of his selected for the anthology, The Fridge, which originally appeared in the Adirondack Review:

I’ve heard a number of famous writers (most recently Steve Erickson in a Bookslut interview from 2007) talk about the phenomenon of the “free” book, the one that’s simply visited on them by the muses as a reward for all the years of toil they put into the rest of their books. I don’t know whether I’ll ever be gifted a free book—my not-terribly-long first novel, Big in Japan, took me five years or more—but I can vouch for the phenomenon of the free story insofar as The Fridge—the story I’m thrilled to have had selected for Best of the Web 2009—was one.

I wrote the first draft of the story longhand in one hour-long burst at a café called ChocoCro (as in chocolate croissant) in Yokohama, Japan. I do this sort of Kerouackian exercise once in a while where I make my hand out-write my mind such that I end up making associative leaps I couldn’t possibly plan. More often than not the exercise yields a surrealistic mess, but once in a while, given enough discipline, I can turn out a viable story. In this case I knew only two things from the outset: 1) I would keep it more or less realistic, and 2) I would write, in good cubist fashion, from at least two points of view.

My story may not feel especially modernist—probably it feels more dirty-realistic insofar as it deals with blue-collar domesticity and adultery—but its germinal texts were in fact modernist landmarks like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and the “Wandering Rocks” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. I played up the impressionism by making the two accounts in the story—May’s and Bill’s—disagree on some of the details of chronology, their different senses of time being one of the story’s motifs. I considered adding a third section in which the reader would get the subjective account of Bill’s lover, Anna, but finally I decided that even as I complicated each character’s claims on history, I would at least impose enough form to make the story the portrait not of a hackneyed love triangle so much as a marriage—and it is a marriage aptly characterized by the title, I think. At the same time, the fridge is the one place where Bill and May continue to commune, the one place, however piddling, where they renew their vows each day, her by putting his lunch in there, him by being there to take it. It’s not much, but it’s something.

One last thing: anyone who has ever been in a writing workshop has heard the old chestnut “Show, don’t tell.” I teach it myself in beginners' writing classes. It’s not bad advice for young writers with a penchant for exposition, whose craft of storytelling has been honed primarily on the telephone, but the dirty secret is that the closer you look at that binary the more it begins to dissolve. So long as we’re working with words, it’s all telling of one sort or another (“diegesis,” the narratologist Gerard Genette would call it), and as Louis Menand notes in his review of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era in a recent New Yorker, that mantra has always been “effectively opposite” that other pedagogical imperative to “Find your voice.” I didn’t find my voice in The Fridge, but I like to think I found Bill’s and May’s. The Fridge is all “telling,” and that’s a curious thing if you overthink it because who are these people supposed to be talking to really? But then who are the intramural narratees of most literature? Ultimately the question proves beside the point. We accept it as a convention because literature is uniquely suited to capturing the human sensorium as channeled through a textual larynx. Suck the narratorial inflections out of it, the quirks and mannerisms, lilts and cadences, and we might as well all stick to screenplays.

Thanks, Thomas, for that insight into your story. Dzanc are running a time-limited promotion: buy both Best of the Web anthologies for $30 instead of $36 - and you'll get a 15% discount coupon off any book published by Dzanc or their imprints. So much great reading.

"Most Imaginative" Sci Fi Author Wins the Edge Hill Prize!

2009-07-06T09:40:00.000+01:00

Shocker in the short story world - Chris Beckett, author of the Turing Test, published by Elastic Press, has beaten heavyweight writers of "literary fiction" Anne Enright, Ali Smith, Gerard Donovan and Shena Mackay to run off with the Edge Hill Prize for the short story!

"I suspect Chris Beckett winning the Edge Hill Prize will be seen as a surprise in the world of books,"

said James Walton, one of the judges.

"In fact, though, it was also a bit of surprise to the judges, none of whom knew they were science fiction fans beforehand. Yet, once the judging process started, it soon became clear that The Turing Test was the book that we'd all been impressed by, and enjoyed, the most — and one by one we admitted it."

Wonderful that finally "genre" transcends its boundaries to claim the prize. Says Walton:

"It was Beckett who seemed to us to have written the most imaginative and endlessly inventive stories, fizzing with ideas and complete with strong characters and big contemporary themes. We also appreciated the sheer zest of his story-telling and the obvious pleasure he had taken in creating his fiction."

Congratulations to Chris! Read Prize organiser Ailsa Cox's sneak peak behind the scenes before the winner was announced.

AND: I've just been informed that World Fantasy Award winner Graham Joyce just won the O Henry award, the US' most prestigious award for a single short story, judged this year by AS Byatt and Tim O'Brien. Genre triumphs again!

The story An Ordinary Soldier Of The Queen, describes the hallucinatory experiences of a British Soldier in the first Gulf conflict. Byatt says she was haunted by the rhythms of the story and the seamless mixing of genres in combining the daily and the strange. O’Brien, celebrated for his own war writing, calls An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen a “superb ghost story, a wonderful story about war”. O’Brien suggests that many war stories merge with the world of magic and ghosts, for the systematic butchery of war does not always feel “real” and that sometimes a realistic story can seem to demean the essential unrealistic reality of war.

Graham Joyce, a previous winner of the World Fantasy award, is known for his blending of realism and the hallucinatory. He is the author of a dozen novels and several short stories and says he wrote the story after seeing a statistic suggesting that three-quarters of homeless people on the streets of the UK are ex-service personnel.

If this inspires in you the immediate urge to read science fiction and fantasy, click on those links to see what we've reviewed that falls under those headings (I hate the "g" word.)

Behind the Scenes of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize

2009-07-02T14:15:00.000+01:00

We welcome Ailsa Cox, fiction writer, critic, tutor of creative writing, and one of the coordinators of the Edge Hill Prize for the Short Story, giving us a quick peak behind the scenes of the Prize, whose winner will be announced on July 4th:

Just about to name the winner of the Edge Hill Prize for the Short Story and as usual my lips are sealed. I’m giving nothing away – not even a clue. I don’t want anything to spoil that moment of surprise and delight at the award ceremony. This year’s shortlist includes two Irish writers, a science fiction writer, two Booker nominees and a Booker prizewinner - in other words, Chris Beckett, Gerard Donovan, Anne Enright, Shena Mackay and Ali Smith. Five really strong contenders. I’m glad the decision isn’t up to me.

The prize was started in 2007 after I ran the first of several short story conferences at Edge Hill University. Many people don’t know where Edge Hill is, which is one of the reasons why the university was keen to put us on the map with a prestigious prize. It is in fact in Ormskirk, Lancashire, somewhere between Liverpool and Southport. By giving £5000 to the author of a published short story collection we were doing something unique; we have the National Short Story Prize and the international Frank O’Connor Award Munster Literature Centre Home for any collection published in English but there is nothing for writers in the UK and Ireland which is anything like, for instance, The Rea Award for the Short Story in the US. We hoped the prize would help change attitudes in the literary world, and actively encourage publishers to accept and promote collections, in the knowledge that they might get some recognition for it.

Since then the university has upped its contribution, so there is now a second prize and a Readers’ Choice; and Blackwell Bookshops have sponsored a specially commissioned artwork to go to the winner. This is not your average bit of engraving gathering dust at the back of the mantelpiece! I’ve been watching Pete Clarke, a painter with a special interest in using text and imagery, create something really special for this year. This year’s judges were last year’s winner, Claire Keegan, Mark Flinn, Pro-Vice Chancellor of the university and James Walton, the writer and critic. Waiting for their final decision was gruelling – I had no idea what would come out of their discussion and dreaded personality clashes or stalemate; and as the time ticked by I needn’t have worried. Though none of them really knew one another, they made a good team, open-minded and sensible and their decision was unanimous. The Readers’ Choice is decided by a combination of local groups from Get Into Reading The Reader - Outreach Programmes and students from our Creative Writing MA Creative Writing. Last year it was won by horror writer Christopher Fowler. What will happen this year? I told you, I’m not saying.

Five writers, three prizes (and theoretically the winner could also get the Readers’ Choice). Not to mention those writers who didn’t quite make the shortlist but have produced outstanding work. This, after all, is a prize for a collection, and sometimes the quality of an individual story isn’t sustained across the whole book. As a reader, I find this especially in small press publications. When a less well known writer does get onto the shortlist it’s so exciting, for them and for us. Last year Rob Shearman didn’t win anything; but even though Tiny Deaths went on to win a World Fantasy Award he says it all started for him with the Edge Hill Prize.

Thanks, Ailsa - we will announce the winner as soon as the news is made public! Good luck to all.

For more about the prize, visit the Edge Hill Short Story Prize page and Ailsa Cox's Edge Hill home page.

2009 Frank O'Connor Award Shortlist Revealed

2009-07-01T18:32:00.000+01:00

The Frank O'Connor Award shortlist has been revealed. At 35,000 euro, this is the biggest prize in the world for a short story collection, and previous winners include Haruki Murakami, Miranda July, Jhumpa Lahiri and Yiyun Li.

From this year's 57-strong longlist of collections, the three-judge panel picked the following six collections - passing over big names such as Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Orange Prize winner Chimanda Ngozi Adiche, Mary Gaitskill and James Lasdun and Sana Krasikov.

An Elegy for Easterly
by Petina Gappah (Faber, UK)

Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University, and the University of Zimbabwe. Her short fiction and essays have been published in eight countries.

Singularity
by Charlotte Grimshaw (Vintage, New Zealand)

Charlotte Grimshaw's first novel was described as ‘New Zealand noir'. Grimshaw has contributed short fiction to anthologies, was awarded the 2006 Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Award, and published her first short story collection in 2007. Titled Opportunity, this collection was also short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Ripples and other Stories
by Shih-Li Kow (Silverfish Books, Malaysia)

Shih-Li Kow was born in Kuala Lumpur. Her stories have been published in the anthologies, News from Home and Silverfish New Writing 7. Sh-li Kow holds a degree in chemical engineering.

The Pleasant Light of Day
by Philip O Ceallaigh (Penguin Ireland.)

Philip O Ceallaigh has lived and worked at a variety of jobs in Ireland, Spain, Russia, the United States, Kosovo and Georgia. He has lived mostly in Bucharest since 2000 where among other things he translates English subtitles for Romanian films. He has won the Glen Dimplex Award and the Rooney Prize for his first short story collection Notes from A Turkish Whorehouse which was also shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award in 2006.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
by Wells Tower (FSG New York and Granta UK)

Wells Tower’s short stories and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Washington Post Magazine, and elsewhere. He received two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review. He divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Brooklyn, New York.

Love Begins in Winter
by Simon Van Booy (Harper Perennial New York)

Simon Van Booy was born in London and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. After playing football in Kentucky, he lived in Paris and Athens. In 2002 he was awarded an MFA and won the H.R. Hays Poetry Prize. Van Booy is the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love. He lives in New York City.

This is a varied bunch geographically and in terms of experienced writers (two previously shortlisted for this prize) versus debutantes, yet not so varied in terms of small presses versus mainstream publishers - it would have been nice for a small-press-published collection to make the shortlist. Before accusations fly, yes, I am a small-press-published author and my collection was on the longlist! But with my editor's hat on, I know that many excellent collections have been published by small presses in the past year, because I have reviewed a number of them. Next year, perhaps?

The winner will be announced in Cork on September 20th at the closing ceremony of the tenth Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival. Before that, we have the winner of the Edge Hill Prize - which features one small-press-published short story collection on its five-book shortlist - to look forward to on Saturday July 4th. Good luck to all!

Congratulations and Upcoming Deadlines

2009-06-20T17:50:00.000+01:00

Congratulations... to Deborah Kay Davies, whose debut short story collection, Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful, has won the 2009 Wales Book of the Year.

and to Pasha Malla, who scooped the Canadian Trillium Book Award for his debut collection, The Withdrawal Method.

If you're inspired by these wins, here are some short story collection competitions whose deadlines are approaching:

June 30th The Drue Heinz Literature Prize

"The Drue Heinz Literature Prize recognizes and supports writers of short fiction and makes their work available to readers around the world. The award is open to writers who have published a book-length collection of fiction or at least three short stories or novellas in commercial magazines or literary journals."

July 15/Nov 15th The Story Prize

Eligibility for The Story Prize is restricted to collections of short fiction (at least two stories and/or novellas) by a living author, written in English. Eligible books must be first publication of the work in the United States during the calendar year, in either hardcover or paperback, and available for purchase by the general public. Collections must also include work previously unpublished in book form.

August 1st The Scotiabank Giller Prize

"The Scotiabank Giller Prize is worth $70,000 (Cdn) annually. A purse of $50,000 is awarded to the author of the best Canadian full-length novel or collection of short stories published in English. Each of the finalists will receive $5,000."

August 7th The Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

"Established in 1997, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize recognizes Canadian writers of exceptional talent for the year's best novel or short-story collection."

See the full Short Review list of contests and awards for short story collections here.

June issue out now!

2009-06-01T15:39:00.001+01:00

With this issue we welcome TSR's new deputy editor, Diane Becker, very glad to have her!

And in a bumper issue this month (well, ok, it's the same size, but packed with goodness!)....Reviews of:

(click on the pic to read the review)

as well as interviews with Matt Bell, Mathias B. Freese, Josephine Rowe, Anne Donovan, Barry Graham and Pat Jourdan. Could you want more? I don't think so.

So much great short story news!

2009-05-27T14:13:00.000+01:00

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.

Second, 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.

Back to Canada, Pasha Malla has won the Danuta Gleed Literary Prize for his collection, The Withdrawal Method. Says the National Post:

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.

What does the word "story" mean to you?

2009-05-23T11:36:00.000+01:00

In honour of National Short Story Month over at the Emerging Writers Network (and just because we love short stories) , I thought I'd bring you a selection of the responses by authors The Short Review interviewed to the question "What does the word 'story' mean to you?".

Quite a few said it was a very difficult question. For some it means nothing, for others it is life itself.

The order is purely alphabetical, I've got as far as the Bs. There will be more! Click on the names to read the full author interviews. Here goes:

Warren Adler
To me story is fundamental and defines us as human beings. What happens next is the heart of the story and the pattern of all life which is a beginning, a middle and and an end. It is also the great mystery since no human being can ever know "what happens next.

Niki Aguirre
So many things, but due to my upbringing, I prefer those that are rich in the oral storytelling tradition. The best ones are the ones you get lost in: multilayered, babbling and chaotic, not necessary neat and linear. If you think about it, when you are sitting in a café or a pub telling a story, it seldom goes from point to point: the little asides are the best parts. Stories are often desperate things, dying to be voiced and heard -- nothing calm and organised about that. Although I admire people who can write succinctly and in an orderly fashion while still maintaining a good level of excitement. That’s something to strive for.

Allison Amend
This question is no softball. Stumped, I just did what I used to do when I was stumped in college, which is look up the word in the Oxford English Dictionary. It was no help, so I’m on my own. To me, a story is the relation of a brief, epiphanal (or at least very important and pivotal) moment in a character’s life. And the stuff you need around that to understand why the moment is so important. That’s in the literature sense. In a more general sense, a story is a narrative told for a specific reason (that reason can be to entertain, to impart a moral, to make the teller seem smart, to humiliate someone else, to teach, to ingratiate the teller to the tellee, etc.).

Elizabeth Baines
I think of something jewelled, dense, which will glow in the mind long after you have finished reading it.

Richard Bardsley
Anything that holds your interest as a reader.

Aimee Bender
A tough question! The feeling of holding onto a sparkling handrail into the dark.

Tom Bissell
Nothing, really, other than serving as a placeholder term for a certain kind of literary experience, which is itself as essentially variable as a medieval bestiary.

Kiril Bozhinov
Annihilation, mystification, unmasking, abstaining … anything but entertainment.

Hugh Brody
Something that is told and has a magic. Something that reaches out and holds because of the events it offers and follows. Something that offers both the fearful and comforting, though always there is a reassurance that the story exists, is told. I have heard such amazing stories from Inuit and other indigenous peoples, in their homes, around fires, in tents at night. These seemed to be the archetypes. Yet I know that there is a story in so many places, in a multitude of forms.

Jason Brown
It means why am I alive, why will I die, make me laugh, why are things this way, help me escape myself, don’t let me escape myself, lie to me, show me how I lie to myself, I can’t believe you said that, I can’t believe the things I remember are now only real to me.

Randall Brown
Oh, a lot of things, but I think the best stories end with haunting, either because of their profundity or their emotional resonance. The desire for these things—for meaning and feeling—maybe drives narratives into existence, a desire shared by the character(s), readers, and the author. That coming together of these entities around wanting something, desperately and urgently, gives reading and writing (for me) its charged intensity. The writer Douglas Glover says this of the short story, "Literature is a way of thinking in which you think by pushing your characters through a set of actions (testing that character in a series of scenes which involve the same conflict)." I think Aristotle said something profound about a story having a beginning, middle, and end. Joseph Campbell discovered in his reading the ONE way to tell a story, the Monomyth, which Kurt Vonnegut summarized as "The hero gets into trouble. The hero gets out of trouble." "Separation—initiation—return," writes Campbell, "might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth.” In describing the narrative pattern of journeys, such as Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, Clift and Clift argue that stories work to "help one make sense of the boredom before and the terror during each journey." Out of these ideas, a very simple, workable definition of plot and narrative structure emerges: As the result of some inciting incident, desire (the beginning of a story) creates actions (the story's middle) leading to an outcome (the end).

James Burr
"Vastly, and inexplicably underrated, form of prose." I love short stories and I just don't understand why the publishing industry, and indeed many readers too, look down upon them. In these times of multi-media saturation and short attention spans surely the short story is THE medium of our times! Surely, just being able to dip in and out of a book whenever you have a few minutes to spare is the way we should all be reading now? Yet stories continue to be seen as the immature, less-devloped sibling to the novel, or worse, as a training ground for aspiring novelists. In my opinion, a good short story collection should always be superior to a good novel - the sheer range of narrative voices that can be used, the variety of characters, the number of ideas that can be explored.... Then again, while I don't write genre fiction I come from a genre background, so I see a short story as having "a point." When you read a story by Philip.K. Dick or Ray Bradbury or Clive Barker there is a definite purpose to the story - it is complete in and of itself. I wonder if the reason many people don't like reading short stories is because they read stories that are essentially notes for abandoned novels masquerading as "mood pieces" or half-formed vignettes pretending to be "character studies." This is a failing I often see in more "literary" short story collections, and it annoys me intensely. A story should be complete in itself, whether it be 1000, 5000 or 20000 words long. It isn't just "a short piece of prose" that isn't long enough to be padded up into a novel, nor is it just a single, clever idea. That isn't a short story. That's a vignette, or even, dare I say, a joke.

How would you answer the question?

Frank O'Connor Longlist 2009

2009-05-13T14:08:00.000+01:00

Hot on the heels of last week's Edge Hill Short Story Prize shortlist comes the list of short story collections longlisted for the 2009 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award - now renamed the The Cork City – Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. With a prize of €35,000 for the winning book, this is theworld's most lucrative award for a short story collection.

However, this is not all about how large the winner's cheque is. This year, the longlist has 57 short story collections - up from 38 last year - which means that publishers are definitely catching on to the prestige and exposure that comes with this award, where all eligible titles are longlisted. As I mentioned last week, this is a wonderful move on the part of the organisers, giving much-needed publicity to many, many books not published by mainstream publishers but by small presses without teams of publicists (including my own collection, The White Road and Other Stories). What is also wonderful is that "big" names are alongside newer writers, showcasing that the short story is not just the province of those who have yet to "graduate" to novels!

“We could have had another twenty entries but for many publishers missing the deadline," said declares Award administrator Patrick Cotter of the Munster Literature Centre in Cork. "We couldn’t bend the rules to allow late entries, there were simply too many titles already on the judges’ table this year. Next year we will have to consider a preliminary weeding-out before the publication of a longlist. But it is gratifying to see an explosion in short story publishing: encouraging short story publishing is the main raison d’etre of the award."

Here is the longlist, ordered by country, with links to those we have already reviewed:

15 American Authors:

Eleanor Bluestein, Tea and Other Ayama Na Tales, BkMk Press (University of

Missouri-Kansas City) review coming soon

Bonnie Jo Cambell, American Salvage,Wayne State University Press

Dennis Cooper, Ugly Man: Stories, Harper Perennial

David Eagleman, Sum, Pantheon Books (Random House)

Mary Gaitskill, Don’t Cry, Pantheon Books (Random House)

Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Bird, Hyperion

Daniel A. Hoyt, Then We Saw The Flames, University of Massachusetts Press

Ian MacMillan, Our People, BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City)

James Mathews, Last Known Position, University of North Texas Press

Christopher Meeks, Months and Season, White Whisker Books

Lydia Peelle, Reasons for and Advantage of Breathing, Harper Perennial

Andrew Porter, The Theory of Light and Matter, University of Georgia Press

Glen Pourciau, Invite, University of Iowa Press

Midge Raymond, Forgetting English, Eastern Washington University Press review coming soon

Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 British Authors:

Anthony Cropper, Nature’s Magician, Route

Jane Feaver, Love Me Tender, Harvill Secker (The Random House Group)

Paul Flynn, Crossing the Border, CC Publishing

Tania Hershman, The White Road and Other Stories, Salt Publishing

Sue Hubbard, Rothko’s Red, Salt Publishing

Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes, Faber and Faber Limited review coming soon

Sushma Joshi, The End of the World, FinePrint Books

Alex Keegan, Ballistics, Salt Publishing

Charles Lambert, The Scent of Cinnamon, Salt Publishing

James Lasdun, It’s Beginning to Hurt, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Tom Lee, Greenfly, Harvill Secker (The Random House Group)

Frederick Lightfoot, Fetish and Other Stories, Superscript

André Mangeot, A Little Javanese, Salt Publishing

Sean O’Brien, The Silence Room, Comma Press

John Saul, As Rivers Flow, Salt Publishing

Ali Smith, The First Person and Other Stories, Penguin Group Canada

Mark Illis, Tender, Salt Publishing

Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter, Harper Perennial review coming soon

5 Canadian Authors:

Tricia Dower, Silent Girl, Innana Publications and Education Inc.

Hannah Holborn, Fierce, McClelland & Stewart

Pamela Stewart, Elysium, Anvil Press

Deborah Willis, Vanishing and Other Stories, Penguin Group Canada

Kuzhali Manickavel, Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings, Blaft Publications

1 Dutch Author:

Arnon Grunberg, Amuse-Bouche, Comma Press

1 Estonian Author:

Kristiina Ehin, A Priceless Nest, Oleander Press

1 German Author:

Maike Wetzel (Trans. Lyn Marven), Long Days, Comma Press

1 Icelandic Author:

Gyrơir Elíasson (Trans. Victoria Cribb), Stone Tree, Comma Press

2 Indian Authors:

Jahnavi Barua, Next Door, Penguin Books ( India )

Jasmine Anita Yvette D’Costa, Curry is Thicker Than Water, BookLand Press

4 Irish Authors:

Michael J. Farrell, Life in the Universe, The Stinging Fly Press

Robert Graham, The Only Living Boy, Salt Publishing

Alan McMonagle, Liar, Liar, Words on the Street

Philip Ó Ceallaigh, The Pleasant Light of Day, Penguin Ireland

1 Macedonian Author:

Kiril Bozhinov, Eclipses: Stories of Disappearances and Reappearance, Beyond Art Productions

1 Malaysian Author:

Shih-Li-Kow, Ripples and Other Short Stories, Silverfish Books

2 New Zealand Authors:

Jeanette Galpin, Aroha and the River, Maungatiro Press of Marton

Charlotte Grimshaw Singularity, Vintage

2 Nigerian Authors:

Sefi Atta, Lawless, Farafina Books

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck, Fourth Estate LTD

1 Spanish Author:

Empar Moliner (Trans. Peter Bush), I Love You When I’m Drunk, Comma Press

1 Ukrainian Author:

Sana Krasikov, One More Year, Portobello Books Ltd

1 Zimbabwean Author

Petina Gappah, An Elegy for Easterly, Faber and Faber

Congratulations to all these authors, and may this bring a much larger readership for short stories. The judges for the award are an American, an Irishman and a Pole: Lloren A. Foster, Milka Jankowska and Vincent McDonnell, who will be choosing a shortlist of 5 titles, to be announced in late June, and a winner in September.

For more on the award visit The Munster Literature Centre. Click here for last year's longlist.

May is Short Story Month at EWN

2009-05-10T19:00:00.000+01:00

May has been declared Short Story Month over at the fabulous Emerging Writers Network blog always a lively place for a literary discussion and ideas for something great to read. Recent posts include Helen W. Mallon's review of Louise Erdrich's collection, The Red Convertible. Says Mallon:

I used the collection in my spring writing workshop, and the students pined when we moved to another author for a week or two. Erdrich is one writer whose language is accessible as popcorn--which makes her popular--yet wildly original in its beauty. Her plot twists are sometimes roll-on-the floor funny, but they never hammer you with the predictable. Her characters also slap you, when you least expect it, with the mystery and profundity of life.

EWN is posting a myriad of short-story related posts daily in May: check out what would be on short story "mix tapes" by Dawn Raffel and John Fox, John McNally on why anyone writes short stories, Gabriel Welsch on George Saunders' sublime Civilwarland in Bad Decline and Jonathan Baumbach on "fictions, short and long, that redefine possibilities".

This is just the tip of the short story iceberg, there is so much more that I am exhausted just thinking about it - visit the Emerging Writers Network and raise a glass for Short Story Month.!

Edge Hill Prize shortlist

2009-05-07T09:59:00.000+01:00

The five short story collections on the shortlist for the £5000 Edge Hill Prize for the Short Story have just been unveiled:

Chris Beckett, The Turing Test, Elastic Press
Gerard Donovan, Country of the Grand, Faber (reviewed as Young Irelanders, the US title)
Anne Enright, Yesterday’s Weather, Random House
Shena Mackay, The Atmospheric Railway, Random House
Ali Smith, The First Person and Other Stories, Hamish Hamilton (review coming soon!)

Congratulations to all the shortlisted, an interesting list pitting four rather big names in literary fiction, all of whom are either MAN Booker Prize winners or nominees, and published by large publishers, against Chris Beckett - a small-press-published author of a collection whose stories, says the Edge Hill website, "feature, among other things, robots, alien planets, genetic manipulation and virtual reality, but their centre focuses on individuals rather than technology, and they deal with love and loneliness, authenticity and illusion, and what it really means to be human". Elastic Press must be hopping up and down with glee!

Last year's shortlist did seem to me rather more eclectic:

Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman (Comma Press)
The Separate Heart by Simon Robson (Jonathan Cape)
Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan (Faber and Faber)
The People on Privilege Hill by Jane Gardam (Chatto and Windus)
Old Devil Moon by Christopher Fowler (Serpent’s Tail)

Tiny Deaths is the first collection by Doctor Who writer Shearman, The Separate Heart is Simon Robson's debut collection, Walk the Blue Fields is Clare Keegan's second collection, Jane Gardam is the author of too many novels and short story collections to mention, and Old Devil Moon is Christopher Fowler's 10th collection of dark short fiction.

It is wonderful that there is a prize for short story collections, don't get me wrong, but we have reviewed so many excellent small-press published collections and debut collections by exciting and talented new writers over the past year, it is a shame that they didn't get a stronger showing on the shortlist this year.

I understand that picking 5 is an impossible task, perhaps the Edge Hill prize organisers could take a leaf out of the Frank O'Connor International Award for the Short Story's book: they publish a longlist that includes every book entered that fits the eligibility criteria. This year's longlist will be announced next week, and if last year is anything to go by it will include 50 or so short story collections (among them, in the interests of full disclosure, my own collection, The White Road and Other Stories). This will be whittled down to 5 books for the shortlist - but the longlist was published last year in the Guardian and all the books received a much-needed boost.

All of us aim to spread the word about great short stories, and the Frank O'Connor Award longlist accomplishes this simply and effectively - we can't all be winners, but just the fact of getting published is an achievement worth celebrating! Good luck to all!

Short Stories Getting Attention in New York and London

2009-04-10T09:29:00.000+01:00

Two newspaper articles on short stories in major broadsheets (NY Times, Guardian) on the same day (April 4th)??? Have we slipped through a wormhole into another dimension? Welcome, I say... bring it on!

First, James Lasdun, the winner of the inaugural BBC National Short Story Prize in 2006, "celebrates growing confidence in an often overlooked form", in the Guardian:

'Art requires honour", declared Cicero. Of the literary arts the short story has always been the least honoured, trailing into the House of Fame a humble fourth after novels, plays and poetry. Between Chekhov and Cheever there can't have been more than a dozen major reputations founded solely or even largely on this unassuming form. You might have thought that in our own attention-deficient age, a narrative art based on speed and brevity would have become the main attraction, but outside the creative writing workshop, where its small scale makes it convenient for study (a dismal basis for survival), that hasn't been the case. Lack of encouragement may be the cause, or it may be something inherently skittish about whichever muse presides over this delicate art: a reluctance to settle anywhere long enough to generate a heavy-duty literary industry. It may be the relative newness of the form (if you accept Turgenev's claim that "we all come out from under Gogol's Overcoat", you can date its birth precisely to 1842), or it may be that people regard it as somehow highbrow or artsy; an insider sport for practitioners and aficionados only. Whatever the case, people still seem to want their blockbusters.

Lasdun's article takes a more positive turn and does something which is very dear to The Short Review's heart: he reviews five debut short story collections: Sana Krasikov's One More Year, Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck, Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly, and Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. And just because he is celebrating the short story form, don't think that this is a puff piece; Lasdun is pretty tough, and he pits one collection against another, which is an interesting way of reviewing. Not all the stories do what he would like a short story to do:

I think there's at least a unique potentiality in the short story, and that it has to do with, among other things, omission and a quality of internal resonance between the parts that, if handled well, can escalate the emotional power of the whole.Colette's story The Hand consists of little more than a young bride looking at her husband's hand as he sleeps, omitting almost all biographical information. But the isolated image and the woman's long, transformative gaze, under which the hand turns from human to ape-like to crab-like to "a panoply of war", conveys all the precarious freight of feeling attendant on a new marriage. Jhumpa Lahiri's Sexy runs its investigation of sexual desire through two parallel relationships that glance off each other in ways that send out progressively brighter sparks of illumination, facilitating a final, stunningly dramatic release of self-knowledge in its central character. Krasikov, Mueenuddin and Adichie are all self-evidently gifted writers who seem likely to engage large audiences whatever shape their work takes. But for what it's worth (and for most readers the distinction probably isn't very important), their approach to the short story seems to me largely novelistic, in that they tend to favour a complete, upfront delivery of the goods over this kind of fugitive alchemy.

Read the full article here.

A.O Scott focused on the American Short Story in the New York Times, but the refrain is similar to Lasdun:

To call an American writer a master of the short story can be taken at best as faint praise, or at worst as an insult, akin to singling out an ambitious novelist’s journalism — or, God forbid, criticism — as her most notable accomplishment. The short story often looks like a minor or even vestigial literary form, redolent of M.F.A.-mill make-work and artistic caution. A good story may survive as classroom fodder or be appreciated as an interesting exercise, an étude rather than a sonata or a symphony. A young writer who turns up at the office of an editor or literary agent with a volume of stories is all but guaranteed a chilly, pitying welcome.

However, it is time for a rethink:

The near-simultaneous appearance of three new literary biographies offers a powerful and concentrated challenge to the habit of undervaluing the short story. The subjects of these lives — Flannery O’Connor,John Cheever, Donald Barthelme — all produced longer work as well, but their reputations rest on shorter work. And this work, far from being minor, is among the most powerfully original American fiction produced in the second half of the 20th century.

Much of it, indeed, makes the novel look superfluous.

Scott also mentions Wells Tower, flavour of the moment - which is no bad thing for the short fiction community! - calling his collection "the most vivid recent example of the way a good story, or a solid collection of them, can do more than a novel to illuminate the textures of ordinary life and the possibilities of language. And the short story may provide a timely antidote to the cultural bloat of the past decade, when it often seemed that every novel needed to be 500 pages long and every movie had to last three hours — or four years, if it took the form of a cable series." And The Short Review heartily applauds Scott's suggestion at the end:

The Kindle might, in time, spur a revival of the short story. If you can buy a single song for a dollar, why wouldn’t you spend that much on a handy, compact package of character, incident and linguistic invention?

Exactly! Read the full article here.

Short story collection news: Sana Krasikov wins $100,000 Sami Rohr prize

2009-03-24T15:19:00.000Z

Congratulations to Short Review author Sana Krasikov winner of the $100,000 Sami Rohr prize for Jewish Literature for her short story collection, One More Year. Read our review of One More Year and an interview with Sana about her collection.

About the prize:

Each year, the prize of $100,000 will aim to reward an emerging writer whose work has demonstrated a fresh vision and evidence of future potential. Recipients must have written a book of exceptional literary merit that stimulates an interest in themes of Jewish concern. Fiction and non-fiction books will be considered in alternate years.

What would you do with $100,000??