Various authors, 2022
Read: November 2023–April 2025 (stuck in the bookshelf traffic jam for a while)
Edition read: Scratch Books, 2022, 173 pages
Contemporary short-story anthology
I read this alongside John Grisham’s The Firm whilst on holiday (St Ives, thanks for asking – yes, the surf was up). Let’s say these were contrasting reads.
This contemporary short-story anthology is made up of seven stories, each with an author interview at the end. I read the first collection* (also consisting of seven stories) in February 2023 and found a lot to pick apart in the interviews, which enhanced a second readthrough.
Whilst I didn’t enjoy this collection as much as the first, I was reminded of how interesting the form of the short story can be. Often, the form is, what is this story? What is it that’s actually happening? Some of these stories are quite hard to parse and further analyse, with a lot between the lines, such as in Bad Dreams, when the mother blames her husband for a nocturnal disarray – actually created by her child – in a kind of misunderstood epiphany.
However, by and large these stories avoid the mistake of having more between the lines than what is actually in them (a now-ceased subscription to Granta impressed upon me that something needs to happen in your stories, not just the idea of something). They are often slice-of-life accounts (All Will Be Well), and/or bring disparate elements brought together (Path Lights and Maintenance).
The interviews with the authors show as much; they are all very learned and sophisticated, combining clever and interesting concepts with carefully considered, sophisticated themes. So why didn’t I enjoy this collection as much as I did the first? A story can be clever, but something still needs to grab you – this was present in the closer, To All Their Dues, but sometimes I was left scratching my head (and not in the sense of being intrigued).
Worth reading? Yes.
Worth re-reading? Yes, although the first volume was better.
* I particularly enjoyed Theophrastus and the Dancing Plague by Jessie Greengrass.
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