JOHN KINSELLA Old Growth. Reviewed by Carmel Bird
John Kinsella’s short stories reveal flashes of beauty amid the bleakness. ‘They were close enough to the dregs of the river to have a water rat dead on their dead lawn.’ So far, so ugly – the opening line of the 18th story in this collection of 27. By...
ROXANE GAY Difficult Women. Reviewed by Linda Godfrey
Women’s difficult lives are laid bare with a surgeon’s precision in this collection. This is a collection of 21 short stories about women in relation to the men in their worlds. I had to think long and hard about the title. The more I read the stories, the...
CK STEAD The Name on the Door is Not Mine: stories new and selected. Reviewed by Carmel Bird
Stead’s short stories contest truth and identity – and feature a winged man, scary women, and a hint of Edna Everidge. One of the most important elements of a short story is its structure. In these 12 pieces gathered from across the lengthy and...
SUE WOOLFE Do You Love Me Or What? Reviewed by Carmel Bird
These short stories from Sue Woolfe offer alienation, yearning and brilliance. The final story in this collection of eight pieces is an extract from the personal papers of an unnamed fiction writer, with footnotes by Professor Amelia Broughton, who has prepared...
LUCY DURNEEN Wild Gestures. Reviewed by Carmel Bird
Durneen has a sharp eye for the meanings woven into the stories of past, present and future. Lucy Durneen teaches writing in Plymouth, England. In 2014 she went to the 13th International Conference on the Short Story in Vienna. In her very long list of...
FIONA MCFARLANE The High Places. Reviewed by Jeannette Delamoir
Everyday life evaporates into unsettling ambiguity in Fiona McFarlane’s new collection of short stories. McFarlane explored the slipperiness of reality in her novel The Night Guest – shortlisted for the 2014 Miles Franklin award – where the central character, Ruth,...
MAXINE BENEBA CLARKE Foreign Soil. Reviewed by Lou Heinrich
These stories add complexity to racial and cultural stereotypes and explore a wide range of human experiences. Foreign Soil won last year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and for good reason. Clarke’s stories contain...
VIVIENNE PLUMB The Glove Box and Other Stories. Reviewed by Nicole Hayes
This unsettling collection explores transience and the longing for something or somewhere lost. The Glove Box and Other Stories is a short story collection by New Zealand playwright, poet and novelist, Vivienne Plumb. This collection, Plumb explains in the...MARK O’FLYNN White Light. Reviewed by Michelle McLaren
Funny, tragic and beautifully crafted, these short stories were destined to be together. Poet, playwright and novelist, Mark O’Flynn is a man of many talents. White Light is the Blue Mountains-based writer’s inaugural collection of stories, gathering...The Godfather: Peter Corris on the decline of the short-story market
In the latter part of the 19th century, after mass education greatly expanded the number of readers, the short story enjoyed a great vogue. In Britain, ‘literary’ writers like Joseph Conrad and Henry James produced them for fashionable magazines and ‘popular’...JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL Forecast: Turbulence. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
These stories of family trauma find their echoes in the elements. In ‘Moon River’, the chapter of memoir that comes at the end of this collection of short stories, there is an image of the Brisbane River swollen and raucous in flood. It occurs six months after...
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