Lore Segal: A life in stories
Lore Segal published her first Ladies’ Lunch story, ‘The Arbus Factor’ in The New Yorker in 2007, and the most recent, ‘Soft Sculpture’, in summer 2022. For her extraordinary new collection, published to coincide with her 95th birthday on 8 March 2023, she brings three new stories together into a sequence with earlier stories published in The New Yorker and elsewhere....
History and ‘the people’
The stories in German Fantasia were written between 2016 and 2020. Although the times and the conditions under which each of these texts was written were different, they turn on themes and ideas that have been important to me for a long time: first and foremost that of the incoherence of history and the roles men play in it,...
Out
Three flashes of lightning illuminate the night, and I catch a glimpse of dirty terraces and dividing walls. The rain hasn’t started yet. The sliding glass door of the balcony across from us opens, and a woman in pajamas comes outside to bring in the clothes from the line. I see all this as I’m...
Wilde
Inside the Dublin guesthouse, over a breakfast of peppery scrambled eggs, I sat watching the young couple below on the street. They stood on the opposite side of the road, next to the bus stop’s thin yellow pole, bundled up in woollen accessories and thick, dark jackets. They pressed their bodies together, their arms clasping...
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...
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...
The life of art
My friend and I went walking the dog in the cemetery. It was a Melbourne autumn: mild breezes, soft air, gentle sun. The dog trotted in front of us between the graves. I had a pair of scissors in my pocket in case we came across a rose bush on a forgotten tomb. “I don’t...
McKinley
“McKinley? That bastard? I hate him. You see him, you tell him, ‘I have a message for you from an old acquaintance: rot in hell, you bastard.’ You tell him that from me. “You know what he did? He put his wife on the street. That beautiful, innocent girl. She wasn’t so innocent by the...
Ex cathedra
“Godfather, you’ll go blind from that, sir.” “What?” “You’re going to go blind. Reading is so sad. No sir, give me that book.” Caetaninha took the book out of his hands. Her godfather paced around and then went into his study, where there was no lack of books. He closed the door behind him and...
