Difference between revisions of "Newest Short Stories Reviews"

From TheBookbag
Jump to navigationJump to search
Line 1: Line 1:
 
[[Category:New Reviews|Short Stories]]
 
[[Category:New Reviews|Short Stories]]
 
[[Category:Short Stories|*]] __NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
 
[[Category:Short Stories|*]] __NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
 +
{{newreview <!-- remove 25/1 -->
 +
|title=A Collection of Short Stories
 +
|author=Gillian Fletcher-Edwards
 +
|rating=4
 +
|genre=Short Stories
 +
|summary=Marged Evans allowed a break-up with a lover to affect everything in her life. Osian wanted to invest in the present but Marged loved the past. Since they drifted apart, Marged's life has been careful, ordered, unadventurous. But then Osian sends her a Christmas card and everything changes. ''Marged Evans'' is the first and longest in this collection of short stories from Gillian Fletcher-Edwards. It's almost a novella and its initially slow pace sets off quite the masterclass in how one event can throw everything into unexpected - but lovely - chaos.
 +
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1524662445</amazonuk>
 +
}}
 
{{newreview
 
{{newreview
 
|author= Sybil Marshall and John Lawrence
 
|author= Sybil Marshall and John Lawrence
Line 256: Line 264:
 
|summary= I chose to review this collection of short stories with no prior knowledge of the author's work – often the best way to do it, though I am aware that McCracken's work comes highly commended. After reading these stories, I can see why and I am already looking forward to reading more of her work.
 
|summary= I chose to review this collection of short stories with no prior knowledge of the author's work – often the best way to do it, though I am aware that McCracken's work comes highly commended. After reading these stories, I can see why and I am already looking forward to reading more of her work.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099592975</amazonuk>
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099592975</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
 
|author= Pete Bellotte
 
|title= The Unround Circle
 
|rating= 2.5
 
|genre= Short Stories
 
|summary= As short story collections go, this is a fairly ambitious bundle, some 22 stories running to a total of nearly four hundred pages.  You'll gather from the fact that I'm starting with the statistics that I didn't instantly fall in love with Bellotte's writing.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1910533092</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}

Revision as of 14:07, 17 January 2017

A Collection of Short Stories by Gillian Fletcher-Edwards

4star.jpg Short Stories

Marged Evans allowed a break-up with a lover to affect everything in her life. Osian wanted to invest in the present but Marged loved the past. Since they drifted apart, Marged's life has been careful, ordered, unadventurous. But then Osian sends her a Christmas card and everything changes. Marged Evans is the first and longest in this collection of short stories from Gillian Fletcher-Edwards. It's almost a novella and its initially slow pace sets off quite the masterclass in how one event can throw everything into unexpected - but lovely - chaos. Full review...

The Book of English Folk Tales by Sybil Marshall and John Lawrence

4star.jpg Anthologies

From ghosts to witches, to giants and fairies, The Book of English Folk Tales is a fascinating collection of stories retold by social historian and folklorist Sybil Marshall. Out of print for over three decades, this beautiful new clothbound edition is complete with wood engraved illustrations by John Lawrence and is sure to capture the attention of a new generation of lovers of folklore. Full review...

1588: A Calendar of Crime (A Hew Cullan Mystery) by Shirley McKay

4.5star.jpg Crime (Historical)

A lot of crime happens in St Andrews during 1588 and therefore in the life of law lecturer and local investigator Hew Cullen too. As we travel through the year with him, his recently wedded English wife Frances, doctor brother in law Giles and his sister Meg, the wise woman, we also encounter some of his most interesting cases. In fact there's one to match each of the year's big festivals: Candlemas, Whitsun, Lammas, Martinmas and Yule. Full review...

Sins by Mary Telford and Louise Verity

4star.jpg Short Stories

Is there enough new to say about the seven deadly sins? We've seen them all shown to us, from school age and up to the movie Se7en, which we sincerely hope was NOT shown to anyone at school age. We can each recount them all, having been long familiar with them, even if we probably can't pin down when they were actually set in stone without help. Similarly, is there anything new in the world of fairy tale? We know the tropes - characters identified by their status or gender (the woman, the husband), a clear set of rules to obey, and a moral as strong as, if not stronger than, the formulae involved. Well, this volume demands we decide the answer to those questions as being positive ones, and if it's not always definitive in the writing here that there is something new, rest assured there will be something in the imagery that will definitely strike one as fresh... Full review...

How Much the Heart Can Hold: Seven Stories on Love by Carys Bray and others

3.5star.jpg Short Stories

This Sceptre collection does not have as simple a remit as it might appear; these are no straightforward love stories. Instead, they each take one aspect of love – often one of the ancient Greek classifications – and provide a whole new way of thinking about it. After all, the heart holds a lot of metaphorical weight. Full review...

Cockfosters by Helen Simpson

3.5star.jpg Short Stories

This was a belated reunion for me, having been introduced to the author's snappy short story collections courtesy the very first one while at uni. Mind, it was a much more gentle and placid reunion than the one that starts this book – Julie and Philippa have had a shop-bought curry together, but have had to forsake a cultural chat for a trip haring along the London Underground chasing after a pair of glasses one of them left behind. The piece is definitely about the subject of ageing – about time passed and what might be remaining ahead – but you soon discover that not only do all the pieces here have titles that are unadorned place names, but they all concern that very theme. Can anyone, let alone Helen Simpson, sustain such a vaguely morbid topic over a full collection? Full review...

The Road More Travelled: Tales of those seeking refuge by David Beckler

5star.jpg Short Stories

The Road More Travelled is an anthology of short stories - and one poem - written in response to the refugee crisis as it exploded across our TV screens and newspapers throughout 2015. To the horror of the authors, the language used by many was aggressive and dehumanising, describing this mass of desperate people as a swarm or a horde. The stories together form a response to this othering. Full review...

Tales of the Peculiar by Ransom Riggs

5star.jpg Teens

A fork-tongued princess. A boy who can control the currents of the sea. Cannibals who feast on the limbs of a village of peculiars. These are just a few of the brilliant stories to be found in Tales of the Peculiar, all of which hold mystical information about the peculiar world - a place familiar to many of us since its first introduction by Ransom Riggs in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. The stories in this collection explore peculiar history and folklore in a wonderfully imaginative way, and also include some beautiful illustrations to accompany each of the tales. Full review...

I'll Be Home For Christmas by Benjamin Zephaniah and Others

5star.jpg Teens

Publisher Little Tiger and homelessness charity Crisis have got together and produced I'll Be Home For Christmas - an anthology of short stories from some of the most popular writers on the UK YA scene. The stories are connected by the theme of home. What does home mean to you? Is it your house, the physical place where you live? Is it your family? Your friends? Home can mean different things to different people, can't it? The book opens with a powerful poem by Bookbag favourite, Benjamin Zephaniah. The following stories are disparate - some telling tales of hardship and fear, some warming the cockles of your heart. But all of them are about home. Full review...

The Bed Moved by Rebecca Schiff

5star.jpg Short Stories

Rebecca Schiff's collection of short stories was a revelation. It has everything I want from a collection: humour, (often of the black variety), heartbreaking sadness, and moments of shocking clarity. These stories feel like the revealing of the inner workings of a young American woman's psyche. In fact, in the last short piece, entitled Write What You Know, it feels that the narrator/author is telling us the experiences which have led to this collection. I only know about parent death and sluttiness', she tells us. She goes on to talk about her knowledge of Jewish people who are assimilated, liberal and sexual guilt, and I think it is no exaggeration to say that these are the underlying themes to practically all of the stories here. Full review...

Tales of Accidental Genius by Simon Van Booy

5star.jpg Short Stories

A diverse, haunting and humorous collection of short fiction, Simon Van Booy offers a collection of stories highlighting how human genius can emerge through acts of compassion. With characters ranging from an eccentric film director, an aging Cockney bodyguard, the teenage child of Nigerian immigrants, a divorced amateur magician and a Beijing street vendor, Tales of Accidental Genius takes the reader on many, incredible journeys, and conveys more in a few pages than many authors would struggle to do in a whole novel. Full review...

Here I Stand by Amnesty International

5star.jpg Teens

Every so often Amnesty International gets together a number of great authors and produces an anthology of writing. This time, they've done it for younger readers with Here I Stand. Twenty-five contributions explore where we are with human rights in today's society: the sacrifices many made to win them; the sacrifices that still need to be made to spread them; how, where and why these rights are under attack and how deep is the need to defend them. Full review...

He Runs the Moon by Wendy Brandmark

3.5star.jpg Short Stories

This is the first time I had read any of Wendy Brandmark's fiction, and I was intrigued at the theme of the stories. She sets out writing short stories about different cities in the US, Denver, Bronx, New York, Cambridge and Boston, but also weaves in setting the stories in different eras. So we have a collection of stories ranging from the 1950's to the 1970's. Full review...

Hah by Birgul Oguz

3star.jpg Literary Fiction

I was interested to receive this book for review as I knew it was written in a modern, interesting style, being effectively a collection of short stories, but appearing more in a novel structure. I was, however, rather disappointed with the book. Whilst it does have some very fine examples of prose writing within the stories, I felt disconnected from the narrator, who is the daughter of a recently deceased man who was involved in a Turkish military coup in 1980. There is therefore a lot of examples of the narrator relating the conversations they had shared regarding revolution, and the way this had affected the daughter's upbringing and childhood. Another 'story' then delves into a seemingly disconnected wander through the town, whereby we see the narrator working at gutting fish, and talking about a man she finds repulsive, but who appears to be in love with her. Full review...

Make Something Up by Chuck Palahniuk

5star.jpg Short Stories

What are we to make of that subtitle-seeming writing on the front cover – stories you can't unread? Does that not apply to all good fiction? Clearly it is here due to the reputation of the author, and the baggage his name brings to the page. We'd expect a dramatic approach from anything Palahniuk writes, and an added frisson, an extra layer, from which we might be forced to shrink back. But a lot of the contents don't quite go that far. Yes, things are dramatic, when society starts attaching defibrillators to itself, to create the perfect, simple, care- (The Price is Right-, and Kardashian-) free happiness. A man buys a horse for his daughter – but boy is it the wrong horse to buy. A man falls in love – yes, sometimes the plot summaries of these stories really are better off for being short (speaking of which, don't turn to the three-page entrant here as a taster, it'll put you off by dint of being, almost uniquely here, a nothing story). A call centre worker can't convince people he's on the level and even in their country – until someone starts riffing back to him. A housing estate report conveys bad regulation violations, but not as bad as the happenings at a 'Burning Man'-styled festival, in a very clever couple of tales. But many too are the instances where that extra step has been taken. Full review...

Murder at the Manor: Country House Mysteries (British Library Crime Classics) by Martin Edwards (editor)

4.5star.jpg Crime (Historical)

I'm not big on short stories, but two factors nudged me towards this book. Firstly, it's broadly golden age crime, one of my weaknesses and secondly, the editor is Martin Edwards, a man whose knowledge of golden age crime is probably unsurpassed and he's done us proud, not only with his selection, but with the half-page biographies of the writers, which precede each story. There's just enough there to allow you to place the author and to direct you to other works if you're tempted. It's an elegant selection, from the well known and the less well known, all set in and around the country house. Full review...

Sharp Ends by Joe Abercrombie

4star.jpg Fantasy

I often feel that short stories are an indulgence on the part of the author, they get to write down a lot of their ideas that don't really fit into a larger story. The stop/start nature of them never sits well with me, just as I am starting to get to know a character they are gone. One way of solving this would be to use characters that a fan will already know; perhaps explore the past, or the future. That sounds great for a fan, but how do you do this whilst also catering for a new reader? Full review...

The Shore by Sara Taylor

4.5star.jpg Short Stories

The first story we hear from the Shore, a group of isolated islands off the coast of Virginia, is from Chloe, who's telling her sister about what she overheard in the store. She'd been there buying chicken necks so that they could go crabbing. Normally they used bacon rinds, but they'd already eaten those. Cabel Bloxom had been murdered and they done cut his thang clean off. The girls are motherless and Chloe is fiercely protective of her little sister Renee. She's the first of the strong women we'll encounter in these stories, which interlink to give a greater picture. Full review...

Death Wears a Beauty Mask by Mary Higgins Clark

4star.jpg Short Stories

In 1972, Mary Higgins Clark began writing a novella entitled Death Wears a Beauty Mask. She struggled with the story and put it aside, where it lay forgotton for several decades. When the author rediscovered the manuscript amongst some old files, she decided that she liked it and was ready to complete the long-awaited ending. Death Wears a Beauty Mask joins some of her other works, both old and new, in an entertaining collection of short stories full of mystery and suspense. Full review...

Dinosaurs on Other Planets by Danielle McLaughlin

4.5star.jpg Short Stories

Seeing as this book is clearly a talented author hitting the ground running, I will dispense with any major preamble. We start with a tale of a daughter affected by the emotions of her parents as they separate – and the influence of a certain school-teacher – from the mother's point of view. An ancient input shows how alien, and the modern day domesticity how regular, the isolation of a woman can feel, as events are peppered by minor acts of destruction. But men can be alienated too – especially one, a reluctant guest at a party for children hosted by someone he once had an affair with – he feels the new form of this influence in the light of another one he has had to try and abandon. 'All About Alice' – that's what the title character wants to say but has nobody to speak it to, but is it her – mid-40s and single, living with her father – that is most removed from her dreams or her old friend and now child factory, Marian? And we complete a lap of the calendar with the wintry tale of a man unable to tell his work superiors of the problems he faces at home – a new home, recently built like so many one sees while driving round Ireland. Full review...

Bryant and May - London's Glory by Christopher Fowler

4star.jpg Crime

In the depths of the last B&M review I wrote I said Of course, it's unbelievable, farcical. But then you don't come to a Bryant and May story for realism. You come for absurdity. Naturally, I stand by that comment. Fowler has concocted his characters and has no shame in shunting them up and down the time-line of British history as he sees fit. Full review...

Chance Developments: Unexpected Love Stories by Alexander McCall Smith

5star.jpg General Fiction

Sometimes, if I'm in a cafe by myself, I like to watch the people around me and imagine stories about their lives. Just a single sentence, overheard, can lead to wonderous tales of mystery and intrigue whilst I sip my cappuccino! So I was delighted to sit down to read the latest offering from AMS, not only because he wrote it, but because he wrote it after looking at 5 different black and white photographs, and then imagining the stories behind them. Who are all these people, and what are their stories? Each story is unique, and yet they all have one abiding link...love. Full review...

When Mr Putin Stole My Painting: Ten Short Stories by Joannah Yacoub

3.5star.jpg Short Stories

Put yourself, if necessary, in the mind of someone wanting to publish their first collection of short stories. What do you choose as the contents – besides just saying the best available? Do you try and find a theme, or connecting happenstance or style, to pin them together? Are they based on you now, someone else somewhen else, or all the diverse people and places you have once met? Joannah Yacoub seems to have gone for the latter. Full review...

Once Upon a Place by Eoin Colfer (editor)

3.5star.jpg Confident Readers

You know the bit of the blurb on every Artemis Fowl book, where Eoin Colfer had it said about how you pronounce his name? That wasn't the intention of an up-and-coming author to be recognisable; rather, it was pride. Pride in the difference of it, of the Irishness of it. Ireland, it seems to me, is more full than usual of people, things and ideas, and places that are different by dint of their singular nationality – and so many deserve to have pride attached to them. The places might not be the famous ones, but they can be the source of pride, and of stories, which is where this compilation of short works for the young comes in, with the authors invited to select their chosen place and write about it. Full review...

The Visitors Book by Sophie Hannah

3.5star.jpg Paranormal

Sophie Hannah's The Visitors Book is a short anthology of modern stories with a supernatural twist. There is not a hammy gothic turret in sight as her characters experience their mundane, day-to-day, 21st century business -- a children's birthday party, a visit to a boyfriend, neck pain, the school run. Now, ghost stories based on ordinary people leading ordinary lives can be very unsettling indeed, making overly imaginative readers look over their shoulder at the bus stop, or giving them goosebumps for no apparent reason. So I was curious to see what Sophie Hannah, a writer I much admire, would make of this particular material. Full review...

Fly Away Home by Marina Warner

3star.jpg Short Stories

How would you subvert a fairy tale? You know enough of them and enough about them to do it, so think on it. Would you give a mermaid a smartphone? Would you pepper them with pop stars, and perhaps let them be witness to the Schadenfreude caused by a cave that's sacred to native Canadians? Would you, in the light of their characters usually being routine, interchangeable tropes, give them a closely-observed personality – as seen here in a teacher's interior thoughts when faced with a piece of East Anglian lore? Would you take the exoticism of the east, and Egypt in particular, and see it in the light of a musical teacher on a zero-hours contract who ends up muttering to himself, directing traffic in the middle of the road, or from the remove of an elderly man with swollen feet in orthopaedic sandals with a message from the past? Certainly these two are not the standard Arabian Nights-styled pieces… Full review...

The American Lover by Rose Tremain

5star.jpg Short Stories

Having never read a Rose Tremain book before, I was interested to start this collection of short stories. I wasn't disappointed, and it quickly became clear why she has won so many literary awards for her work. Full review...

The Wind's Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose by Ursula K Le Guin

4star.jpg Science Fiction

I'll start by saying that I think the SF Masterworks series are pretty much always and without fail a really interesting read. I've bought quite a few from this publisher now and I find they will always pick interesting titles from the science fiction genre, making them a great place to start if you are either just dipping your toe into science fiction for the first time or if you're looking to build up your collection. Full review...

A Few of the Girls by Maeve Binchy

5star.jpg Short Stories

I was excited about reviewing a brand new collection of Maeve Binchy short stories and I wasn't disappointed. As her widower states in the introduction, Binchy had an extraordinary talent for telling powerful and compassionate stories, and was a true storyteller with an amazing output. Full review...

Dark Benediction by Walter M Miller Jr

5star.jpg Science Fiction

Walter M. Miller Jr is rightly placed among the science fiction giants H.G. Wells, Michael Moorcock, and Philip K. Dick in the Masterworks series, a large selection of genre-defining writers and works at the centre of what is now such a popular and diverse range of literatures, films, and television productions. Miller is considered one of the finest science fiction writers of the 1950s, and in Dark Benediction, fourteen of this author's best short stories are brought together in one collection. Full review...

Thunderstruck by Elizabeth McCracken

5star.jpg Short Stories

I chose to review this collection of short stories with no prior knowledge of the author's work – often the best way to do it, though I am aware that McCracken's work comes highly commended. After reading these stories, I can see why and I am already looking forward to reading more of her work. Full review...