Introduction
Nicholas Royle
If I had a pound for every time over the last year someone has remarked to me that the short story is enjoying a notable renaissance, I’d have enough money to submit numerous stories to Ambit and the Fiction Desk. But more on that later.
First, the New Statesman. I like the New Statesman – I subscribe to it and look forward to its arrival in my letterbox every Friday – but I wish it would do more for the short story. Among US newsstand magazines, Harper’s Magazine and the New Yorker regularly publish short stories. (Indeed, the New Yorker published a very good story, ‘Cecilia Awakened’, by Tessa Hadley, in Sepember 2018.) The New Statesman does, too, but regularly only in the sense of two or three times a year. The 2017–18 Christmas special featured an extract from a forthcoming new collection by Rose Tremain and the 2018 summer special extracted a story from Helen Dunmore’s final collection, Girl, Balancing & Other Stories (Hutchinson). The 2018–19 Christmas special giftwrapped us a new story by Kate Atkinson. How about a new story every week instead of just in the summer and at Christmas (and sometimes in spring)? That way we would get to enjoy not only more stories, but more new stories, rather than mostly extracts from forthcoming collections (rather a lazy way to publish short stories).
Short story competition anthologies have clearly become a bit of a thing. The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology has reached volume 11; the Bath Short Story Award Anthology has been going since 2013 (in print form since 2014). The City of Stories anthology is on its second incarnation; it has a tag line – ‘Celebrating London’s writers, readers and libraries’. Spread the Word are responsible for it and this edition features over 60 London-based writers who took part in creative writing workshops in June 2018 in libraries across the city. A competition for 500-word stories was judged by four writers-in-residence – Gary Budden, Meena Kandasamy, Olumide Popoola and Leone Ross – who have all contributed pieces that appear alongside the winning stories.
May You: The Walter Swan Prize Anthology, edited by S. J. Bradley, is published by Scarborough’s Valley Press in association with the Northern Short Story Festival, Leeds Big Bookend Festival and the Walter Swan Trust. Bradley presents nineteen of the best from a field of more than 300 entries, including a short-list of six and three winners. The judges, Anna Chilvers and Angela Readman, awarded first and second prizes to Sarah Brooks and Andrea Brittan respectively, and they’re very good stories, but I would have been tempted to give top spot to P. V. Wolseley just for the description of a hamster – ‘He was golden-brown and sagged like a beanbag’ – in her story ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. Megan Taylor’s ‘Touched’, short-listed, was also among my favourites.
Megan Taylor also appeared among last year’s chapbooks from TSS Publishing, with ‘Waiting For the Rat’, a worthy addition to an always-enjoyable sub-genre, holiday-let horror stories. It was the fifth in TSS’s series and it was followed by Christopher M. Drew’s very powerful ‘Remnants’, which reminded me of Cormac McCarthy, in a good way. I was delighted to see Rough Trade get in on the chapbook boom with Rough Trade Editions. Mostly non-fiction, the series has included one short story, ‘The Faithful Look Away’, by poet Melissa Lee-Houghton; I hope it goes on to feature more stories.
In yet more chapbook news, Word Factory and Guillemot Press formed a collaboration, the Guillemot Factory, to publish, in the first instance, four new stories in chapbook format. Lavishly illustrated, the four titles, by Jessie Greengrass, Carys Davies, Adam Marek and David Constantine, were received with great enthusiasm. In Constantine’s ‘What We Are Now’, my favourite of the four, an unhappily married woman bumps into an old flame. Nightjar Press, meanwhile, if I may mention my own baby, although now ten years old, published four more chapbooks, two in the spring and two in the autumn.
From single stories to single-author collections. Vicky Grut’s Live Show, Drink Included (Holland Park Press) is a selection of her published stories from the past twenty-five years. There are a couple of previously unpublished stories and two that appeared for the first time in other publications during 2018. My favourite of these was ‘On the Way to the Church’. I would have chosen it for this volume even if it hadn’t featured my favourite track on my favourite album by my favourite solo artist.
Other interesting collections included Sean O’Brien’s Quartier Perdu (Comma Press), Vesna Main’s Temptation: A User’s Guide (Salt) and the publishing phenomenon that was Ann Quin’s The Unmapped Country (And Other Stories). To say that the latter was ‘edited and introduced’ by Jennifer Hodgson, as is recorded on the title page, I’m sure gives very little idea of the amount of love, dedication and sheer hard work that must have gone into creating this book of ‘stories and fragments’ by the great British writer who died in 1973 at the age of 37. Hats off to Hodgson and to her publisher.
Is it a book? Is it a magazine? From issue ten of The Lonely Crowd the answer was on the cover: ‘the magazine of new fiction and poetry’. It still looks like a book, like quite a chunky anthology, and it’s still publishing tons of really good stories. In issue nine I particularly liked Courttia Newland’s ‘A Gift For Abidah’ and James Clarke’s ‘Waddington’, while stories by Kate Hamer, Jane Fraser, Lucie McKnight Hardy and Neil Campbell were the highlights, for me, in issue ten.
Newsprint is not dead: two new publications launched last year. Firstly, the Brixton Review of Books, an excellent and very welcome free literary quarterly created by Michael Caines, whose day job is at the TLS. Well, free if you happen to be wandering around south London when a new issue hits the streets (it’s given away outside tube stations, I believe, and I’ve seen it in the Herne Hill Oxfam Bookshop), or you can pay £10 for a subscription (check the web site). It features reviews, articles and columns, and, in issue three there was a notable story of ‘formless dread’, ‘Down the Line’ by Richard Lea. What’s not to like about formless dread? More, please. Secondly, at the Dublin Ghost Story Festival in June last year I picked up a copy of Infra-Noir, edited by Jonathan Wood and Alcebiades Diniz and published by Jonas Ploeger’s specialist press Zagava. The first issue contains stories by Brian Howell, previously featured in this series, and poet Nigel Humphreys, whose first-published short story ‘Beyond Dead’ is reprinted in the current volume.
Staying with literary magazines, the most interesting things in Hotel issue four – and they were very interesting – were either not short stories or not by British authors. In Structo issue 18, I was struck by Paul McQuade’s ‘The Wound in the Air’ and was similarly drawn to his not-unrelated story, ‘A Gift of Tongues’, in Confingo issue ten, which also included notable stories by a number of writers including Simon Kinch and Giselle Leeb. Jumping back to spring 2018, Confingo issue nine was packed with good stories. Stand-outs: Charles Wilkinson’s ‘Berkmann’s Anti-novel’, one of those stories about oddball school friends and how they turn out, which are always interesting, especially when they’re this well written; Elizabeth Baines’ ‘The Next Stop Will Be Didsbury Village’, which is best read on a Manchester Metrolink tram leaving either East Didsbury or Burton Road in the direction of Didsbury Village; David Gaffney’s ‘The Dog’, which, like Baines’ story, was written to be performed in the Didsbury Arts Festival. ‘Performed’ in this context may strike you as an overstatement, when such performance generally takes the form of reading the story to an audience, but Baines and Gaffney (if that doesn’t sound like a new ITV cop show partnership, I don’t know what does) always read well.