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Guest Editor, September 2011: Tania Hershman
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Tania Hershman Tania Hershman is a short story writer, reader, reviewer and obsessive. Her collection, The White Road and Other Stories (Salt 2008), was commended, 2009 Orange Award for New Writers. |
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| She is currently writer-in-residence in the Science Faculty at Bristol University, working on a new collection of biology-inspired fictions, with the generous assistance of the Arts Council England. She has had many short stories and flash fictions published in literary magazines online and in print and broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Afternoon Reading. She is founder and editor of The Short Review (www.theshortreview.com), a unique journal reviewing short story collections old and new and interviewing their authors. Tania's website is www.taniahershman.com, she blogs about writing at TaniaWrites (www.titaniawrites.blogspot.com) and tweets at @taniahershman. |
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I am a short story addict. There's no two ways about it. Short stories make me happy - even the dark and disturbing ones - in a way that nothing else can. I recently attempted to go without reading short stories for a month while I was on a writing retreat, and by Day 10 I was miserable, cranky. I reached for a few collections and an anthology, and the light flooded back into my life. In 2010, I read a record 2000 short stories, a large number of which I was paid to read for competitions, and what amazed me was how many of them I enjoyed. I am constantly surprised and delighted by what writers are doing with the short story form - which of course is defined simply as a piece of fiction under a certain length (10,000 words, 20,000 words?), nothing more. Short stories can be anything and everything, from chick lit to lad lit, science fiction, historical fiction, experimental, speculative, literary fic, erotica... There are 100s of individual short stories published weekly in literary magazines worldwide - and many short story collections too, although you have to dig a little deeper to find those since most bookshops don't keep many in. But the dig will be worth it. On this page are are a few recommendations of some recent favourites of mine that I've reviewed or am currently reviewing for The Short Review, the journal I edit. |
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Short story festivals
September is an exciting month for short stories in this part of the UK & Ireland, with not one but TWO short story festivals in the space of 10 days.
First, the newly-renamed Cork International Short Story Festival (formerly the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival) kicks off on September 14th in Cork, Ireland, and features a fantastic line-up of writers, including our own Helen Dunmore and Alison MacLeod, Irish writers Ethel Rohan and Órfhlaith Foyle, and the six authors shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize: Yiyun Li, Alexander MacLeod, Edna O’Brien, Suzanne Rivecca, Colm Tóibín and Valerie Trueblood.
The winner of the prize will be announced here, as will the winner of the Sean O'Faolain prize for a single short story. All the readings are free to attend. There are also short story workshops given by Clare Wigfall and Jon Boilard. This is a really fun festival, where every evening the authors and the attendees repair to a nearby tapas bar to mingle and chat about short stories!
The following week, die-hard short story fans (i.e. me) will be heading to Charleston, the country home of the Bloomsbury Group, in Lewes, Sussex, for Small Wonder
Held from Thursday 22nd September - Sunday 25th, the atmopshere in the converted barn is slight more genteel - except for the raucous Friday night short story slam! Authors appearing this year include Robert Coover, Rachel Cusk, Geoff Dyer, the excellent, Janice Galloway, Yiyun Li, Tom Rachman, Polly Samson, Ali Smith, Sarah Waters, Ben Watt and Tom Vowler. Buy your tickets now!
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A Life on Paper: Stories by Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud, translated by Edward Gauvin (Small Beer Press, 2010)
This beautiful hardback book - with a fairly forbidding image of the author on the front which belies the wonderfully odd and playful nature of his writing - collects 23 stories by this French author who has won every French literary prize but has now, thank goodness, finally been translated into English. The shortest story is only two pages, and all the stories were written between 1974 and 2002. The tone that Chȃteaureynaud often chooses to write in is old fashioned, formal, ornate, and it distances you a little from the text but in a pleasing way. It's the tone of a faintly sardonic narrator and the author often wrong-foots you by slipping in something more colloquial. This is definitely one of my favourite books of 2010, it delighted me with its wit and imagination, and will, I hope, inspire others to go beyond our English- speaking world.
Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr (Fourth Estate, 2010)
This, Doerr's second collection, won the prestigious Story Prize in the US. It might serve as a caution to all short story writers: if the first story in your collection is too good, if it happens to actually be a masterpiece, watch out. You may set such high standards that even you might not be able to meet them. This is the "problem" with Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall. I found the title story, which opens the collection of six, is so astonishing, so brilliant, so moving - it moved me to tears each time I read it - that the other five stories, which, without the giant shadow cast by Memory Wall, would be at worst very, very good indeed, had a hard time holding their own. Mostly, though, they do. This collection is a unique exploration of some of the weightiest of life's issues, looked at from diverse and compelling viewpoints by characters in a variety of circumstances. This is the work of a master storyteller.
Collected Stories by Carol Emshwiller (Nonstop Press, 2011)
These 90 or so stories cover the now-90-yearold Emswhiller's career from 1954 til 2002. Described to me as "feminist science fiction", that label does not do justice to Emshwiller's wondrous imagination and playfulness. Yes, there are aliens here, strange creatures, strange lands, but what Emshwiller is really doing is what all great writers do, whatever their so-called "genre": she holds up a mirror in which we see ourselves, us humans, our society, our foibles and desires, anew. I found it hard to read more than one story at a time, regardless of length. There is so much to ponder here, as well as much that entertains and amuses. Reading these stories definitely left me changed.
Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi (Picador 2011)
This is a book that's difficult to classify but since Oyeyemi herself likes to think of it as a short story collection, I'm allowed to include it here! It is really a sort of long story with more stories woven through; it is the weaving that makes this unique - I've never read anything quite like it. Oyeyemi writes so beautifully and delights in wrong-footing the reader with characters that may or may not be entirely fictional even within a fictional universe. Inspired by Bluebeard and most definitely a 21st century cousin to Angela Carter, though, in my opinion, much funnier, Oyeyemi tackles dark themes, such as violence against women, as well as exploring the nature of love and marriage. Wonderful.
A few more to briefly mention: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Farrer Strauss and Giroux, 2009) is a mammoth book of mostly miniature stories written with Davis' characteristic wit and sharpness. On the subject of very very short stories, and to echo last month's editor, Jon Pinnock, I really enjoyed David Gaffney's Half Life of Songs (Salt, 2010) often bizarre and magical stories that carry much more weight than their length implies. I'm currently reading Rachael B. Glaser's Pee on Water (Publishing Genius, 2010), which is in places extremely odd, but several of the stories have left me reeling, in the best way. I'm also enjoying Rob Shearman's new collection, Everybody's Just So Special (Big finish, 2011), which draws the reader in with lightness and humour and then knocks you sideways. And if you're looking for a great multi-author anthology, Amnesty International's Freedom: An Anthology of Short Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Mainstream Publishing, 2009) contains some incredibly poignant and moving stories inspired by the UDHR. |
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