Amy Tan among the courtesans
Amy Tan’s latest novel, The Valley of Amazement, is a sweeping saga spanning fifty years and two continents, at its heart examining the inner workings of Shanghai’s courtesan houses in the aftermath of the collapse of China’s imperial dynasty when the New Republic opened the gates to international trade – and universal chicanery. In territory...
Joyce Carol Oates: ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’
Anyone who doubts a short story’s capacity to pack a powerful punch hasn’t yet read the much anthologised and analysed short story by Joyce Carol Oates ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’. Set in the mid-1960s, it is a tale that can be read as a crime story, an allegory, a snapshot of...
Katherine Mansfield: ‘Bliss’
“What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks...
Elizabeth Jane Howard backwards
I had worried that meeting Elizabeth Jane Howard might be a slightly melancholy experience. Whilst her novels have sold in their millions and she counts Hilary Mantel among her fans, she has never quite received the acclaim she deserves. In spite of this and the fact that at 90 she is now quite frail, there...
Suzanne Berne behind the picket fence
Suzanne Berne won the 1997 Orange Prize for Fiction with her debut, A Crime in the Neighborhood, the shocking story of a young boy’s molestation and murder in a Washington suburb in the 1970s. With her latest novel, The Dogs of Littlefield, she’s back in the suburbs again, this time in Massachusetts. A poised study...
Fatima Bhutto borders on empathy
Fatima Bhutto’s mesmerising and impassioned debut novel The Shadow of the Crescent Moon focuses on the impossible but urgent choices facing five young people living in the tribal areas on the Pakistan border with Afghanistan, where communities are under constant threat from brutal Taliban foot soldiers and American drone strikes – and the vagaries of...
Raymond Carver: ‘Cathedral’
“I knew that story was different from anything I’d ever written… and all of the stories after that seemed to be fuller somehow and much more generous and maybe more affirmative… Somehow I had found another direction I wanted to move toward. And I moved. And quickly.” This is Raymond Carver and he is referring...
Lorrie Moore: ‘Community Life’
As with most anything in life, from parents to food to clothes, I’d had plenty of experience with short stories before I really knew what they were. We read them in school (another thing experienced before it’s understood): these one- to forty-page things of fiction, usually in a photocopied packet, or an anthology containing other...
Herman Melville: ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’
I’m not sure if Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ is a very long short story or a very short novella, but I’ve always thought of it as a story and, ever since I first read it for my English and American Literature degree in 1991, it has been my favourite short story. It contains three...
Alice Munro: ‘Menesteung’
One of the reasons to write about the past, it seems to me, is to try to save someone or something from obscurity, or as Alice Munro says in ‘Menesteung’, from her collection Friend of My Youth: “to rescue one thing from the rubbish,” to “see a trickle in time.” This is that kind of...
Katherine Mansfield: ‘At the Bay’
However you choose to dissect her best work, (and she did do some that wasn’t all that), Katherine Mansfield was a revolutionary writer. She was a symbolist and a modernist and her stories were, according to katherinemansfield.com, the “first of significance in English to be written without a conventional plot.” Commenting on Somerset Maugham’s ‘Rain’,...
Autumn and spring fiction highlights
Well, it’s certainly been a fantastic autumn for fiction. The two novels dominating this year’s fiction round-ups are Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries (Granta) and Donna Tartt’s eagerly anticipated third novel The Goldfinch (Little, Brown). The Luminaries is a tale of star-crossed lovers, murder, opium and séances – a Victorian pastiche in the...
