Buy short stories and help the wretched of the earth! I don’t mean short-story writers, on this occasion, though that injunction usually holds too. No: I mean, if you buy one or, preferably, all four of these pretty, pocket-sized paperbacks you’ll be donating to Oxfam.
Cooked up between the Hay Festival’s impresario Peter Florence and Mark Ellingham of Profile Books, Ox-Tales is a sort of literary equivalent of the War Child album: a gallimaufry of short fiction donated by various authors — about two thirds original stories, about a third novel-extracts.
These have been gussied up into four very loosely themed volumes, each of which is accompanied by an elemental poem by Vikram Seth (sample: ‘Fa-yaah/ O fayah-fayah-fayaaah/ Dizayaah/ Hot hot hot/ I’m burning a lot with dizayaah’ etc.) At the end of each a two-page coda explains the work that Oxfam is doing in that element — drinking water, farming, climate change, controls on the arms trade (fire) and such like.
Short stories are hard enough to review as it is, and a project like this doesn’t invite criticism so much as statistical analysis. Thirty seven stories — nine each in Earth, Air and Water, ten in Fire — of which about half are by men and half by women, and maybe two thirds are told in the third person.
A four-volume collection of short stories whose authors are chosen for their willingness to help Oxfam out and, presumably, for their name recognition, isn’t likely to offer a guiding literary principle. It’s a snapshot of some things in the culture, though.
The fact that around a quarter of the stories are told in the present tense seems to be indicative. You get that less, as a rule, in long-form fiction — it can get annoying after a bit if not extremely well handled — but it’s a favourite of short-story writers. I’m on the fence about it, personally. It gets you out of some tangles with the pluperfect and can lend immediacy, I suppose, but it’s now so much used as to seem a bit conventional. Each to their own, however.
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