Category: Short stories

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Review: Black Vodka:10 short stories by Deborah Levy

Black Vodka:10 short stories by Deborah Levy

In preparation for Bantry and the West Cork Literary Festival 2013, I have been reading Black Vodka-ten short stories written By Deborah Levy. Deborah is reading at the festival and not only that her Black Vodka collection has been shortlisted for the Cork International Short story award this year,along with five others. Black Vodka was also shortlisted for the BBC international short story award in 2012 so it was well time for me to read it.

Deborah demonstrates her writing prowess by moving along in an easy to read and sometimes more complex and mystifying style. The stories are also nicely made up of longer ones and more concise ones, which is a mixture I like.

The title story, Black Vodka is a story about a young advertising executive who also has a physical deformity, a hunchback. From the opening paragraphs, we are being brought into the world of tenseness, advertising and superficiality. Where appearances matter and are dissected  and used. Levy uses the narrator and his “little hump on his back, a mound between his shoulder blades” to point out the obsession of celebrity and appearance. The narrator meets a girl, Lisa who is instantly attracted to and she him. But, she seems most obsessed with his hunchback and she ” doodles a…sketch…of a naked hunchback man, with every single organ of his body labelled.” Underneath, she writes the words “homo sapiens” Is Levy trying to get all moralistic and preachy with the reader? Is there to us than an image? A first glance? Are we in danger of becoming a slick marketing plan and don’t we all fall into this?

It has a very European feel to it, settings move from Prague in the story Shining a light to Vienna in the same title to the cool cityscape of London in Stardust Nation.

What I liked most was the way that this collection pushes and pushes the themes and contents of each short story. There is a wild sense of imagination in each story, charting the possibilities, hurt and constraints of love. This is a short story collection about love but never conventional. Levy’s writing is controlled and describes in a plain, direct way. Again, a feature I like. I cannot stand to have to consult the dictionary on my phone so much that I lose my way in a story.

For me, there are two stand out stories. We have Cave Girl, a very contemporary story of forbidden and weird love between a sister, Cass and her brother. The sister decides to have a complete surgical( we are led to believe) make over. Her brother wonders if

the surgeon slopped her into a stainless-steel tray?

Cass is a brand new person and her brother starts to fall in love with the type of girl that men seem to prefer. The brother says that

Cass doesn’t have opinions;she listens to what I have to say as if I have more important.

The problem is that now she is the type of girl that other men like to and she makes room for everyone now that she is the perfect girl. This is a story about mortality and retaining the way you look forever. The narrator asks for help from the Ancients, this is where the story deepens in the last paragraph. The Ancient would:

have answers to where souls go after death and how people transform themselves from one thing to another.

The narrator is scared of life and of death. He wonders if he is scared of the dark and things lurking in the sea. Things are not so simple now as the days of Cave girl, the narrator looks back and remains in the past.

The other beautiful and gracefully told short story I was struck by was Roma. Its opening hooked me.  The husband who is going to betray her is standing inside the city of Roma. A woman dreams her husband is being unfaithful, it is a vivid and true dream and she wakes but the traitor is lying beside her.

The dream merges with reality throughout the holiday, we do not know if she is imagining or has she entered her dream again? Levy is an incredibly poetic writer and this shines out in this tight piece of writing. the drenched succulents and rotting fishing boats have the same atmosphere of betrayal she experiences in her dream.

She stares into the shallow of the salt lagoon. A stork stands in the mud.

The narrator’s isolation and growing hatred of her husband and his sins are becoming apparent through these type of sentences. We get a resolution at the end yet the wife and husband cannot communicate the rationale behind their infidelity or dreaming. They keep a piece of themselves back.

She does not tell him that she has been standing outside the city of Roma.

There is much to like in Black Vodka. I loved the range and boundary pushing of each story, theme, characters, locations that have been created. I loved the shortness of some of the pieces and the poetry of some. I loved the range in writing that Levy shows without forcing the need to be quirky. She is naturally so, I would think that she just muses differently to others. Some of her stories are pieces that need to be re-read, dissected and discussed but all are brilliant examples of the confusion of modern love and relationships. A unique but universal collection. I am really looking forward to hearing her read her stories as this always cements their connection with me and the story.

Black Vodka by Deborah Levy is published by and other stories and can be purchased on kindle, amazon and andotherstories.org or pop down to Bantry and hear her read and get your own copy signed!

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Review:Bloodlines by Joyce Russell

Review:Bloodlines by Joyce Russell published by Mercier Press

Joyce Russell released her set of short stories, Bloodlines last year at the Cork International Short Story Festival. She is quite the interesting character; Born in  North Yorkshire, a  journalist and writer. She is also gardening correspondent with The Southern Star.

She had been writing stories for over a decade and this is the part that fascinates me most. Stay with me on this one.

At the back of the collection, a list of Joyce’ accolades are given. She has been shortlisted or won many prestigious short story competitions. From Fish Publishing, Sean O’ Faoilean, Francis Mac Manus, Bridport Prize and the Real Writers competition.

The collection is called Bloodlines and the themes are unmistakably centered around family, blood connections, maternal, paternal, the child and the I, the innocent and love between all of these things. I am unsure to whether Joyce was working to a collection as she sent stories into magazines or competitions but these themes must have meant everything to her writing life as each story shines clearly with them.

It is wonderful for the reader to have an implicit connection of the themes. Some short story anthologies take more to work out while others have little to connect the writer’s voice and his/her motifs.

But, most strongly what comes out of these tales are the female voice as a child, a teenager and an old woman. Joyce writes mostly from the first person and pulls off the difficult child narrative again and again, without once failing.

Joyce is a lover of nature and this glistens throughout, she is an image maker but a simple one. She does not use demanding vocabulary unless the story demands it.

In Blood Red is a story of a teenage narrator and her mother. The narrator cannot communciate what she needs to her mother. Her mother has a way of dealing with big issues in life, mostly just to ignore.

She puts her hands over her ears or sings when bad news comes on the radio. The twin towers are still standing in her head.

The conflict happens when the narrator gets herself into a trouble that she feels will need an honesty her relationship with her mother does not share.

Some people say that their mother is their best friend, but I know they are wrong…There is no way I could talk to her about anything else. It’s so easy to hide what people don’t want to see.

But, the mother comes good, in the end and deals with the potentially life-wrecking situation in her own way. This way suits the daughter and mother as this is their life and there way of dealing with challenges. The reader will judge but will agree with the mother by the end.

In Walking Backwards, the story reflects on the most important thing in life. This story is about the protagonist, a young girl and her mother. There has been a loss. The father has dies some time ago and there have been changes in the way the protagonist sees her mother and her life. She is now a lonely child that travels on the same bus route every day, avoiding school, avoiding the real problem at home. She ruminates about the last day on earth constantly to the point that the reader may be lead into thinking something morbid is going to happen. Joyce twists the story at a gentle angle and the ending does not seem forced or as if a trick has been played on the reader. It seems natural.

Though, this collection is predominately proud of its maternal and feminine theme, Joyce also features stories that go away from this female theme. In Light, thought and Evelyn, we see the quirky side of Joyce’s style come out. Evelyn works in a restaurant of some sort and she dreams every night of creating the world from scratch, like a deity. In Comparable, identical, One and the Same, we look into a world of isolation in the school yard and meet a girl who has a father she is ashamed of. She is aware of herself and her family and their difference in the world. She is sitting in the car, ready to go into school, her father lies snoring beside her.  A universal theme of cliques and isolation is dealt with in a light and speedy way as she looks out and observes the girls going into school.  We see the awfulness of those girls who

wear trainers. Some have blank, clonky shoes with fat heels. She knows about sets from maths. the clonkies are a set. The trainers are a much bigger set. the two don’t overlap.

Lilli has it figured out quickly and the story ends as gracefully as she does.

The stand out story, personally, is Changes of Light. A story about a piece of land, like every good Irish short story! A daughter and her father look over the land and house that she is about to buy. This is where Joyce’s strength is shown. We see the landscape through each character’s eyes.

 

I knew he was seeing small steep fields where  a sheep could break a leg. I could see his gaze scouring for topsoil, trying to spot one small place where a hayfield might grown.

We hear what they are thinking and feel inclined to take sides, we empathise.

I wanted my father to see what I saw. I wanted him to fall in love with the high clouds and the sweet taste of the pure air as it entered his lungs.

Good story telling needs to get the reader to feel and connect with their characters and in Changes Of Light, this is done without sentimentality.

There are sixteen well crafted stories here, blending the full spectrum of emotions and feelings that come with being part of a family or a parent. This is a collection that will not age and will stand up well to time, binding the generations together.

You can buy Bloodlines from excellent bookshops, Mercier Press directly or from amazon a ebook or paper.

 

 

 

 

 

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Telemtale Bloomnibus ebook from the Irish Writers’ Centre

Ebook

To celebrate Bloomsday the Irish Writers’ centre asked 18 writers to do some work on Ulysses , to modernise it.

Each writers took an episode and situated the chapter in a present Dublin. It is a lovely, little read and if you want to get your fix of writers like Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Niamh Boyce or Christodoulous Makris then download the kindle ebook edition here. About £2 sterling so you really won’t miss it. My stand out story was one by usually a poet, Colm Keegan. He writes the story without taking away or copying the Ulysses chapter, Nestor. He makes it and brings it on. Really nice, haven’t read prose from him since the Silver Threads of Hope anthology where his story Yes made me feel and tingle.

Hope you had a very happy Bloomsday!

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Carlow Writers’ Launch of first anthology-What champagne was like

We didn’t get to taste what champagne was like but we had plenty chances to sample prosecco!

We kicked off with the Hard Times Duo of music, beautiful folky guitar music went down easily with the crowd.

The launch was opened by Jamie O’ Connell, much loved short story teller on rozz.ie. Jamie wrote a beautifully, insightful foreword for the anthology and on the night, he spoke about the themes of the work. He also read us one of the new stories he is working on and it was a treat to hear something that is unavailable in print. Jamie is a lovely speaker and reader and the story was a powerful one.

Simon Lewis compered the evening and did a fantastic job. We were then treated to a small selection of readings from the anthology. Finally, we had the Editor, Dr. Derek Coyle and he spoke to us about the meaning of a co-operative writing group and thanked everyone who had helped bring this project to its completion.

Then, we mingled and sold books! It was a super late night and much fun was had. Thanks to the Teach Dolmen Bar and all of our sponsors who made this project possible.

We will be in the Carlow Library reading at the Carlow Arts Festival on Tuesday, 11th June at 7:30, looking forward to seeing you there.

 

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Carve Magazine and Dan Powell

I enter lots of competitions and finally, I won! I had to describe what a short story was in a simple sentence and post it on Dan Powell’s blog. I won a lovely magazine called Carve. This is an American glossy and beautiful magazine that focuses purely on the short story. You get the title now!

Not only does it feature 3 pretty awesome stories each issue, it also has unique and helpful features for short story writers. Some of these features are:

What we talk about: Very informative chats with the author who wrote the story that is published in that very issue. You read the story first and then read about its themes and how it was made. The best thing that comes before this story each time is the Fast Facts feature. You can see how many drafts this story took, how long it took to write, how many times it was rejected(Ouch) and how long the writer waited until it was published. These are usually things we don’t talk about and these sort of facts really can boost a writer.

The Reject! feature where stories that Carve  passed on but were later published elsewhere are highlighted. There is an conversation with a featured writer about what that rejection meant for them. The Editor from Carve  that rejected it gives their comment, the author gives their feelings to that rejection and goes through any changes they made because of that rejection. A wonderful piece of learning through rejection and very noble of Carve magazine, if I may say so.

The Carve magazine is special and I am going to subscribe straightaway. If you don’t want to subscribe for the print/digital issue, you can read the 3 chosen stories each time on their blog for free price!

Dan Powell won the Esoteric Award for his story Storm in a teacup, which is a magical and very British story about falling in and out of love and life while a storm brews in a teacup! It is very much worth a read and so is his interview but you will have to subscribe for that! Check out Dan on his blog  and his award winning story Storm in a Teacup here.

Dan Powell

 

 

 

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What champagne was like:Carlow Writers’ First Anthology is launched by Jamie O Connell Thursday, 6th June

At last, the day is nearly here.

It has been a year’w hard work to get our first anthology launched. The Carlow Writers are launching our first anthology tomorrow evening at 7:30 in the Teach Dolmen Bar, Tullow Street at 7:30. There will be prosecco. There will be Jamie O’ Connell. There will be a Rozzie reading her story. There will be a winning short story read by Phyllis Mahoud. There will be fun, fun, fun!

The Carlow Writers are also reading at the Carlow Arts Festival in the Carlow Library, Tullow Street at 7:30 Tuesday, 11th and there will be a marvelous spread of food and drink.

Come join us to kick the Carlow Arts Festival off tomorrow evening, 6th June at 7:30 in the Teach Bar! It would be terribly bold not to.

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Review: The story of before by Susan Stairs

The story of before by Susan Stairs

This novel is narrated in the first person of a nine year old girl called Ruth Lamb. The story tells about how the family change when they move to a housing estate in Dublin back in the 1970s. Susan tells us about life in Dublin as if we were there.

The story is a dark one. Ruth announces that a very bad thing is going to happen that year and this sets the action up well. The grimness of the theme does not let up. The story gives us a piece of history in a non sentimental way, while keeping the action trickling in. We become very involved with the setting and the characters as we remember the way it was when life was without restrictions.

This is not merely a nostalgic tale of how life was for children in the past in Dublin. This is a story about a little girl who feels excluded from her family, friends and the estate she lives on. This story is her story and Stairs writes this tale with exceptional ease. The story flows well, building up with each chapter to the awful ending that Ruth predicted at the beginning of her story.

The themes of the book are ones of fate and choice. About what can happen if a person takes one choice in their life and how that can impact on your life forever. It tells of the secret world of adults and children and what can go wrong when things become confused. It is a wonderfully evocative book with a beautiful dusting of magic brushed through each page. I am looking forward to Susan’s next book which I have heard she is working on.

You can purchase this book directly at Atlantic Books or in most excellent bookshops. Susan is launching this book this Wednesday, 5th June in Dubray Books on Grafton Street at 6:30. Get your copy, it is well worth a read.

Susan is also reading at Bantry Literary Festival on Friday, 12th July at 11:15. All information here.

 

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Frank O’ Connor Short Story Shortlist is out and ready for the taking

Unfortunately, we have no Irish authors in the Frank O’ Connor Short Story Prize short list. Though we had 8 Irish ones in the longlist-Celeste Auge, Emma Donoghue, Kitty Fitzgerald, Aideen Henry, Mike Mc Cormack, Alan Mc Gonagle, Micheal O Conghaile and Joyce Russell. So, pretty good really.

Across the water, we have Deborah Levy, Claire Vaye Watkins and David Constantine up against Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Stamm and Tomas Dobozy.

The award is worth €25,000, the world’s best award for a single short-story collection, and has been won by some of the biggest names in literature from Haruki Murakami to Nathan Englander and Edna O’Brien. This year judges chose a shortlist of six titles from 78 titles.

Choosing the final six, said judge and Irish author John Deane, was “no less than an adventure”.

“From an ebb-tide in the short-story form – particularly in Ireland and the UK over the last few decades – to this flood-tide proved a delight and a deep sense of optimism in me for the form,” said Deane. “Overall, among the original 78, there were very few titles that could be dismissed quickly, hence the wealth and excitement of the presentation at our discussion. I have been enlightened, at times even mesmerised, at the variety, the strength, the depth and the numbers of experimental books.”

Imagine how I feel, I’ve got the pleasure of getting down to reading and reviewing them all, before September. Homework was never like this in school! Before that, I’ve got a review of Susan Stair’s new novel The story of before and Joyce Russell’s Bloodlines. I also have many more books that I probably won’t get time to give a detailed review too like Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision, Collected stories of Lydia Davis and Ancient Lights. And yes, I know the last one is a year old but I like to take it slow in relationship building.

The winner will be announced in the first week of July, with the award to be presented in September at the culmination of the Cork International Short Story Festival. Again, my life clashes with things like this. 2 weddings lined up that weekend, no where near Cork… I will be there in spirit!

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Review:Town and Country:New Irish Short Stories edited by Kevin Barry (Faber and Faber)

Review: Faber and Faber Town and Country: New Irish Short Stories edited by Kevin Barry.

The title and cover give a  hint towards a  far from Post Celtic landscape in Ireland and its writing. The cover art in futuristic yellow, black and white design, paints a landscape of religious buildings and skyscrapers amongst buildings in constructed transience.

Ireland is being built again from inside out and so to its writing. It is unsure to what its identity is. The title, Town and Country demonstrate a wide open feel as a member of a larger, ever expanding community. What we thought was true post boom is not and so to the Irish short story. Kevin Barry, the editor writes that:

“The Irish short story is changing and is pulsing with great, mad and rude new energies.”

But, as Ireland and its literature changes and pushes through into new ways, it is still committed to the universal theme of what it means to be a human. The strength of the short story is the ability to capture a human moment and Barry says this too:

“the contours of our great human aches and sorrows are traced here.”

To represent a new Ireland, to try to capture what it is that is Irish now, Barry has presented an anthology that contains many new voices. The book is all the better for this; With these new voices,we get stories about a  sometimes confused Ireland. The title Town and Country is an easy one to work with now, we move all around Ireland and outside of it. From the countryside, coasts and cities, we hear Irish voices and non-Irish ones.

The anthology is made up of twenty stories, never too long or short. Quite perfect. Relationships have changed in Ireland. How we love and what happens after we lose love is reflected throughout the anthology. Humanity in all its sadness and warmth comes rises up, time and time again.  A collection that tells us where we may have gone wrong and asks if we can get back on track again. Relationships and humanity are the short story’s finest strengths and it is hard not to be warmed by these snippets of humanity.

In Tiger by Michael Harding, it is 2006 and we see the remnants of the good times in a marriage and all the material items that have to be divided up in the aftermath of a divorce. The narrator now lives in a flat surrounded by “Eastern Europeans in small apartments with paper-thin walls.” His possessions are all left behind in the family home-the Aga cooker, the wok, coffee pot-all things synonymous with the Celtic Tiger years. At the end, he yearns for something real that he can never have.

Again, in Saturday, Boring by Lisa Mc Inerney, we see a new Ireland of mixed messages and pressures. This story is told from the perspective of a fifteen year old and it frightened me how real this story probably is. The teenage girl is setting out to have sex for the first time with her boyfriend of 3 weeks. The uncertainty of this act is revealed on a journey to the till in Penneys with her best friend. Once, she pays for the adult-like lingerie, the die is cast and the Rubicon has been crossed. She has made up her mind and her relationships with her father and  friendship with her best friend have changed forever. This story is handled well, it tells of the pressures young children encounter today. She feels “like there was so much to learn and so much expected of her.” but this is no naive girl. She concludes that it is all nonsense and she wants “the world to slow down its revolution as to make space for her.” By the end of the story, she feels “as old as the sea” and the adult reader will have the  benefit of knowing that her next action will not bestow any maturity on her.

In Second-Best Bar in Cadiz, we get drawn into a non-conventional love story. A man from Castlebar wants to make it big as a chef. He deludes himself, his lover is unfaithful, his brother is a dangerous gimp and his job is uncertain and uninspired. He rests all of his dreams on Oscar, his boss. The narrator wants to be more than “the man with a plastic fork in the emperor inn in Castlebar” but he cannot get away from the drugs and pointless relationships. I feared the worst for him and was relieved when Oscar’s fate was safe but the ending is worse than this. He realises that he is “The man with a plastic fork in the emperor inn in Castlebar.” We have all been there and we know he may have to settle for a part of life that he may not have imagined for himself. A return to Castlebar and all the truth it brings with it for him.

In Barcelona, Mary Costello continues to grab my admiration. She always makes it seem so simple but with one sentence, we are caught in her world, one she controls to its last breath. In this story, the narrator, Catherine is multi-faced, she is revealed piece by piece until the end. Her manic thoughts pervade the text and the setting until the ending where her husband is left confused, looking into a corner. Catherine realises that she has been too honest, she has gone too far. Her marriage is unable to cope with the reality and rawness of life. Again, a brilliant post Celtic Tiger theme and a story we have come to associate with Mary Costello, she thinks and observes and so do her characters.

Relationship breakdown and the honesty between two people is dealt with in Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s Joyride to Jupiter. The story of a man whose wife is starting to collapse with dementia in old age. Storytelling  comes too easy to Nuala. She writes the type of stories that the reader might think they could do but the way she builds this story to a tear provoking climax is a gift that is hard to come by. In Barcelona and Joyride to Jupiter, we see two very different relationships. Both deal with being true to yourself and the one you love. However, the ending for Nuala’s character was made chillingly real and left me affected. Anyone who loves takes risks, the narrator realises this and he is stirred to memories of their life together, the good times of  “paradise squares, our daughter’s nervous glancing in the rear-view, dancing in Banba Hall, a single coral rose, the spongy hump of the pillow.” The risk was worth it.

The Clancy Kid by Colin Barrett is a stand out story. Colin’s stories have been coming up every so often with these wonderful stories. His collection is due this September, an excitement for me. I find his writing very cool and urgently unique. The Clancy Kid is a good, solid Irish story centering on the character’s  relationships. It opens up in any old pub in any town in Ireland. Two men are speaking about their obsessions. One a woman he can’t have and the other a child that disappeared, the Clancy Kid. Their friendship drags through the story, rising until the strength at the end. This is a story of the bromance. A typically Irish one, there are emotions all over the place, left unsaid and at the end the narrator concludes that “we all have things we won’t let go of.” The narrator cannot let go of what he could have had with this girl and his friend cannot let go of the Clancy kid. They look back on their nameless town after a wonderfully troll fairy tale-like adventure with some scary children and they see that the kids have gone. Were they there at all? The story tells us of the importance of the simple things, growing up and the fear of letting go as we do so.  Brilliant characters, typically Irish yet brought to life with a contemporary feel. A story that left me thinking and counting the days off till September and Colin’s book is published with the Stinging Fly.

In City of Glass, its opening gives the impression that this is another story about immigration and poor old Ireland in the early 1990s where then old men cycled in bicycles. Was this another landscape heavy story by an American writer with a glint in their eye for Ireland?  But, it wasn’t. In fact, this story summarises the story of Ireland in 1989 and compares that Ireland with the one we are living in now. The author Molly Mc Closkey  says that “The country was like a beautiful failure.” She brings the main character through a series of relationships pre and post Celtic Tiger and concludes that “Now, it was like we all existed in some nebulous after-life, a vantage point from which we gazed down on everything we had destroyed…all the parallel dimensions in which we were reconciled.” A humanistic take of what went wrong in the world and Ireland and how strong relationships matter. This story cements the meaning of the stories in this book, a non sentimental look to the past can push us forward to feel gratitude that we will survive. We may not know where the future is but we can feel excited that we have come this far, from the days of the original game makers like O’ Connor and Trevor to a new pulse and style.

Barry advises us to “Watch it now as it spirals and spins out” I wait patiently  for the next Faber and Faber anthology with a strong  hope that our new community who are living here, originally coming from outside Ireland will add to this changing landscape of the Irish short story. This is my biggest wish for Irish writing and we are moving towards this. The Town and Country Anthology is a step towards that landscape.