Category Archives: short fiction

Happy Birthday Raymond Carver

Had he lived, Raymond Carver would have been 75 today.

Raymond Carver

Considering the brilliance of the the body of work he left behind, I can’t help but be a little sad when I consider what great fictions he might have created in the years since his death in 1988. As a way of marking this day I thought I might share a few of my favourite bits of Carver.

First up audio recordings of three of my favourite Carver stories, The Student’s Wife (read by Richard Ford), Fat (read by Anne Enright) and Chef’s House (read by David Means), can be found on OpenCulture, along with a handy text commentary for the uninitiated.

To get a glimpse at the writer behind the work you could do a lot worse than read his Paris Review interview with Mona Simpson.

You can read one of his most striking and one of his shortest fictions, Popular Mechanics, from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. (You might want to use Readability or some such extension to do away with the nasty pale green background and let the words come to the fore though).

Carver’s essay on the Principles of a Story is essential reading for those writing short fiction, beginner and veteran alike.

And the wonderful, Carver-inspired magazine Carve has 25% off everything in their store today. Worth a look, particularly as you can get a cut price subscription which will include the upcoming 2013 Carver Prize Winners Edition.

Lots to go at. I’m off to read some stories from Elephant, but I’ll leave you with my favourite of Carver’s many insights into the art of writing:

“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say.” — A Storyteller’s Shoptalk

Feel free to share your favourite slices of Carver in the comments below.

Looking Out of Broken Windows to be published in 2014

2008 was the year I finally decided, after years of not writing and half-writing, to get my act together and really do the thing I have most wanted to do since I was a teenager – write. To that end I signed up for an OU course starting in May of that year. The idea was simple. Sign up on the course and use it to get some feedback on my work. See if pursuing this writing lark was really worth my time. If I did well on the course then chances are I had something worth nurturing. I did well enough on the first course to sign up for more over the next two years. The feedback from my tutors gave me the confidence to start subbing my work. Fast forward to now and I am knee deep in an MA, up to my neck in a novel-in-progress, and have a whole load of published short stories.

And this week, about five years to the day since I started that original OU course, I heard that Salt Publishing will publish my Scott Prize short-listed collection, Looking Out of Broken Windows, in 2014. Longtime readers will know what a fan I am of Salt’s short fiction list. Having my debut collection published by Salt has been a goal of mine since discovering their books back in the early days of this blog. Next year can’t arrive fast enough.

For anyone interested to hear more, you can read all about the writing of my collection in my Scott Prize shortlist post over on the Salt blog.

Winner of 2013 Scott Prize announced

For those of you that haven’t already heard, the winner of the Scott Prize was announced over the weekend. As one of the shortlisted authors I spent a nervous Friday and half of Saturday awaiting the result, which appeared on Twitter a little after lunch:

As you can see, the brilliant Kirsty Logan won and her collection The Rental Heart and other Fairytales will be published by Salt later this year. Having enjoyed each of the Scott Prize winning collections I have so far read, I am very much looking forward to it. ‘The Rental Heart’ was one of my favourites from The Best British Short Stories 2011 and if the rest of the collection is half as good, it’ll be a corker.

Thresholds Feature Competition Winner Announced.

And this year’s winner of the Threshold’s Feature competition is the brilliant and lovely Nuala Ní Chonchúir. Her essay A Trio of Short Stories is a heartfelt examination of three stories that, though read as a child, have had a lasting impact upon her. Those of you who have read the My Life In Short Fiction posts on this blog will know I am always interested in discovering the stories that helped shape a writer’s unique perspective. If after reading Nuala’s excellent essay you are eager to find out more about the stories she cherishes, you can read her Life in Short Fiction post here.

I am delighted to be able to say that my little essay on Stig Dagerman‘s excellent collection, The Games of Night, was the runner-up and will appear on the Thresholds website on Monday (29th April).

A big congratulations to Nuala and the other short-listed and long-listed essayists. I am looking forward to reading each of them as they appear on Thresholds.

Now go read Nuala’s essay already.