My second guest column for Fiction Uncovered is now live. I want to cover my main reading interests in these columns, so this one is a celebration of short stories. It’s a list of ten recommended contemporary British short story writers. It’s not a ‘top ten’ as such, because of course there are more than ten authors whom I could have included – and I’d love to hear about your favourite short story writers in the comments.
Further reading
Here are links to my reviews of some of the stories and books mentioned in the column:
The Silver Wind by Nina Allan
Ten Stories About Smoking by Stuart Evers
‘Butcher’s Perfume’ by Sarah Hall
The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales by Kirsty Logan
The Stone Thrower by Adam Marek
This Isn’t the Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone Like You by Jon McGregor
Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi
Leading the Dance by Sarah Salway
Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical and Everyone’s Just So So Special by Robert Shearman
Diving Belles by Lucy Wood
Keep up to date with my Fiction Uncovered columns here.
The stories in Sarah Salway’s collection Leading the Dance (recently republished in a new edition) are built from elements that are ostensibly largely quotidian, but often treated in a way that lays bare the significance that everyday things can have to people. Let’s start with the title story, which is a fine illustration of this (as well as being one of my favourite pieces in the book); it tells of a couple attending a school ceilidh, but also of the tensions running through their relationship. The man is quickly—and chillingly—established as a threatening figure (‘For a child to cry during one of Daddy’s moods is not a good thing because then he’ll teach them how it really feels to hurt,’ p. 139); he attends the ceilidh only reluctantly, and makes sure his partner, Deborah, knows that; for Deborah’s part, she knows how destructive is this relationship, but still finds herself drawn to the man (who is not named, thereby depersonalising him and emphasising the sense of his being a threat). The act of leading the dance comes to represent the struggle to exert control over the relationship; Salway superbly maintains a sense of menace throughout.
Esteban Echeverría’s short story ‘El matadero’ (originally published in 1871, twenty years after its author’s death, and here translated as The Slaughteryard by Norman Thomas di Giovanni and Susan Ashe) is, says di Giovanni’s introduction, one of the ‘cornerstones of Argentine literature’. I must admit here and now that I know very little about the literature and history of Argentina (and of Latin America in general), so I’m coming to The Slaughteryard very much as a general reader.
From a 140-year-old text to one which first appeared only six years ago. Sarah Salway’s debut novel, Something Beginning With (aka The ABCs of Love) is the story of Verity Bell, a secretary in an industrial publishing company, who falls in love with a married man just as her best friend Sally’s own affair enters turbulent waters.
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