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Last Night by James Salter: “Arlington”
I am aware that my pieces about the stories in this collection have been growing increasingly ill-tempered. At first, Salter’s elliptical methods and saw-tooth stylings enchanted me but the novelty has...
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Last Night by James Salter: “Last Night”
While I have tried my best to stay out of the way of any essays or reviews that might have distorted my take on this collection, I had heard that the final eponymous story was something special. I...
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Colin Barrett’s Young Skins: “The Clancy Kid”
Having spent some time among the upper middle-class Americans of James Salter’s Last Night, I decided to go somewhere different for my next series of pieces about short fiction. Set in the fictitious...
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Colin Barrett’s Young Skins: “Bait”
“Bait” closely resembles “The Clancy Kid” in that it is another story about the gender dynamics of Barrett’s fictional Irish town. In Glanbeigh, the young women are fierce and exotic creatures while...
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Colin Barrett’s Young Skins: “The Moon”
Short story Short: This is yet another story about the impossibly fierce, beautiful and unapproachable women living in the fictional Irish town of Glanbeigh. Short story Long: This follows the example...
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Colin Barrett’s Young Skins: “Stand Your Skin”
I alighted on this book after reading a few reviews but none of them went so far as to mention a context for the book’s creation. Interviews with Barrett focus on his process and the fact that he...
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Colin Barrett’s Young Skins: “Calm With Horses”
At 74-pages in length “Calm with Horses” is not only the longest work in the collection by some considerable margin. It is also the only work that might be described as a novella rather than a...
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Colin Barrett’s Young Skins: “Diamonds”
If “Calm with Horses” was all about Barrett relaxing into the long-distance gait of the novelist then this story is all about the explosive energy of the short fiction sprinter. Even less concerned...
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Colin Barrett’s Young Skins: “Kindly Forget My Existence”
As I reach the finish line, I’m moved to consider whether or not Colin Barrett’s Young Skins is actually a decent collection of short stories. As I’ve mentioned before, Barrett’s name often features in...
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[SOR] L. Timmel Duchamp’s “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.”
I admit to having entirely unreasonable expectations when it comes to themed short fiction anthologies. The reason I have such high standards is that themed anthologies have always struck me as...
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[SOR] Leonora Carrington “My Flannel Knickers”
The second story to feature in Sisters of the Revolution may be a bit unconventional but its inclusion is nonetheless a really clever piece of business. Leonora Carrington was born in Lancashire to...
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[SOR] Kit Reed’s “The Mothers of Shark Island”
This story reminded me very much of an Australian horror film named The Babadook. First screened at the 2014 Sundance film festival, Jennifer Kent’s Babadook tells of a single mother named Amelia who...
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[SOR] Nnedi Okorafor’s “The Palm Tree Bandit”
There is a tendency in genre culture to view Nnedi Okorafor as an African genre writer despite the fact that she was born in Ohio and works as an academic at an American university. While I would never...
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[SOR] Eleanor Arnason’s “The Grammarian’s Five Daughters”
I’ve been riding my luck so far with this anthology but the other foot has now officially dropped. Commentators sometimes talk about using short fiction anthologies to frame particular movements,...
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[SOR] Kelley Eskridge’s “And Salome Danced”
Having spent far too much time complaining about genre culture’s unhealthy addiction to meta-textual writing and the VanderMeers’ decision to demonstrate this dependency in the form of back-to-back...
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[SOR] Angélica Gorodischer’s “The Perfect Married Woman”
One of the biggest structural problems facing genre publishing is the reluctance of editors to seek out the work of emerging writers. As genre awards demonstrate, the single most effective way of...
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[SOR] Nalo Hopkinson’s “The Glass Bottle Trick”
I noted with interest that while this is no less than the sixth time that “The Glass Bottle Trick” has appeared in a magazine or anthology, it first appeared in a book called Whispers from the Cotton...
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[SOR] Leena Krohn’s “Their Mother’s Tears: Fourth Letter”
Less a short story than an excerpt from a novel, “Their Mothers Tears: The Fourth Letter” is clipped from the pages of Krohn’s novel Tainaron: Mail from Another City. Tanairon was first published in...
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[SOR] James Tiptree, Jr’s “The Screwfly Solution”
Given that one of the more rewarding elements of this anthology has been the VanderMeer’s willingness to seek out the work of writers not usually attended to in genre circles, I am slightly...
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Genre Origin Stories
As part of the Shadow Clarke project, each of the jurors were asked to write an introduction that laid out some of their thoughts about science fiction and how they perceived the Arthur C. Clarke...
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