Tag: short fiction

BBC National Short Story Award 2013 shortlist

22nd September 2013 / / 1 Comment

The shortlist for this year’s BBC National Short Story Award has been announced:

  • ‘Barmouth’ by Lisa Blower
  • ‘We Are Watching Something Terrible Happen’ by Lavinia Greenlaw
  • ‘Mrs Fox’ by Sarah Hall
  • ‘Notes from the House Spirits’ by Lucy Wood
  • ‘Prepositions’ by Lionel Shriver

I’ve been following this award for the past few years, and it always throws light o some interesting stories. This is the first time, however, that I’ve already been familiar with one of the stories in advance. I loved Lucy Wood’s collection Diving Belles (which I reviewed for Strange Horizons here), and ‘Notes from the House Spirits’ was one of my favourite stories in that book. So that’s who I’m rooting for, though I expect there is some stiff competition in that list.

The winner of this year’s Award will be announced on Tuesday 8 October. In the meantime, there is an anthology of the stories available, and there will also be podcasts of story readings from BBC Radio 4 going up this week.

Sunday Story Society: ‘Meet the President!’ by Zadie Smith

1st September 2013 / / 3 Comments

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It’s time for the first installment of the new monthly Sunday Story Society, for which I’ve chosen to look at Zadie Smith’s story ‘Meet the President!‘ in the New Yorker (you can read it by clicking on the link). The way it works is, I start off with a review of the story, then you can join in talking about the story in the comments here, and we’ll just see how it goes. So…

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Zadie Smith has reportedly said that she’s working on a science fictional novel, which is an intriguing prospect to me. I’m not sure whether ‘Meet the President!; is an extract (it stands well enough on its own. And seems to make all the point that it needs to make), but it is a taster of how Smith may approach science-fictional material.

We begin on the edge of what is presumably still Suffolk, in a future sketched fairly conventionally, but efficiently: there was flooding a hundred years previously; Felixstowe has moved inland; a woman of forty-nine qualifies as ‘very old’ (on reflection, this may simply be reflecting the viewpoint of the protagonist as a teenage boy, but it still strikes me as fitting with the harsh nature of life in this place). Then comes the key technological innovation around which the story revolves: a personal augmented-reality device which allows users to place pretty much any situation or setting over the world they see.

‘Meet the President!’ is about dramatising contrasts. On the one hand, we have Bill Peek, the rich boy with the Augmentor, whose task (perhaps a futuristic analogue of the Grand Tour) is to travel around and use the augmentation technology to deepen his understanding of the world and its inhabitants. If that ends up looking like play, or ticking the boxes without really learning anything, so be it: Bill has the privilege to get ahead; to be safe; to move away from here (‘If you can’t move, you’re no one from nowhere,’ he says).

On the other hand, we have Melinda Durham and Aggie Hanwell, the local woman and girl who disturb Bill as the story begins. They have none of Bill’s advantages, and quite a few disadvantages if you go by what the Augmentor tells Bill about their likelihood of falling ill. But that kind of itemisation doesn’t give Bill the true measure of people – and the lacks the ability to deal with the real place in which he finds himself, as we see in the contrast between the rural community and the game Bill creates through the Augmentor.

I suppose that contrast could be seen as somewhat heavy-handed – Smith clearly has her thumb on the scales – but I think it ultimately works because there is such a sharp difference between the augmented and physical worlds that Bill experiences. I’d stop short of saying ‘Meet the President!’ is a great story (I don’t think it has quite enough depth for that); but it does make me look forward to that novel.

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And now, over to you…

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Sarah Hall

29th August 2013 / / 1 Comment

Whenever I’ve read Sarah Hall’s work previously (see my posts on The Carhullan Army and ‘Butcher’s Perfume‘), I have always been struck by her use of landscape and strong sense of place. I see those qualities again in ‘The Reservation’, which is one of those extracts in the Granta anthology that really makes me feel excited about reading the full novel.

Hall’s protagonist is Rachel, who returns to Cumbria for the first time in six years, having been working on a reservation in Idaho. She is here for a new commission from a wealthy entrepreneur, but also to see her dying mother. There are suggestions of an interesting contrast to be explored between the different spaces of the Reservation and the entrepreneur’s estate; and the implication that the hospice where Rachel’s mother lives is a kind of reservation itself. I am suitably intrigued about Hall’s novel-to-come.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

The return of Sunday Story Society

24th August 2013 / / 2 Comments

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Last year, I started an interactive feature on the blog called Sunday Story Society, where I invited people to come and talk about a short story in a comment thread. I put the feature on hold when I moved house, but it went well as a whole and I have always wanted to bring it back.

So that’s what I’m doing now.

Taking inspiration from Strange Horizons’ Short Story Snapshot series, I’m making a few changes. Sunday Story Society will now run monthly, on the first Sunday of each month. The stories will still all be freely available online, but I want to concentrate on new stories (at least for the time being), so I will be looking at stories published during in the previous month. I’m also going to be writing more of a review of each story as a starting point.

I’m not going to plan ahead of time what I will cover: there could be any type of story; the author may or may not be well-known. It will depend entirely on what I see that interests me and that I think will make for a good discussion. I’ll post a notice on the blog a week or so beforehand.

So, if you’d like to join me, we’ll kick Sunday Story Society 2.0 off on Sunday 1 September with a look at “Meet the President!” by Zadie Smith, from the New Yorker. See you then!

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Zadie Smith

18th August 2013 / / 1 Comment

So far, I’ve read two of Zadie Smith’s novels: On Beauty didn’t particularly engage me, but I found NW very good indeed; so I went into her Granta piece feeling unsure but hopeful.

‘Just Right’ (the title refers to the tale of Goldilocks) is described in Smith’s biographical note as ‘an excerpt from an unfinished novella’, though it works well enough as a complete piece. It takes us to 1970s New York, where young white boy Donovan Kendal is paired up for a school project with Cassie King, a black girl. As a result, Cassie is drawn into the orbit of the Kendals and their puppet theatre, but theirs is not a comfortable relationship. There’s an effective sense in the piece of emotions and events going on beyond Donovan’s understanding; but I can’t help wondering how events and themes might have carried forward into the rest of the novella. I guess I’ll never know.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Joanna Kavenna

31st July 2013 / / 2 Comments

With most of the novel extracts in the Granta anthology, I’ve been able to gain some sense of what the full novel may be like (which is not say my impressions are correct, but I have been able to form them). Not so Joanna Kavenna’s short piece ‘Tomorrow’, which has the potential to head off in a number of odd directions. We see its narrator collect the stuff she (along with several others) has been storing at a friend’s house; do her job at home, sending out customer service emails; talk to a friend about the subjective passage of time.

Now I read that back, it maybe doesn’t sound all that strange in summary. But it’s the tone of Kavenna’s writing that makes it feel so whilst one is reading it. I have a copy of the author’s most recent novel, Come to the Edge, on my shelves; and I’m thinking I ought to read it soon – because one thing I do sense clearly from ‘Tomorrow’ is that Kavenna may be my kind of writer.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Benjamin Markovits

30th July 2013 / / 1 Comment

Benjamin Markovits’s biographical note in the Granta anthology says that ‘You Don’t Have to Live Like This’ is excerpted from “his new novel about, about a group of university friends who get involved in a scheme to regenerate Detroit”. This particular excerpt focuses on their time at university, so we don’t seem to get much of a sense form it of where the novel will ultimately go.

Two characters in particular strand out to me from the extract: the narrator, Greg Marnier, an ordinary kid from Baton Rouge who doesn’t seem to have been too lucky in love; and his college friend Robert James, a more privileged type who seems set to go places. These characters could be the foundation for an interesting novel, but Markovits’s piece does feel very much like a beginning, and I am undecided as to whether I’d want to read the novel on the basis of this extract alone.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Adam Foulds

29th July 2013 / / 2 Comments

In Adam Foulds’s ‘A World Intact’, Will returns from military training in London to his family home in the rural heart of England, for a short stay before he embarks on his posting in Field Security Services. It’s not quite the commission he wanted, especially as he hoped to follow in the footsteps his late father, who was awarded the Victoria Cross during the Great War.

This extract from a forthcoming novel sets up themes of romantic heroism versus the horror of war (there’s the suggestion that Will’s father may not have been as pleased as his son thinks to know that his Will is off to fight), and personal fulfilment (Will’s rural home is the ‘world intact’, yet it is still not quite enough for him). The piece is perhaps too short to satisfy by itself; but it’s a promising foundation for Foulds’s novel.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Steven Hall

28th July 2013 / / 1 Comment

I didn’t plan it this way, but it has been a few months since my last blog on Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 4 anthology. Now I’m back to it, and up to Steven Hall, whose The Raw Shark Texts I reviewed back in the pre-blog days of 2006 for Laurs Hird’s New Review website.

Hall’s upcoming second novel is titled The End of Endings, and the Granta volume has a couple of excerpts. One of these, Autumn’ is set in the UK of 2014: its narrator, Philip Quinn, tells of speaking to his wife on the phone while he (and the rest of the world) watches a webcam feed of her sleeping; talks a bit about entropy and how it applies to his kitchen; and describes receiving a photograph of a mysterious black sphere from a friend (whom he’s already told us died soon after) .

Turn the volume upside-down, and there is ‘Spring’, printed on alternate pages (white text on a black background) and set in the US of 1854. A writer is commissioned by the New York Tribune to write a story on a spiritualist who claims to have invented an engine powered by prayer; just as he decided to accept the assignment, Hall’s piece ends.

Perhaps inevitably, ‘Spring’ and ‘Autumn’ serve more to whet one’s appetite for the novel than as complete pieces in their own right. But what intriguing tasters they are: evidently these two rather different storylines are going to connect somehow; and it sounds as though there’s going to be an interesting subtext too. I look forward to reading the novel to see how everything plays out.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Edge Hill Prize 2013: And the winner is…

5th July 2013 / / 1 Comment

Last night, the 2013 Edge Hill Short Story Prize was awarded to Kevin Barry for his collection Dark Lies the Island.

As well as the main prize, Barry also won the Readers’ Prize. These add to a growing tally of prizes that he has won in recent years – with good reason. What was also clear from Barry’s acceptance speech was that he’s a great ambassador for the short story. Many congratulations to him.

Elsewhere on the blog, you can read my review of  Dark Lies the Island here; and check out a discussion from last year of Kevin Barry’s story ‘Atlantic City’.

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