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July/August
2010
This month we have many first collections and
one last collection, by the late John
Updike. We have deer, a homicide survivors' picnic, temporary lives
where people don't normally live like this and if they did live here
they'd already be home, everything ravaged and burned, but death is not
an option. Seven of this month's authors let us in behind the scenes of
their collections - and in honour of this bumper holiday double issue
we are giving away a copy of four of this month's
books to four lucky readers! Visit the Competitions
page to find out how to win.
Holiday reading: Whether you are heading to a beach or staying
in while it snows, our reviewers have come up with their
recommendations for the ideal holiday
short story collections to slip in your suitcase.
Congratulations! Lots this month: to Short Review author Robert
Shearman who won the 2010
Edge Hill Short Story Reader's Prize and Best
Collection category of the Shirley
Jackson Awards, and is nominated for
Best Collection in the 2010 British Fantasy Awards. Short Review author
Clifford Garstang's In
an Uncharted Country
won the 2010
Maria Thomas Fiction Award from Peace Corps Writers, and Short Review
authors David Constantine and Laura van den Berg's collections, The Shieling and What
the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, are
shortlisted for the 2010 Cork City-Frank O'Connor Short Story Award.
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Homicide
Survivors' Picnic
by Lorraine M. Lopez
...he
wonders if homicide hasn't gotten something of a bad rap. Clearly
murdering a person betrays a limitation of options, if not lack of
imagination. It should always
be
a last resort. But hadn't Micki reached this stage, even gone well
beyond it? Divorce could never keep her safe. The memory of her
broken face, glimpsed through the glass partition in the prison
visiting area, still makes Leo wince..."
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"More
than a simple picnic, this is a literary feast. Proof, if any were
needed, that the short story form is doing much more than surviving;
in Lopez's hands it is living a rich, colourful,
humorous, moving life..." Read the
full review
by A J Kirby
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Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
by Wells Tower
"Sometimes,
sometimes, after six or so large drinks, it seems like a sane idea to
call my little brother on the phone. It takes a lot of solvent to
bleach out such dark memories as my ninth birthday party, when Stephen,
aged six, ran up behind me at the goldfish pond ... and
shoved me face-first into the murk… my friends laughed until they wept..."
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"An
eclectic collection that left me gasping for air. Not once have I put
the book down before I read a story from beginning to end..." Read the
full review
by Daniela Norris
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Deer and Other Stories
by Susan Tepper
"Stop
worrying about those damned trees. I don’t want to hear another
word about them. They’ll burn until they’ve had enough. And
that will be that."
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"The
most exciting, interesting, emotional and thoroughly awe inspiring
collection of stories by a contemporary writer I have ever read..."
Read the
full review
by Alex Thornber
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Mechanics Institute Review 6
by Various
"I watched fascinated as
the needles took up their familiar and soothing dance through the wool,
their clicking lost in the awful crescendo coming from the door..."
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"One
of the only collections I thought I could read from front to back
rather than picking from titles or author bios..." Read the
full review
by Jason Makansi
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Temporary Lives
by Ramola D
"My grandfather Roderick
is
fastened by one lung to the world..."
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"They
may inhabit temporary lives but the plight of Ramola D’s characters
will haunt you with a resonance that is both profound and permanent..."
Read the
full review
by Julia Bohanna
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If You Lived Here You'd Already Be Home
by John Jodzio
"I get paid eight dollars
an hour to pretend I am Vincent, Mrs Ramon's dead son..."
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"The
poignant writing and unusual details make this collection a pleasure
to read, but the stories are strongest where they leave The Quirk
behind and dive into the emotions...
Read the
full review
by Stefani Nellen
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Death is Not An Option
by Suzanne Rivecca
"I usually hated it when
men used the term 'make love'. It sounded so squishy and
earnest, like some kind of craft project..."
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"A
superb and assured debut collection of stories that bristle both with
intelligence and raw emotion..."Read the
full review by Scott Doyle
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Normal People Don't Live Like This
by Dylan Landis
"Helen
Levinson stared into her daughter’s top drawer, seeking folded
white cotton. Instead: a tangle of fuscia bikinis. Satin brassieres
in a psychedelic print – psychedelic, one of those Jimi Hendrix
drug words. Fishnet stockings, parrot-green..."
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"An
intriguing, sometimes puzzling, novel-in-stories which explores the
inner world and coming of age of a girl in 1970’s New York City..."Read
the
full review by Daniela I.
Norris
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My Father's Tears
by John Updike
"But
the fact, discovered by two independent teams of researchers, seemed to
be that deep space showed not only no relenting in the speed of the
farthest galaxies but instead a detectable acceleration, so that an
eventual dispersion of everything into absolute cold and darkness
could be confidently predicted. We are riding an aimless explosion to
nowhere..."
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"These are classic stories: crafted with
exquisite and down-to-earth
phrasing, that particularly chart the course of human relationships
and marriages and the experience of aging through the senses of a
master writer..." Read the
full review by James
Murray-White
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Trailer Girl
by Terese Svoboda
"We
were Neanderthal, our cave icebound Canada, a basement apartment. Our
Neanderthal love we expelled with grunts in white vapors, the kind of
unwavering, always-lit lust that passes for passion if you are too
Neanderthal to know better..."
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"Atmospheric
stories, told in rich, oblique language by a supreme stylist..." Read the
full review by Nuala Ni
Chonchúir
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| The Short Review shines the
spotlight on short story
collections, new and older, across all genres, styles, publishers and
countries. Each month we review 10 books and interview as many of their
authors as possible.... Read more>> |
Author Interviews
| " I used Sundress
as the fulcrum in the middle of the book to begin the section with the
stories. Its
characters resemble those |
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Terese Svoboda
Author of
Trailer Girl
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in
the novella yet propel the
narrative in an entirely new direction. I ended with White
because it refers to family as pieces of chicken shaken up inside a bag
of flour and seasonings, a metaphor that I thought encompassed the wild
familial theme of the whole book."
Read
the rest of the interview >>
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| "I envision a train that
picks the character up at one station and drops him off at another,
changed, or on the verge of change.He might not know it. |
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Dylan Landis
Author of
Normal People Don't Live Like This
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But
you do.
And somewhere on the
train tracks (sorry; I think in pictures) there's a weed growing that
sends down one of those long skinny roots you can't dig up with a
trowel—a taproot. A story has to snake a taproot down into
something murky and subconscious. It can't just travel along on the
surface. "
Read the
rest of the interview >>
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| "I
wrote a lot of stories that I’d intended to be part of the
collection, but had
to scrap them because they weren’t good enough.
And there were a
couple I |
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Suzanne Rivecca
Author of Death is Not An Option
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adamantly didn’t plan to
include in the
collection, but ended up including them anyway because I realized how
they played off the others. In terms of the order, I aimed an
emotional trajectory, a kind of arc, in which each successive
protagonist has ascended a little higher in the reluctant journey to
self-confrontation. "
Read
the rest of the interview >>
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| "It’s weird. When you are
publishing work in journals and
magazines, people can just page past your story without too much
animus. If they buy your book, |
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John Jodzio
Author of If You Lived Here You'd
Already Be Home
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the pressure’s on for
you to make
every sentence memorable. That’s a lot of pressure and it’s why I
lose sleep at night... "
Read the
rest of the interview >>
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| "I was experimenting with
fabulist fiction
and magic realism and flash fiction. I grew up reading the Brontes,
Jane Austen, Twain, Hawthorne, |
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Ramola D
Author of Temporary Lives
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Dickens, the English and
American
classics - after my MFA I was reading
Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Italo
Calvino and Milan Kundera, also Janet Frame, whom I’ve long loved, and
really experimenting with form. I was also exploring the surreal and
language poets and writing poetry.. "
Read the rest
of the interview >>
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| "I never have a sense of a
"future" on any of the work I
do, be it stories, poems or novels. I just sit down at my
computer
and work |
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Susan Tepper
Author of Deer and Other Stories
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cold. No preconceived idea of whether
it will be
fiction or poetry that will come out during a particular writing
time. What started as a story grew into a novel in
two instances, simply because I fell so in love with the
characters and
plot that I couldn't bear it to end. I find all
my longer works (4 novels) have been written in winter when I'm
less
distracted by the beauty of the warmer months... "
Read the
rest of the interview >>
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| "The story,
like a poem, is a self-contained unit, complete with its volta, or
that turning point
at which the reader’s
thinking about the
events
and the characters |
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Lorraine M. Lopez
Author of Homicide Survivors' Picnic
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becomes charged with new
awareness or recognition,
and I’m not talking about an epiphanic moment necessarily, but I am
referring to that scalp-tightening moment, that frisson that occurs
when one is moved powerfully and emotionally by a work of visual art
or music. Great short stories can do this. A friend of mine who is
a librarian has a simpler and handier definition. She says a short
story consists of interesting people doing things, and for me, that
works, too.... "
Read
the rest of the interview >>
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