I find I have more books on my shelves that fall into this category than I realise, usually picked up at an Op Shop somewhere for a buck or two, but look interesting enough to be worth the expense. And the risk. Many turn out to be keepers. And there's also quite a few that have been presents. For which I will be eternally thankful.
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"CRACKING THE SPINE" - Spineless Wonders Pub (Aust 2014)
Spineless Wonders (not to be confused with the WA environmental group of the same name) is a Sydney publishing house that has a heavy accent on short stories, and well worth looking up...
...and this is one of their many compilations. But this one has a twist.
It has ten short stories (all Aust) from well-published writers, but each one is followed by an essay by the author, partly on the background of the writing of the story, and partly on their approach to writing generally.
It's these essays that are the strength of this collection, and any aspiring short story writer should hunt down a copy of this book, for the essays if nothing else, as they so clearly spell out what writing short fiction is all about. And compiled the way it is, with the essay immediately following the story, gives an added value to the content.
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"NIGHT ANIMALS" - Bruce Pascoe (1986 Aus)
Every fiction writer who puts words down, is saying - this is a small piece of the Life that I found while I was here, and this is the meaning I gleaned from it. That's what the Ghost said to me while I was reading this slim-ish collection of Pascoe's short stories, all Australian, mostly in the bush, all (as per the blurb) of people at the edge. I loved it. Each story short and sharp and biting.
I know (knew) little of Bruce Pascoe except that I owe him, as back in 1988 he was the first publisher to buy something of mine, a short story, for the quarterly collections he was doing back then (1982 to 1998), putting me in with some serious Aus Lit company. But I'd never read any of his own stuff, so when I fell over a battered copy for two bucks in an Op Shop (my favourites for book browsing!) I couldn't resist, and it paid off, as it pulled my head back into the world of thought and exploration and imagination.
A well-known Aus author once said of my first novel, that I was "...a worthy heir to Henry Lawson." Very kind and inspiring words (which geared me up no end!), and I notice that the same has been said of Pascoe on the back blurb. I have to say that Bruce deserves that accolade more than I. Like the great Henry Lawson, Bruce plugged away at his work and never gave up, unlike yours truly. I dropped out of the Publishing Circus way too early. Seriously unfaithful to my craft. It's a primary lesson to you my friend, if you have aspirations as a "serious" writer. Never give up.
If you'd like to know more of Bruce Pascoe and his surprising life. click the Wiki link below....
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"CONFESSIONS & MEMOIRS" - Various (CQUP 2006)
One out of my Xmas lucky dip box of 10, this collection isn't like most collections, having no theme, in fact not even all fiction, but a mish-mash of essays, memoirs, and short stories, grouped in 10 clusters of 2-5 items, all by well-accredited writers, of varying readability - not your usual anthology.
This was put out by Central Qld Uni Press (never bumped into them before, they're based in Rockhampton and have quite a string of stuff in their portfolio), and this publication was "Supported by the Literature Board of the Australia Council". Which I guess means that without Federal Arts funding it would never have seen the light of day. And it's the 3rd in a series they call "Best Stories Under The Sun".
Okay, what to say? I found the political essays bloody boring, but that's just me, the backgrounds to Thomas Keneally's "Schindler" (haven't read) and Kate Grenville's "Secret River" (have read, really great) fascinating, the fiction typically ranging between really good, fairly bad, and indifferent (with a couple of pieces just too too arty-clever for words), and the memoirs a mixed bag. Of the fiction, I liked Carmel Bird's "Shooting The Fox" the best, great prose that makes one aspire to be as good.
To sum up, I came away from this book thinking that it's mainly an exercise in helping keep a selected handful of Aus writers in pocket money.
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"THE GIFT OF STORY" - University of Qld Press (1998 Aust)
Subtitled "Three decades of UQP short stories", there's 35 of them in date order, all previously published by UQP, presumably from 1968 to 1998, and from the pens of some of the best names in Aus Lit - Thea Astley, Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Kate Grenville, Janette Turner Hospital, Barbara Hanrahan, Gillian Mears, etc etc,
They should be the best of the best, but as always it's down to taste, and I found this collection came in at about...
50% - okay, yeah, not bad.
25% - couldn't get into them at all.
25% - makes you want to race off and write as creatively.
So, again it depends on who you are, the way you are, what you're looking for in a story, and yes even what you're looking for in life, as to how you'll react to any short story. And I have to say, they are still my first preference, for writing that is. And with so many legitimate contest platforms available to you, short stories simply have the capacity to fully test your talent, without taking a year (or three) to do it. And if you crack a gong with one of those platforms, it's so good for your CV when the novel is finished.
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"BEST AUSTRALIAN SHORT STORIES" - Ed by Beatrice Davis & Douglas Stewart (Aust 1981)
A great collection from a wide range of writers and styles, here a couple of quick out-takes.....
Edward Dyson (1865-1931)
"Mickey was a small scraggy man, with a mop of grizzled hair and a little red, humorous face, ever bristling with auburn stubble. His trousers were the most striking things about him, they were built on the premises, and almost contained enough stuff to make him a full suit and a winter overcoat."
Thelma Forshaw (1923-1995)
"Auntie Dee was a true criminal type, who corrupted at a touch. She was the evil genius of her clan, the witch doctor who presided over orgy and wake, broken marriage and psychopathic child. She loved the young as the rake loves a virgin. Now and again she arranged for me - just turned sixteen - to meet the wealthy or influential men whose flats she serviced. But they always went away quietly after treating me to a paternal lunch, daunted I think, by the passionate purity I wore like an amulet."
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"PRIZE WRITING" - Ed by Martin Goff (UK 1989)
This is a collection by past winners of The Booker Prize in the 21 years from inception to 1989.
I've never made a secret of the fact that mostly I've been disappointed by Booker winners, but this bunch of short stories is well worth going through, if for no other reason than the curiosity value. Here's a couple of scraps to get you going. Or not.
P. H. Newby (1918-1987)
"Ray Drower thought himself a bit of a tearaway but in fact he was just the usual sort of statistician who gets employed by big insurance companies. The life he might have lived, the actor he might have been, the drunken fights he might have been hauled out of! And the women! But it was all fantasy. He wore a dark suit, commuted from Guildford, was married to a doctor's daughter who thought him her social inferior..."
Salman Rushdie (1947 - )
"...her hair was made of scarecrow straw, her skin was peppered with freckles and her teeth lived in a metal cage. These teeth were, it seemed, the only things on earth over which she was powerless - they grew wild, in malicious crazy-paving overlaps, and stung her dreadfully when she ate ice cream."
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"THE LITTLE RESTAURANT" (Wang Anyi - 2010 - China)
This is a collection of novellas by one of China's well-known writers, who also has several novels (and movies?) and a Booker nomination to her credit. I'm into the third of this set of nine at the moment, and each (and all of them I think) are set in Shanghai, roughly in the period not long after the Cultural Revolution, and capture the essence of what it was like for the hard-working locals of the day at street and alley level, and does it so well that you are - like - there.
They are each about 7k-8k words, and have a slight "documentary" feel to the prose (but some of this could be the translation for all I know), but that just seems to add to the reality of these everyday folks' lives, as the work and strive and finagle through each day, chasing after their small hopes and dreams to the sounds and smells and the wonderfully small detail of their days. Do yourself a favour and find this one.
I had an urge to "get back to my roots" a while back, so I fell back on my Collected Works of Henry Lawson, forgot just how well he wrote.
This is a collection of poetry and prose that I take down off the shelf every so often when I feel - feel - nup, can't quickly think what it is that draws me to this paperback of odds and ends. Probably because I discover something in it every time, discover yet another piece of great writing. And re-discover old friends.
I have no idea where I found this book, but as it's looked well-travelled as long as I've had it, I'm fairly sure I picked it up in a second-hander or an Op Shop, and probably back in the 1970s. The other thing is, I can't find any reference to it online, the book or the guy who compiled it for Macmillan back in 1972. Which is odd, as it looks fairly mainstream. Maybe it's worth a fortune. Which would be good, although I certainly wouldn't part with it.
That's Bob Dylan on the cover - he has three pieces in it - but it casts a much wider net of great writing, from John Donne, Shakespeare, and Milton, through to T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Judith Wright, and heaps in between. And this time through I'm picking out all my personal favs, scanning them into a file, and I think I might even use up a kilobyte or two here and put them up, because - - because - well, because I can! Who knows, they might just get you out there looking for more of the same. And godknows none of us can be exposed to too much good writing.
One of my favourite books - read many times (first published UK 1937, but mine is the 1990 Sceptre Reprint, bought in Killarney in 1991), being 50-odd stories of about 2,500 words each, but not a dud amongst them. If you ever aspire to writing short fiction, get hold of a copy, because it challenges you to turn out something as good.
They're all set in Ireland in the '20s and '30s but that's incidental, the quality of the writing is universal and eternal. Actually, no, they're not SET in Ireland, they HAPPEN there. This is a storyteller with a keen eye and a keen ear and you imagine that he was a spectator (or a participant!) to each one of them......
"...she was reputed to be a thorough slattern, one of those large, healthy, easy-going women with prominent hips who have an amazing faculty for surrounding themselves with sloppiness and who go around their yard with the tongues of their boots hanging out."
"He was a man I never liked, the same son of Crooked Michael, a braggart without any good in him, a man who must have come crooked from his mother's womb, and his father before him was the same dishonest son of a horse-stealing tinker."
This is another of my bargain $1.00 finds from an Op Shop down at Goolwa, a collection of 31 short stories by published Aus authors.
I'm only just into it but it's already obvious that Garry Disher the editor has selected well, as some SS collections I've read - both Aus and OS - are pretty patchy, a lot like some CD albums, a couple of good tracks and the rest are just padding.
As much as I've said it before, I have NO idea why (good) short story collections don't have a much much bigger commercial market. They are an art form in themselves, require skills and disciplines sometimes tougher than with full length novels. And so entertaining. AND can be satisfyingly enjoyed in half an hour. I love them.
The bonus with this collection - subtitled "The story behind the story" - is that it has a short bit from the author at the end of each one, sketching out the circumstances of what caused she/he to write the story, just about always some real life event, sometimes weirdly small and trivial, sometimes big and traumatic, but always having an impact on their memory, and often dredged up decades later and massaged into the end product. This I also love, to read where a story first lodges in the mind of the author, to germinate in time to become what we read.