"Alone" by Paolo Alberti (ed) (Giraldi Editore, 2019)

18 stories by Paolo Alberti, Gianluca Morozzi, Stefano Mellini, Leonardo Vicari, Piero Mariella

"alone" in Italian means "halo", an apt coincidence, as the back cover notes.

• "Han Solo!" recounts activity in a computer game - Han Solo vs Deus - for 6 pages, then shows us at the end that the 2 players are a boy whose mother discourages computer games, and an illegal immigrant, a 10 y.o. Chinese boy who told the psychologist he wanted to be called Han.
• "All those yesterdays" refers to several songs including Pearl Jam's "Alone".
• In "Sisifo Meccanico" a robot continues visiting his masters' house not realising they're dead. There may be no-one else alive. The robot then dies.
• In "Isolamento Amniotico" a fetus comes to consciousness, wondering if it already knows all it needs to. It's late. The mother doesn't know the baby's gender.
• In "2 Agosto 1980" Marisa (recently divorced, working in an autogrill) feels lonely though she's with a crowd. Paride (recently divorced from Marisa is a bus driver. His bus is divered to help with the Bologna massacre. Their son Tommaso is with his grandmother. She says that when she feels angry she hammers nails into wood. When Paride collects him, he's hammered in as much nails as victims of the massacre.

"The Darkest Evening" by Ann Cleeves

An audio book.

Lorna, who's been ill, has a baby, Thomas, who's about a year old.

It's been snowing. While driving her landrover in Northumberland, Vera, a detective inspector, finds an abandoned car with a baby in it. She takes the baby, leaving a note. The nearest house happens to belong to a rich relative of Vera's. Vera's not seen them for years, not since her father (the black sheep of the family) died. Juliette's holding a little party there. She and actor Mark have been married 3 years, childless. He wants to convert the rundown stately home into a theatre, and it seeking money. Dorothy, with a Cambridge degree and a toddler, is the housekeeper. She went to school with Juliette. Vera finds that the car is owned by 67 year old Constance Brown (ex-teacher). Her neighbour Lorna, a single mother, sometimes borrows her car.

Joe, a family man, is one of the policemen.

A dead body is found outside - Laura's.

They interview Lorna's mother while the father is out. Pretty Lorna had been bullied at school and got anorexia. She spent time in a clinic. She became pregnant. The mother thinks that her husband loved Lorna deeply, but the police wonder about the father (though they don't interview him?). The mother had seen the baby, but the father hadn't. The couple agree to look after the baby.

Holly, part of the police team, thinks through the suspicions that readers might be harbouring - that a woman might have murdered.

Mark has a womanising reputation. Juliette wants a child. Mark jobshares with Sophie. Mark lies to the police about what he did early one day in Newcastle.

Lorna liked painting. One of her several paintings of a cottage was called "The darkest evening". Josh (a friend of Mark) was in her art group. He and Lorna were friends, non-sexual.

Constance suddenly disappears. Lorna's clinic bills were paid by Juliette's father, Crispin. Lorna's mother said that she had a serious affair with Juliette's father, and Lorna could have been his child. But Juliette says that Crispin died before Lorna became pregnant.

On the day of her death, Lorna phoned various helpers saying that she was slipping back - something to do with Thomas's father.

Juliette knows that her mother knows that her father wanted Lorna to be looked after, though it wasn't in the will.

Vera finds that the cottage is in the estate's woods.

Bloodtests showed that Crispin wasn't Lorna's father.

Thomas is taken. Vera finds him in the cottage. A man with a shotgun takes here away - Josh's father. He confesses that he was Thomas's father, and that he'd planned to start a new life with Lorna. But when Lorna became stronger, less vulnerable, she changed her kind and became friends with Josh. Holly saves Vera. Vera later explains the case to Joe, and promises to stay friends with her rich relatives. Vera sees ways to help solve some people's problems that she'd learnt about during the invesigation.

"The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida" by Shehan Karunatilaka

An audio book.

It's a whodunnit where the second-person POV murder victim is a ghost who's forgotten the moments before his death. Comedy and Politics are included in the mix.

It’s 1975, Sri Lanka. The Tamil Tigers are about. When Maali realises he’s dead, in limbo, he thinks "So there is an afterlife". He was a photographer, gay, keen on gambling. He's described as a "dinner party activist". He's proud that he worked for anyone. He doesn’t recall his death. He sees his body in pieces, with other bodies. There’s admin to do within 7 days otherwise he'll never be able to move on to "The Light". They’re short of staff and are seeking volunteers. He learns the rules – about how to travel, etc. He's jumped from place to place (conveniently). He’s told not to visit cemeteries. He follows relatives and police to see what happened to him - thrown off a hotel balcony? He sees other ghosts. He doesn't want to leave until he finds out how he died, and gets the negatives of the photos to the right people. He learns how to whisper to the living, and influence their dreams.

Dr Rani is his guide. He knows her from his previous life - she used some of his photos without permission. Under his bed he has some incriminating photos from the 1983 riots. A Canadian-backed charity would like the photos. He used to live with Jackie – a relationship of convenience. He has a friend whose trait is "weaponising politeness as well as any Englishman"

Suicides and scholars try to convince him about the pros about cons of limbo. One suicider said that reincarnation was cheaper than paying for a sex-change, and that staying in limbo suited him - he'd always been an inbetweener.

When he discovers that Jackie was interrogated, he sells his soul to get her freed.

I think it could be shortened by 20% (the final 30 minutes for example don't feel effective) but it mostly manages to combine its genres successfully.

Other reviews

• Tomiwa Owolade
• Frank Lawton (For worlds like Karunatilaka’s to work, an author must set governing rules, so that the fantastic is not used as an easy trick to just magic away plot problems. Karunatilaka does briefly fall into this trap, with a new rule, discovered two-thirds of the way through and leading to an important plot development a few pages later, feeling overly convenient. But generally, his creation is hard won ... Some critics have seen The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida as a purely dystopian satire. But this misses the hope at the book’s core. For Karunatilaka also satirises those who see the world as a flat, material place without deeper meaning. ... Witty, inventive and moving, Karunatilaka’s prose is gloriously free of cliché, and despite the apparent cynicism of his smart-alec narrator, this is a deeply moral book that eschews the simple moralising of so much contemporary fiction. )

"Royston and district writers' circle 30th anniversary anthology" (2009)

In the introduction it says "we all aspire to write a novel". There are poems, radio scripts, poems, articles and stories - more variety than in many anthologies, and more PoVs of cats and dogs. I prefer the prose to the poetry.

• "A Day in the life ..." has the horn from "Lord of the flies" as the PoV - I like the idea.
• "Healing herb?" is a 50 word story where each word starts with "H".
• "Moonshine" uses a fun idea. I don't think it quite works in the end, but it was worth a try.

"New American stories" by Ben Marcus (ed) (Granta, 2015)

In the introduction Marcus writes -

• I also made a classic mistake. I confused the description of feeling with the creation of them. I wanted to cause feeling in others, but all I did was assert, somewhat grandiosely, that I had feelings myself (xviii)
• If writers can't genuinely make it new, they probably can't convincingly make it old, either (xx)

The stories were less than 10 years old at the time of printing, chosen with variety as well as quality in mind. 4 from the New Yorker, 2 from Harper's. 700+ pages. Doerr, Saunders, Lydia Davis, Zadie Smith, DeLillo, etc.

• "Paranoia" (Said Sayrafiezadeh) - Roberto arrived in the States when he was 13. His parents left him there when he was 17. Now 24, he lives above (and works for) a cobbler. When he breaks his nose, Dean (it's his 1st person PoV) visits him in hospital. On the way, Dean meets some guys (now fat) that he used to play football with. War is in the air. When Roberto's released, the bill is $3k. Dean lends Roberto $200. He goes to the July 4th parade and sees that a guy who was with his friends is now a soldier. When he goes round to Roberto's place he finds that Roberto's been taken away. Illegal immigrant? Trouble with a loan?
• "Slatland" (Rebecca Lee) - In 1967 the narrator, Margit, was a sad 11 year old girl. Her lecturer father took her to his colleague, Prof Pine, who told her to rise above her problems – she rightly thought her father was having an affair. In 1987 she's engaged with Balescu, a Romanian who escaped Ceausescu. He thinks that in America “People discuss their feelings as if they were great works of art or literature that need to be analyzed and examined and passed on and on”. When she’s driving him she falls asleep and he’s hurt in an accident which she rises above, looking down on him, hurting him the way Ceausescu would have hurt him. She thinks that “the signs indicating that a man is in love with another woman are often similar to the signs of an immigrant in a new country, his heart torn in two.” She thinks she’s getting letters from his wife, so she intercepts the letters (like Ceausescu would). She goes to Prof Pine to get the letters translated. Balescu has a wife and 2 kids. She decides to give him the letters
• "The early deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp and Carr" (Jesse Ball) - A judge claims that 4 young men, mucking about, caused his wife's miscarriage and challenges them one by one to a duel. He kills 2 of them. The 3rd kills the second at the last moment, then gets killed. We're privy to the youths' thoughts on the eve of their deaths. Next day the 4th youth is visited by the judge's wife, who has sex with him and tells him there was no miscarriage. The wife is the second for the duel. The 4th youth dies.
  I don't get it.
• "Some other, better Otto" (Deborah Eisenberg) - Mid-life crisis. Lawyer Otto, 50+, is in a long relationbship with musician William. He avoids family gatherings if he can. His sister Sharon is brilliant and mentally troubled. His sister's step-daughter at 9 is showing similar traits. A lesbian couple have just adopted a baby from China. Otto wonders whether he's good enough for William, and wonders about multi-verses.
  No
• "The Deep" (Anthony Doerr) - Tom's born in 1914 with a hole-in-the-heart problem. He's not expected to live to 18. He faints. He calms himself by thinking of blue. His single mother runs a boarding house for salt miners. A classmate, Ruby, befriends him. She likes oceans. She gives him tadpoles. She improvises diving equipment with a garden hose, getting him to pump while she walks into the lake weighed down by stones. When 15 they clumsily kiss once. In the Depression his mother leaves him. The bank repossesses the house. He finds a job in the city - a porter in a maternity ward. Ruby comes in. They've not seen each other for years. They agree to meet in an acquarium. They wish each other luck. Maybe the baby's eyes will turn blue. In the final sentence we're told he has a day to live.
• "A man like him" (Yiyun Li) - 66 year old ex Art teacher Fen in Beijing looks after his mother. She's rather confused. He notes down her phrases as if they were wise aphorism. He spends 3 hours/day in a cybercafe, Mrs Luo covering for him. He reads about a daughter who attacks an unfaithful father. Fen was adopted. He was doing well at art college until his prof father had to become a toilet cleaner. When he was 24, a teacher, he was accused of being over-interested in a 10 y.o. girl. He attacks the daughter online. He arranges a meeting with the father, who first thinks Fen is gay. Fen has found someone as passive and fatalistic has he is. He quotes his mother. I like how our view of Fen changes, and I kuke his use of his mother's quotes.
• "Home" (George Saunders) - A war-veteran returns to see his (ill?) mother and remarried ex-wife. Lots of quirky dialog and "don't tell her I told you" discussion.
• "Shhhh" (NoViolet Bulawayo) - The boy narrator's father has returned from South Africa at last, dying (of AIDS we later discover). Mother tells the boy to keep his father's return a secret. He can't play with his friends. He prays, and wonders above heaven.
  No
• "Special economics" (Maureen McHugh) - Set in China after bird-flu has kill a quarter of a million people. There are plague markets where secondhand wares are sold. Jeiling starts working in a factory making bio-batteries, paying the company more for food and accomodation than she earns. She sneaks out on Sundays with a friend, and busk. A man breaks into their room claiming to be a government inspector. He says that the local police are too corrupt to deal with their slavery, but stories in US media will work. They don't trust him. They take his money and use it to buy themselves out of the company, helping others too.
• "This appointment occurs in the past" (Sam Lipsyte) - The main character leaves the bed of his ex mother-in-law and later drives in a car (a parting gift from her) to a student friend, Davis, who he hadn't seen for year. There's a flashback to the witty student banter they had with Brianna and Debbie. They meet in a diner - "I suppose you could call it a retro diner, but what diner isn't? They're all designed to make you think fried food won't kill you because it's the 1950s".Davis (accidentally?) shhots him. He marries Debbie, who becomes a prof. Or maybe at the end he suicides?
• "Men" (Lydia Davis) - 7 lines.
• "Another Manhattan" (Donald Antrim) - 2 couples have been secretly swopping. Jim has been hopitalised a few times recently after suicide attempts. He's just spent hundreds of dollars on flowers for his wife, putting them in debt.
  Far too long for me - I lost interest.
• "Meet the president!" (Zadie Smith) - SF, set in East Anglia. Lowestoft has a population of 850 - the only people left are those who can't leave. Bill Peek, 14, is augmented. He talks with a local. I think he's playing an immersive computer game to break into the president's office while guiding the local to her sister's wake.
• "The largesse of the sea maiden" (Denis Johnson) - Episodic, some parts working for me, most including a moment of inappropriate/unexpected behaviour. I'm puzzled by the ending.
• "The country" (Joy Williams) - A father living with parents goes to a sort of church-based group therapy session. She wanted to put a Tagore quote on a billboard. His wife's left him. His 9 y.o. son is being home-taught. A woman from the church group visits. I don't get it.
• "A happy rural seat of various view: Lucinda's garden" (Christine Schutt) - Recently Nick and Pie visit Gordon - a friend, artist and womaniser. He touches Pie. Pie eventually leaves Nick. I don't get it.
• "Hammer and sickle" (Don DeLillo) - The Narrator is in a low-security prison. His ex-wife informs him that their 2 daughters (10 and 12) are on a kid's channel - reading out (and riffing off) financial snippets like playground chants. He thinks she wrote the script. The common room fills to watch their performances. He wonders what the inmates are deprived of - "touch screens ... the gentle bell reminders of an appointment ... the prospect of failed signals ... We were always on, wanted to be on, needed to be on, but that was history now." I like it.
• "Play" (Mathias Svalina) - The rules for some childhood games. I like most of them.
• "Madmen" (Lucy Corin) - The main character has her first period so she has to go to a place to pick her madman (or women). The people are labelled "Contemporary Bipolar", etc. She choses which to take home. Her mother might have been a madman. I like it.
• "The arms and legs of the lake" (Mary Gaitskill) - On a train, an Iraqi vet and a female pacificist (and others) talk. It gets awkward.
• "Raw water" (Wells Tower) - Cora (43, an artist who visits failed environmental projects) and huband Rodney go to stay in a rented house for a few weeks by an artificial sea-water lake with desalination equipment. The change (or the water) does their sex life good. He falls for a young girl. Interesting.
• "Pee on water" (Rachel B Glaser) - Summarising evolution in few pages. "This is the nice time of early men and monkeys, before cigarette butts cozied fat into the grass. No plastics, no prayers ... The first restaurant opens ... A pencil with an eraser attached ... The seventeen-year-old girl looks into the toilet at the shape of the shit that sits there, complete as one thing, a size similar to her boyfriend's penis. Not right, but close maybe, and she puts her hand above the water, widening her fingers to remember the length."
• "Love is a thing on sale for more money than there exists" (Tao Lin) - Garret and Kristy are NY students who've lived togerther for 1.5 years. Fears about terrorists abound. Garret sees her with a man - a terrorist? They separate. No.
• "The toast" (Rebecca Curtis) - Sonya (40) has an older sister Leala who has 2 daughters (6 and 8). She's invited Sonya to a wedding event. Sonya was a CW tutor. She's a food faddist. She thinks her sister's partner is boring. She's going to write the toast. She relates then rejects some family stories full of sibling rivalry and a friend of their mother who was often mentioned though rarely seen. When Leala read Sonya's book of short stories she wondered why all the big sisters were so nasty.
• "Going for a beer" (Robert Coover) - The narrator's confused about whether he's in the past, present or future.
• "Standard loneliness package" (Charles Yu) - The narrator works in a call centre for emotional engineering, experiencing moments of others' lives for a set rate. He tried to befriend the woman who works in the next cubicle but it doesn't last. He experiences the funeral of the woman's father.
• "Wait till you see me dance" (Deb Olin Unferth) - The narrator teaches English to non-English students. She can also tell when people will die. She falls in love with a useless student who's 11 years younger than she is. He's a brilliant pianist. The school administrator invites her to a Native American dance event. Neither of then are native american. She offers the administrator $1000 if she can mark her class's exams. The administrator refuses. She abandons the administrator in the desert, knowing she's soon to die anyway, then returns to collect her. She still refuses. The narrator's contract isn't going to be renewed anyway - poor performance.
• "The lucky body" (Kyle Coma-Thompson) - A murder and subsequent destruction of the body. 4 pages. I don't get it.
• "The lost order" (Rivka Galchen) - A lawyer has retired without telling her husand. She'd receiving phone orders for food. She becomes ambiguous about gender roles.
• "Fish Sticks" (Donald Ray Pollock) - Del's in a late-night laundromat on the eve of cousin Randy's funeral. Randy had been a sucessful body-builder. When they were kids they ran off to Florida and Del got money for them by selling sex. The wierd girlfriend who Del's been trying to dump comes in and offers sex, telling him to pretend he's paying for it.
• "Valley of the girls" (Kelly Link) - In the near future some kids emulate Egyptian rites, having pyramids and burial chambres built, worrying about grave robbers. In the text, names are in boxes, like cartouches. Someone suicides, someone is locked in a tomb with them.
• "The diggings" (Claire Vaye Watkins) - In 1847 2 brother become gold-diggers. One has visions of the future. They get ripped off, meet an interesting pair of Chinese men.

"Fabulous" by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (4th Estate, 2019)

Stories based on myths which are summarised at the end of the book.

• Orpheus - A man, Oz, is worried when a woman (his wife? Eurydice?) walks a dog withe friend Milla. She's pulled underground, ends up in hospital. He has a remarkable, classical, voice, giving concerts. He goes to her bedside, sings. He disappears underground, meets her. He's resuscitated. She dies. People help him with his grief. (No. I don't like the way myth and life have been mixed)
• Actaeon - The narrator (married to Sophie) is in a team of estate agents lead by Acton (gay, living with William). Acton's boss is Diana. They redevelop a London warehouse, sell off the apartments one by one. They party on the roof. Acton starts watching Diana have sex with her female lover. When Diana learns about this she talks to each of her team, makes them aggressive. At the next party they throw him off the roof.
• Psyche - The beautiful pysche has no friends. She works at the library. Quiet, pretty Crispin talks to her. The local boys help Crispin's rough cousin Mackeson to take her to a cave. He can't rape her. She feels sorry for him, and he for himself. He leaves, Crispin rushes to help her. They meet each evening in the cave, Psyche pretending not to know it's Crispin she's making love to. Mackeson tells her the Crispin has a secret. When Crispin's asleep after sex she lights a match to check Mackeson's claim. Then in the story an "I" appears, telling us that she marries the head librarian and has an affair with Mackeson.
• Pasiphae - Minos controls a gang, competing with the Danaans for control. When someone needs to be killed as an example, a bull's head is put on them. Dee-Dee is his fixer. They're involved with illegal immigrants who are at first hidden in tunnels, then work in clubs, etc. Passify (Paz) used to be one. Now, 11 weeks later, she's his preferred partner. He suggested that she manage the new club he's opening - The Cow. She starts watching a handsome man swim - a Danaan. Dee-Dee suggests that she employ him as a dancer. She makes lover with him. When she become pregnant, Minos chucks her out. The dancer is arrested. She moves in to the tunnels under Dee-Dee's house. He flees (we learn that he's Dedalus). She gives birth to twins - one Minos's, one the strangers'.
• Joseph - "Uncle" Joseph fell in love with Maria when she was a toddler. He emigrated to London, becoming a window cleaner. When 38 he was offered a room in return for looking after the house. He moved into the basement and returned to his homeland to ask for Maria's hand. She was pregnant and single so she moved to London with him. He was evicted. They tried fruit-picking for a while, then found a room. He picked apple blossom for her. (No)
• Mary Magdalen - She works in a beauticians, reads in a pub, and swims regulary. At night she's a whore in a cemetery. In the cemetery one night a man's dying. She tries to revive him with the help of his friends (who have disciples' names) and cocaine. Yobs take him away. He's buried - digging the grave takes 3 attempts. Later, she sees the cemetery gardener. But actually it's the man, saying "don't touch me."
• Tristan - Mark Corwall (an antiques dealer) tells his intern Tristan to collect his wife-to-be Izza (Isolde) from the airport. She arrives with Bronwen. Tristan fall in love with Izza (he's drugged). He used to fancy Mark. Bronwen loves Izza. mark finds out about Izza and Tristan. To his surprise he's jealous. The women move to Lisbon. Izza becomes a num. A decade later, Mark (married to Brian) and Tristan meet. Tristan wonders how strong the various loves were. Did he and Mark both make Izza up to some extent?
• Piper - He lives in a double-decker bus by an airstrip in Suffolk and works as a vermin exterminator. Kids like playing in his bus, imagining journeys. He plays the sax. The town has tunnels and waterways beneath it - there were floods about twice a year. Sylvia's a single mother, with a little son, Billy (who's deaf, we learn much later). There's a rat infestation. People stay indoors. He rigs his van with his old disco equipment and drives it through town. The rats follow. He drives them into the sea, then gives the town the bill. There are many communists in the town. The town's richest man has a daughter called Jazz. He says that the town can't afford the bill (Piper's an outsider anyway). Next day he drives the bus into the square where there's a festival and starts playing. The adults get amorous. Immigrants and outsiders continue his performance while he leaves in his bus that's full of children. The bus is never seen again, though there are rumours. (I think this is the best of the stories. It certainly has the best passages, the outsider theme being a welcome addition)

Sometimes more of the myth is added to the story than reality can cope with - the stories are more Realism than Magic Realism.

Other reviews

• Johanna Thomas-Corr (All eight tales demonstrate a peculiar anti-knack for storytelling. ... Modern Britain is rendered in broad brushstrokes, the happy-hour cocktails and spaniels carried in handbags doing little to make these tales feel relevant. ... The writing is so drunk on its own capriciousness, it’s difficult to pick out any unifying themes, except for perhaps the randomness of life. For random is what these stories are. )
• Kirkus reviews (Each of these stories has its charms, but none is particularly successful. ... “Actaeon” suffers from two issues that are endemic in this collection. There is a heavy reliance on exposition, to the point that these tales read more like outlines for novels than short fictions. And these stories only come to life when knowledge of the source material isn’t necessary to find the story compelling)
• Townsend Walker (The lack of subtlety is repeated in the story of “Joseph.” He sees the young Mary with pale gray eyes and “from that moment Joseph was hers for life, for ever and ever amen.” The lack of trust in the reader is further portrayed when Joseph breaks off flowering sprays from a wild apple tree to carry back to Mary ... The basic issue in this collection of stories is that the author does not have a good sense of the segments of the myths that work in the context of a modern setting and those she should leave behind.)

"Plot and counter-plot" by Helena Nelson (Shoestring Press, 2010)

Some sonnets - loose and tight ones appear on facing pages early on, establishing the stylistic flexibility. There are rhyming pieces that are like Stevie Smith or folk songs - "O" and "Oh" are used. There are short pieces like "Teller" (which has an "ab cd ad cb" rhyme scheme). There are psychological dialogues like "The Hill" where a man leaves a woman to climb a hill alone. It ends with "He doesn't ask about the view from the top./ She doesn't tell him she didn't reach the top.// She might think, 'This is the story of my life'/ but although this the story of her life// that is not what she thinks./ She thinks something else."