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...
“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...
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...
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...
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...
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’,...
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...
“Airport, please.” All things considered, it’s something closer to vindictiveness than politeness that has him jump into the cab at the last minute and fold himself between her and her luggage. It’s only when she inches closer to her window in response that he becomes aware of the true time commitment of this ride-along. But...
The last twelve months have seen some exceptional works by some of my absolute favourite writers, as well as a handful of duffers from those who should know better. Here, then, is my highly subjective round-up of the year that just was. Books of the year Tenth of December by George Saunders (Bloomsbury) Any new...
In the December 2013 issue we launched our ‘Favourite Stories’ feature, with seven writers each introducing a short story which they feel stands out as a shining example of the form. Suzanne Berne picks out a perfect sketch from recent Nobel Prize winner and short-story stylist Alice Munro, Sophie Hannah weighs up Herman Melville’s ever-popular...
The skin, touching your skin with the tip of my finger, drawing your outline, I remember that this natural skin covering us can only capture our sensations on the surface, on which thousands of radars are planted; like roads, the skin is not depth but extension, tattooed dregs, the skin is not like the ocean,...
The strongest waves reach our feet, covering them with sand and foam, and Hana lets out peals of laughter and splashes, splattering everywhere. Her sweet, chubby, gap-toothed face never tires of smiling, and every time she wants to show me something she pulls on my fingers with her small, thin hand. Is it like this,...
