Latest news with #shortstory
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
After the Troubles: Liadan Ní Chuinn's phenomenal debut
Every One Still Here, t he first short story collection by Northern Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn, is something of a mystery. The name is a pseudonym and the book comes with no author photograph: all we are told is that they were born in 1998, the year of the Good Friday agreement. But, reading Ní Chuinn's work, one thing quickly becomes clear: this is a phenomenal debut. The opening story, We All Go , follows Jackie, a student stultified by both a claustrophobic home life and the anatomy classes they attend at university. Ní Chuinn's prose is austere and precise: a technician places a body's 'white fascia and curds of yellow fat' into a bowl, while the narrator feels queasy. It is a tale of disconnections – physical and emotional. Jackie's mother, seemingly, has no sympathy for her: the heaviness of one is inexpressible to the other. This pattern is repeated throughout. In Amalur, a young girl confides her pregnancy to a family friend, unable to tell anyone else. In Novena, a fraudulent fertility clinic leaves a Northern Irish town divided and reeling. In Mary , written in the second person, 'you' join a writing class after being made unemployed. Among the regular passengers on the bus to the class is a child named Mary, who the protagonist tries and fails to commit to paper. The tutor asks: 'Is she a character? Or is she a metaphor?' This is a post-Troubles world, in which trauma lingers in every interaction: rendering it in fiction is a fraught, complicated task. Ní Chuinn's scenes are filled with shattered glass, broken bones, cannulas, needles, desperate ambulance rides. By the final story, Daisy Hill , we are braced for terrible events. A character is slumped on the floor, and here is yet another uncle, brother or father to mourn. The collection's true force, however, is only revealed at the end. In a coda, Ní Chuinn records – in chilling, factual, present tense – the deaths of dozens of real people killed by British state forces. The painful scenes of Every One Still Here do not, as one character has it, recur by coincidence – they are the direct consequence of a political situation. This is heart-stopping writing, and I hope for more to come from the mysterious Ní Chuinn. Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn is published by Granta (£14.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £13.49. Delivery charges may apply Photography by Olivier Martel for Getty Images
The Guardian
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine review – a polyphonic portrait of class and trauma in Belfast
That we tend to regard the shift from the short story to the novel as a natural authorial progression perhaps speaks to a failure to recognise the shorter form as its own distinct discipline. Short stories are not novels in miniature, or parts of novels pruned to stand on their own. Without the luxury of space and looser pacing, they demand of the writer a linguistic precision and compression that, at its most radical, borders on the poetic, and which across the breadth of a novel would feel wearying. Novels need room to breathe. The writer expanding their scope therefore faces a difficult adjustment: guarding against density while ensuring they don't get lost in the space. For Wendy Erskine, the move to a larger canvas feels entirely unforced. Her highly praised stories, collected in 2018's Sweet Home and 2022's Dance Move, often display a certain capaciousness, a willingness to wander beyond the single epiphanic moment that is the traditional preserve of the short story. Now, in her first novel, she revels in the possibilities of an expanded cast, yet controls the pace and framing with all the precision of a miniaturist. The result is a novel that feels like a balancing act: at once sprawling and meticulous, polyphonic and tonally coherent. The Benefactors is ambitiously structured, but functions in some ways as a short story with a novel around it. At the book's heart is a pivotal, life-altering moment. Gracefully flowing into and out of it are the day-to-day lives that the moment both springs from and distorts, rendered in a tapestry of third-person narration and unattributed interjections of monologue – a kind of community chorus, commenting and adding colour. At the centre is Misty, a teenager who dreams of a career in special effects makeup, but who tops up her current job in a hotel by putting in the hours on Bennyz, or Benefactors, a camgirl site not unlike OnlyFans. Misty has a crush on Chris, the spoiled son of a wealthy businessman, but at a party in an Airbnb Chris and his friends Rami and Lineup sexually assault her. The trauma is Misty's, but the aftermath is dominated by the parents: Misty's adoptive father Boogie, Chris's stepmother Frankie, Rami's widowed mother Miriam, and Lineup's idealistic but ultimately hypocritical mother Bronagh, who runs a successful children's charity. Erskine's great gift is for character. Not a single figure in this novel feels contrived; all are complicatedly flawed and empathetically rendered. In the novel's first third, Erskine juggles not only a series of perspectival shifts but also multiple, fragmentary diversions back in time, constructing from a mosaic of voices and moments both a convincing cast and a richly textured collective portrait of suburban Belfast – an array of pasts and circumstances deeply and believably integrated. As the novel comes to rest in the present, Erskine draws for the communication of her characters' inner lives on her other most striking skill: the construction of warmly human dialogue on the page. In the book's most remarkable character, Misty's wonderfully abrasive grandmother Nan D, all Erskine's generous literary gifts find their perfect expression. Observe, for example, the sheer rhythmic poetry that careens across the page when Nan D, who favours a more direct form of reparation than the criminal justice system allows for, sardonically relays in beautifully cadenced sarcasm a cinematic fantasy of justice heroically upheld: Misty could end up with one of those lawyers like off the films, a young underdog, nice long hair like your woman, can't remember her name. She's been in loads of things. From the wrong side of the tracks, underdog, but sees something in Misty that reminds her of herself, you know what I mean? And works night and day. In libraries at midnight and grafting grafting grafting. And she turns a whole jury around, our girl. And those guys are going down and their lives are just grubbed up for all time. Boogie, too, is touchingly portrayed. The scene when, on hearing that Misty has been assaulted, he drives to the supermarket on the way to collect her from the police station and buys all the uncomplicated comfort he can think of – food, a dressing gown, orange juice – is, like much of this novel, poignant and true without ever being sentimental or manipulative. When Misty's sister Gen, who accompanies Misty to the police station, uses the word 'Dad' – just once, and entirely uneditorialised – the reader feels the weight of it without anything further needing to be said, such is the depth of the characterisation that has gone before. As should be obvious by this point, there is no doubting Erskine's skill as a writer. The problem is that skill itself must be skilfully deployed – rougher textures allowed to show through the polish. Otherwise, the depiction can cleanse the subject of life. The Benefactors is a work of great assurance and precision, but by the end there is a sense that it has imposed its discipline and control on its characters, denying them emotional expansiveness. The novel's structure – the quotidian trickling towards the seismic, the seismic dissolving in turn back into the quotidian – makes a perfectly valid point about the processing of trauma in collective life, but it costs the story its impact. When, towards the end, a character finally loses their temper, allows themselves to be seized by the irrational, it feels less like a shock than a relief, as if they have shattered not just their own inner reservation but the constraints of the narration around them – a narration that circles a significant trauma, but somehow never quite reaches inside it, as if in fear of what might be found there, and how it might trouble the perfect surface of Erskine's creation. The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine is published by Sceptre (£18.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Washington Post
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Rare Ian Fleming story features a Londoner named Bone, Caffery Bone
NEW YORK — 'James Bond' creator Ian Fleming didn't need to write about Cold War intrigue to consider the ways people scheme against each other. 'The Shameful Dream,' a rare Fleming work published this week, is a short story about a Londoner named Bone, Caffery Bone. Fleming's protagonist is the literary editor of Our World, a periodical 'designed to bring power and social advancement to Lord Ower,' its owner. Bone has been summoned to spend Saturday evening with Lord and Lady Ower, transported to them in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. Bone suspects, with a feeling of 'inevitable doom,' that he is to meet the same fate of so many employed by Lord Ower — removed from his job and soon forgotten.
The Independent
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Rare Ian Fleming story features a Londoner named Bone, Caffery Bone
'James Bond' creator Ian Fleming didn't need to write about Cold War intrigue to consider the ways people scheme against each other. 'The Shameful Dream,' a rare Fleming work published this week, is a short story about a Londoner named Bone, Caffery Bone. Fleming's protagonist is the literary editor of Our World, a periodical 'designed to bring power and social advancement to Lord Ower,' its owner. Bone has been summoned to spend Saturday evening with Lord and Lady Ower, transported to them in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. Bone suspects, with a feeling of 'inevitable doom,' that he is to meet the same fate of so many employed by Lord Ower — removed from his job and soon forgotten. 'For Lord Ower sacked everyone sooner or later, harshly if they belonged to no union or with a fat check if they did and were in a position to hit back,' Fleming writes. 'If one worked for Lord Ower one was expendable and one just spent oneself until one had gone over the cliff edge and disappeared beneath the waves with a fat splash.' 'The Shameful Dream' appears in this week's Strand Magazine along with another obscure work from a master of intrigue, Graham Greene 's ' Reading at Night,' a brief ghost story in which the contents of a paperback anthology become frighteningly real. Greene scholars believe that the author of 'Our Man in Havana,' 'The End of the Affair' and other classics dashed off 'Reading at Night' in the early 1960s when he found himself struggling to write a longer narrative. Strand Magazine is a quarterly publication that has run little-known works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and many others. Managing editor Andrew F. Gulli noted that the current issue was Strand's 75th and that he 'thought it would be interesting for fans to read stories by these two midcentury literary icons side by side — writers whose approaches to the genre were markedly distinct: Greene, with his moral ambiguity and spiritual tension; and Fleming, with his glamorous take on espionage.' Fleming, best known for such Bond thrillers as 'Dr. No' and 'From Russia with Love,' had a career in journalism spanning from the 1930s to the early 1960s, when he was well established as an author. For Reuters in the '30s, he wrote obituaries, covered auto racing in Austria and a Stalin show trial in the Soviet Union. After World War II, he served as foreign manager for the Kemsley newspaper group, a subsidiary of The Sunday Times. Fleming died of a heart attack in 1964, at age 56. Mike VanBlaricum, president of the Ian Fleming Foundation, says that Fleming was clearly drawing upon his own background for 'The Shameful Dream.' But biographers disagree over when Fleming wrote it. According to Nicholas Shakespeare's 'Ian Fleming: The Complete Man,' Fleming worked on the story in the early 1950s, based Lord Ower on his boss, Lord Kemsley, and based Bone upon himself. Lord Ower is sometimes referred to as 'O,' anticipating the spy chief 'M' of the Bond novels. In 'James Bond: The Man and His World,' author Henry Chancellor theorizes that Fleming wrote the story in 1961, and may have been inspired by a dispute with Daily Express owner Lord Beaverbrook over rights to a James Bond comic strip. VanBlaricum speculates that Fleming wrote it in 1951, citing the author's reference to a Sheerline saloon, a luxury car that the UK stopped producing in the mid-1950s. 'It is unlikely that Fleming would have used a decade-old car if the story were written in 1961,' he says. 'In either event, 'The Shameful Dream' was never published. It has been stated that Lord Ower too closely resembled Lord Kemsley.' ___
Associated Press
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Rare Ian Fleming story features a Londoner named Bone, Caffery Bone
NEW YORK (AP) — 'James Bond' creator Ian Fleming didn't need to write about Cold War intrigue to consider the ways people scheme against each other. 'The Shameful Dream,' a rare Fleming work published this week, is a short story about a Londoner named Bone, Caffery Bone. Fleming's protagonist is the literary editor of Our World, a periodical 'designed to bring power and social advancement to Lord Ower,' its owner. Bone has been summoned to spend Saturday evening with Lord and Lady Ower, transported to them in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. Bone suspects, with a feeling of 'inevitable doom,' that he is to meet the same fate of so many employed by Lord Ower — removed from his job and soon forgotten. 'For Lord Ower sacked everyone sooner or later, harshly if they belonged to no union or with a fat check if they did and were in a position to hit back,' Fleming writes. 'If one worked for Lord Ower one was expendable and one just spent oneself until one had gone over the cliff edge and disappeared beneath the waves with a fat splash.' 'The Shameful Dream' appears in this week's Strand Magazine along with another obscure work from a master of intrigue, Graham Greene's 'Reading at Night,' a brief ghost story in which the contents of a paperback anthology becomes frighteningly real. Greene scholars believe that the author of 'Our Man in Havana,' 'The End of the Affair' and other classics dashed off 'Reading at Night' in the early 1960s when he found himself struggling to write a longer narrative. Strand Magazine is a quarterly publication that has run little-known works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and many others. Managing editor Andrew F. Gulli noted that the current issue was Strand's 75th and that he 'thought it would be interesting for fans to read stories by these two midcentury literary icons side by side — writers whose approaches to the genre were markedly distinct: Greene, with his moral ambiguity and spiritual tension; and Fleming, with his glamorous take on espionage.' Fleming, best known for such Bond thrillers as 'Dr. No' and 'From Russia with Love,' had a career in journalism spanning from the 1930s to the early 1960s, when he was well established as an author. For Reuters in the '30s, he wrote obituaries, covered auto racing in Austria and a Stalin show trial in the Soviet Union. After World War II, he served as foreign manager for the Kemsley newspaper group, a subsidiary of The Sunday Times. Fleming died of a heart attack in 1964, at age 56. Mike VanBlaribum, president of the Ian Fleming Foundation, says that Fleming was clearly drawing upon his own background for 'The Shameful Dream.' But biographers disagree over when Fleming wrote it. According to Nicholas Shakespeare's 'Ian Fleming: The Complete Man,' Fleming worked on the story in the early 1950s, based Lord Ower on his boss, Lord Kemsley, and based Bone upon himself. Lord Ower is sometimes referred to as 'O,' anticipating the spy chief 'M' of the Bond novels. In 'James Bond: The Man and His World,' author Henry Chancellor theorizes that Fleming wrote the story in 1961, and may have been inspired by a dispute with Daily Express owner Lord Beaverbrook over rights to a James Bond comic strip. VanBlaribum speculates that Fleming wrote it in 1951, citing the author's reference to a Sheerline saloon, a luxury car that the UK stopped producing in the mid-1950s. 'It is unlikely that Fleming would have used a decade-old car if the story were written in 1961,' he says. 'In either event, 'The Shameful Dream' was never published. It has been stated that Lord Ower too closely resembled Lord Kemsley.'
