"Dying by numbers" by Sam Kates (2018)

A short story with 2 time-lines - 1944 Auschwitz and 2001 Paris. The conditions in Auschwitz are well described. Joe and Sam make 2 promises: if one of their numbers is called out, the other will step forward; if only one of them gets out, he'll find the daughter of the other. Sam's number is called. Joe dies. Sam's ordered to cover the bodies. In 2001, Sam's daughter finds Joe's daughter by chance (Sam's extensive searches had failed). Sam, 78 years old, immediately flies over from England riddled with guilt, and apologises to Joe's daughter. That's it.

"All hail the new puritans" by Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne (eds) (Fourth Estate, 2000)

They begin with a 10 point, single page manifesto which the authors signed up to. Then there's an introduction to elaborate the manifesto, including -

• In the name of clarity, we recognise the importance of temporal linearity and eschew flashbacks, dual temporal narratives and foreshadowing ... Flashbacks are a cheap trick ... I have no problem with dual narratives generally, especially in longer fiction. But for this project we wanted to force the included writers into putting everything into a single narrative strand.
• All our texts are dated and set in the present day. All products, places, artists and objects named are real ... Current historical fiction seems to be written with the sole purpose of denying life
• We are moralists, so all texts feature a recognisable ethical reality

"Mind Control" (Scarlett Thomas) begins at a cracking pace, then fades a little. In "Monaco" a photographer recounts the lead-up to a photo taken during the Monaco Grand Prix (a pretty female spectator orgasming as a car speeds past), giving some historical info. "A Ghost Story (Director's Cut)" - Jim visits Martha who he met at film school. She and Gareth have a nice house. During discussion with their young cleaner, Karen, Jim reveals that he had a sort of breakdown when his film got some bad reviews (one said that Jim was "a failed magic realist", which might be an allusion to the manifesto). He's an ex-alcoholic too.

"Short Guide to Game Theory". About a Dragon's Den boardgame conference, where supposed industrial espionage leads to assault. "Mr Miller" - A bar monologuer, having left a soggy parcel with the bartender to dry, tells the narrator that people who talk about suicide don't go on to do it. But an hour after leaving the bar, he's found dead, hanging from a lamp-post. The parcel contains the pros/cons of suicide written when in his early teens after he was jilted. In "Better than well" someone wakes up after having fluoxetine, and ponders. In "Skunk" the narrator visits friends in Paris, and during an afternoon walk shares skunk with a woman he meets, a friend of his hosts. But she has an adverse reaction. Confused, she takes a taxi. The story ends when he receives a phone call at 12.30am

After several stories I wasn't fussy about I like Matt Thorne's "Not as bad as this". It had the "textual simplicity" encouraged by the manifesto. I enjoys working out the relationships. The narrator Rob has been asked by his ex, Chloe, to stay with her and her father for a few days because her father wouldn't won't talk. Above Chloe's bed, there's a lifesize nude of Chloe done by the girlfriend of Chloe's sister. Rob leaves in the night with the painting once he realises that he might have to stay for a while (he's slept with Chloe).

In "Facing the Music" Jane, the 15 y.o. narrator goes out to see a gig, lying to her single mother that she's babysitting. When she gets to the venue she finds that the gig's been cancelled because te lead singer's ill. She phones the lead singer and he's not ill. She'll be in big trouble when she gets home - she's told lies to cover up earlier lies. The "Three Love Stories" total 3 pages and aren't really worth it.

The narrator in "Monkey See" (Matthew Branton) is a 40 y.o. policeman whose job is to look at computer porn. He's remarried to 45 y.o Fran. She wants him to change jobs. They've not had sex for 4 months. Her daughter's an art student whose works use porn ironically. He gets sexual pleasure looking through Fran's family photos in the loft. In part 2 a few months later they visit a swingers club for the first time. He's hoping it will rekindle something. Fran enjoys it even more than he does. The story's rather long, but I like the dead-pan delivery.

"Two Holes" - BigPete's lost the belt where each hole represents a woman he's slept with. He hasn't added a hole for a year. He shares a flat with LittlePete. While searching, evidence is uncovered to suggest that his last lover slept with LittlePete. In "Poet" the narrator's "giving up smoking and his mistress of six months, and writing a sonnet every day instead" dedicated to his wife. There are hints at the end about why he and his wife are apart - "They'll be able to put this hospital thing behind them". Toby Litt's "The Puritans" features Jill and Jack (a couple) and John each do 8 hour shifts in the cellar of their Suffolk beach cottage, copying hard-porn video tapes. A young couple, Mark and Molly, arrive to rent the the next cottage for a week. Molly tells Jill that she's pregnant. She tried to seduce Jack. Mark tells Jack that she's mad, not pregnant, and tries to seduce Molly. At the end, the hard-porn boss appears. Jill and John are man-handled by Molly, Mark, John and the boss. Perhaps a porn-film's going to be made, rather like one described earlier in the story? In "Lovers" a young girl leaves her parents' home to start up life in a flat with her boyfriend. The 2 of them and her parents both seems like happy couples.

So in the end I liked the stories by Scarlett Thomas, Matthew Branton, Matt Thorne and Toby Litt.

Other reviews

• James Wood ()
• Judith Shulevitz (the reviews have been plentiful and negative ... the editors -- the tough-guy crime writer Nicholas Blincoe, 36, and the rave-scene novelist Matt Thorne, 27 -- required their contributors to sign a 10-point manifesto implicitly modeled on the one issued by the filmmakers of Dogma 95. ... The best piece in the collection, ''Skunk'' by Geoff Dyer, flouts the rules in a minor way -- it's set a year in the past -- but is none the worse for sticking to them otherwise ... It's tempting to dismiss ''All Hail the New Puritans'' as a clumsy joke, the impudent gesture of cocksure youth or a marketing ploy, if not all three. Supremely silly as it can sometimes be, however, the manifesto does demand to be taken seriously at its most fundamental level: as a statement of an intention to revolt by being revolting.)
• workshyfop (Looking at the group as a whole, there is a clear slant towards the white, metropolitan and male, but the roster contains a relatively impressive mixture of established authors and rising stars. Coupled with a deliberately controversial and media-friendly manifesto, it’s no surprise the arts supplements were interested. ... It soon becomes apparent that the strictures on punctuation and flashbacks severely hamper the stories contained within. In particular, the need to create rounded characters within a purely linear narrative means the authors stuff their dialogue with exposition ... Many of the stories lack any sort of conclusion, possibly influenced by rule nine, ‘all texts feature a recognisable ethical reality’. ... Perhaps, though, the anthology’s problems are best summed up by Geoff Dyer’s Skunk. Dyer is clearly a cut above most of the rest of the contributors, but seems hamstrung by the manifesto. ... The New Puritans briefly satisfied a need in the literary world, their manifesto providing a controversial discussion point for arts shows and Sunday supplements desperate for a narrative. Unfortunately, the title proved to be more of a flag of convenience than a real meeting of like-minds.)

"Aromabingo" by David Gaffney (Salt, 2007)

Flash and some longer pieces from Ambit, Lamport Court, etc.

Nothing ostentaciously literary. Even when stories didn't work for me, there were interesting details and twists. I liked the twists of "Art Movement" and "Through the medium of modern dance". I liked the idea of "All mod cons" though I wasn't so keen on the ending. "Still in box" puzzled me, as did "Only the stones remain". "Using the facilities" didn't have enough. "Chairs Missing" is interesting. "Mean picking" with its Dorian Gray influence, had some touching moments

Later in the book, some stories are over 10 pages long. Rather than padding the space with backstory and description there's more of an emphasis in plot. Sometimes 2 ideas that could each have sustained a Flash piece are combined. I think these stories are more consistently good than the earlier ones. The features I like in the Flash are here too.

• "This is about Dixie" looks rather like a merge of 2 short pieces - one about the secret lives of cats, and another about getting along with a tedious neighbour. The threads combine well - it's perhaps my favourite story, ending with For without boundaries how would we ever know where one thing ended and the other began?.
• In "Does anyone care for you on a regular basis" Carl starts being a counsellor. "Repeat, Reflect, Paraphrase" doesn't work. While counselling from home on the phone he picks up a manual at random, finding the contents useful - "You see, sometimes a system needs completely draining. Years and years of the same stuff circulating round and round causes, like, a build up".
• "Special pudding" begins excellently, has a slight dip in the middle while the plot's developed, then ends well.
• In "Guided by voices" Gifford is trying to solve a customer's computer problems over the phone. The customer's Anthony Burgess - a voice from the past? Burgess begins to haunt Gifford's life. An original and entertaining piece.
• "Gossamer" - In the evening Damien fakes being a cleaner at the place where he has a daytime desk job, hoping to to find out what his office colleague Emma thinks about him. He befriends Donny whose newly born grandson is in intensive care. There's a twist in the Donny thread at the end, but not much of an Emma twist.

Other reviews

• Melissa Lee (It’s not to say I was dissatisfied by the many arbitrarily challenged endings, but unsatisfied, yes. Gaffney has a knack of producing inner qualms in a reader so that he operates almost as a keen opponent as much as the story’s creator. And the humour is as black as only northerners know how, or feel the right to be offended by.)

"Bath Short Story Award 2018" (Adhoc, 2018)

My impression is that that meta-fiction doesn't do well in competitions. Strong (even quirky) voices do.

• The tank - To escape a bush fire a couple get into a water tank. They can't escape it, and have to keep swimming. We learn about them as they pass the time and wonder what to do. The action flicks to others who the couple think about, and who might save them.
• Off-ground summer - A very plotty piece, though not lacking in observation. It's in the first-person. Dan (maybe 10-ish?) sees new US neighbours move in. He becomes friendly with the girl, Suzie. Her father's a pilot. She's impressed when he tells her that his older brother Pete died a year before. His mother still can't go into Pete's room. Dan's only been in once. Dan thinks that Mr Bruce, a neighbour, ran him over. One night in her new tree house they hatch a plan - Dan will dress like Pete's ghost in Mr Bruce's garden. Mr Bruce sees him, gets in his car and kills himself. Dan tells his mother that Mr Bruce killed Pete. She says that actually he was the one who found him and never got over it. Suzie soon leaves. Dan cries on Pete's bed - for Pete? for Mr Bruce? for Suzie? His mother stands at the door. He hugs her. The final sentence is - "I can't remember the last time I'd hugged her, but I know she was bigger then - or maybe, in the summer, I'd grown."
• Sea defences - Here's the first section: "I'm in the police station. Again. But this time it's different because of the shoe. And because Mumma's not here. Normally she waits outside while they tell me off about my job (you can't keep doing this, Michael) and then we get chips and go home.
  Mumma was trying to save me, but she couldn't. There was blood and mud on her face, and her eyes were shut. Her skirt was up round the top of her legs and they put a blanket on her and took her to hospital. There was an ambulance and three police cars and blue lights flashing". The main character spends his time looking after children because of the death of a child a few years before. As the sea was destroying their home, a red shoe appeared that he'd hidden. It had belonged to Hannah, who'd been carried away by the sea as he was showing her humanoid footprints exposed by storms. His mother fell trying to recover the shoe before the police found it. At the end we learn that she's died.
• Blue suede shoes - While in a coffee bar Irena sees her boyfriend of 3 years ago, an orchestra leader who used to kick her. I saw little in the piece, perhaps because I'm not keen on the sort of writing on p.34 - metaphors like "he would furiously tear away the cocoon they had spun around themselves", and the description of his behaviour that uses music analogies - "Fortissimo" etc. Yet the writing's described as "exquisite".
• Witches sail in eggshells - The female narrator, 18 or so, has a brief intense affair with an attractive, difficult stranger, Kezia, encouraged by her friend and workmate Meg. Two years later Kezia presumptiously reappears. The narrator ejects her quickly, realising that the reliable long-term friendship of Meg means more. Seemed a minor tale to me.
• The other couple - A couple are on holiday at the beach. The wife (who's lost a baby?) repeatedly sees an old, content couple, and then sees some mothers with kids at the beach. Thinking the old woman's walk into the sea, she walks in to save her. Her husband rescues her. They're alone on the beach. It's a telegraphed plot that's been used before, and the implementation's nothing special. I'm puzzled.
• Down in the mud on Limehouse beach - A 73 y.o. woman who used to work in a sugar factory, has several dead friends and likes repeating adjectives, searches the Thames mud for stories rather than treasures. She seeks to educate spectators. An interestingly quirky voice and world-view.
• Educating Susan - It's Susan's first day in an Australian school. She's from England. The male teacher makes fun of her accent. She has to decide whether to keep her accent or learn a new one. Her class-aware mother can no longer assess class merely by how people speak, and want Susan to keep her accent. Susan doesn't agree.
• Hikikomori - Kenji's mother, Azumi, leaves a meal outside his bedroom that he's not left for 248 days, not since he left for Tokyo University and returned after a day. She tells an acquaintance that he's travelling around Europe. She writes a note to him on an origami bird, asking him to come down for a meal and promising to keep all the lights off. By candle-light, silently, they eat (she's put out Ricicles, Pop Tarts and Coco-Pops) and he returns to his room. Not enough for me.
• Kassidee - It begins in media res. "The facts are these", we're told 2 pages in, "Kathleen died in bloody childbirth, and Aunt Eleanor helped ensure that she wasn't buried at her mother's feet in a tiny casket of her own. Everything else is a gift to the Irish storyteller". The girl, now 7, crosses a field, is told off and chased by the farmer who throws her in the air. It's mock anger - he's her father who walks with her to see the countryside from the top of a hill/mountain. He tells her how horrible London is, how kids have to clean chimneys. An old friend, hollow-cheeked, tells her father "It has returned. Worse than ever. The stench - my God, the stench!". After a few months her father has "deep, rasping breaths" and there's potato blight.
• Nanook's Igloo - I'd have given this a prize. At first it's unclear who "I" and "you" are. "You" liked watching a docudrama about an Inuk man. "You" could be the therapist of the suicidal narrator, who says "I knew if I could only break through the glass I could re-connect. Smash through the barrier. I was trying to re-enter my life not lose it." The glass is the screen she Skypes him with. It's also the igloo made by an artist. In the hospital where the narrator first met "you" there's a cold room where dead bodies are stored. At the end the narrator has plans - "Tonight, when everyone is asleep, I shall go back to the hospital ... I will climb into one of the deep drawers, slide myself in next to the other dead bodies ... Not smashing through the glass but becoming part of it. Brittle. Transparent."
• Pairing - The narrator finds a single wireless ear-bud (a "shiny white tadpole") in the street. It plays evocative music to suit each occasion. He imagines a woman with the other ear-bud, the sort of things they'd say to each other. The ending is "Forever after, people will ask us how we met and we will fight over who gets to tell the story, but in the end she will always win, and she will always say, I was walking along listening to half a song, and the last sun lay on the water like coming home, and I saw a man about to set a tadpole free". I like much of it.
• The court order - The first-person narrator is a separated father who sees his 7 y.o. son once a week. He drives him to the coast for a treat. He stops at a service station for a coffee, leaving his son in the car. Surprise, surprise, his son's gone when he returns. Eventually he sees his son come out of the toilets.
• The dresser's apprentice - The 12 y.o. narrator works for his uncle, smartening up the dead to be photographed for the records in a war zone. At the dead he's smartened up, photographed and put in a coffin so he can be smuggled out to somewhere safe.
• The maze game - It's Helen's story - 3rd person but we're in her head. She's had periods in hospital, she attends therapy sessions, likes patterns. Her brother died in an accident when he was little, at the hands of the father. She could have prevented it. The maze game was a game she invented when Peter was 4. On the beach she'd draw a maze around herself and make Peter find her. Phrases are repeated - "Draw a happy time", "To care for something, Helen", "Door, Lennie, door!", "Draw yourself as you really are, Helen". I like it.
• The plates of strangers - A mother's leaving her adolescent daughter in a residential home. The daughter has an unknown mental condition. She'll be with Down's Syndrome kids and children with various other issues. She notices that "the residents talk of their parents as though they're pleasant acquaintances they used to know well. They are more interested in stall and each other, which gives the mother hope." When the mother leaves, there are indications that she's not 100% - she buys a dismembered hand at a joke shop and asks a barman out.
• The river is always right - A middle aged couple stay in a cabin that's in the middle of a river supported by 4 stone columns. They've brought a box. "You placed the box on a small folding table and we looked at it. We'd waited so long for the right moment, the right place, and now I realised I didn't want to let go of the waiting." As they sleep, the foundations weaken. They escape just as the cabin's washed away. They hadn't time to save the box. The last sentence is the narrator saying "The river has taken it, and it's only right. The river is always right." I'm not convinced - contrived mystery.
• The shopkeeper's wife - The first-person narrator is Matilda, 29 with 3 kids, married to Bobby, a shopkeeper for 10 years. She thinks things like "Her sermons are rapturous and she reminds me of a fervent dominee from one of the valley's churches"; "Ma sometimes says, in her semi-lucid moments, that life is like a join-the-dots puzzle. The dots are the facts of your life. The line you put through them - the story you tell - either joins them all together in a way that makes a pretty picture or gives you a jumble"; "Hardship and parenthood had layered experience on top of us, fossilising the people we once were so that, while we would be recognisable to someone who knew us ten years ago, the essence of the person we fell in love with as a teenager only remained in its hardest, most inaccessible form". I think that if you're going to use such inauthentic diction, you might as well do something better than this with the freedom you've given yourself. It doesn't work for me.
• Unravelling - On the Black Sea coast a soldier boy, off to war, asked his grandmother to knit him some socks. She had to unravel a red item to get the wool. When he died in action she blamed herself for making him an easy target. 25 years later, while waiting for his remains to be returned to the house, she's told that his body was identified in a mass grave (the result of an atrocity) only because of the socks.
• The museum of dead crows - A boy does the cooking etc round the house now that his mother's gone. He's bullied at school. He traps and kills birds, hanging them in a secret place in the woods. Failing a maths test, he scrunches up the page from his exercise book and puts it in a bird's mouth. At the end of each day, in bed, he thinks through the events, feeling best about the ones he's in control of.

"Bath Short Story Award 2017" (Brown Dog Books, 2017)

When assembling an anthology an editor might normally try to offer balanced content. Such an objective wouldn't be in the mind of a judge producing a short-list. Nevertheless, there's sufficient variety here.

• "This is all mostly true" - Meta-fiction disguised as first-person mental disorder? Literary showboating? I think it's a gamble that pays off.
• "Performance in the hills" - A woman who's been a widow for a month rides round her hill farm's boundary. Some lads came to buy a dog off her. She turned them down. She catches one of them apparently about to destroy an occupied nest. She injures him, makes him bleed. He claims he was only going to pretend, so that his mates (who made him do it and were watching) wouldn't hurt him. She apologises and in return offers future use of her horse. When she and her husband had discussed reincarnation, her husband wanted to be a barn owl and she wanted to be a pampered cat. Some nights later she walks the dog around the boundary, dressed in black, unseen. She sees the boy on the horse. He has a torch in each hand, teaching the horse tricks. He's good. Then an owl flies overhead. I liked the gathering density of symbolism - identity boundaries, respect for life, etc. The mention of reincarnation is a bit much though.
• "Forget me not" - Virginia (wife of Henry, mother of Anne) is becoming forgetful. Still still recalls the names of many garden plants - the garden was always her domain. Anne tries to label the plants, the way she labelled things around the house. Henry selectively digs them up - he's no so good at recalling their names.
• "Breaking the glass-blower's heart" - Camilla (au pair?) is in Joanne and David's house. Joanne's a glass-worker and a piece that's of of sentimental value has been broken (by the kids, who Camilla let loose?). Camilla and Joanne have never got on. Camilla has to go. But first she picks up the largest shard ("something from the glass-blower's heart", says the final sentence) to take back to Spain. I guess that either with the kids or the husband, Camilla feels she's been more of a success than Joanne has? It's mostly from Joanne's PoV though we slip into Camilla's PoV at too-convenient moments.
• "Everything must go" - A recently widowed woman thinks she hears noises in the loft. She lets things slide, then starts tidying up - the garden first. She buys a new bed. We learn that he used to hit her. She goes in the loft and clears up.
• "North ridge" - The story begins with "Gone four o'clock. So, it's true then. From the car you can see the path I took this morning. That's where I'll come from. When I come". On the next page there's "Scream. You could scream. Or cry. That would be normal in this situation. But you don't. As you knew you wouldn't. As I knew you wouldn't. My wife, the stoic.". The "I" is a husband who's decided to walk into the mountains in winter. The "you" is his wife who's waiting in a car with their son for the husband to return. Then on the next page there's "In some languages, the pronoun 'you' is different in the singular and plural. French, for example. Vous is plural; tu is singular. Your son can be translated as votre fils or ton fils. In English, the pronoun stays the same. That's something to be grateful for, isn't it?". How does the "I" know what the "you" is doing? The husband could be dying from exposure (that seems to be his intention) or even a ghost. He could be imagining things.
• "Big bones" - Marie, 8, has 7 sisters called Marie. English father, French mother. They've been living in England for a year on a farm, arriving from France. She might die in the end. Didn't see much in it.
• "Speak no evil" - The narrator (a male teacher?) is at the bedside of Jamal, a boy who's had brain damage after an assault. The boy's father thinks it's a racist attack. The narrator's cousin Andrew had brain damage 20 years before. The narrator's seen Jamal maybe kiss Danny Keane so he goes to Danny's house hoping to gather evidence. Danny father doesn't let the narrator see Danny, asking instead why the narrator's not married. We learn at the end that Andrew tried to kiss the narrator just before his tragic motorbike accident.
• "Into the looking glass" - A 13 year-old girl has to go out on her birthday with her parents and her father's boss to a restaurant. Her mother flirts with the American boss, then tells her husband to take their daughter home and not wait up. There are Alice allusions, and the girl's jolted into the kind of adult life that she'd only seen on TV before, but I don't see how the story got in the book.
• "Hunger in the air" - 4 daughters find out what their mother (dead a day) left them. We find out about their lives and what they think of each other. Perky language.
• "Little comrade" - Sons of a family (in an ex-USSR country?) are gradually being taken away for military service. The 15 y.o. narrator has more lofty plans. His older brother gets him out of trouble at school by turning up in his uniform and making excuses.
• "Seen/unseen" - The narrator's a convict let out for a few days to attend his mother's funeral. She'd stuck up for him. Visitors feel awkward with him. When the corpse seems to jerk he has to go to the toilet to vomit. When he sees himself in the mirror it's like seeing himself for the first time. He recalls when he was once brought into a police station handcuffed. He saw an old lady sitting, then realised it was his mother. She had a blank expression having not yet recognised him.
• "Laughing and turning away" - A Brazilian girl studying at a US college recalls being held at gunpoint twice. She's sharing a room with her lesbian lover. She gets a phone call saying that her brother's been shot dead. She realises that her female submissiveness had saved her when mugged. She goes home. She doesn't return to the States or reply to the e-mail of her lover. She seems to have decided to be submissive, not telling her family about her orientation.
• "Then I am gone" - Vanessa has a twin sister who's been a missing person for a few weeks. We later learn that their mother disappeared a while before. Vanessa goes to the fairground, repeatedly thinking she sees her sister. She looks around a freak exhibition, asked the owner about the Siamese twins. She goes into the hall of mirrors, sees herself as so thin she's almost not there.
• "Paid in full" - An old man, back in the French town he stayed in as a child during the occupation, is helped to the centre by his grand-daughter plus her boyfriend who photographs the pretty scenes. He recalls finding a body in the river and taking things from the pockets - a coin which he kept, and some odds and ends that he hid - before freeing the body to float away. Germans had found the hidden items and in retribution killed 3 townsfolk at random. He has returned to somehow atone. He's led a good life, his grand-daughter says. He buries the old German coin in a flowerbed.
• "Hollow" - Kas, 18, is doing casual work in a chicken processing plant. She tells her friend that she's had a miscarriage. Actually she had an abortion. She's asked to do some gutting, but she can't face it - it reminds her of the operation. So she walks out. Too blatant for me.
• "Nico and Moliere" - It's 7.20am. Nick is waiting for Molly (a French teacher) at St Pancras, drinking Champagne. They're leaving to live in Paris - her dream. She's late as usual. He takes the EuroStar without her. No.
• "Bionic girl" - 8 y.o. Boyanna (daughter of Yugoslavian immigrants) is bullied by Ned, 10, on his bike. He has Yugoslavian parents too. She wants to use her special powers. In the end her mouth bleeds. I wasn't impressed.

"Bath Short Story Award 2015" (Brown Dog Books, 2015)

Stories by Angela Readman, KM Elkes, etc selected from 1003 entries. When Louise Erdrich selected anonymised stories for "The Best American Short Stories (1993)" she chose twice as many females as males. The following year Tobias Wolff selected from the anonymised stories and chose about twice as many male authors as female. Here 15 of the 20 stories are by females). That said, many of the pieces here written by females are from a male PoV.

The judge, Carrie Kania, wrote "I can't help but remark on the themes of the shortlist: love, death, and growing up. Sometimes all three, often two, always at least one."

• "That summer" - Events one hot summer in 80s Northern Island are seen through an adolescent boy's eyes. He doesn't understand it all. A 33 year old woman who the narrator had briefly spied topless, and whose chainbelt he'd picked up dies in suspicious circumstances - it's a protestant part of NI. The story's rich with incidental detail, though the use of "tardiness" seems odd.
• "Dancing to the shipping forecast" - It's stormy by the sea. 3 months after the death of a partner who the narrator had met only 6 months ago, the narrator's in a house belonging to the lover's family, who are wondering when the house will be vacated. The narrator walks the dog, throws a present s/he'd been given ("a small cloth-covered box" probably with a "shiny thing" inside). A ring? The tide returns it to their feet. I don't see much to the story.
• "The woman of letters" - A women writes love letters for the illiterate woman in her village. They want to marry rich foreigners. She lies about what the replies say, acting as advisor as well as scribe. She thinks her own husband left her to marry a Russian. Their son Robin remains unmarried - not much of a catch but she has plans. The story ends with "One day, that's all we are waiting for: Lily, Robin, and I. We wait for one dream to be fulfilled, be watered down, break, so another can begin".
• "The three kings" - 3 mates are out for the night. A lesson's learnt.
• "Last rites" - An ill 88 year-old woman, 48 years a widow, hears her daughters downstairs. She doesn't expect to see them after tonight. She thinks back decades to a lover in Varanasi, where she saw a ritual involving an old woman's corpse. Her daughters say she should go to a home. Next morning she leaves for Varanasi, a trip she'd been secretly planning. She expects to die there within days.
• "Hummingbird heart" - A (sort-of?) doctor on yet another night shift befriends a dying old woman. The man's way of life is portrayed well.
• "The she-wolves" - This feels more literary than many of the other pieces. Hints of fable. A husband/father disappears in a Russian winter. His wife says he's gone to Moscow. People find his hat in the forest, and assume he's been eaten by wolves. At the end, wife and daughter howl.
• "Lilith" - Another rather literary piece. Women are taken advantage of by the shady men of the town. Should they be submissive? It's claimed the men go to Cuba "once a month, when they're doing whatever they do there ..." harvesting the next crop of girls.
• "Boy uncharted" - a sensitive young boy (living in France?) has an alcoholic mother and absent father. He tells a classmate his father works on the canals of Mars, the red planet. His mother tells him his father was a matador. There's a picture of a matador in their house - red and gold suit, red blood. At the end her mother's late home. She has several (paying?) lovers. Style-wise, my favourite so far.
• "The ends of the Earth" - A mother's father pays to take her, her sister, and their boys to see the Northern Lights. After business trips abroad that took ever longer, her husband's effectively left her. It was gradual. Her sister asks if she's ever sensed that there's another life she should have lived. When she sees the lights she thinks "This is it; the threshold, the border between this world and the unknown ...I am here, where I should be, fully present in this version of now".
• "Ruby Shoesmith, click, click, click" - Each section begins with 1 of 10 words from a spelling test. They spark off meanings for the girl who's the narrator. She's living with her grandparents, her mother gone away to be an artist. It's a worthwhile form, but there's not enough content for me.
• "The witching hour" - A witch lurks outside a couple's house, scratching at the windows. The husband (with a history of having affairs) is unconcerned. They go to a party and meet Emily who he seems to fancy. In bed that night he wants her to say "I'm Emily" as they have sex. After, one night when he's late (at Emily's?), she kills the witch with an ax and burns it in the Aga. When he finally returns she says "Everything's going to be fine".
• "Sand" - A few people are jeeped through a desert past corpses, in and out of prison, then driven to the coast to board an overloaded dingy. Illegal migration I guess. Excellently written.
• "Cargo" - Rob works in a film distribution warehouse. He likes working late, getting used to navigating into bed, quietly in the dark so as not to wake Susan, sticking to his side. She makes documentaries, hoping that the next will be about Carlo Cults. Even after she's left him he navigates carefully in the dark. I think there are too few surprises - the final one's telegraphed.
• "Mosquito press" - A reporter and a photographer have a drink in a seedy bar. The reporter feels guilty about an atrocity they witnessed in Phnom Penh: the two of them could have helped - instead they got a story out of it. The piece sounds too much like a first chapter, though I like the writing.
• "Big and brie" - A couple who aren't bright want to have a child and keep it. The story's from the man's PoV. I think it works well, though it's not much of a story per se.
• "The quiet numb of nothing" - A deaf third-world fruit-picker girl who'd been raped by some village boys months ago begins to be help by a women. It's from the picker's PoV - "My first day will be my last when she realises the badness I bring, and I 'll go back to the hut making smoke on the way with my toes" ... "I curl myself up and press my hand to my stomach where the thing hoofs through my inside water. it sends the taste of metal into my mouth. I rub at the stretch of scar in front of my left ear where Lion Boy hunted me the last time".
• "Ruby slippers" - A man puts his wife's red trainers by her hospital bed. Colon cancer. They joke about her recovering to do another marathon. After her death he takes the trainers with him wherever he go - to bed, etc.
• "Death in the nest" - A father whose wife is dying gives an orphaned nestling to their little daughter who seems to be kept away from her mother's ordeal. The girl cares for it, feeding it worms. On the day it's released, the mother dies.
• "Lips" - A couple meet monthly in a cafe. We see things from the quirky male's PoV. He adds a word to his diary after each meeting. Sometimes she does too. It takes over 8 years for his parting kiss on the cheek to become a kiss on the lips. He doesn't want to rush things. In that time she's married, had a child, separated, etc.

Other reviews

• Debbi Voisey (My favourite story, Dan Powell’s ‘Dancing to the Shipping Forecast’)

"Raconteur (issue 2)" (Raconteur publications, 1994)

This paperback (partly backed by "The European" newspaper) has articles, stories by famous authors (Ruth Rendell, John Mortimer, etc) and prizewinning stories from a competition that ran. It was published quarterly and was available in newsagents, etc. I don't think it lasted long. The pieces are mainstream.

The first article (about Writers Block) is by Graham Lord. He writes about Harold Brodkey (after a well-reviewed short story collection he took 27 years to produce his 837 page first novel), Casaubon in Middlemarch, Salinger, etc. Many writers have a fear of publishing rather than an inability to write. They fear they can't live up to the hype. Salinger wrote in 1974 that "There is a marvellous peace in not publishing. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I have to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." Dr Anthony Storr ("The Dynamics of Creation") thought that poets are especially vulnerable. Dannie Abse thought that poets are susceptible because "so many do very good early work then fall off. Maybe it's a fear of reviewers"

Rendell's piece was pedestrian. GW Fraser's was fun. The stories by Joe O'Donnell (an incident at a beach, largely from the perspective of a trinket-seller) and Sonia Melchett were good. John Campbell's story was too long. Jules Hardy's "Black Opal" starts slowly, then lurches twice, ending in Dreamtime. By the end it had impressed me. It won 1st prize. Sally Cline's piece has a narrator of a different gender to the author, for a change. I didn't like the pieces by Brian Birch, Dawn Dutchman, FJA Bateman, Roy Barnes or Ione Banner (the latter piece had an unlikely plot, insufficiently justified psychologically). There was too much explanation for my liking, too much show and tell.

Alice Thomas Ellis reviews some short story books. She writes that "Only good gossips can write compelling short stories" and "I do not enjoy having to work at short stories; I like them clear". Alice Munro's book is too much hard work. Preferable is Carol Lake's "Switchboard operators".

"English short stories of today 4" by Roger Sharrock (ed), (OUP, 1976)

Stories by Achebe, Kingsley Amis, Susan Hill, Rhys, Updike, etc. 15 men. 5 women - one "married to a philosopher", one "Married to the Shakespearian scholar Stanley Wells", and another "married to Professor R.D. Smith".

In the introduction Sharrock points out that the short story started in France, Russia and America before coming to England. Even then, the stories had excessive detail - "The revolution came when it was seen that the short story must aim at a goal wholly different from that of the novel" (p.vi). "The peculiar, the eccentric, the lonely, the downright mad: these, with children and old people, make up a great part of the population of the modern short story ... the spare form of the short story cannot concern itself with the vast complexity of the modern social world; it is a form for the pre-social and the post-social" (p.viii).

I liked George Mackay Brown, Liz Taylor, William Trevor. Disliked Morley Callaghan. Sentences I liked included -

• Both Peter and his father knew they would over-discuss this subject: they exploited to the utmost the few topics for conversation that now remained to them - Frank Tuohy
• studying the sea as a man through the smoke of a good pipe might look at the face of a friend - Benedict Kelly

"A man's hands" by Andrew Crawford (Shepdek Publishing, 2012)

11 Stories from "Ink, Sweat and Tears", etc., organised into sections. The first story's much longer than the others, some of which are Flash.

Sean

"The Canny Cyclist". Sean is in York with Rose. They're getting to know each other, wandering in the city centre. We learn that they'd once had a one-night stand in Edinburgh. He didn't contact her until a few months later, after which he took the first train to see her. Rose gets a phone-call and suddenly decides she needs to see her family in Newcastle. She drives them over. They go into an empty house, recently painted, meet an old friend of Rose's, Kevin, a strange cyclist, then while they are making love upstairs her father starts playing Lady Eleanor below.

Sean goes downstairs. Mr Pell's drinking and smoking. He has cuts on his face. He calls Sean Kevin, and explains, vaguely, his emotional situation. Rose comes down, puts her father to bed, goes into her own bed to cry, telling Sean to sleep in another room. He begins to piece together the clues - Rose's mother's dead. But who's Kevin? When he goes down for breakfast, Kevin is there. They talk. Next thing we know, Rose is driving Sean into town. He's catching a train, going north.

Matt

"Gimlet". He feels bad about getting drunk again. He's back in his flat. Without warning, Yanni and Alan are in the room. Or has the scene changed to a bar? Matt later becomes "you". Then "I". Your voice is in my ear. 'We're all avoiding something,' you say.

Jack

"Edinburgh Arrivals" - Her PoV. Jill (a wife and mother) lands in Edinburgh to have an affair with an ex-lover she's not seen for half a lifetime. Seeing him again at the airport she realises it's a huge mistake. "Arthur's Seat" - His PoV. They climb Arthur's Seat. He struggles. "She is looking at my hand as if taking it would be going too far. She grabs my sleeve". From the top there's too much mist to see the city. He gives her a trinket. The chain breaks. 12 blue stones fall. She tells him it's a mistake. She offers her hand. "Edinburgh Departures" - We learn that 20 years before she'd begged him to stay. Now she's the one going, "turning the corner into Security, the place where they check for things you shouldn't be carrying".

John

"Sofitel Gatwick". A man's in a rented room close to an airport. A woman arrives. He was hoping she'd come. She doesn't remove her jacket. She says she has 20 minutes and Michael's outside. They bicker. "He thought he had moved on. He has, but it is all coming back". She looks out the window

'It's sad,' she says. 'All those people coming back from somewhere.' 'Maybe they're tourists,' he says. 'People arriving from somewhere. People at the start of something. Or on the verge of something. People like me.'

Later, He tries to think of the people on the aeroplanes. People who only exist in his mind./ The room is so empty./ He is alone, and he is afraid.

"Player". He wrote a book. It was a minor hit. Nothing major. It got a handful of good reviews. It dealt with a defining moment in his life. This defining moment had to do with things falling apart. ... He had written to understand the past. He'd got an old friend to read it, a women he'd left 20 years before. She suggested that they meet up. They're both married. She'd been with him when the police knocked on his door - something to do with his mother. He flies to Edinburgh to meet her in a pub. She's worried about her memory. Her husband, Michael, arrives to collect her. He imagines his wife suddenly appearing to. They leave. She's forgotten the defining moment. He returns to his "real home" two thousand miles away.

Andy

"Chicken Soup". Andy, a writer, is returning to the campus where as a student he met a girl. He's written a 90k draft - autobiographical but with a happy ending. He goes under what used to be her window. A voice says "It wasn't like that at all," and that she didn't want to remember him. But he wants to remember, and her presence will help. His hands freeze to the railings. Police have to free him. They find out that he's flown from Greece to Gatwick where he stayed in Sofitel, then onto Edinburgh. "Gentleman, we have a problem" - Andy's at a story prizegiving. He's won. In his speech he says "The story is about a middle-aged man who is obsessed with a woman, a girl, he knew years ago. He goes back to the college where they met ... If it's about anything, it's about how people should leave the past alone." He's invited her along. She turns up. He asks to sleep with her. She has a husband and kids. Her last train's at 10. But she agrees. In the hotel room her forwardness makes him change his mind. He'd rather talk all night.

"When iron turns to rust". A writer's in a run-down room. A woman visits. Her husband's found out about the man. The man's wife has discovered his lies. He no longer writes, and the visitor's no longer his muse - "I want it to be like it was ... I want to feel wanted".

Clio

"A man's hands". You continue to talk of the past, of things I don't want to hear. I give all my attention to your hands.

Overall

I like it. The pieces are linked by character and theme. Information is carefully released. I like the details, the descrpitions. The changes in PoV, interruptions and the repetitions keep the reader engaged. There are airports, hotels, stations, bars, visitors from other times. Touch vs memory. Characters returning to places hoping to recover memories. Men age and women don't. Women visit, knocking at doors.

Other reviews

• Carol McKay (By the end, the generic male lead has come through various stages of obsession, from self-destructive alcohol abuse, living hand to mouth, to something close to distaste once he actually comes within reach of what he desires. ... Clarity comes gradually. “If it’s about anything,” the writer character in ‘Gentlemen’ says of his winning story, “it’s about how people should leave the past alone.”)
• Fiona Johnson
• Jim Murdoch (the Jacks, Johns, Andys, Matts and Seans all feel a bit like they all ought to be Andrews ... The metaphor of tourism is a strong one and all the locations in the book—York, Newcastle, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and London—are major tourist spots ... It takes a lot of self-control to leave stuff out and to know what to leave out. I was lucky. Within me I seemed to have all the missing pieces to ‘finish’ this book. Others may struggle. That’s life not bad writing. I heartily recommend this book.)

"Bliss, and other stories" by Katherine Mansfield (Aeterna Classics, 2015)

First published in 1920.

• "Prelude" - an extended family move out of town. We learn (rather non-linearly) how most of them feel about it. When invited boys play with the girls they cut off a duck's head. It's a novella.
• "Je ne parle pas français" - A would-be writer, 26, sits in a Parisian cafe. Women like him. He meets Dick, an Englishman researching into French literature, at a party. They become friends. The narrator's angry when Dick suddenly returns home. Months later Dick returns with his girlfriend, but has decided during the journey that he can't upset his mother by marrying. The narrator wonders whether to help the girl, but then leaves the couple, never to see them again. At the end we're back in the cafe.
• "Bliss" - A Hampstead young mother who's never sexually fancied her husband hosts an evening. One guest she's invited is a beautiful girl who her husband says is a dumb blonde. Amid the idle, arty banter, the hostess and the girl share a wordless moment staring out into the garden. At the end the hostess desires her husband but as they help the guests leave she notices hints of intimacy between the girl and her husband. The final paragraph is "But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still."
• "The Wind Blows" - She's in bed. There's a storm. She goes (has gone?) to a music lesson where she cries. She goes for a walk by the sea with Bogey. She sees a ship. She imagines she's on that ship with Bogey years later, looking towards the shore, remembering the music lesson and their walk.
• "Psychology" - A male psychologist (31) and woman (30) discuss books and the future of the novel. She thinks that their friendship suffices for a long-term relationship. He suddenly gets ready to leave her to meet a mutual male friend at 6. She's angry but doesn't say so. At the doorstep is an old spinster friend of the woman (presumably an image of how the woman fears she'll become).
• "Pictures" - 8am. Penniless Ada Moss is in bed in Hampstead staring at the ceiling. The landlady comes in threatening to evict her. She spends the day looking for an acting/singing job, ending up at a club where she lets herself be picked up by a fat old man.
• "The Man Without a Temperament" - an invalid wife (TB?) and husband are staying at a pension with a General, a Honeymoon couple, etc. He goes off for a walk in the afternoon. Via flashbacks we learn that she vitally needed the holiday and she couldn't do it alone.
• "Mr Reginald Peacock's Day" - A singer/teacher is grumpy that his wife is trying to drag him down to her mundane level. He regrets being talked into marrying her. After a day of giving admiring women singing lessons he tries to win over his wife, lapsing into the kind of smarm he uses with his pupils.
• "Sun and Moon" - 2 little children sneak down to see their parents' party, puzzled by the mess of adult fun.
• "Feuille d'Album" - Women wonder about a quiet, blushing artist who they see in cafes of an evening. He has his eyes on a neighbour. He follows her one day, and awkwardly tries to make friends
• "A Dill Pickle" - A couple meet after 6 years. He's been to many places they'd planned to go together. They're still lonely. He (who speaks a lot) says it's because they're egoists and still are. She leaves.
• "The Little Governess" - It's her first time abroad. The ferry isn't too bad. A porter tries to take advantage of her at the train station. She copes. There are some noisy men on the train but an old man shares her carriage and helps her. He offers to show her around Munich. She has a few spare hours so she takes up his offer. At the end he shows her his room and tries to take advantage of her. She escapes, older and wiser.
• "Revelations" - A wife who has nerves in the morning rejects her husband's invitation to lunch. Instead she goes to her favourite hairdresser, who seems out of sorts. She finds out that his daughter died that morning.
• "The Escape" - A couple abroad miss a train and go by horse and cart instead. Tensions arise during the trip.

People easily split into selves - observer and observed - or they're surprised by their self in a mirror, etc. The PoV easily changes. Couples are in unhappy relationships, male arrogance or artistic ambition not helping. The characters, often lonely, have moments of inexpressible joy that they can't find a reason for or can't sustain. The women have bursts of affection for their partners. There are hints of homosexuality.

Other reviews

• Wikipedia

"La promessa del maresciallo" by Nino Genovese (Il Foglio Letterario, 2018)

Gianluca Mariangelo, a Sicilian living in the North, is dealing with the murder of a prostitute's daughter, a 15 y.o. whose pregnant body was found down a well. He regrets promising the mother that he'll find the killer - who isn't the father, or the step-father, or the boy friend. The motive of the killer and his supposed reason for how he disposed of the body, don't convince me.

"The text" by Claire Douglas (Penguin, 2017)

A single short story. The first person narrator uses phrases like "pervading the place" and "I stand morosely". I can't see much in the language, characterisation or the plot.

There's also an extract from "Last Seen Alive". That's rather better.

Other reviews

• Aria (the rushed narrative here does little to convince me that Emily is real enough to be someone I know, much less for me to care for her. Moreover, the twists—be it the way they’re revealed or the type of twist it is—are in no way surprising. )
• Goodreads - (2,507 ratings, 272 reviews)

"The Book of Birmingham", Kavita Bhanot (ed), (Comma Press, 2018)

• "Exterior Paint" (Kit de Waal) - Recently widowered Alfonse is repainting his front door red, selling his house. There's a flashback to 1965 when he arrived from St Kitts. White barmaids told blacks to go round the side, into the Smoke Room. One barmaid takes a shine to him. They have a secret affair - her mother and sisters are actively racist. After a few weeks she doesn't want to keep it secret but he does. A visit by Malcolm X gives him the nerve to openly ask her to marry him. The flashback ends. Alone, he has a shot of rum, toasting his wife and Malcolm.
• "Seep" (Sharon Guggal) - Bina (Indian) lives with 4 siblings and her parents in their 8-roomed house. There are 14 Indian tenants. She has a crush on Suresh, a new arrival. He starts having a political argument with her father at her father's birthday party. She's worried that he'd be asked to leave. But they diplomatically, impressively, agree to differ. End of story.
• "Amir Aziz" (Bobby Nayyar) - The narrator tells us about Amir, who bought up derelict houses and revamped then, working his way up the property ladder, tenants often being new immigrants. He doesn't have a happy family life. The narrator and Amir lose touch. The narrator and his grandson see Amir in a white Mercedes Benz. The grandson, impressed, asked "Who's that man?". The narrator replies "Amir Aziz. He's a friend of mine", which is a neat ending.
• "Taking Doreen out of the sky" (Alan Beard) - The narrator's coming home from work having been told that his metal-working firm's closing down. He, his wife and their 2 year-old live in high-rise flats. There's lots of observation and reflection, no despair. I rather like it.
• "1985" (Balvinder Banga) - After the Handsworth riots, asians are carrying weapons for self-defense. The main character is a Sikh with a liking for KFC and beer, and some tribal honour. His mate Ash is hospitalised because of drugs he got off Hector. Ash, drunk, attacks Hector and scrams. The narrator tries to help Ash. Did Hector die? Will he exact revenge? There's relief when they discover he's moved to London. On p.67 the passage "we synchronised our bravado, with all its feigned indifference" sounds over-elevated.
• "Kindling" (Jendella Benson) - Lauren, a black schoolgirl, met Zee, an asian, on a bus. She lies to her mum about where she's going when she goes to walk with him for the first time. The post-riot streets are nearly empty except for police. As they walk to the park a gang of blacks verbally abuse and threaten them. They walk on, inarticulately and briefly discussing the race issue. She doesn't care as long as he kisses her. Rather inconsequential.
• "Blind Circles" (Joel Lane) - The 1st person character is a policeman, seconded to a zone where "The trees fade away and the colour washes out of the skyline, leaving only a blank repeated motif of tarmac, breeze-block and concrete. It's a screensaver of a district". NF supporters are going blind. They gather at a meeting in a school hall to listen to newcomers - Albinos (ultra-blond Aryans). The persona infiltrates, watches the blind supporters being killed. The best story so far.
• "A game of chess" (Malachi McIntosh) - I like this too. A thirtysomething married guy, childless, ditches his job. Drifting around Birmingham he sees his father for the first time in decades. He's a street-cleaner. The persona thinks back to when he was 8 and he was taken by his mother to stay a while with his remarried father. They played chess. I'm puzzled by this aspect - there are section headings "Bishop's Pawn to F3", "Queen's Pawn to E5", Knight's Pawn to G4" and "Checkmate". It's a strange notation (usual is f3 e5; g4 Qh4) and anyway "Queen" should be "King". White's been suicidal. Maybe the persona's forgotten the details of chess, only recalling how to mess things up. He starts tracking the movements of his father (which gives his life direction again). One day he confronts his father. Here's the ending "He wasn't my father, couldn't be, but he said my name, and his voice was the voice that I knew, remembered, and I heard: Look again. You're not thinking about him. And if you move there - you see? I can take you". The final words refer to chess, but I don't quite get it.
• "The Call" (Sibyl Ruth) - Julie, who's volunteering on a help-line, sees a picture of Bridget, an ex-housemate, in the paper. On the way home she looks for the house which they shared, the house where Bridget's friend sexually assaulted her. She can't remember quite which house it was. She knows that victims often blame themselves.
• "Necessary Bandages" (C.D. Rose) - It's 1951. Emma climbs to Maddox's loft which is open to the elements. There are paintings, books, etc. Maddox (a quirky/surreal artist) puts things all over his walls to make surreal montages. There's a party of misfits, eccentrics and girls dressed by Maddox as nuns. 'The problem with the London lot was that they never lived in Birmingham,' says Maddox. 'Here, you have to work harder.'. The final page jumps to 2018. The narrator compares then and now, trying to find Maddox's house.

In a few stories it looks like the author has started with a historic event, added some period detail, and channelled it through a character in an attempt to bring the history to life. If possible, they've given the character a personal problem which interacts in some way with the event.

Other reviews

• georgia DC
• Jenny Booth

"Hidden Depths" (AWC Online Workshopping Group, 2017)

It's a collection of short stories produced by an online workshopping group formed by the Australian Writer’s Centre.

• "Fatal Words" - Louise Guy - Teresa's clever but autistic son Dominic causes trouble at school. Other parents don't like him or her. Her husband left them 2 years before because he couldn't cope. He returns, rich, on the day that Dominic saves the life of a fellow pupil. Will Teresa let her husband stay? At the end she says "I've been holding onto something for two years wishing I still had it. Today I no longer want or need it", ... It was over. All rather contrived, with straightforward characters.
• "Just Another Statistic" - LM Joannides - Lorelai is the victim of domestic abuse from Nathanial. The cleaner tells her to go to the police, telling her about stories in the paper. When Lorelai finds she's pregnant she fakes her own murder. No surprises, except why Lorelai didn't act earlier.
• "Skel Corpus" - Robyn H Butler - in a medieval world Tuaka Afore has been chosen by Jhe Jah to walk the Hove, so her family get perks. She's starved. On the big day she's taken to the Walled City and manages the walk along with many others, but she defies the ceremony at the end. It may save her life (thus pleasing her father) but their perks will surely be taken away. Maybe worse. It's an "in media res" piece which works well.
• "The Old Man And The Boy" - Laila Miller - an old fisherman teaches a boy about sea life. The scene changes - a development agent and the village chief talk about providing the village with clean water, electricity, and a fish farm. Work begins, but it's vandalised by a drugs gang who the chief works for. The chief has disappeared. The agent abandons his plan. The old man talks him into a smaller project to clean the environment and re-introduce native fish.
• "Wrong Side Of The Tracks" - Sueanne Gregg - This story is prefaced by a warning about the material and numbers of some help lines. Belinda (fostered by several families) has lived with violent Rick for a month. While cleaning the toilets in the filling station she helps a girl in labour. The baby survives, but the mother dies. When Belinda make a statement at the police station her bruises are noticed and she's given protection. She turns her life around so she can adopt the child after a few years.
• "The Bell Of Warning" - Claire McLennan - Fantasy. June rungs the bell to summon people and the perytons (stags? the villager's protectors?) to the square. She says she saw a vaulk. She's not believed by her kin. The perytons are angry that she went into the wood. She's banished. She leaves her brother, Pin. They have no parents. After a week or so of being tracked by vaulks, they take her to their lair where she administers a potion to one of them, who transforms into her mother. The perytons are baddies, using the vaulks as their soldiers. When vaulks bite humans the humans are transformed into vaulks. I didn't like the piece.
• "Broken Song" - Mark J Keenan - Mel, overlooked for promotion in preference to her friend Lucy, has a drink problem, made worse by working at home for a week. She and her husband Mick go to a works party. She'd nearly messed up a big contract at work. At the party she announced her error, and blames it on drink. She blames her husband for not noticing. She rushes out, drives and crashes. In the ambulance, maybe about to die, she regrets not telling Mick about her troubles. No surprises.
• "Lightning Speed" - Amanda Lee Charman - Emily's pregnant after months of trying. She's married to Paul, whose wife Penny died soon after giving birth to Sarah, now 4. Penny's mother Clair doesn't like Emily. Emily's worried that she's not as good a wife as Penny, and that she'll love Sarah less when the baby's born. After an incident where she thinks she's run over Sarah then realises she hasn't, she begins having a miscarriage.
• "Building Bridges" - Suzanne S-Smith - Gerry, a provocative Wisconsin phone-in DJ, is grumpy when his audience believes his satire and votes for Trump. His regular chauffeur Bill asks why after years Gerry's never asked his opinion on matters (Bill ditched a good finance job for one with greater satisfaction). Gerry is murdered by Republican worker Dot Pringle (an unnecessary deus ex macchina). Gerry gets a good send off.

I liked parts of some of these. Though many of the stories depended on plot, the endings were a let down, and the characters weren't very complex.

Other reviews

• Good reads

"Five from Centuria" by Giorgio Manganelli (McPherson's and Company, 2020)

A selection from "Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels", translated by Henry Martin. Manganelli (1922-1990) was part of “Gruppo ‘63”. There are 5 pieces of Borgesian essay/Flash.

• Five - a man is wrongly sentenced to death for murdering his business partner - "to end up in court, accused of homicide, struck him as so wondrous and improbable as to lead him to conclude that he had realized one of his life’s great themes: the achievement of an objective insanity, not only his own, but a structural insanity"
• Sixteen - A man gets ready at 8am for a special hour - "he must traverse it as pure and simple time, nothing else, absolutely. ... but the twenty-eighth minute deals him a blow on the temple, and he falls from the chair; upon striking the floor, absolutely without a sound, he disintegrates."
• Thirty-five - An intellectual couple who often meet don't think they love each other. Finally "With a bizarre, mental desperation, they think about a life that does not include the other’s voice. And then, briefly, they fall into silence, since they direly mistrust, and will always mistrust, the vocality of the voice, that vain custodian of the purity of concepts."
• Fifty-three - In a city where humans are mythical, there are finely crafted masks and puppets in the likeness of humans in wildly varying myths - "some [citizens] suppose human beings to be immortal; they venerate those masks and puppets, and if they judge them imperfect or disrespectful, they reverently burn them".
• Seventy-seven - "In this city, everyone possesses something which is indispensable to someone else, without the possessor knowing what to do with it, or even knowing they possess it." The piece describes how citizens might organise themselves to get what they think they want.

"Dancing alone and other lessons" by Digby Beaumont (2020)

About 30 Flash pieces from "Monkeybicycle", "Boston Literary Magazine", "The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts", etc. It's in 3 sections - "reaching out", "holding on" and letting go".

The "reaching out" section has lonely people meeting lonely people. Three of the pieces are episodic. The best idea is in "On Finding Your Father Is a Ventriloquist: A Guide" (one of 3 "Guides" in the book) - a widower father visits his son, who tries to make him give up his dummy. "He Drives as If This Were the Start of Something" has a quietly menacing feel. In "I Really Like Your Hair" a person misapplies some guidelines to making friends. It's short and works ok. Several of the other pieces have interesting details but the mood's a bit samey and the endings are inconsequential. "Ring of Fire" goes nowhere despite a promising set-up. "Blue, Red, Black" ends flatly. I presume the idea of "Rescue" is that by saving Sid, the narrator saves herself. But that's not enough for me.

In the "holding on" section I like "Home Improvements", "Bird Table", "Excuses" and "Thermalling". Not "Last Shot" or "Room and Board". "Searching for Venus" is ok too, though I've seen the idea of looking back at one's own house from a garden telescope twice before.

In "letting go" (my favourite section) I liked "Who Knew More Than Karen Carpenter About a Broken Heart?" (in the sentence "Karen sings about a kiss for luck and being on our way in that happy-sad way of hers and I wonder if she visits others in this way, too" "way" is used 3 times. Deliberate?). "Clawing at Hope" is ok too, as is "The Naming of Fruit". "Cut Loose" is perhaps my favourite story in the book. It starts with "It’s impossible for my dad to move". Given the body count so far in the book I expected a death-bed scene, but the continuation is "overnight he’s turned into a kite". The twists continue. The narrator says “First Mum, now this” making us aware of the context. The father later says “I’m counting on you” which adds suspense. The father wants the son to launch him. He succeeds. At the end of the story, "another kite appears. Then another. ... I wave back before letting go, and the sun hurts my eyes as he continues his ascent" - lyricism prepared for by the earlier details of the kite and the beach.

In general, starts are much better than endings. As I've mentioned elsewhere, Flash collections are a relatively new (or at least recently revived) idea, and I'm still inexperienced about reading them. How much variety should one expect? Is thematic coherence an asset or are there too many passively lonely men in this collection?

Theme	Freq
Man's dead neighbour/friend/brother	3
Man deserted by wife	7
Lonely widower/divorcé	5
Dead parent	3

Where should the quality line be drawn? Should each collection have at least one competition winner? The short story and poetry collections I like tend to have at least a Bridport short-listed piece or equivalent. Most if not all these pieces have been previously published, but I don't feel that the best are strong enough to carry the weaker pieces.

"The Best American Short Stories 2019", Anthony Doerr (ed), (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 2019)

In his introduction, Doerr points out that he picked many stories that break the rules -

• Single point-of-view: Deborah Eisenberg leaps into a doctor's mind in two of her story's 13 sections. Wendell Berry waits until the last seven paragraphs of "The great Interruption" to introduce a first-person narrator - a character you didn't even know was part of the story
• Don't start with backstory: Siaid Sayrafiezadeh opens "Audition" with seven long paragraphs of exposition
• Make the reader identify with the main character: Sigrid Nunez uses an unlikable narrator
• Have one main character: Jeffrey Eugenides and Ursula K. Le Guin both have stories with dual protagonists. Jim Shephard uses 4
• Don't be preachy: Wike Wang's "Omakase" has a strong moral stance

He's picked extensively from some of the shinier magazines - "The New Yorker" (4 stories), "Zoetrope: All-Story" (3 stories), and "Harper's" (2 stories). There are 2 from "LitMag", which started in 2017. In her Foreword, Heidi Pitlor reminds us that "Tin House" and "Glimmer Train" have gone.

Crowd-sourced reviews are quite useful for anthologies like this, so here's my penny's worth.

• "The Era" by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - A first-person schoolkid lives in an age where children are encouraged to tell the truth, and gene-therapy is available for those with money. "I don't have any gene corrections. I wasn't optimised at all", he says. "Leslie is always telling lies about how great things are or how nice everyone looks and how everybody is special". He regularly get an injection of Happy from the school nurse.
• "Natural Light" by Kathleen Alcott - a first-person woman, not separated from her much older husband, sees a photo of her now dead mother in an exhibition. She's doing something we're not told about. The persona contacts the photographer, learning little, then contacts her father, learning that her mother and he used to be (heroin?) addicts. The language often becomes more elevated when observations are made - "There was always one student who hated me. This was a problem I could solve more easily with young men, pretending to lessen my authority while I sharpened my argument. But with girls it was never clear, for their hatred was much more original, multifaceted, and they clung to it even while enjoying whichever dialectic I'd introduced to distract them"
• "The Great Interruption" by Wendell Berry - a boy gets the chance to give birth to an anecdote that by word of mouth goes viral. The method of distribution and the way it comes to be associated with the area are dealt with.
• "No more than a bubble" by Jamel Brinkley - a guy and his mate are at an upmarket student party. His black mother, having walked out on his white father, is soon to remarry. The two guys make out with two exotic black girls. At the end there's a jump to the father's funeral. The mother's there who the narrator's not seen for years. The narrator thinks back to the wild night, his father's advice, and tries to make sense of it all - of fathership and friendship.
• "The third tower" by Deborah Eisenberg - A 17 y.o. girl takes a train ride past ruined towns to The City, for treatment. She suffers from hyperassociativity. "Her teachers said she'd grow out of it, but it's only gotten worse since school - words heating up, expanding, exploding into pictures of things, shooting off in all directions, then flaming out, leaving behind cinders and husks, a litter of tiny, empty, winged corpses, like scorched gnats or angels". There are hints of a 1984-like fist in a velvet glove.
• "Hellion" by Julia Elliot - Alex, a townie, about 13, is staying with Miss Edna while his newly born premature sister is in intensive care. Butter (13) a distant cousin, befriends him, tells him the vulnerabilities of potential bullies. When Alex and Butter mess a shed up, Alex is humiliated in front of the bullies, and Butter's pet alligator is shot by order of her mother. She'd like to stay friends with him - she plans to leave the town and studdy. My favourite piece so far.
• "Bronze" by Jeffrey Eugenides - A high, flamboyant male who's often hit upon by men, wonders about the signals he sends. He gets drunk with a stranger (a gay older man, an actor) and things get a bit physical. He leaves suddenly, drops in on a fellow student, a ballerina with a wheelchaired mother. We're shown the two men's point-of-view.
• "Protozoa" by Ella Martinsen Gorham - About internet bullying. Didn't work for me. Samples are

  They moved to the front door, noses in phones. He typed something and Noa's phone buzzed. He had messaged her: 300 likes for nosebleed von hobo pants If you roast me, better make me look good, she replied. She remembered that he'd made up a rhyme for their music teacher Inez, a 'siren with all guns firin'."

  and

  Smoking gun emoji. She folded her knees to her chest. Can you? Crying-face emoji, blue-face emoji. She took a raggedy breath "Are you going to cry?" a voice said. She shrieked. It was Callan, nestled in a corner "Don't sneak up on me like that," she said. "This is my perch," he said, bugging his eyes.

• "Seeing Ershadi" by Nicole Krauss - Two women friends, the narrator and Romi, share a mysterious attraction to a foreign film, especially the main character, Ershadi. At the end after years apart they get in touch again.

  How much time we wasted, she wrote, believing that things came to us as gifts, through channels of wonder, in the form of signs, in the love of men, in the name of God, rather than seeing them for what they were: strengths that we dragged up from the nothingness of our own depths.

  The ending, which I like, is

  Romi wrote that the last thing that had surprised her was that when Ershadi is lying in the grave he's dug and his eyes finally drift closed and the screen goes black, is isn't really black at all. If you look closely, you can see the rain falling.

  I liked the odd page or so (when Mark appears, etc).
• "Pity and Shame" by Ursula K. Le Guin - A young woman with an unreliable husband is looking after an old man. I lost concentration a few times during this piece. Paragraphs like "Something relaxed between them then. An inner movement, very deep down, definitive, almost imperceptible" don't appeal to me.
• "Anyone Can Do it" by Manuel Munoz - A poor couple, Delfina and her husband, have moved to California from Texas in search of casual work. They have a little son Kiki but no phone. The boy takes a little car from a shop. A neighbour, Lis, invites her to do some peach-picking. Lis steals her car!
• "The Plan" by Sigrid Nunez - Roden Jones plans to murder someone - "In his head he had strangled the assistant principal, several teachers and fellow students, and dozens, if not hundreds, or strangers. And one particular snub-nosed cheerleader many times". When he's about to kill his wife she leaves him so he kills a whore he frequents. I don't see much in the story.
• "Letter of Apology" by Maria Reva - In the USSR an agent is assigned to extract a letter of apology from a poet who had joked about a leader. The agent suspects that the poet's wife is assessing the agent with a view to recommending him for promotion. In fact the wife, whose relatives have been victims of the regime, threatens him with a knife. He leaves, ready to apologise to his boss.
• "Black Corfu" by Karen Russell - It's 1620. A surgeon cuts the hamstrings of the dead (even his own stillborn son) to stop them walking. He's accused of botching an op. They story had lofty passages - "Those few who do meet the doctor's gaze still fail to recognize him. Their paranoia trawls over his skin, and a monster springs into their nets. His timbre shakes, and they presume his guilt"; "In later centuries, new etiologies will evolve. Miasma theory will yield to germ theory, superstition to science. Yet every novel treatment breeds an equally novel genetic resilience, as only the hardiest survivors spawn. And so the cure teaches the disease how to evade it". It seems rather long and pointless it me.
• "Audition" by Said Sayrafiezadeh - The narrator's a 19 year old son of a rich man. He's working on his father's building site to gain experience. He wants to be actor. He smokes crack cocaine twice with a fellow labourer and has insights about Seinfold and his own ambitions. He's still young. Seemed a minor piece to me.
• "Natural Disasters" by Alexis Schaitkin - This involves a 24 year old freshly married couple, Steven and the first-person narrator - "In New York we were broke, but this was OK, even fun, because we assumed that someday soon we would be comfortable, and would look back on these days with a tender longing ... Perhaps our faith in this narrative is what allowed us to delight even in our frequent arguments".
  They move to Oklahoma and a big house - "We had arrived in a place where space was completely unprecious, and this notion was a astonishing to me as if the same thing were to be true of time ... I believed that I could nail this place by triangulating among its details, that this place typifying images converged upon a deeper truth". She's depressed, lonely. She gets a job writing copy for a realtor, visiting many houses. We get flash-forwards and reflections. "a place and its disasters - its fathomless, inscrutable unknowns - are not separable ... The disaster is always there, because it takes up residence inside of you". She visits a gorgeous house, the door opened by a gorgeous man. They have to rush to the storm shelter. She hopes to be seduced. She dreams about being stuck there for life. But it's his dead brother's house, not his. His brother's dreams died in a car accident.
  At the end there's "Maybe you think all of this is easy to interpret ... Maybe it is only my personal stake in the matter that makes me want to believe it was not that simple. All I can say is that when I pulled up to the house on Redtail Road I thought life was one thing, and when I drove away I knew it was another. I knew, quite simply, that life is not a story at all. It is the disasters we carry within us. It is amazing, it is exquisite, it is a stunning charmer, and it is noted in water and jotted in dust and the wind lifts it away". My favourite piece so far.
• "Our day of grace" by Jim Shepard - Exchanges of letters during the American Civil War. Not my type of story.
• "Wrong Object" by Mona Simpson - First-person therapist (female) has a middle-aged male client who eventually admits to liking little girls. We find out about the therapist's partner and her line-manager. There wasn't enough in the story for me.
• "They told us not to say this" by Jenn Alandy Trahan - In the Walkman era, when daughters weren't given the same social liberties as sons, some girls admire a sportsman. They try to impress him by playing sports. "In practice after school we did suicides until we felt like puking. We did them in our driveways at night too". "We were brown like their daddies' secretaries ... brown like may I take your plate, brown like you think I need your charity "
• "Omakase" by Weike Wang - Two years after they met online (dating by watching the same movie in different cities while linked with Skype) a finance analyst (38) and a potter moved in together in New York. Going out for sushi exposes their personality differences (she overthinks), which are analysed and explained.

Other reviews

• Good reads
• Kirkus review (A highlight is the opener, an assured work of post-apocalyptic fiction by young writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ... If the collection has a theme, it might be mutual incomprehension)
• Anjanette Delgado

"Turning the Corner" by David A. Hill (ed) (CUP, 2007)

Stories by Helen Dunmore, Clare Wigfall, Rose Tremain, Helen Simpson etc, chosen for their "accessibility and for their relevance to the way we live now". It's designed for schoolchildren I think, with notes, suggested activities and reader guides. There are illustrations, and footnotes to explain words like "coaxed". Only a few of the stories were written specifically for teenagers. There are 5 sections (culture clash, growing up, death, school/home, adult), the difficult stories towards the end of each section according to the introduction.

I liked Helen Dunmore's "Lilac" though the twist wasn't a surprise. I like Colm Toibin's "A Summer Job" which ends "Frances did not know whether her going was the lifting of a burden for John or a loss which he could not contemplate. The more she looked at him, the more she realised that at this moment she did not herself know the difference. Suddenly John glanced at the window and saw her watching him. He shrugged as if to say that he would give nothing away, she could look at him as long as she liked". And I liked "The Chain", described as "a sad story without a neat conclusion". "Waving at trains" by Mathew Davey is my favourite. "Peerless" (Rose Tremain) is nearly as good.

In Echo Freer's "The Scream" I presumed the 1st person narrator was a ghost as soon as she died - before the narrator did. I can't work out why "The Boy who fell asleep" by Mick Jackson was chosen. I've read "Tuesday Lunch" by Leila Aboulela before. The main character, Nadia is eight. She has school dinners in the gym. She is getting used to western ways. It dawns on her that it wouldn't be right to behave at lunchtime as if it were a gym session. She's learning fast.

In "The Beast" (Philip O Ceallaigh) an old man walks along a road - "He passed a boy and girl. They had been kissing and he had disturbed them. They separated and greeted him politely and did not resume speaking until he had passed. They were both perhaps sixteen. He knew the families they came from, knew more about their grandparents and great-grandparents than they knew themselves. But the knowledge of their grandparents meant nothing to them. The old were fading and disappearing and the world needed to be discovered again, for the first time. Only kisses on warm summer evenings, the first ones in the history of the world, were real to the young. And the young were right, he felt". I guessed the 50-50 offer but not the final twist. I liked "Blinds" by Jackie Kay.

I tend not to like didactic pieces. These aren't too preachy though. I was hoping for more narrational variety, as in The Room, or The Wasp Factory. They use standard English. No gangs or rude words. The footnotes are quirky. On p.201 "dill" is given an extensive footnote - "a plant of the parsley family, the leaves of which are used as a herb". "Derrida" on p.212 isn't given a footnote. On p.217 "gritted teeth" is footnoted but not "Parasitical symbiosis".

"Table Manners" by Susmita Bhattacharya (Dahlia Books, 2019)

Stories from Structo, Litro, Lonely Crowd, etc.

• The right thing to do - A maid consoles a neighbour who come round when her respectable husband beats her. The maid's mistress, Bhabhi, is rather pampered. When Bhabhi supposed cousin Arjun, an entomologist, visits, they spend time together. He's searching for a rare butterfly. The two of them and the maid find it, a brown plain thing. He puts it in a jar. She objects. At the end Bhabhi removes Arjun's toothbrush from the mug where it's been leaning against hers
• Comfort food - A wife enjoys her Friday nights alone with a simple meal. One Friday as she's about to eat she's called out by her husband to accompany him on a business meal. The client flirts. When they return and her husband's in bed, she makes herself vomit so she can eat her simple meal.
• Good Golly Miss Molly - Mouli wakes to hear her husband Satish, dead a month, talk to her. Actually it's Popat, a parrot Satish had bought her 40 years before as a disappointing first anniversary present. The ending is "Tomorrow she would set him free. He could roam the skies and eat the mangoes himself. The tree he has accidentally planted all those years ago. Tomorrow he would taste the fruit. Then he would return to her. She was sure of it"
• Growing tomatoes - Hoda has been shipped in from India to Cardiff because Fatima and Abdu are childless, and Abdu needs an heir for his business. A neighbour, Waheeda, is pregnant with a 5th child and grows potted tomatoes that die of neglect after Waheeda gives birth. Hoda remains childless. Abdu refuses to be tested until Waheeda has the child. Hoda decides to cook him a stew with her tomatoes in it
• In the lap of the gods - At a Christian camp the narrator hopes to find a husband. She spends 3 nights with a rather rebellious room-mate who doesn't want to marry. Other people declare their love of god - they say they have found the meaning of life. The narrator and room-mate drink rum and sleep together. After, they do not meet again, though the narrator's outlook on life has changed. The narrator on social media sees the traditional wedding photos of her friend.
• Letters home - Hassan goes from Dhaka to Cardiff to work in an Indian restaurant. We see his letters back to his expectant wife. His English isn't standard and aspects of UK life confuse him - what is curry? His boss is in London when there's terrorist attack and dies. Coincidence? Hassan shaves his beard and moustache hoping to reduce prejudice.
• Buon Anniversario amore mio - Andy and Maya are in Venice. They've been together 20 years. Maya's bald with terminal cancer. She's an artist, keen to visit the Biennale. He's not into modern art. She used to live with Tom, Andy's brother, indulging in drugs and alcohol. Andy saved her from that, and had discovered her breast cancer. On their wedding day Tom had overdosed. An accident?
• The taste of onion on his tongue - It's 7pm. A woman is watching the couple opposite who married 10 years before. She hasn't left her house since she cremated her husband. They were married for 30 years, childless. She likes watching (and listening to) the couple having sex. They're childless, which she thinks explains why the husband beats his wife. At the end, the husband stares across the road at her, mouthing "crazy bitch" before drawing the curtains.
• Dusk over Atlantic Wharf - The wife arrived in Cardiff 4 months before the wedding. He'd been there 6 years. "She would learn to love him." They go to the cinema. By chance a Bollywood film is on. They watch it. It's set in Mumbai, her home-town, which she's missing. She's not used to how the local girls behave. She cries in the car.
• Table Manners - "The Chinese family across the street is cooking. The whole street knows ... The steam from their bubbling pots condenses on their window, creating a soft blur of their movements". They're watched by a widower. He's invited over by the Chinese grandma to get a cat out of a tree. She speaks no English. They're both lonely. She makes him tea then a meal. The colourful kitchen and its fragrances contrasts with his microwaved food and body odour. When he returns home he gets out a photo of his wife and his much thinner old self. Typo - "but it's certainly smells better"
• That face like a harvest moon - Manju has a week left of her 3 month stay with her daughter and son-in-law in Wimbledon. They have a student daughter Divya, who arrives unexpectedly, in tears. She's pregnant. It's soon decided that she'll have the child. We learn that Manju had a baby before marriage - a shameful event. Her baby was whisked away straight after birth. As they part at the airport the son-in-law tells Manju to try to forgive Divya (dramatic irony - Manju should forgive herself). Typo - "but when her baby was born was born"
• The summer of learning - An Indian man, with his golden haired UK wife and daughter (they live in Cardiff) visit the father's village in India for the first time, where they're treated as if they were rich, though they live above a shop and the father's a taxi-driver. The daughter begins to like it, the father begins to go drinking, ignoring his wife. The maid steals 200 pounds from the father because her son is sick. She's sacked and the son dies.
• The luxury of quiet contemplation - An old woman falls in her kitchen and can't get up. She recalls when her husband died in the night. Her son's gone to the States, married to a women she carefully chose. Her maid's being beaten by her husband.
• Spider - Paula and husband Tony are on a touring holiday. She's bored of temples. The guide takes her around alone, to show her the real India. She's shown backstreets. For a price (paid before she know what for), she's shown male Siamese twins. At first she's not impressed by the guide, then realises that this is the only way the two sons can earn money - they have five sisters.
• A holiday to remember - Anand takes wife Rima (who he met at a Bombay college; she came from a much poorer home than he did) and baby on a cheap caravan holiday. It's all they can afford now that they live in the UK. She's fed up. They argue. Then their baby takes his first steps.
• After she was gone - A girl's looking out of her window for her mother, who's out late again. Her taxi-driver father is waiting too. They pick her up from a shop where she's being held for shop-lifting. She hasn't got over baby Dolly's cot death. Dolly was pretty. The narrator's plain. Years pass. The narrator marries and has a baby. Her parents are happy. Her mother dies. She visits her father on a bad day. He decides to clear his wife's stuff out. He gives his daughter a home-made quilt. When it rips they discover that it's stuffed with stolen baby clothes, some with the price tag still on.
• Marked - a girl at the Taj Mahal scratches the initials of her and her boyfriend on the marble. Years later she revisits with her husband (who isn't that earlier lover) and kids. They return to India yearly, but don't usually have time to see the sights. The initials have gone. We learn that her parents had rejected her lover for religious reasons. She'd been sad that he'd given her up without a fight. They learn about the result of the Brexit vote, which triggers feelings of estrangement. Then we switch to point-of-view of her erstwhile boyfriend. We learn that he's living in the UK, married to an English woman. The Brexit vote has just happened. Vandals have scratched "Go home" on his car.
• Mango season - In India a great-grandmother dies at 102, eating a mango. She and her husband were westernised, well-to-do, until he became a Gandhi follower, after which she burned her western stuff - piano, etc. Her great-grand-daughter moves into her room, finds some old gloves stuffed with love letters from "John". John had asked her to return with him to England. The girl realises that her great-grandmother may have set fire to things more as a reaction to that than because of politics. Mangoes are mentioned in a letter.

I've described the plots here because I'm bad at plot development and wanted to study them - they're central to the success of the book. Though in the main they scaffold the stories effectively, sometimes I feel that they restrict character development. I think non-writers would like the stories - they'd work well on the radio. Maybe fellow writers wouldn't be quite so impressed. Scenarios are set up involving displacement and adaption, or people watching others unaware that they're learning about themselves. Symbolism's often seeded near the start and is used to convey the message at the end (butterflies, tomatoes, mangoes). Some stories (e.g."Dusk over Atlantic Wharf") get little further than setting the scenario up. Others develop along lines which while not being entirely predictable come as no surprise. Characters learn things, often belatedly, and in ways that don't affect their subsequent behaviour. The language varies little in register, the characters are recognisable, and the mode is resolutely realist with a sentimental twist. Some pieces are nearly real-time, others have a story duration of a day or so. A few jump years. "Marked" has split time-lines. No story particularly stands out. They're all readable. Maybe the title story's my favourite.

Other reviews

• Emma Lee (A motif throughout the stories is the concept of home and family. Some characters remain at home, others move countries, others have mixed race heritage; all have to consider what sustains and nurtures them)
• storgy
• Chris Sanders (The characters in Susmita Bhattacharya’s collection, Table Manners, are alienated by language, culture and geography, silenced by loneliness and yearning. Food is a byword for class, loss, happiness, and a minefield of potential gaffes for the culturally uninitiated. ... “Comfort Food” is a gem of a story ... The stories in this collection are deftly constructed and executed with confidence and surgical precision. ... At its best, her writing brilliantly reveals entire worlds in a paragraph ... Regrettably, these insights are all too rare. The hushed-up domestic violence, English lessons, chicken kormas, caustic mother-in-laws, and cooking smells leaking into the street often seem overly familiar – perhaps because so many writers have latterly documented the immigrant/outsider experience, these observations appear commonplace rather than curious?)
• Pia Ghosh-Roy (For me, the most beautiful part of these stories is that they end not with a resolution but with small, sharp shards of hope.)
• Good reads

"Burning Chrome" by William Gibson (Gollanz, 2016)

First published in 1986, this story collection includes 3 collaborations. "Gibson is the Raymond Chandler of SF", according to the Observer on the back cover.

"Johnny Mnemonic" is crammed with ideas and atmosphere. In "The Belonging Kind" Coretti's an outsider - "Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer" (p.49). He's stalking another outsider, a women, who seems to change. The trek from bar to bar reminds me of John Cheever's "The Swimmer". Is she an alien? I liked much of "Hinterlands". "The Winter Market" held my attention - "Trash fires gutter in steel canisters around the Market. The snow still falls and kids huddle over the flames like arthritic crows, hopping from foot to foot, wind whipping their dark coats. Up in Fairview's arty slum-tumble, someone's laundry has frozen solid on the line, pink squares of bedsheets standing out against the background dinge and the confusion of satellite dishes and solar panels. Some ecologist's eggbeater windmill goes round and round, round and round, giving a whirling finger to the Hydro rates."

"Burning Chrome" is set in a world I'm familiar with from his novels - icebreakers and black ice. "Somewhere we have bodies, very far away, in a crowded loft roofed with steel and glass. Somewhere we have microseconds, maybe time left to pull out. We've crashed her gates disguised as an audit and three subpoenas".

Other reviews

• Adi Robertson
• Ted Gioia
• Nader Elhefnawy (Gibson's storytelling can be as muddled as his prose style can be dazzling, the strength of his plotting and descriptions of the action inconsistent for all of the flash of a single word choice or sentence ... "Continuum" works well, in part, because it is rooted in Gibson's strengths (his eye for detail, his strong sensibility about past, present and future) rather than his weaknesses (like his plotting) ... "The Winter Market" requires Casey to get inside Leni in the most literal, technological terms, as Gibson only rarely does in his focus on surface detail. The result here is not only one of Gibson's best composed stories, but perhaps the most resonant expression of the loneliness and alienation of the future he describes in the entire collection.)