A short-story renaissance has been promised since 2013. That year Alice Munro won the Nobel, Lydia Davis won the Booker International, and George Saunders’s bestselling collection The Tenth of December won the Folio Prize. The rise of the form was declared, but it is mainly now that we’re reaping the harvest.
Established novelists such as Philip Hensher, Mark Haddon and Lucy Caldwell have recently published collections. But perhaps we’d get a better sense of where the form is at present by looking to those who’ve recently announced themselves in it.
Twenty-five-year-old Daisy Johnson’s excellent debut is set in the precarious and artificial landscape of the East Anglian fens: marshland that has, against its will, been drained and made hospitable to humans. In Fen, this unstable landscape exerts an otherworldly influence over its inhabitants. Anorexic girls turn into eels. A house becomes jealous when its teenage inhabitant falls in love. Women lure men from dating sites to their house and eat them.
Fen has been compared to the stories of Angela Carter, but for me it recalls the poetry of Robin Robertson, known for reframing myths in a familiarly bleak British climate.
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