Shovel Kings: A Story by Edna O’Brien
Saints and Sinners is a new collection of short stories by the award-winning Edna O’Brien who, since her debut novel The Country Girls (1960), has published over twenty works of fiction. To celebrate...
View ArticleIn Rude Health
On Sunday, at a ceremony in the Gresham Metropole Hotel in Cork, a resplendent Edna O’Brien won the 7th Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize. It is a prestigious award, not only for its association with...
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Just like X-Factor?
“I never thought I’d arrive on stage after Jarvis Cocker,” marvelled Lee Brackstone at the end of the fifth Faber Social. But did the fiction editor, who also appears as a character in an excellent new...
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Short Stories: The Art Behind the Precision
‘This is actually the purpose of every story: to find one more active, breathing example of what a story can be.’ George Saunders, author of Pastoralia ‘Intoxicating.’ Financial Times Last week saw the...
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Is ‘Regional Writing’ Pejorative?
A year ago I wrote a piece for The Thought Fox in praise of the short story, as Faber published Sarah Hall’s arresting first collection, The Beautiful Indifference. Described by Helen Simpson (herself...
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Making It Look Easy
‘Lydia Davis,’ Ricky Moody says, ‘does the hardest thing: she makes it look easy.’ You could say the same about Lorrie Moore whose first book, Self Help, appeared in the mid-1980s and, along with...
View ArticleThe Loudest Sound and Nothing
Skilfully wrought and perfectly pitched, The Loudest Sound and Nothing, the first collection of stories by Clare Wigfall, has been acclaimed as the work of a prodigious new talent. The title story from...
View ArticleIlya and the Ice House
From the imagination of Alex Milway, author of The Mousehunter books, comes Ilya and the Ice House, an exclusive story for Christmas. It’s a cautionary, wintry tale – a chilling warning to be careful...
View ArticleExplosions in the Dark: A. L. Barker
A brilliant short story writer and winner of the first ever Somerset Maugham Prize, A. L. Barker was relatively unheralded, often confused with the ‘other Pat Barker’. But she had many admirers and...
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Lorrie Moore: Bark
American writer Lorrie Moore has long been lauded as one of the ‘most vivid, engaging writers of the [short story] form in America’ (Guardian). This month see the publication of Bark, Moore’s first...
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On why short stories matter
Author Lucy Caldwell, whose new collection Multitudes is published this month, tells us why short stories matter – both to readers and to writers – and offers us five examples of beautifully crafted...
View ArticleExclusive Extract: ‘Lucky’ from The Lucky Ones by Julianne Pachico
Read ‘Lucky’ from the haunting debut collection of stories from Julianne Pachico, The Lucky Ones. Out in February 2017. Set mostly in lush, heady Colombia but even in a jungle-like New York City,...
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