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A brief survey of the short story part 39: William Trevor
Trevor's greatest skill is seamless characterisation: words that appear authorial are actually those of his protagonistsWilliam Trevor was born in County Cork in 1928 and has lived in England since the...
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A brief survey of the short story part 40: JD Salinger
Salinger's style evolved over the years before his self-imposed silence, but his stories share an 'uncanny, hypnotic readability'JD Salinger, who died in 2010, last published a piece of fiction in the...
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A brief survey of the short story part 41: Rudyard Kipling
George Orwell thought he was 'morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting', but Kipling's stories are both original and excitingFor George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling was "a jingo imperialist …...
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A brief survey of the short story part 42: Danilo Kiš
Muddling the real and the fictional, the power of Kiš's stories lie in their ability to capture truth by doctoring historyIn The Anatomy Lesson, a book-length essay published in 1978, the Yugoslavian...
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A brief survey of the short story part 43: Flannery O'Connor
O'Connor brings an enigmatic intensity to her gothic vision of the American SouthFlannery O'Connor's stories plough a straight and often gory furrow from individual pride to disaster. Writing the way...
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A brief survey of the short story part 44: Frank O'Connor
The way he captured 'the tone of a man's voice, speaking' combines storytelling tradition with Chekhovian objectivityFrank O'Connor, born Michael O'Donovan in Cork in 1903, strikes me as one of those...
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A brief survey of the short story part 45: John Cheever
As National Short Story week draws to a close, Chris Power considers a master of the form who brings something shadowy and troubled – not to mention enchanted – to his depictions of suburban New...
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A brief survey of the short story part 46: Roberto Bolaño
Invested with a rare belief in literature's importance, his enigmatic stories encompass deep feeling and extreme violenceWhen he died of liver failure in Spain in 2003, aged 50, Chilean author Roberto...
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A brief survey of the short story part 47: Machado de Assis
Still neglected by English readers, the Brazilian writer is one of the very greatest of the early modern eraThe Brazilian Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is, to English-language readers, perhaps the...
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A brief survey of the short story part 48: Angela Carter
By harnessing the peculiar power of fairytales, Carter invested her stories with a vibrant emotional and intellectual energyIn an interview Angela Carter gave in 1991, not long before her death from...
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A brief survey of the short story part 49: Guy de Maupassant
His prolific output of sensational stories for the popular press should not obscure the incomparable art of his best work"He is a better writer than you think," Malcolm Lowry once said of Guy de...
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A brief survey of the short story part 50: Ivan Turgenev
Turgenev's work is imbued with sorrow but pulses with life, and bears powerful testimony to the fleeting beauty of existenceWhen Gogol died in 1852, Ivan Turgenev, the man whom many in Russia were...
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A brief survey of the short story part 51: Sherwood Anderson
In his story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, midwest maestro Sherwood Anderson lavishes love on a collection of grotesques whose lives have been distorted by an inability to communicateCertain locations belong...
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A brief survey of the short story part 52: Juan Rulfo
Rulfo is one of the greatest Latin American writers. His spare, startling short fiction, set in tumultous post-revolutionary Mexico, possesses an elemental, universal qualityAt the turn of the...
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A brief survey of the short story part 53: Katherine Anne Porter
Full of both concrete and hallucinatory detail, Porter's slender output includes some of the very best American storiesKatherine Anne Porter lived a long life but published sparingly. Her bibliography...
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A brief survey of the short story, part 54: Dambudzo Marechera
A writer who considered fiction a 'form of combat', his work is complex, challenging – and uniquely potent"Like overhearing a scream", is how Doris Lessing described reading the Zimbabwean author...
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A brief survey of the short story, part 55: Edgar Allan Poe
He's no prose stylist, but the psychological territory mapped by his tales set a fictional compass still in wide use"I cannot think of any other author", said Harold Bloom of Edgar Allan Poe, "who...
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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 part 37: Alice Munro
The easy, conversational flow of her stories conceals an almost Proustian complexity of constructionAlice Munro is so routinely called one of the greatest living short story writers that the accolade...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story part 38: Isaac Babel
Somehow both flamboyant and spare, these stories hum with a sense of the newOn 15 May 1939, when Isaac Babel was arrested on false charges and taken to Moscow's Lubyanka prison, the NKVD also...
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