"Words & Women: The Compendium" by Lynne Bryan and Belona Greenwood (eds) (Singular Press)

Short Prose (1,000-2000 words?) from women over 40 - some names I know (as poets) and some experienced prose writers. The pieces are selected from several annual competitions run by the same people.

• Cornflake Girl (Lora Stimson) - a girl starring in a cornflakes ad sleeps with the director. The piece is interrupted by passages about her suicide attempt as a student
• A canary in Kabul non-fiction (Antoinette Moses) - 1971. Kabul. A girl who's with her hippy boyfriend gets to know an Italian (ex-fascist?) and his sick parrot
• Kurt Cobain's son (Julianne Pacico) - A fan-fic writer thinks Cobain's son is in her class (the author's been in New Yorker, Granta, etc - I'm surprised)
• Sunday tea non-fiction (Kate Harmond Allan) - Food nostalgia, and how the meals at the 2 grandmothers differed. At the end, a grandmother says something very strange: 'Your mother picked from the orchard until she got the crab.'
• The wife (Deborah Arnander) - A prof's wife in California gets to know a briefly visiting prof's wife, Juliette, much older than her and French. The older wife tells her about her stillborn and abortions. Out of sight of her husband she smokes and has a coughing fit - she has asthma. A few weeks later we learn via the wife's husband Ted that the French wife can now only go out with an oxygen tank, so her husband can't go to conferences. At the end, "The way Ted tells it, you would think that Juliette was doing it deliberately". My favourite so far.
• For the records non-fiction (Lois Williams) - It's 1975. A girl who's 7 is listening to The Sound of Music. Her father (who's away during the week, working) plays Mozart records
• The time of assassinations (Nasrin Parvaz) - Ramin's brother Nader is killed in Tehran. Ramin meets his girlfriend Soraya who suggests that he not tell his parents the bad news. He phones them, pretending to be Nader living in Germany. At the end he wonders how long he would be able to keep up this deceit. A rather flat, premature ending, given that Ramin and Soraya might not see each other again.
• Scalpelling Through (Sarah Evans) - A single woman (2nd person) gives birth - "The baby rips from you". The baby is of indeterminate gender. At the registrar, she decides which gender she'll bring up the baby, Jess, for now - "'Girl.' The word rips from you". Like many of these pieces, there's too little room to develop the potentially interesting set-up. The style is of a longer story.
• Sorry Business (Lilie Ferrari) - The narrator is on a tour of Australia with her Australian husband who has terminal cancer and is on lots of drugs. At Alice Springs, having visited the Rock, he decides that he wants her to give him an overdose. She agrees and he dies.
• The Call (Caroline Jackson) - The narrator, doing a Ph.D, is a mother married to a newly qualified churchman. Queenie Bird's funeral is approaching. The language is at times ornate - "Her few tentative, grey hairs at either temple were the only external indicators that zest had given place to zeal with neither declaration nor admission".
• The Sunbathers (Kerry Hood) - A couple who yearly holiday at the same beach have got to know the 18 other regulars. A new couple arrive, who don't mix. At one point the men knock the new man off his seat(?). The language at times becomes strained - "We are in our cars, rear-views making a concertina of eyes. We get out, clench the hollow-cysted rail. We are sweating and angry but mostly afraid. I am not with the nineteen but know that they are sweating, angry and afraid for we are only a half-alive brain apart always".
• You have what you want (Anthea Morrison) - on a hot summer night in a village a mother wakes, hearing her baby cry across the landing. Her husband's away for 3 days. She makes up a bottle and feeds the baby in the garden. Still in her nightgown, barefoot, she goes to the river with the sleeping baby in a pushchair. She swims. She hears the baby cry - a cow is near the buggy. She struggles to get out of the river then saves her daughter.
• The Bear non-fiction (Louise Dumayne) -She, British, is in Alaska with her husband, cut off from the world. They're looking after 12 huskies while a friend is away. She has to shoot a bear at close range to save their lives. They should have dealt with matters better.
• My sister's haircut (Dani Redd) - A girl learns about sex by overhearing her older sister Hattie talk and overhearing her having sex with Daniel. Daniel wants the narrator to shave Hattie's head while he photographs. When it grew back, Daniel left her, and she was going to university. Hattie thinks that Daniel has kept her hair. They go to his house. They see him through the window, asleep, gripping it. The girl experiences her first disillusionment about men. I like quite a lot of this.
• Room service (Claudine Toutoungi) - A man (though we're not told that for a while) works as an airport hotel cleaner. He meets a difficult customer and takes revenge.
• Did you eat lunch? non-fiction (Hannah Garrard) - Korean seafood BBQ restaurants (where you BBQ your own food). American (spam) and China influences. Koreans begin conversations with "Did you eat something/lunch?" the way the English might begin with "Looks like rain".
• The once and only first lady judge (Margaret Meyer) - While the landlord quizzes her hangovered father, she walks to the fields and plays at being a Lawyer in a court with her dolls. But she needs a school scholarship for that. When her 5 year-old brother starts school, her father says she has to stay home, but her mother tells her to go.
• Thin walls (Sarah Ridgard) - The cheap terrace houses in Victoria street are being renovated on the cheap by the residents - contents of houses were being barrowed into yellow skips that stood in the road like open urns of bone rubble. At 87 lives Sylvie. Her husband is abroad for a week at a conference. One of his PhD students comes to put down a floor and have sex. The removal of a load-bearing wall in one house causes the street to collapse like dominoes except for No. 51. My favourite so far.
• Suite for my father non-fiction (Melissa Fu) - A father ( single?) brings the narrator daughter up to enjoy books. She likes exploring his study while he's out, and walking to the library with him - "It is because of his hands that I love books and ice-cream"