And I love some short stories, too: the dark, funny magic of Kelly Link, the miraculously rich work of Deborah Eisenberg, the popular energy still coursing through short fiction in the sci-fi and fantasy worlds. I can already hear multiple friends and colleagues jumping up to protest “I love short stories!” in the slightly wistful tone of someone praising the virtues of vinyl LPs. Now they live in captivity in poorly selling collections stuck on bookshelves, hardly their native habitat. Appearing in almost every magazine, they diverted people during quiet evenings at home, on trains, and in doctors’ waiting rooms. Once, stories flourished at the fertile intersection of art and entertainment, much as television does now. The literary short story is an awkward holdover. To order A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, The Slow Road to Tehran or Drift go to has relationships with various online retailers.īut note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change.Īll prices were up to date at the time of publication. In times of war, Lewis finds resilience, redemption and hope right now, Drift feels perfectly judged.
Contemporary concerns of war, displacement and identity are adroitly woven into a story with a magical quality, underpinned by some lovely yearning writing about the land and sea. Nefyn finds the body of a Syrian, Hamza, washed up on the Welsh coast and as she nurses him back to life, her unique powers are gradually revealed. Lewis is an award-winning Welsh novelist, playwright and screenwriter her debut English-language novel confirms her talent. There are scrapes and difficulties, but these escapades are less about Lowe and more about the kindness of others, encouraged by the disarming quality of “the machine which makes us all brothers and sisters”. Nor is Lowe an avid cyclist instead, she is a perceptive writer who finds new ways to think about the complex peoples, histories and politics of the countries she journeys through. The Slow Road to Tehranīilled as a revelatory bike ride through Europe and the Middle East, Lowe’s adventure from London to Tehran is not a typical tale of endurance. This is a book for readers as well as would-be writers, a wonderful treatise on the importance of fiction as a way to be more active, curious and alert in our own lives. Rather than academically deconstructing stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol, he wittily guides the reader through their craft and meaning. Booker-winning author Saunders has been teaching the 19th-century Russian short story at Syracuse University for more than 20 years now and this book makes the class sound incredible.
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