Latest news with #shortstories
Daily Mail
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Sophisticated Short Stories out now: Failed Summer Vacation By Heuijung Hur, Poppyland By D J Taylor, The Latehomecomer By Mavis Gallant
Failed Summer Vacation By Heuijung Hur, Translated by Paige Aniyah Morris (Scratch Books £10.99, 184pp) There's an air of quiet mystery to these seven askance short stories, a sense that nighttime dreaminess has seeped into the daytime world, leaving reality awash with strange, unsettling feelings and inexplicable happenings. Hur's world is one of emotional alienation and failed human connection. Unexplained, menacing triangles fall from the sky in a story that begins with housemates deciding to get a dog (Shard), a smashed music box becomes symbolic of a troubled friendship (Ruined Winter Holiday), and a futuristic Earth is the scene of unexpected violence between crew members on an expedition team (Flying in the Rain). Poppyland By D J Taylor (Salt £9.99, 208pp) Norwich is the geographical setting for most of the stories in this wry, wistful, astutely observed collection, but its real territory is that liminal space where hopes and dreams are dashed against the disappointing realities of the present. Relationships drift, husbands stray, families fight, ambitions are thwarted and even eyeliner is 'overwrought'. D J Taylor is an affectionate chronicler of his characters' failings and eccentric foibles, gracing the melancholy of their situations with surprising shimmers of beauty from the 'great wide sky' in Drowning in Hunny to the warm glimmer of poppies 'crimson and consoling' in Poppyland. The Latehomecomer By Mavis Gallant (Pushkin Press Classics £12.99, 288pp) Canadian author Mavis Gallant was an exceptional short story writer, with over a hundred stories to her credit, most of which were published in The New Yorker. The 16 sophisticated tales gathered here beautifully capture the elegance and economy of her prose. Her characters are displaced, out of step with themselves and their surroundings, dislocated by war or hardship, the hapless husbands, put upon wives and a wry observant child struggle to find their place in a changing world. None more so than Thomas, who's the Latehomecomer of the collection's title; a young German prisoner of war arrives home, and – swamped with overwhelmingly bitter memories – he's advised by a fascist neighbour-turned-black-marketeer to do the impossible: 'Forget everything …Forget. Forget.'
CBC
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Rag Pickers by Blaine Newton
A sinister note sewn in the lining of a vintage jacket from a second-hand store compels a young woman to make changes in her life. A brother discovers his dying twin has been burying jars of coins in an attempt to create mystery in a neighbourhood. On his 43rd birthday, a man realizes that the critical events of his life occur in years when his age is a prime number. A woman reconfigures her stick figure on the back window of the family minivan in an act of defiance and reinvention. Rag Pickers is a collection of eighteen short stories that challenge the essential loneliness of the human condition. Blaine Newton writes with wry humour, deep observation, and an off-kilter perspective, bringing his skill as a playwright to crackling dialogue and polished prose. Well-crafted, heartbreaking, and really, really funny, this is a book for anyone who has ever felt alone. (From University of Calgary Press) Blaine Newton is an Edmonton-based award-winning playwright, comedy writer, short-fiction author, actor and occasional engineer. His plays have been produced across western Canada, and his short fiction has been featured in magazines and anthologies, and on CBC and CKUA radio. Rag Pickers is his debut short story collection.
New York Times
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Stories for When Real Life Feels Like a Dream (or Nightmare)
Many people don't realize that short story collections often take years to complete, so it's hard for us fiction writers to remain topical when the cultural terra firma is shifting so rapidly beneath our feet. For example, most of the 33 stories in 'Autocorrect,' the most recent book by the celebrated Israeli author Etgar Keret, were written before the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — which, in internet time, is maybe a decade or more ago. It's a problem, particularly for the satirically inclined. The outrageous things you imagined as dark hypotheticals have come true. Each news cycle requires a suspension of disbelief. Keret is famous for his dry, winsome comic sketches, often using fantastical or science-fictional settings, with clever hooks and twists and a melancholic aftertaste. A number of the tentpole stories in 'Autocorrect' have that wry dystopian flavor. In 'A World Without Selfie Sticks,' a man encounters an alternate-reality version of his ex-girlfriend, who is traveling across parallel worlds as a part of a bizarre game-show scavenger hunt. 'Soulo' is about A.I. friends who are offered up as cures for loneliness, while in 'The Future Is Not What It Used to Be,' the discovery of time travel is purchased by SpaceX, then monetized and run into the ground. 'Guided Tour' has the last surviving humans make their living as Earth's docents for alien tourists. 'Director's Cut,' meanwhile, is a mash-up of 'The Truman Show' and 'Boyhood': A man's life is recorded continuously from beginning to end, which results in a 73-year-long film that few survive long enough to watch all the way through. At times, Keret can seem like that hip, cynical Gen X guy who's down at the end of the bar doling out hot takes about the doomed future of our species. Human extinction features in a number of these tales, delivered with a 'what did you expect?' wink. But the targets here (cruel game shows and people lost in virtual reality and A.I. companionship and time-travel conundrums and so forth) feel a bit played out, as though we've kind of already seen them in an episode of 'Black Mirror.' My favorite stories in the collection are the ones that — despite whatever tomfoolery is going on in the global monoculture — focus on the singular strangeness of being a living person in the world. The tense and moving 'A Dog for a Dog' features a group of Jewish children questing into an Arab neighborhood to seek revenge for the killing of their dog by a reckless driver — a quietly devastating tale of ethnic resentment and empathy. It's this story that suffers most from the rapid changes in world history after it was written, though you may feel that the opposite is true, that it lands with the extra heft of real-life tragedy. In another piece, the peculiar and brilliant 'Mitzvah,' a guy tripping on ecstasy in Tel Aviv is waylaid outside a synagogue and persuaded to join a group of elderly men praying for their recently deceased friend. The story has a druggy, digressive structure that continually surprises. Others hew to the universal and timeless. The touching title story is an attempt to rewrite the last words we say to someone — in this case, a son reliving and revising his final conversation with his father. And in the lovely 'Cherry Garcia Memories With M&Ms on Top' a man who is caring for his dementia-fogged mother asks her if she remembers who he is. ''Not exactly,' she says with a sigh. 'I know that you love me and I love you. Isn't that enough?'' And isn't that the timeliest revelation?
CBC
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Indian author Banu Mushtaq wins International Booker Prize with short story collection
Indian author Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi won the International Booker Prize for fiction for Heart Lamp, a collection of 12 short stories written over a period of more than 30 years and which chronicle the everyday lives and struggles of women in southern India. The award was announced by bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter in his role as chair of the five-member voting panel, at a ceremony at London's Tate Modern. The annual award celebrates the best works of fiction from around the world that have been translated into English and published in the U.K. or Ireland. The £50,000 (approx. $93,188 Cdn) grand prize is divided equally between writer and translator. There were no Canadians nominated this year. The 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is now open The prize was set up to boost the profile of fiction in other languages — which accounts for only a small share of books published in Britain — and to salute the underappreciated work of literary translators. It is the first time the International Booker Prize has been given to a collection of short stories. Bhasthi is the first Indian translator — and ninth female translator — to win the prize since it took on its current form in 2016. Mushtaq is the sixth female author to be awarded the prize since then. Written in Kannada, which is spoken by around 65 million people, primarily in southern India, Porter praised the "radical" nature of the translation, adding that "it's been a joy" to listen to the evolving appreciation of the stories by members of the jury. "These beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories rise from Kannada, interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects," said Porter. "It speaks of women's lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression." The book, which beat five other finalists, comprises stories written from 1990 to 2023. They were selected and curated by Bhasthi, who was keen to preserve the multilingual nature of southern India in her translation. Mushtaq, who is a lawyer and activist as well as writer, told a short list reading event on Sunday that the stories "are about women – how religion, society and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates." The prize money is to be divided equally between author and translator. Each is presented with a trophy too. Last year's winner was German author Jenny Erpenbeck for Kairos, the story of a tangled love affair during the final years of East Germany's existence, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Globe and Mail
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
In his new short story collection, André Alexis summons the avatars of his parents, and himself
When I tell him I found his new book of short stories, Other Worlds, wistful as well as witty, André Alexis isn't surprised. The collection was written after the loss of his mother and father, so 'the avatars of the parents are really strong in it,' he says. 'Loss' is in a manner of speaking. Alexis's father died in 2019. His mother, who read early drafts of his work and helped edit his first novel, Childhood (she even, at his recommendation, read the Beckett trilogy: 'not something that moms generally do') is alive but afflicted with dementia. She doesn't always recognize her son and can no longer read. At 68, Alexis says death and mortality are never far from his mind. (When we spoke, he was in London, England, where he'd flown the previous day to say goodbye to a close friend who was about to enter hospice.) He casually surmises that he has one or two novels left in him, though he wouldn't rule out short stories. And yet Alexis's youthful appearance, the vigour and ease with which he talks about his passion – literature – and the fact that, over the past decade, he's produced a book almost every year, all suggest he might be selling himself a little short. Other Worlds continues, on a smaller scale, the genre experiments that Alexis embarked on in his Quincunx cycle: the five novels – published between 2014 and 2019 – that include Pastoral, Fifteen Dogs, Ring, The Hidden Keys and Days by Moonlight. Writing the stories in Other Worlds, he says, was as a means of grasping not just his birth parents but his literary parents: a global crew that includes the Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata, the Polish writer and playwright Witold Gombrowicz, the Chinese classical short-story writer Pu Songling and the Italian literary eccentric Tommaso Landolfi. You'd think that approach would result in a stylistic crazy quilt. But the parent-child relationships – and accompanying themes of revenge, innocence and alienation – that run through Other Worlds give it a satisfying sense of cohesion, to the degree that several of the stories feel interlinked. The first one Alexis wrote, Houyhnhnm, about a man who becomes enraptured with his late physician father's horse after discovering the latter can talk (the unpronounceable title is from Jonathan Swift), was published in The New Yorker in 2022 – the first of Alexis's stories to be picked up by the magazine. Two years later, The New Yorker also published Consolation, whose Trinidadian immigrant narrator shares a number of biographical similarities with Alexis, including a father who's a doctor and a mother with dementia. And though Winter, in Palgrave, a beguilingly strange tale about a writer who finds himself unwitting caretaker to a town's unfriendly residents, who 'hibernate' in winter by hanging in sacks from their homes' rafters, isn't explicitly about parents, Alexis points to the symbolism of its setting: 'Winter is the maternal space, isn't it? Where it's just care, care for things in the womb.' Alexis's professed love of Jane Austen, meanwhile, is apparent in The Bridle Path, a comedy of manners involving a lawyer who, having adopted his Trinidadian immigrant father's socially striving ways, nabs a coveted dinner invitation at the home of a couple from the wealthy Toronto enclave who may or may not be eating the help. Asked, on this major Austen anniversary year, what his favourite novels are, Alexis doesn't hesitate: Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey – the latter because of its playfulness and mockery of Gothic fiction. 'It shows you she's not just writing stories. She's thinking about what literature is. How amusing its effects can be. She has written that one in a comedic mode. But it could just as easily be tragic. She's not some naive person that just happened to write good sentences. She's extraordinarily aware of what's going on.' Other Worlds ends with An Elegy, a brief personal essay – inspired by Walter Benjamin's The Art of Storytelling – in which Alexis lays out his literary M.O. His love of genre, he explains, comes from his 'immigrant self,' which he also considers his most creative self. Mastering the rules and conventions of a new genre, and the fear that process engenders, feels, Alexis writes, like 'a kind of emigration.' The essay also sheds retrospective light on the book's opening story, Contrition, an isekai (a traditional Japanese folktale, huge in manga, usually involving a character being transported through time into a parallel world) about an elderly Trinidadian healer who, after he dies at the hands of British soldiers in 1857, is reborn a century later in the body of a boy named Paul who lives in Petrolia, Ont. Turns out (per An Elegy), that when he was a child living in Petrolia – and his race and French name marked him as different – Alexis went by 'Paul' for about a year, until his parents discovered the name change and put the kibosh on it. He writes that he still 'resents' his birth name. A foray into psychoanalysis convinced Alexis that his brief incarnation as Paul had a deeper motivation, one related to the central trauma of his childhood. From infancy to the age of 4, he'd been left in the care of Trinidadian relatives after his parents went to Canada. When he saw them again, half his short life had passed, and his parents were effectively strangers. 'André was the name of the boy who was left behind. If I was Paul, perhaps there was a chance that I wouldn't be abandoned. That I would be okay,' he says. Alexis's next project is a rewriting of the entire Quincunx cycle. His principal aim is to correct some chronological and logistical errors, but he also wants to revise parts of Fifteen Dogs – the novel that won him a hat trick of big Canadian awards (the Giller, Writer's Trust, Canada Reads) and that was adapted to the stage in 2023 (the show was revived early this year by Mirvish Productions in Toronto and will be mounted at Ottawa's National Arts Centre this fall). In October, the book's publisher, Coach House Books, will commemorate its 10th anniversary with a special hardcover edition. Alexis wants to add 'a little something, at most a page' to Rosie, a character from Fifteen Dogs that was important to him, and to whom he feels he gave short shrift, perspective-wise. I ask if altering finished work like that isn't considered verboten. Akin to George Lucas's controversial reworking of the original Star Wars trilogy. Alexis counters with the example of another of his favourite authors, Henry James, who rewrote, often extensively, 24 of his novels, which he republished in a collection known as 'the New York Edition.' 'And they're all worse!' Alexis says with a laugh. 'Because they're written in his later style. So you've got to be really aware of what you're doing.'
