Review by Sally Shaw of "Perfect Circle," ed. Rob Redman, illustrated by Lucy Scott

Perfect Circle, an illustrated anthology, is volume two in the Uncertain Stories series. The stories tell how life, happenings, folklore, beliefs and society move in cycles that may or may not form complete circles.

"Swineside" by David Frankel opens with "I have two mementos of my visit to Swineside: a photograph and a tape recording." Immediately I want to know what or who was in the photograph and on the recording. The photograph shows Mathew, Anne and Clara at Swineside. The protagonist is looking back on a significant time in his life. Frankel enabled me to visualise and feel the bleakness of Swineside. Mathew is wrestling with his younger-self: was he right to question the mental stability of his girlfriend Anne, due to the circumstances of her grandmother’s death? Should he have believed what was recorded on the tape or accepted what Clara said she heard? This is a story of the power of hindsight and maturity although it may not always have the answers.

"Triptych" by Eva Carson tells the story of an artist whose life’s work depicts the mountainous landscape of Scotland so much so it appears that she is possessed as her paintings always follow the same format, as if she’s trapped in a reoccurring nightmare. There’s a darkness to the paintings: something is lurking within the crevices of the rocks, "I will say that viewers almost always have the same reaction: fear, even a kind of disgust." Following the death of her mother, her daughter visits her mother’s biographer, Robert. When Robert dies six weeks later his documentation of interviews with her mother describe the place where she first encountered the mountainous landscape and a mysterious event from which she never truly escaped. Carson writes in a way that enables the reader to experience the chill of the uncanny happenings, and provides unexpected outcomes and twists. The closing line is fabulous. 

"Dead Man’s Hollow" by Kathy Hoyle is the longest of the stories and its placing within the book is perfect. "They built a skate park over Dead Man’s Hollow. We were dead chuffed. Nobody needed a reminder of the past, the councilmen said, not in this day and age." Whatever happened must have been long ago if adults were talking about it; it was as though by putting a skate park on top of the hollow it would keep the children safe. I sensed the threat of history repeating itself, and as the story is told the tension builds in this ordinary working-class community with an unspoken knowing. Hoyle has three main voices, The Boy, The Witch and The Worm. I like the way Hoyle titled each, they formed vignettes which provide clarity and heightened my anxiety with each ending, like scenes from a play. Hoyle’s microstructure provides a rhythmic flow, and at the climax I felt the panic of The Boy’s parents and aunt running towards him, while being chased. The terror was palpable. What I thought was going to happen didn’t, and an unexpected hero is burdened with a gift. I appreciated the use of local dialect, its authenticity and how it amplified the voice of The Worm. 

"The Watchkeeper" by Lauren O’Donoghue I read twice. Writing from the protagonist's viewpoint, O’Donoghue causes the reader to believe all is normal, at first glance, and then the reader sees the reality of what's happened. 

The narrator of "Date Night" by Lynsey May is a woman who opposes the eternal generational cycle of society’s opinion of what’s right for a woman. The woman is complex, her thoughts and actions projecting a feeling of the supernatural and danger. 

The book ends with "Perfect Circle" by Jo Gatford. I absolutely loved this story of knowing deep down the fragility of life and the cruelty of that one in a million chance. This is a wonderful and atmospheric human story. 

Perfect Circle was a joy to read, bringing to my mind that maybe sometimes acceptance of uncertainty will bring a sense of peace.

About the reviewer
Sally has an MA Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. She gains inspiration from old photographs, history, childhood memories, and is inspired by writers Sandra Cisneros, Deborah Morgan, Liz Berry and Emily Dickinson. She has short stories and poetry published in various online publications including the Ink Pantry, AnotherNorth, Roi Faineant Press. Sally lives in the countryside. 

Review by Saleh Razzouk of "Strangers" by Rebecca Ruth Gould

Strangers is a collection of short stories by Rebecca Ruth Gould, some of which first appeared in an earlier version under the longer title Strangers in Love. This new edition retains most of the original stories, with significant additions. As Gould writes in her prefatory note, these are stories of "lost bonds, fleeting connections, and relationships formed at a distance." While the first set of stories explored civilizational tensions—particularly encounters across East/West divides, often mediated through encounters that occasionally evolve into fleeting love affairs with inevitable dead ends—the new edition expands the thematic scope in two key directions.  

The first is the treatment of the cities the narrator visits, ranging from snow-covered English towns to the layered cityscapes of Tbilisi and Damascus, and finally to the scorching heat of Abu Dhabi. Between these climatic and cultural poles, Gould introduces readers to foreign lands through both direct experience and deep scholarship. 

In one particularly striking story, "Hands," Tehran emerges as a dystopian space, where the private and the political collapse into one another: "Strange how acts of affection, expressions of love, can be made into crimes." The story’s atmosphere is reminiscent of the surveilled worlds of Orwell’s 1984 and We, the prophetic novel by Russian dissident Yevgeny Zamyatin. 

This symbolic geography reaches its emotional peak in "When You Are Old," where Gould expresses deep affection for Tbilisi while sharply criticising the forces that have historically drained it of vitality. The narrative casts Tbilisi as a wounded yet dignified space, caught between imperial appetites and regional violence. The Tbilisi setting  grounds this historical imagination in architecture: "The blue and gold tiles covering the Blue Bath’s walls belonged to an age of peaceful exchanges between peoples of different faiths, languages, and ethnicities." The narrator’s voice here is not merely descriptive but accusatory, blending historical grievance with personal reverence.  

This shift does not mean that love has disappeared from the stories; rather, the love plots are increasingly shaped by questions of cultural translation, especially by the ways Arab and Middle Eastern cultures are represented, refracted, and sometimes misrecognised in English-language fiction. In "Speaking in Tongues," for example, intimacy itself becomes linguistic invention: "With time, they cultivated a language that only made sense to the two of them." The stories resist a superficial language of hybridity, in which East and West are folded too easily into coexistence, and instead insist on the  weight of historical and cultural difference. The story "Goodbye, Home" similarly underscores how the histories of peoples struggling under imperial appetites shape their present. 

The surface of travel and urban encounter, loosely bundled with love, politics, and culture, does not become documentary prose in the manner of Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich. Instead, it moves closer to the autobiographical and politically observant fiction of Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim, particularly his late novel Amricanly (2003), giving the autobiographical dimension greater informational density and archival texture.

A second dimension that sets this book apart  is its pedagogical impulse, which situates the individual within a longer cross-generational history. Gould’s characters are shaped by national histories, and guided not only by personal desire but also by conscience and civic duty. Her portrayal of the Middle East works through symbolic and affective registers. But the exile’s struggle to survive is often rendered through gestures such as a walk in the rain (as in "When You Are Old"), a few exchanged letters, or scripts written in what the story calls a "sleeping language." In these stories, languages do not simply die. They transform slowly, like energy, which neither disappears nor emerges from nothing.  

In this way, Strangers embodies both the outsider’s gaze and the passionate witness of a writer intent on preserving memory and dignity for oppressed peoples who have borne centuries of injustice.  

About the reviewer
Saleh Razzouk is a Syrian fiction writer, translator, and Associate Professor at the University of Aleppo. Born in Aleppo province in 1959, he was educated at Aleppo University and Gliwice Polytechnic in Poland, and also studied at Bolton Institute and the University of Nottingham in the UK. His first book was published by the Union of Arabic Writers in 1980, and his translations of contemporary poetry and literary criticism have appeared in Poetry International, Poetry London, The Bitter Oleander, and The Laurel Review.

Review by Jonathan Wilkins of "A Thousand Souls" by Catherine Tudish

When I was sent this book, I was due to attend a tedious round of tests. My wife, who was accompanying me, hijacked the novel, and she enjoyed it so much I asked her for a short review:

"Loved this book; read it in one day. It was an easy read as it was written so well and each chapter was one part of the whole. By that I mean that this is the story of a small town and each chapter relates to those living there and their stories. It deserves a wide audience as it could easily be a best seller. I’ll certainly be recommending it to my friends."

In A Thousand Souls we have a collection of fourteen stories intervolving the lives of three generations in the isolated American town of Neptune, Vermont. The fourteen stories in Tudish’s beautifully crafted book intertwine the lives of three generations of Neptune as they inevitably touch the outside world. We read of a boy born of an illicit romance travelling to South Carolina for a first-time and meeting with his  father. We encounter a widow and friend who solve the mystery of a missing girl. The local sheriff breaks up a drug operation, only, in a nod to current American affairs, to get arrested for helping undocumented workers evade ICE. The frustrated wife of a mail driver presents him with a nude portrait of herself. A magical section sees a shy girl lose her stutter when she speaks to a black bear. In another chapter a boy has strange nightmares that appear to represent the memories of a stranger’s tragedy.

As in any small town, loyalties and traditions are tested through loss, betrayal and day-to-day living. The town’s characters epitomize the belongingness that comes from a close-knit rural community.

These  charmingly written,  wryly observed, delicate stories give us a view of life that is relatable, conveying the costs of interrelationship and kinship as the years pass. All of them demonstrate how seemingly ordinary lives can take unforeseen and unpredictable twists and turns.

About the reviewer
Jonathan Wilkins is 69. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones’ bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester and Warwick Universities. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.

You can read more about A Thousand Souls by Catherine Tudish on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Mike O'Driscoll of "Remains" Magazine, Issue 1, ed. Andy Cox

If the visual layout and content seem familiar, it’s because Remains is the welcome new venture from Andy Cox, the publisher and editor of Black Static, the superlative and much-missed magazine of contemporary horror fiction. It features a gorgeous cover and interior artwork from Richard Wagner, whose work also graced the pages of the former magazine, but the real test of Remains resides in the quality of its fiction.

There are seven stories, including ‘Cockatrice,’ a novella from Stephen Bacon, that starts out on familiar ground—an inquisitive child more taken with the monsters of his imagination than with the real ones much closer to home—before morphing into vengeful time travel tale with echoes of Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. The shifting perspectives in a narrative that touches on infidelity, the power of the imagination, childhood sexual abuse, and the struggle to unsee the horrors one sees, are handled with great skill and compassion by Bacon.

Giselle Leeb’s story ‘Inclusions’ is a subtle and suggestive take on the haunted house theme. It maintains a certain distance from its human characters—the last of a group of writers gathered for a weekend workshop—allowing us to observe their interactions through the indifferent gaze of the house itself.

‘Her Little Ray of Sunshine’ is the story that most clearly evokes the tone of Black Static—no surprise considering it’s written by Neil Williamson, a regular contributor to the former magazine. It’s an unsettling and thought-provoking piece, reminiscent of much Slipstream fiction of the 1990s, with its quiet sense of outrage, even despair, at the extent of the psychological and physical harm men perpetrate on women, and even more so the lies and excuses we deploy to justify our weaknesses to ourselves. 

Also recalling 12 Monkeys, but this time more explicitly, is Jolie Toomajan’s ‘A Heartwarming Tale of a Girl and Her Monkey.’ The tone here is elusive, even somewhat disjointed, such that protagonist Karyan’s motives in unleashing an apocalypse are never quite clear. Yet perhaps that sense of disconnection leads her to bond more closely with the monkey she liberates than with her human co-workers, which may be precisely the point.

The remaining stories range thematically from the delusion of overweening ambition (Rich Larson), to the peril of one’s life being exploited for fictional purposes (Anna Tambour). The final story, James Cooper’s ‘Nothing Special,’ offers a particularly bleak, noirish variation on the cynicism and self-loathing engendered by succumbing to the Hollywood dream.

About the reviewer
Mike O’Driscoll is a writer living in Swansea. His work has appeared in Black Static, Interzone, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous anthologies. His story ‘Sounds Like’ was adapted for a TV movie by Brad Anderson, as part of the Masters of Horror series. Mike blogs on different aspects of genre writing and film here. 

Review by Jonathan Wilkins of "The Calamity of Desire and Other Stories" by Judith Dancoff

I read this book in one sitting.

No, I tell a lie, part way through I had to email the author to tell her what a wonderful work she had produced. I’ve never done that before, but if you read this collection of amazing short stories you will understand.

This is a truly beautiful collection of stories, most of them part-inspired by artists and works of art. The one outlier is a tale surrounding Annie Oakley, re-imagining her life on a trip to Paris where we are able to discover the vulnerabilities of a woman who dragged herself from the gutter to being the world-famous markswoman of lore. This story delves deep into her upbringing and lifestyle while commenting on the morals of the time with criticisms of well-known contemporary artists. This re-imagining is so clever and takes a real talent - a talent that is replicated through the collection.

Many of the stories play on the emotions of the reader and allow us a vision that we would not have imagined. We play a part in the characters' lives and stories. We discover another life that Dancoff imagines, and who are we to tell reality from fiction? 

The way Dancoff can draw out the allusions and images she makes is nonpareil. She writes about the life of the Infanta, the subject of the artist Klimt, the work of Louise Moillon, a sitter for Renoir during the Dreyfus affair, a curator at a museum, and a Vermeer inspired artist searching for love. Each tale made me research the artists and artworks that inspired Dancoff, hence introducing me to another layer of interest. 

This window into another world is just one of the benefits of reading the stories. They are delightful. Poignant and revealing, in some cases enchanting. There is a wistfulness to many and diverse historical perspectives are showcased. A great deal of research has obviously gone into each story as each is grounded on fact. I thoroughly enjoyed The Calamity of Desire and wholeheartedly recommend it.

About the reviewer

Jonathan Wilkins is 68. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones’ bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester and Warwick Universities. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.

Review by Gus Gresham of "Umbilical" by Teika Marija Smits

While savouring this stunning collection of stories, I kept asking myself (as an avid reader and writer) ‘What’s the most effective way of getting a reader’s attention?’ Because Umbilical does grab the attention and does not let go. It’s stylish, intriguing, beautifully written. There are characters and concepts that fascinate, beguile, bewilder. But there is something else going on here …

Teika Marija Smits is not writing sci-fi, fantasy, horror or speculative fiction for its own sake; she is employing elements of these in ways that are on-point. Whether a story has social justice at its core, the human condition, relationships, or the dangers of unfettered medical and tech development, the ideas are handled with subtlety and skill. 

She trusts her own intuitions, too – like the narrator of the title story who hears “those ancient, knowing whisperings arising from my womb”. Smits knows that the ‘darker’ parts of ourselves that we so often dismiss are the places where treasures may be found.

Because it would be difficult to summarise any of the stories (without committing spoiler-crime), I can only tantalise and tease:

In ‘Death of the Grapevine,’ we meet a computer engineer whose job it is to troubleshoot an in-house AI system and carry out a bizarre and strangely sad form of maintenance. In ‘His Birth,’ amid the sensitive and powerful rendering of the bond between a mother and child, we meet a creature known as a lamphine. In ‘Girls’ Night Out,’ the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’ takes on a whole other mysterious and resonant meaning. In ‘Our Lady of Flies,’ loss, misunderstanding and a failing relationship are deftly explored. In other stories, such as ‘Star Making at Sellafield,’ we encounter tenderness and hope.

As for the earlier question (What’s the most effective way of getting a reader’s attention?) Teika Marija Smits’s answer is to explore issues from quirky angles, thereby offering unique, enthralling perspectives.

A thoroughly engaging and enjoyable collection.

About the reviewer
Gus Gresham has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing (NTU) and has worked as a mechanical engineer, construction worker, fruit picker, community activist for Greenpeace, writer, English tutor, audio-book producer, medical-scenario simulator/facilitator, civil funeral celebrant, and building surveyor. He’s had short stories published in literary magazines including Brittle Star and Under the Radar, and his most recent novel, Kyiv Trance – a dark, twisty, love story and crime thriller – is available on Amazon.

You can read more about Umbilical by Teika Marija Smits on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Laura Besley of "Intimacies" by Lucy Caldwell

Lucy Caldwell’s story, ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad,’ won the BBC Short story prize in 2021. Two years earlier, ‘The Children’ was short-listed. Both are available to listen to on BBC Sounds and both are in Caldwell’s latest short story collection, Intimacies – a collection which, according to the back cover, ‘exquisitely charts the steps and missteps of young women trying to find their place in the world.’

In his introduction to the Oxford Book of Short Stories, V. S. Pritchett writes: ‘the short story tells us only one thing, and that, intensely.’ Caldwell’s winning story – told in second person present tense – is about a woman on a transatlantic flight with her 22-month old daughter and the connection she makes with the man sitting next to her. It explores, as the title of the collection suggests, an intimacy, a moment. Within the limited timeframe of the flight and the couple of hours that follow on from it, ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad’ focuses on the intensity that springs up between the main character and her fellow passenger, bringing in her thoughts on motherhood and her marriage. What do you choose to reveal about yourself? And how real can such a connection really be? 'There is an artist whose work you saw once in a Whitechapel gallery: she had stitched to a globe of the world metallic threads representing one single day’s flights, then somehow dissolved the globe, leaving just the sugar-spun mass of threads, and you think of it now, of how it made you think, how fine the threads that connect us from one person, or place, to another, and how precious, and how strong.'

‘The Children’ is, in some ways, more technically skilful. Within the story there are three separate strands woven together to form a single coherent narrative: a young mother, who finds a lump in her breast; a 19th-century writer called Caroline Norton is separated from her children and seeks to bring about a change in the law; and the children of asylum seekers being taken from their parents at the US border. It feels very modern in its form, with tweets, -and bang up-to-date politically, as well as timeless regarding its subject matter and the inclusion of poetry. 

My only reservation about Intimacies is its claim to be about young women in the modern world. Nine of the eleven stories are about motherhood, or near-motherhood, and to me it feels like the balance tips too far in that direction. Personally I am very interested in stories on modern motherhood, but I wonder if you weren’t, whether you might struggle to find what you are looking for within these stories. Having said that, there is no doubt that Caldwell, who is also a novelist and playwright, is extremely adept at writing in the short story form, and this is a heartfelt and beautiful collection. 

About the reviewer
Laura Besley is the author of three collections of flash & micro fiction: (Un)Natural Elements, 100neHundred and The Almost Mothers. She is also an editor for Flash Fiction Magazine. She tweets @laurabesley.

Review by Laura Besley of "The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories" by Brian Howell

Brian Howell’s latest collection of short stories, The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories (Salt, 2022), is wonderfully weird. What can be done in a short story, which is much harder to sustain over the length of an entire novel, is to explore feelings and situations that are off-kilter, at odds with the norm. These are narratives that push the boundaries of acceptance and conjure feelings of uneasiness, sometimes even repulsion, but that also challenge views on how people choose, or are forced, to live. 

Lucie McKnight Hardy writes: ‘Sensations brought about by the manifestation of the Uncanny – dread, unease, that inescapable sensation that something is not quite right – have been said to derive from that which is familiar (homely) becoming unfamiliar (unhomely)’ (Writing the Uncanny, pp.9-10). Some of Howell’s stories start out innocent enough, like the opening of ‘Green to Blue’ or ‘The Shore’ wherein a young girl asks the main character which book he is reading. Whereas others drop more quickly into a world that is not quite as it should be. The opening line of the titular story – ‘As Ishii started out on one of his daily walks past the local daycare centre, the screams of the children sounded out’ – could’ve been a man merely taking a stroll, but for a singular word: screams. This word can, of course, be read in various ways, but to me it was immediately unsettling. 

Howell makes great use of silence and space between the characters to heighten their sense of disjointedness which in turn enhances the sense of unease in the reader. One example is from ‘The Folding Man’: ‘[Pippa] seemed not to be looking so much at her mother as into a pocket of space between them’ until a ‘chasm opened up, a resentment that cannot be filled with cheery conversation, it seemed.’ Another is a one-sided conversation in ‘The Shore’ between an American man and a young Asian girl. 

In his essay ‘What My Gland Wants,’ Adam Marek states that ‘the short story reader has the ability to suspend their disbelief to a far greater degree’ (Short Circuit, p.147). This is true in many of the stories within Howell’s collection, not least ‘The Folding Man’ wherein the main character’s skin is peeled back to reveal his organs and ‘wonderfully, no blood spilled anywhere.’

Some argue that short fiction doesn’t need any description; it is only a distraction and readers are able to imagine characters for themselves. Tobias Hill, on the other hand, likens physical character description to ‘having the salt beside you when you are cooking. You don’t need a lot of it … But it is necessary to have just enough’ (Short Circuit, p.108). This singular description of Mandy in ‘Family Tree’ is not only concise, but also serves as foreshadowing for what will later unfold: ‘She seemed concerned over little else but the doll she dragged along in the dirt. I thought how much it resembled her, with its Belisha-beacon orange hair, its staring, unseeing eyes, its fixed, reprimanding expression.’ 

Bearing in mind these elements, I feel The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories, although not for everyone, is not only wonderfully weird, but also weirdly wonderful.  

    

About the reviewer

Laura Besley is the author of three collections of flash & micro fiction: (Un)Natural Elements, 100neHundred and The Almost Mothers. She is also an editor for Flash Fiction Magazine. She tweets @laurabesley.

You can read more about The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Kate Durban of "In Their Absence" by Hannah Stevens

Countless people are lost every year. Hannah Stevens’s debut collection of short stories is a haunting exploration of what it means to be missing, both for those that disappear and those left behind. She follows her characters so closely that the reader can’t help but feel part of each devastating experience. Each story is breathtaking, and lingers in the memory long after the last beautiful page. 

One after another, the stories deal with yet another view of what it means to lose or be lost or to bear witness to loss: there is death, abduction, and abandonment. There is the couple on holiday who visit a café, where their toddler disappears from under the table when they are momentarily distracted. Then there is the hotel room where a man and a woman have sex after meeting in a bar. They drink and snort cocaine and then she jumps out of the window. And there are numerous others, each as painful and memorable as the last.

Hannah’s seemingly effortless prose brings her stories alive with devastating details that are both deeply authentic and agonisingly poignant. One couple, who are moving out of their house following the disappearance of their child, leave behind an empty swing in the back garden. The worn spots beneath it are being covered over by grass, now growing unimpeded by the feet of the missing child. There is the man who throws himself under a train, witnessed by the woman who innocently follows him to the platform. She likes his Fedora and picks up his still-warm coffee cup from the platform on which he stood just moments before.  The imagery is sparse but beautiful. 

The stories are sometimes connected which adds texture and augments the impact of each already powerful narrative The wife of the man in the fedora  receives his suicide note by text and doesn’t know which service to ask for when she dials 999.There is the story of a woman who runs away and joins the circus, followed by the story of her husband scanning the garden from which she has just disappeared. 

It might be tempting to avoid this book, which shines its lens so relentlessly into the darkness of what it means to be missing. But these stories are like jewels, small, but beautifully complex and bright. In them, perhaps we recognise our own secret desire to renounce our responsibilities, to disappear, as well as the losses we all inevitably experience in life.

About the reviewer
Kate Durban is a Cancer Wellbeing Specialist Nurse who lives in Northamptonshire with her husband and two dogs. She is currently completing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

Review by Laura Besley of "Everything Inside" by Edwidge Danticat

          On the other side of the door was the same kind of sticker, with the NOTHING
          scratched out by hand and replaced with EVERYTHING, so that the altered sticker read

          EVERYTHING INSIDE IS WORTH DYING FOR. Next to that was another black-and-

          white sticker that read YOU LOOT, WE SHOOT.

- Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside

Everything Inside is a short story collection by prize-winning Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat. Each of the eight stories explores the idea of belonging and how, or if, it is possible to achieve this when no longer living in your homeland. 

Danticat is a master of the opening sentence. None is greater than this one, which in a single sentence of 24 words, sets up the entire first story, "Dosas": "Elsie was with Gaspard, her live-in renal-failure patient, when her ex-husband called to inform her that his girlfriend, Olivia, had been kidnapped in Port-au-Prince."

Each story – varying in length from 18 to 39 pages – is daring in subject matter, creating a sense of danger and ramping up the pace. And even when the situation is more every day, for example in "Sunrise, Sunset," which is about dementia and the challenges of motherhood, this supposedly normal situation within a normal family is pushed to the very outer limits of possibility. 

All the stories are about the idea of home and whether we can truly feel at home anywhere. In "Seven Stories," two childhood friends meet again as adults: “‘Home, sweet home,’ Callie said, trying to perhaps put [Kimberly] at ease.” Using this commonplace phrase to welcome her friend is underscored with the fact that this is Kimberley’s first time on Haiti, despite being of Haitian heritage, and everything feels strange and new. 

Every story in Everything Inside is deeply moving and only strengthened as being part of a collection which I would highly recommend.  

About the reviewer

Laura Besley writes short fiction in the precious moments that her children are asleep. Her fiction has appeared online, as well as in print and in various anthologies. Her flash fiction collection, The Almost Mothers, was published in March 2020. She tweets @laurabesley.

Review by Amirah Mohiddin of "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts" by Maxine Hong Kingston

We are made, destroyed and remade by the stories we are told as we grow up. Maxine Hong Kingston’s fantastic The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts provides us with a vivid representation of an Asian-American woman and shows just how much stories shaped her identity. 

Each of Kingston’s five chapters are beautifully woven with mythical and traditional stories passed down from her mother. They overpower the narrative, excellently depicting the suffocation of these stories upon Kingston’s childhood. Yet her voice still seeps through, thorny and bitter against the elevation of males and the oppression of female sexual desire in a patriarchal world. Each chapter of this memoir is hauntingly beautiful, giving life to the past by giving it space on the page. 

My favourite chapter was ‘A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.’ Through the memoir, we journey from the silenced female in ‘No Name Woman,’ to this final explosive voice, where Kingston weaves the story of Ts’ai Yen, her voice clear and vocal. This story finally gives us a direct and raw voice, no longer overpowered by a story from childhood, instead using Ts’ai Yen’s story to show the end-point of Kingston’s search for identity. It explores Kingston’s childhood, the silent Chinese girl in the American schooling system, using an interplay of personal stories and the theme of shame and repression.

All our parents tell us stories growing up, they ‘talk-story’ as Kingston puts it. These stories play a large part in making us who we are. Yet for the generation after the emigrants, there is a huge gap between the stories and what we see outside our Western windows. I expect it’s worse for parents, who see a world so completely different to the one they grew up in. So, parents create an impossible distance between culture and Western society. Kingston’s memoir shows the destruction and turmoil that parents create by talking-story, bringing children up with fantastical superstitions to frighten them in the new Western world, making them curl further and further within themselves. And the Western world doesn’t help. White people, the ‘ghosts,’ the centre of society, cultivate shame and repression of culture and identity. Kingston’s The Woman Warrior depicts the strangeness of our generation, eloquently showing oppression from both sides, culture and society, and how we succumb to both, and consequently, belong to neither.

It is only in doing what Kingston has done in her final chapter, ‘A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,’ rejecting both sides and embracing our hybridity, our distinct voices, that we can fight away the shame and even begin to be remade by the stories we tell ourselves. The Woman Warrior, with its honest and bitter narrative, makes way for Asian women, but it’s also a true inspiration for people of colour and different ethnic backgrounds to take another step forward into the Western world, out of the stereotypes, by beginning a new generation of stories that will remake us all.


About the reviewer
Amirah Mohiddin, born in Birmingham U.K, is an MA Creative Writing student. She specialises in fantasy, speculative fiction and magical realism.

Review by Kate Howey of "Breath Visible" by Linda Danz

Breath Visible is the first collection of short stories by Linda Danz. The stories give fascinating insight into the contemporary lives of artists and painters. One of the major themes is the city of New York itself, and how it has changed over time, the ghost of the old city residing within the monolithic new one. The stories describe life in different decades that the author has experienced, capturing poignant moments of reflection and change. 

Danz’s writing has the bite of a North Atlantic wind. Its veracity is evident in her probing accounts of contemporary US life from the perspective of a native New Yorker. Her terse descriptive prose and gift for metaphor breathes poetry into an otherwise realistic narrative, as shown in "From Russia": “She tilted her head, hoping to shake the Beatles’ tune that, since Moscow, had been rattling in her brain like a bee trapped under glass.” The unifying characteristics of her style include the repartee of her characters, which sparkle with wit, echoing the astringent New York streets Danz grew up in. All nineteen stories focus on the fragility and awkward points in relationships. 

Danz writes with unflinching honesty: “Someone once described friendship as a glass ornament. Shattered, it never returns to its original form” (p.117). Her direct, succinct prose style captures the dilemmas of modern life, the pauses between relationships, ill health, the search for artistic fulfilment and reflections on the aftermath of 9/11. For example, "The Churchgoer" begins, “‘These people think they have problems? I have a fucking brain tumor. I have a problem.’ Throats cleared, heads turned and people stared.” 

Together, these stories paint a vivid picture of not just New York life, but the passage through life of the boomer generation on both sides of the Atlantic, and the political and social challenges that they traverse. Danz’s voice provides a strong unifying device across these very different depictions of ordinary life. The major accomplishment of these stories is the spread of topics, themes, styles and characters which will keep you turning the pages well into the early hours. 


About the Reviewer
Kate Howey is a writer and student on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. Her website is: www.isabelladalzell.com

Review by Lee Wright of "Selfie and Other Stories" by Nora Nadjarian

'Let me start at the beginning, or what I think is the beginning,' says the unnamed narrator in the story, 'The Gentleman on The Train,' which makes up one of the twenty-five stories in this original collection by Nora Nadjarian, author of previous short story anthologies, Ledra Street (2006) and Girl, Wolf, Bones (2011) along with three further books of poetry. Each story here reflects true passion and intimacy through startling first-person narratives which are built around human contact. And, later on in the same story: 'Smashing girl. I’m a smashing girl, and I don’t even know it, because nobody’s ever called me a smashing girl before. I can just see myself going around, smashing men’s hearts and denting their lives with a hammer and asking them what they’ve done to deserve me.'

Nadjarian is a gifted wrier and in this book, she is at the top of her game. The story 'Truth' opens with 'At the exact moment my neighbour tells her lover “I’m leaving you,” a rainbow appears somewhere behind her.' This is the kind of fiction that shines light on blackness. 

There are pleasing similarities with Raymond Carver and Franz Kafka, whom she writes directly about in the story 'Kafkaesque': 'He hated me till the day he died. He called me a schmuck and he was right.' The collection is full-to-bursting with characters who live with people they think they know but don’t - who speak in puzzlingly witty dialogue, and have us engrossed until the often-ugly outcome.  

The author returns again and again to solitary women reconstructing their thoughts and desperate dreams: 'I’m a character in a play, but I’ve forgotten my lines ... In the kitchen my mother makes babies with flour and eggs ... My sister said she was carrying a bird inside her, a bird which would soon be drinking water out of her navel. “I am a cage,” said my sister.'
  
Nadjarian doesn’t concern herself with such old-fashioned basics as plot. Because life isn’t about plot, but about glimpses, moments. Some of these stories are just good moments, while others are purely wonderful.    
  

About the reviewer

Lee Wright was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1980 and has been writing both fiction and non-fiction since 2008. He is taking an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.