There is an intense intimacy in Solding’s writing style. The words come as a confession: a kind of whispered tale that draws the reader in and invites collusion. The characters progress naturally through time, beginning with key moments of youth and awakening perception, and moving through coupling, and later parenthood.
Tag: short stories
A review of Inherited by Amanda Curtin
Memory is critical in each of the stories, recycled into new experiences, and reworked into new memories, twisting, in and out of view, but never lost—nothing is ever lost. The setting brings history into the present day as modern characters uncover clues about the past that lead to self-awareness.
A review of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory
Loory often ends with an invisible higher power, who seems to approve the goings-on with laughter or, in the case of the balloon, “a faint, expected pop.” What’s eerie about a balloon breaking? Nothing, if you don’t think a child is attached to it as it rises above the Stories world.
A review of Sourdough and Other Stories by Angela Slatter
These stories are stupendously good and offer many distinct pleasures: a strange yet superbly realised world, compelling characters and, above all, beautiful prose that has the power to move. One of those characters mentions of her lover’s failings that ‘he could not realize how all women are, in one way or another, “her kind” [i.e. a witch], even his dear departed mother.’ And that could be a coda for the book.
A review of Little Pieces: This Side of Japan by Michael Hoffman
That said and frankly acknowledged as a personal response, Hoffman has style and ingenuity that goes far towards compensating for the ubiquity of ghostly stuff. This book is part of the body of work from a distinguished author who deserves all the rewards of excellence. You will not go wrong to read it.
A review of Happy Baby by Stephen Elliott
We all of us choose what we do with our lives from a finite set of alternatives; and for Theo, in his darkest moments at any rate, love is not on the menu: ‘If I could love I would have loved by now.’ Happy Baby is about a person for whom love, as a possibility, has been taken away. It isn’t any kind of answer, it cannot be.
A review of The End of the Circle by Walter Cummins
These are bitter stories. All of the men, women, and children of the stories are imprisoned by circumstances. Redemption for the reader is in Cummins’s pitiless depiction of his doomed characters. Truth is what matters and he makes truth transcendent.
A review of Briefs by John Edgar Wideman
Overall, the stories paint very clear pictures, sometimes reading more like prose poetry, sometimes like anecdotes, sometimes with surprising turns, sometimes just resonating in lush language.
A review of What Came Between by Patrick Cullen
Almost more important than the major transitions in these lives are the impact of day to day living – the dust that fills the pores; the washing of clothing; the purchasing of art. What makes this work distinctive is the intensity of the narrative gaze. We learn about the characters through an almost anthropomorphic rendering of the natural world they observe.
A review of The Best Australian Stories 2006
Good short fiction works a quite a different dimension to novels – it needs a fast denouement, and the language has to be sharper, cleaner, more exacting because of the limited space. All of this stories in this collection are complete – leaving the reader with some kind of denoument. Drewe has chosen well, and the book contains a good range of material, from the modern to the traditional, funny, serious, intense, lighthearted – funky or political.