Publisher : Harvill Press
How much : £12.99
Short stories revived: They are back in
fashion, as established, and fledging,
writers return to the form
Aesthetica magazine writing competition
Raymond Carver, in a Paris Review interview, spoke
of seeing his first short story, “Pastoral”, published in
a literary magazine as “A terrific day! Maybe one of
the best days ever.”
When he reached another landmark moment in the
1960s and his story, Will you Please Be Quiet, Please?
was printed in The Best American Short Stories Annual,
he took the book to bed with him.
This year, I helped to judge a short story writing
competition for the Aesthetica Creative Writing
Annual - a collection of new writing in poetry and
short fiction. The writers in the annual, plucked from
a longlist of over a thousand entries, should feel the
same sense of reward and validation as Carver. These
are stories that the reader can take to bed and there,
encounter the joyous flexibility of a form that can
present an entire fictional world in just 2,000 words,
or the entirety of a single, crystallised moment in the
same word count.
It is particularly satisfying to see the fortunes of the
short story revived in recent times. Following Alice
Munro’s crowning last year as Nobel Prize winner for
literature, some of our most revered writers –
Margaret Atwood, George Saunders, Lorrie Moore,
Graham Swift – have since proved with their latest
collections that the short story is to be taken seriously
and not merely a transitional form for fledging
novelists-in-training.
I found a refreshing breadth of style and subject
matter in competition entries. What makes them so
diverse is not just the internationalism of their
entrants but their imaginative scope. Themes range
from family dysfunction, love and loss to the hard-
edged social realities of dementia, domestic violence
and public acts of terror, though there is playfulness
too. Several dramatise the fragile, polar states of old
age and of childhood in original ways.
Corinne Demas’s Thanksgiving, a subtle story of
sibling bonds and betrayals, stood out for judges as
this year’s winner. It is an unshowy piece of writing –
nothing more, it would seem, than a brother and
sister taking a car-ride together after a festive family
dinner. Yet, emotional undercurrents swirl beneath
the surface to give it heft and complexity, and there is
a quiet, controlled confidence in its telling.
Each selected story was marked by its distinctive
voice, from the lyrical to the spare to the loud and
large-hearted. These are the tales that wriggled their
way beneath the skin, working a groove in the mind
to surprise, impress, or merely to remain memorable.
We hope that readers will be as moved, unsettled, and
dazzled, as we found ourselves in their reading.
*The Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, now in its
eighth year, s an annual prize hosted by Aesthetica
Magazine. It is as an opportunity for emerging and
established writers to showcase their work to an
international audience, and the winners and finalists
are published in the Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual
- a collection of new writing in poetry and short fiction.
For more information visit
www.aestheticamagazine.com/creativewriting
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