Short stories

It can’t be easy to switch between editing others people’s fiction and writing your own: how do you suspend that intuitive critical impulse? Gordon Lish, who is best known as the editor of Raymond Carver’s short stories but has also written plenty of fiction in his own right, is familiar with this dilemma, and in White Plains (Little Island Press, £18.99) he has fun with it. These stories are replete with parenthetical um-ing and ah-ing over synonyms, punctuation and grammatical solecisms — a prolix testament to the agonies of prose composition: ‘Losing tone here, not retaining purchase on stance here, falling to pieces with the coward’s frolic along the phraseological

Leonora Carrington was strikingly beautiful with ‘the personality of a headstrong and hypersensitive horse’ (according to her friend and patron Edward James); and she fled from her family, renouncing a life of privilege and ease to pursue her calling as an artist. Joanna Moorhead deplores the fact that she is ‘not much more than a footnote in art history’. But she has long been a legendary figure (among recent devotees, apparently, Madonna and Björk); in Mexico, where she lived and worked for most of her life, she is a national treasure; and for the feminist she is a heroine and her art ‘a modern woman’s codex’. She painted some marvellous

We know our way around Raymond Carver’s blue-collar cityscapes and Updike’s urban angst and despair. Rick Bass opens a window onto a wilder America — the far reaches of Montana, Alabama, Texas, Missouri… But to say his stories are about rural life would be like saying Moby-Dick is about whaling. Lauded by American critics and freighted with prizes, Bass is scarcely known in Britain. Praise to Pushkin Press for introducing us to an astonishing literary voice. Life in Bass’s world is often challenging: his people live close to the land; they fish, shoot birds, hunt elk, moose and deer to stock the larder. But while forests, prairies, rivers and lakes

There is a common assumption that experimental writing — for want of a better term — is obscure, joyless and arid. Or worse: that it is fake (or ‘pseudy’), a deception practised upon either the deluded or gullible reader. So I wonder what people who hold such assumptions would make of this. It constitutes the final paragraph of ‘Specialist’, one of the stories in this collection. The story itself is, not untypically for this book, less than a page long: The cyclist hit me, and it’s vile after my life ends in the afterlife. Lots of incense, resin, apes and giraffe-tails — all acquired tastes. I don’t like that kind

In a Johannesburg mall, a listless and lonely IT worker chats with his dad about the bitter fruits of upward mobility in South Africa. ‘Do you remember when you scored 139 for that IQ test?’ Pa asks, in Masande Ntshanga’s story ‘Space II’. ‘I thought it meant my life would be different, I tell him, but I don’t really like computers.’ As the dream of a ‘rainbow nation’ fades, all the Ubers, espressos and craft beers in the city can’t dispel the mood of yuppie melancholia. Modern Africa, as several pieces in the latest edition of this annual anthology attest, may cast away old burdens only to take on the

Are writers born or made? The answer, by the end of Love from Boy — a selection of Roald Dahl’s letters to his mother drawn from the 40 years of correspondence they kept up, lovingly edited and deftly commented upon by his biographer Donald Sturrock — is surely that they are both. Even as a 12-year-old, regaling her with tales of derring-do at Repton, the economy and vivid turn of phrase are evident that would characterise both his grand guignol short stories for adults and the children’s books for which he eventually became both loved and lauded. Out ice-skating, ‘I had eight chaps pulling me with a long rope at

Helen Simpson is not a prolific writer; six slim collections of short stories in 25 years, each timed quinquennially with what seems, at least retrospectively, like impeccable forward planning. In fact, time, we shall see, is what her career so far has been about. She has also heroically resisted the pressure —and there must have been a significant one, at least towards the beginning — to move on from the short form and deliver a novel, as if the short story were not an entirely different genre but just a warming-up exercise before the heavyweight training session of the novel. Cockfosters is a slender volume, all of 140 pages, each

Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In this new volume of stories from the American writer Ken Kalfus no one, innocent or guilty, can be counted safe. The novella which gives this collection its title is an audacious fictional riff on a real-life scandal: the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF, favoured candidate for president of France, arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a hotel chambermaid in New York. Couched in the form of an email apologia to the maid, this is like the story of Red Riding Hood told by the wolf. Kalfus simultaneously

‘People talk about their childhood and it’s so mundane. I don’t remember much about it, if I’m honest. I can’t even tell you what my father’s voice sounded like.’ In Stuart Evers’s story ‘Frequencies’, in this collection, a besotted new father hears this pronouncement coming from the baby monitor. The monitor is picking up a radio signal, so the sound of eight-month-old Jack’s precious snuffling is overlaid with hardheaded recollections of an anonymous speaker’s parents. ‘They were such dull people… I… pitied them even before I knew what the word meant.’ Eventually the juxtaposition grows too much for the father, and he smashes the baby monitor. Then he goes to

The short story likes to play the underdog. Famously unfavoured by publishers, it has none of the commercial clout of the novel. Denying itself the luxury of length, it is a martyr to the cause of shortness. When the short story writer Alice Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel prize for literature, she seemed to personify the supposed modesty of her craft. With the blessing of the Swedish Academy, the short story had finally gained the status of a standalone art form: no longer, to quote Munro, ‘just something you played around with until you got a novel’. All this modesty seems at odds with the idea of an ‘epiphany’

I am not sure if it’s properly understood quite what a crisis the short story is now in. Superficial signs of success and publicity — such as Alice Munro winning the Nobel, or the establishment of another well-funded prize — are widely mistaken for a resurgence. But what has disappeared — and disappeared quite recently — is the wide spread of journals willing to pay for a single story. That is what sustained the genre in its glory days. Edwardian magazines such as the Strand happily paid their star writers the equivalent (or even more) of a doctor’s annual income for a single story. There were dozens of such publications

Although entitled Infidelities this collection of short stories could as well be called Choices, because that is what really preoccupies Kirsty Gunn’s characters. Divided into three sections, ‘Going Out’, ‘Staying Out’ and ‘Never Coming Home’, the stories are more linked by style and writing than by any theme. Gunn’s style is clear, unaffected and poetic without being pretentious; her descriptions of nature — for instance the sky at the beginning of ‘The Wolf on the Road’ — are at times almost painfully beautiful. One stylistic technique she favours is not always as successful as her descriptive writing; often in a story she will slip from a narrative voice to an

Rose Tremain walks on water. Her historical novels are absolutely marvellous, brilliantly plotted, witty and wise, with some of the best characters you’ll find anywhere. Indeed one of their number has a good claim to being the natural heir to Falstaff, his bawdy antics giving way to a more melancholy conclusion: he is to be found in both Restoration and the eponymous Merivel. Tremain’s contemporary fiction is similarly strong. With tremendous insight and sympathy, The Road Home describes the life of an Eastern European as he tries to make a new life in England. The novel is a powerful corrective to the notion that economic migrants have an easy time

Heaven knows what the millions of purchasers of the Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies will make of the ten stories collected here, for they return us to the landscape occupied by Hilary Mantel’s last great contemporary novel, Beyond Black (2005). This, for those of you unfamiliar with her pre- (or rather post-) Tudor work is a world of fraught domestic interiors, twitches on the satirical thread and, above all, stealing over the shimmering Home Counties gardens and the thronged Thames Valley shopping malls, a faint hint of the numinous. Make that a very strong hint of the numinous, for The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher fairly crackles

‘The first night I stayed in Kilinochchi, I was a little apprehensive,’ admits the usually cool-headed Vasantha, van-driver and narrator of all the stories in Noontide Toll. Kilinochchi was the operational centre of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) until the Sri Lankan army’s entry in January 2009. Now the town offers amenities like the Spice Garden Inn, with glass-walled cafeteria and reception desk overflowing with coconut flowers and bougainvillea. Yet its assistant manager, Miss Saraswati, belies such luxurious blandness. A rat suddenly appears in the café; immediately she hurls a bottle, breaking the creature’s skull without destroying the implement. ‘I stared at Miss Saraswati. “You learn to do

Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was a literary celebrity in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. She chose the pen-name ‘Teffi’ because it was androgynous, and because it was the kind of name a ‘lucky’ fool would have; in Russia, fools were held to tell truths, albeit obliquely. ‘Teffi’ wrote for newspapers, most notably the Russian Word. By 1911 she was writing more fiction than journalism; her short story collections achieved instant popularity. In 1919 the Russian Word was closed down. Teffi was evacuated, ending up, like so many ‘lesrusses’, in Paris. She never returned to Russia, except in her stories. Teffi’s fame evaporated almost immediately after her death in 1952. Pushkin Press has issued

The American writer, Charles Portis, has had what some novelists — the more purist ones — might regard as an ideal life. While his books have seldom been big-sellers, his fans sink to their knees at the mention of his name. In the mid 1980s, two bookshop employees in New York were so smitten with Portis’s then out-of-print novel, The Dog of the South, that they bought up all 183 hardback copies on the market and put them in their bookshop window. The books sold out in days. Contacted in his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, where he writes in an office behind a bar called Cash McCool’s, Portis said