Lucy Caldwell: Some short story collections I’ve loved recently, one I’m looking forward to, and one I’m currently obsessed with
By Faber
Lucy Caldwell: Some short story collections I’ve loved recently, one I’m looking forward to, and one I’m currently obsessed with
By Faber
Neighbors and Other Stories (Faber Editions): 'Breathtaking' - Tayari Jones; 'Brilliant' - Damon Galgut
Diane Oliver
£9.99 £9.49Diane Oliver published just four stories in her lifetime – she was killed in a motorcycle accident aged just twenty-two. Reading her body of work here, it’s impossible to believe she was so young – and impossible not to lament all she might have written. Her stories illuminate life for Black Americans in the Jim Crow-era South, written in a prose that’s assured and alive, attuned to the nuances and complexities and possibilities of each moment. There are such sharp Gothic swerves that you feel yourself holding your breath, completely at the story’s mercy, and moments of such unexpected grace you feel something lift in you. This edition comes with a heartfelt foreword by Tayari Jones.
Quickly, While They Still Have Horses
Jan Carson
£16.99 £16.14This is Ballymena-born writer Jan Carson’s best collection yet. Story after story glints with the strange, hard magic of the North – a seam that Carson has opened in her previous books and mines here to perfection. From soft play slides that swallow children to static caravans where girls are sent ahead of marriage, babies that float down the river in biscuit tins and the ‘pruch’ (to use the Ulster-Scots term, with which this collection is gorgeously rich) for sale at garden centres – this is a Northern Ireland at once uncanny and familiar, ancient and modern.
This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Winner of the 2023 BBC National Short Story Award
Naomi Wood
£16.99 £16.14Naomi Wood won the BBC National Short Story Award last year with her brilliant story ‘Comorbidities’, about a couple with young children trying to spice up their sex life by recording erotic home videos. That story sets the tone for her debut collection – sharp and fresh and painful and funny, these are clever and illuminating stories about contemporary motherhood. There’s great pleasure to be found in these spiky women giving sarcastic retorts to their fragmented lives, and the ways that society and its structures have let them down. It recalled for me the underrated collection by Elske Rahill, In White Ink (Apollo, 2017) which would make for a great companion read (brace yourself for the opening story about headlice…)
After the Funeral
Tessa Hadley
£18.99 £18.04There are very few writers who manage to slip so effortlessly between novels and short stories, and even fewer who have such precision and sheer command – on a tonal and emotional level, at the level of each sentence, and, in this instance, of the short story form. Tessa Hadley’s stories are written with a captivating ease. As one of her own characters says of Madame Bovary, there is a ‘ferocious pure aim’ to Hadley’s words that goes right to the heart – of each story, and of this reader. She always seems to me to be an inheritor of Elizabeth Bowen, and this is a great collection.
This Train Is For
Bernie McGill
£12.00 £11.40Bernie McGill won the Edge Hill University Prize for this collection in 2023 – the only prize in the UK and Ireland awarded to a short story collection. These stories are written in a precise, lyrical, and deceptively quiet style, sensitive, and full of psychological insight. This Train is For is the work of a decade, and it shows; each story burnished, each word carefully placed.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
Mariana Enriquez
£9.99 £9.49The standout story in this collection of grotesqueries is the novella-length ‘Kids Who Come Back’. Our guide is Mechi, who works in the archives of the lost and disappeared children in Buenos Aires. In the years that she’s worked there, no child has ever reappeared. And then, one day, they start to show up again. What is briefly a miracle soon sours, and then becomes intensely disturbing. Enriquez is part of a generation of Latin American writers – Argentinian Samanta Schweblin is another favourite of mine – who work in a contemporary Gothic tradition, using horror and fantasy to illuminate realities of contemporary life and the recent past.
Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love
Huma Qureshi
£9.99 £9.49In her debut collection, which often illuminates the lives of the grown-up children of Pakistani immigrants, journalist and memoirist Huma Qureshi writes the distances between mothers and daughters, palpable yet inarticulable and unbreachable; the consuming ache of longing for someone not yet kissed; the invisible, irreparable breaches in friendships or between lovers, with real lightness of touch. In the best of these stories, everything and nothing happens.
Wild Swims
Dorthe Nors
£9.99 £9.49Danish writer Dorthe Nors describes her own prose style as ‘minimalism that is under attack from within’. Few of these stories, as with her previous book Karate Chop, are more than a handful of pages, but each of these blunt, intense stores packs a punch.
Barcelona
Mary Costello
£14.99 £14.24I love Mary Costello’s stories, and am looking forward immensely to this, her second collection (featuring the affecting ‘The Choc-Ice Woman’, published last year by the New Yorker). Alex Clark described it in the Guardian as ‘insistent, precise and unsparing. Everyday acts and ordinary lives are infused with a sense of the skull beneath the skin and of a catastrophe held tautly at bay.’
The Maples Stories
John Updike
£12.99 £12.34I am currently obsessed with Updike’s Maples stories – about the fortunes of Richard and Joan Maple, whom we first meet as a newlywed couple in 1956 New York, and follow until the time of their divorce in 1976. This edition contains a foreword by Updike in which he describes how the couple first presented themselves to him in a story, before dropping out of sight and reappearing seven years later in the suburbs of Boston, now with four children. He continued to write their life, tracing the advance and retreat of their relationship, and eventually the decline of their marriage, for years. The stories were published independently, not originally envisaged as a collection, but there is something electrifying about reading them together as a portrait of a couple, a family, a particular social demographic at a particular time. I think a lot about the function of time in a story, and there is something magical in the idea of the Maples going about their lives for decades, occasionally revealing themselves to Updike. I have been wondering how it might be possible to work with ‘real’ time and fiction in that way… Towards the end of his Foreword, an addendum added in 1995, he says that, ‘The couple surprised me, in the mid-eighties, by reappearing in wintry Hartford, married to others but brought together by the birth of their first grandchild. I have not encountered them since, though mutual friends assure me that they are both still alive and look well, considering.’ The final words of the final story: ‘Nobody belongs to us, except in memory.’ Perfection.