A brief survey of the short story, part 56: Clarice Lispector
This darkly addictive Brazilian writer is more concerned with perceptions of objects than conventional plot structuresIn The Apple in the Dark, the novel Clarice Lispector completed in 1956, she writes...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story: Jean Rhys
Filled with doomed women in loveless relationships, Jean Rhys's prose would be very hard to read if it weren't so extraordinary"Too bitter," Jean Rhys said of her work in 1945. "And besides, who wants...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story: Isak Dinesen
A Dane who wrote almost exclusively in English, Isak Dinesen used lurid subjects, including incest, murder and witchcraft, to explore philosophy, morality and questions of identityMy paperback copy of...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story: John McGahern
Returning over and over again to the same territory, these bleak but beautiful stories build into a complete fictional worldDuring his lifetime John McGahern was frequently called Ireland's Chekhov....
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story: Italo Calvino
A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fictionRead more on the short story mastersIn a lecture delivered in New York in the spring...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story: Barry Hannah
A writer who captured the violence, bigotry and wild humour of the American deep south in line after unpredictable line• More from A brief survey of the short story“Gee, he can use the word, Jeb can,”...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story: Nikolai Leskov
Perennially falling into and out of fashion, he is a stunningly versatile writer and a very un-Russian Russian greatA brief survey of the short story: read more blogposts“I calculated once,” Vladimir...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story: Robert Aickman
Written with real psychological depth, these enigmatic tales rise far beyond straightforward ghost stories, writes Chris PowerThe lending history of my ex-library copy of The Attempted Rescue, one of...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story: John Updike
The longevity and prodigal output of this ‘conspicuously autobiographical writer’ give his complete works – and especially his celebrated stories – the shape of an entire life• More from Chris Power’s...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story: Varlam Shalamov
Shalamov’s great work on the Soviet gulag, Kolyma Tales, is much more than a memoir of crushed humanity: seen as an epic cycle, the work acquires major philosophical dimensions• More from Chris Power’s...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story: David Foster Wallace
For all its elaborate formal tricks, Wallace’s work is marked by a deep desire for authentic connection, to his subjects and to his readersDavid Foster Wallace was a maximalist. His masterpiece,...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story: Silvina Ocampo
While her collaborator and fellow Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges created fantastical worlds, Ocampo infected the recognisable with strangeness and cruelty In 1940 a book was published in Buenos Aires...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story: Elizabeth Taylor
Her work may be set in a world of dated manners, but its hard insights into social vanity and anxiety speak all too clearly to our ownIf it wasn’t for Paul Theroux, I might never have got around to...
View ArticleLucia Berlin: 'Conversational, confessional snapshots into domestic life'
Sketching lives very similar to her own, Berlin’s stories of hardscrabble lives resemble Raymond Carver’s – while also invoking some of Proust’s spirit“It’s not that I’m worried about the future that...
View ArticleSamuel Beckett, the maestro of failure
Better known for his plays, Beckett felt his prose fiction was his central work, and his fearlessly bleak short stories are among the 20th century’s greatestFifty years ago, in the summer of 1966,...
View ArticleGeorge Saunders's funny, sad stories from a divided nation
With a surrealism that owes a lot to the real world of ordinary Americans, his stories offer sharp, moral parables of contemporary life in the USEarlier this year, George Saunders wrote an article for...
View ArticleA brief history of the short story: James Salter's unreliable genius
Some of his short stories have conspicuous faults – not least in their portrayal of women – but the best show a unique, sad beauty“There is no complete life. There are only fragments.” These lines from...
View ArticleRebel, radical, relic? Nadine Gordimer is out of fashion – we must keep...
Returning to his survey of the best short story writers of all time, Chris Power looks at Gordimer’s long career documenting South African apartheidIn 1975, Nadine Gordimer reflected that “there are...
View Article'Enough heroin to kill the whole street': does Anna Kavan's life overshadow...
The details of Anna Kavan’s life loom large over her work, says Chris Power, but the brilliant light of her short fiction illuminates psychological trauma and mortalityAnna Kavan’s 1943 essay about her...
View ArticleStuart Dybek: bungee jumping through the trapdoors of time
Unaccountably little-known outside the US, his stories take the reader from a carefully observed midwest into a past that is very much aliveLike Steven Millhauser, Deborah Eisenberg and Edward P Jones,...
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