Dorian Gray is having more fun than you
You don’t know how you know Dorian Gray. When Dorian Gray first added you on Facebook, you two had sixteen mutual friends. You had been in New York six weeks, and you were always drunk. You figured you’d met Dorian Gray at one of your parties – your riotous parties, your all-night parties, your starlit...
The perils of Portland
Rain pelts the back of Harriet’s slicker like the palms of a thousand needy toddlers. Without relent it pours, so surprising in its force that its mammoth drops coalesce into one entity, one massive, sopping curtain coming down, trying its darnedest to prostrate her onto the soaked earth. After only five minutes of digging, her...
The painting
Lotta’s husband, Vik, was good at presents, and this year he had excelled himself. This year, he had commissioned a painting for his wife’s birthday. It would be a family portrait. Vik and Lotta both had curly hair – his dark, hers fair. Their children had curly hair too. They would make a wonderful composition,...
What she can do
From where they stood, it was all her fault. She was entirely to blame. She’d left home, taking the child with her, and bringing her short-lived marriage to an end. In more ways than one, her other half wasn’t the paternal sort, the husbandly sort. In more ways than one, he wasn’t the child-support-paying sort...
The natural
When he heard that the great Maltese actress Marianne R. was coming to Glasgow to give a series of masterclasses, Willem applied immediately. He was invited to audition a few weeks later by letter and had to plead with his agency to move his cleaning shift at the university. After all the fuss and rehearsing...
The short cut
I look so much like her, it upsets them. They think they’re seeing her, seeing her returned, seeing her returning. They take me for a revenant. I’ve never returned, though; I haven’t seen my family since then. Since I can’t remember when. Actually I do know, since the death of our grandmother. They talk to...
American spirit
A couple of months ago, I met up with my friend Dorothy. We’d been very close back when we worked at Friday’s together, she as a bartender and I as a waitress, but we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Maybe three years, since just after her son was born and I quit....
I’ll sing when you sleep
And so too might cocks, falcons, and other birds of prey, which have been forced into warlike battle at the hands of man, be armed like knights. Treatise on falconry and other arts, 1386 He steps into the ring and notes with apprehension that his opponent has spurs curved like Moorish swords. His armour, sharp,...
Wendy Erskine: Beyond normal
Wendy Erskine’s debut story collection Sweet Home, published last year by The Stinging Fly Press in Ireland and since picked up by Picador, combines intelligent lucidity, humour, fear, compassion and above all, what is it to be human. The stories are complicated yet simple; hilarious yet chilling; they deal with both our darkest nature and...
Etgar Keret: Something weird
Fly Already, Etgar Keret’s first story collection for seven years, hits a familiarly outlandish and infectious groove. The title story relates a potential suicide jump as witnessed by a young boy whose innocent, excited observations to his father are set against a backdrop of grief, guilt, recovery and misunderstanding. It typifies the offbeat humour, childlike...
Let there be light
Tatyana Tolstaya lives a double life. A fiercely postmodern, vibrant writer of the here-and-now, an indulgently larger-than-life presence in Russian letters and culture at home and abroad, she is also a ghost – a rather hard-to-miss, palpably material ghost, but a ghost of Russian and Tolstoyan past, nonetheless. Her latest collection of short stories, Aetherial...
Oceans of stories
258 people used to live in this road and I knew everyone’s names. I’d lie in bed, young back then, and count. Numbers 1 to 60 Ocean Road. The ten Arkwrights to Winifred Waters. 258 people, 258 names, not a single ocean nearby. No one saw the sea. Never thought the world would go faster...
