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...
View ArticleA 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...
View ArticleA 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 morally...
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 storyGee, he can use the word, Jeb can, a...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story part 27: Jorge Luis Borges
With a quiet style and exuberant use of references, Borges scrutinised reality in short yet labyrinthine worksSpeaking on a New Yorker podcast in 2007, Paul Theroux noted that Jorge Luis Borges is "a...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story part 28: Vladimir Nabokov
There's no doubting that he's a master writer but not of short storiesIn Paris in the late 1930s, Vladimir Nabokov duped a hostile critic, Ales Adamovich, by publishing a poem under the pseudonym...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story part 29: Eudora Welty
Her reputation as a regionalist tends to obscure the rich sophistication of the workEudora Welty won eight O Henry awards and the Pulitzer prize, was awarded the Légion d'honneur, became the first...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story part 30: Bruno Schulz
A writer who redraws the boundaries between fact and imagination, Schulz is a master of what he called 'the mythicisation of reality'The Polish Jewish writer Bruno Schulz described Sanatorium Under the...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story part 31: Boccaccio
The 100 stories of his Decameron, moving through a wild array of moods and subjects, were a watershed in European literature and continue to inspire nearly seven centuries onGiovanni Boccaccio's...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story part 32: James Joyce
With just one collection of stories, Joyce left his mark on almost every short story writer who followed himJames Joyce wrote just one collection of short stories, but it ranks among the finest in...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story part 33: Deborah Eisenberg
Intellectual and moral seriousness blends with great wit in the stories of Deborah Eisenberg, as well as a gift for metaphorFor most people there is a gap between the person we are and the person we...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story part 34: Ernest Hemingway
Stripping down fiction to austere minimalism, these are some of the most influential stories ever written"Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft that burns," Ernest...
View ArticleChris Power | A brief survey of the short story part 35: Tadeusz Borowski
In Borowski's stories atrocity is piled upon atrocity, but it has been argued that the close identification of character with creator was a deliberate moral decision"I saw the death of a million people...
View ArticleA brief survey of the short story part 36: Denis Johnson
These potent tales are as tightly-controlled as their addled characters are chaoticA Sacred Heart Jesus, an iconographic representation of a drug capsule, a light-damaged photograph of tract housing in...
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...
View Article