"Head Land" by Rodge Glass (ed), Freight Books and Edge Hill UP, 2016

10 years of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. The editor chose the authors who each chose one of their stories. I've heard of nearly all the authors - Ali Smith, Tessa Hadley, Sarah Hall, Jon McGregor, et al.

The editor writes that "In the 21st century, the short story world is organised ... No longer can lovers of the form complain about being marginalised ... I believed the short story in the UK and Ireland in particular is in rude health right now", backing his case by mentioning some the big prizes now available, major authors who've stayed faithful to the short story, and Hensher's two-volume anthology.

• "A Priest in the Family" (Colm Toibin) - a widow's son is accused of child abuse just when she's learning to use the internet. Friends tell her to holiday in the Canaries until things quieten down. When her son visits to tell her the same, she says the right things, but isn't motherly. She plans to keep her social routines going.
• "The Rainbow" (Nicholas Royle) - a rainbow appears for days over Paris. The narrator's just split with a man. S/he sees him on the crowded street of observers. The rainbow fades. S/he loses sight of the man. I like the idea. I'm less sure of the ending.
• "The Flints of Memory Lane" (Neil Gaiman). No.
• "An Italian Child" (Tamar Yellin) - literary, but nothing special. Contains "In the morning the cockerel crows at dawn" (which sounds wrong) and "It is easiest to tell lies in a foreign language. Which is surely why so many people pray in Latin" (which is better)
• "Close to the water's edge" (Claire Keegan) - some sudden jumps.
• "Monsters" (Chris Beckett) - The narrator from the Metropolis visits Flain with its high society, wannebee artists, fire horses and sky-ball. Works for me.
• "True Short Story" (Ali Smith) - an overheard dialogue in a cafe leads the narrator to phone a friend undergoing chemo, and to think about the differences between novels and short stories. My favourite piece so far.
• "Michael" (Jeremy Dyson) - Dannie, a self-harming loner, meets a self-harming girl in a wood. Turns out she's a ghost tempting him to his death. I recall reading the story before. I like it.
• "Vanish" (A.L. Kennedy) - I don't understand all of this.
• "George Clooney's Moustache" (Robert Shearman) - the first-person narrator (who's a wife and mother?) is being held captive, like in "The Room". But when she has a chance to escape, she doesn't. The captor tries to make her go. While threatening her he kills her. But she remains in love with him as a ghost, and in the end he becomes her captive.
• "The lesson" (Graham Mort) - I like the (old fashioned?) style. It's set in Spain. An old man with an old dog befriends a youth. His thinks about the past, the wars, and how his ancestors were fisherman. He asks the boy to teach him to swim. The story ends rather suddenly with his first lesson.
• "Diary of an interesting year" (Helen Simpson) - diary entries set in 2040, London. Pollution, rationing, no internet.
• "There are new birthdays now" (Tom Vowler) - a separated couple meet on the anniversary of their daughter's disappearance. He's remarried with children. She isn't.
• "Married love" (Tessa Hadley) - A student marries her OAP music lecturer and quickly has 3 children. "A squall of rain urged against the steamed-up window panes, the kettle boiled, toast sprang from the toaster for no one in particular" might be ok, but not "Em was gracefully loose-jointed with her mother's hooded, poetic eyes". It did very little for me.
• "Vuotjärvi" (Sarah Hall) - A couple are staying by a lake. The water's red, nearly body temperature with mysterious depths. Her lover decides to swim to an island an hour away. She worries about him, wants to commit herself to him, decides to set off in a rowing boat, but when the boat starts to sink she heads back - to the nearest point of the coast if not their rented cottage. Water takes them both over. I think there's a typo on p.161 - "If he converted his easy breaststroke into a craw".
• "These words are no more than a story about a woman on a bus" (Zoe Lambert) - a story about Lithuanian resistance framed by a story about being on a bus. Wasn't that impressed.
• "Wifey redux" (Kevin Barry) - A father's talked into trying to make his daughter's ex-boyfriend come back to her, but the father disliked the boy in the first place. He especially dislikes some graffiti he's seen about his daughter. A long and rather routine story. Jolly enough though.
• "Everything a parent needs to know" (Carys Bray) - the story's ok, but I dislike some of the details - "Helen is porcupined by these articulated arrows", "Disappointment bounces off Paul like hail"
• "The stone thrower" (Adam Marek) - a superhuman stone-thrower kills a family's chickens one by one, even those that the father tries to save by bringing indoors - sounds an odd idea for a story, but it sticks in the mind.
• "Wires" (Jon McGregor) - the shock of a minor car accident makes the driver reconsider her relationship with an older man.
• "The deer larder" (John Burnside) - Another framed story. A man is e-mailed a sequence of posts - wrong address? surreal junk? a literary trick? Reality interrupts at the end, but I couldn't see what the purpose of narrator's illness was.
• "Hard as nails" (Rachel Trezise) - someone working in a nail-parlour goes on holiday with 2 work colleagues. One of them, who's hidden their pregnancy, gives birth to a dead baby. No.
• "The fox and the placenta" (Madaleine D'Arcy) - Marilyn's expecting her first child. The father might be her fun-loving ex, or the devoted Brendan (who's aware of the uncertainty). It's a home birth. Foxes are lurking outside. They try to go off with the placenta that Brendan's put outside.
• "The redemption of Galen Pike" (Carys Davies) - A condemned man, Pike, is visited nearly daily during his final week by Patience, a 36 year-old Quaker, in a little settlement (Colorado). Her hopes for a library, a hostel for unwed mothers, etc have for years been thwarted by the mayor. The twist is that we learn after Pike's hanging that his crime (eating 4 residents) has tipped the balance so that the mayor will lose the next election. This realisation seems to cheer Patience up.
• "The scenario" (Kirsty Gunn) - About a chat at a party, and semiotics - "the particular delicious feeling you sometimes get when talking with someone, about the conversation actually being about several things at once - the primary subject having been about that film, and how it had caused both of us to express quite opposing views, and then this other very different, narratively-oriented conversation that had come out of that, all about bodies versus language and what had happened to Claire with a glamorous older woman when she was a student"
• "The dowager of bees" (China Mieville) - a rather strange sequence of card games
• "Scropton, Sudbury, Marchinton, Uttoxeter" (Jessie Greengrass) - Greengrass's usual well-spoken narrator who does rather odd things. Not much happens. The daughter of a greengrocer who got a scholarship to a boarding school felt guilty later in life about her somewhat snooty attitude to her now dead parents. She returned to the town, and the shop. "After a few minutes it began to seem as if to go in now would be more peculiar than not to do so, and nor could I just walk away; besides which, I felt a kind of peace standing on the cobbles in the rain. I felt as though perhaps I had hit entirely by accident upon the only right thing I could have done, and so in the end it was all that I did: I stood outside the shop all afternoon". At the end of the story on the train home "I felt that regardless of whether anything was different because of it, still what I had done had been satisfactory, and I hoped too that it might in some way have been expiatory, and that I might have made amends; and perhaps after all I had been afforded some measure of absolution"