Short stories

Heaven knows what the millions of purchasers of the Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies will make of the ten stories collected here, for they return us to the landscape occupied by Hilary Mantel’s last great contemporary novel, Beyond Black (2005). This, for those of you unfamiliar with her pre- (or rather post-) Tudor work is a world of fraught domestic interiors, twitches on the satirical thread and, above all, stealing over the shimmering Home Counties gardens and the thronged Thames Valley shopping malls, a faint hint of the numinous. Make that a very strong hint of the numinous, for The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher fairly crackles

‘The first night I stayed in Kilinochchi, I was a little apprehensive,’ admits the usually cool-headed Vasantha, van-driver and narrator of all the stories in Noontide Toll. Kilinochchi was the operational centre of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) until the Sri Lankan army’s entry in January 2009. Now the town offers amenities like the Spice Garden Inn, with glass-walled cafeteria and reception desk overflowing with coconut flowers and bougainvillea. Yet its assistant manager, Miss Saraswati, belies such luxurious blandness. A rat suddenly appears in the café; immediately she hurls a bottle, breaking the creature’s skull without destroying the implement. ‘I stared at Miss Saraswati. “You learn to do

Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was a literary celebrity in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. She chose the pen-name ‘Teffi’ because it was androgynous, and because it was the kind of name a ‘lucky’ fool would have; in Russia, fools were held to tell truths, albeit obliquely. ‘Teffi’ wrote for newspapers, most notably the Russian Word. By 1911 she was writing more fiction than journalism; her short story collections achieved instant popularity. In 1919 the Russian Word was closed down. Teffi was evacuated, ending up, like so many ‘lesrusses’, in Paris. She never returned to Russia, except in her stories. Teffi’s fame evaporated almost immediately after her death in 1952. Pushkin Press has issued

The American writer, Charles Portis, has had what some novelists — the more purist ones — might regard as an ideal life. While his books have seldom been big-sellers, his fans sink to their knees at the mention of his name. In the mid 1980s, two bookshop employees in New York were so smitten with Portis’s then out-of-print novel, The Dog of the South, that they bought up all 183 hardback copies on the market and put them in their bookshop window. The books sold out in days. Contacted in his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, where he writes in an office behind a bar called Cash McCool’s, Portis said

In the world of Jane Gardam’s stories the past is always present, solid and often unwanted and always too big, like a heavy antique sideboard crammed into a modern retirement flat. Her characters are easily imagined surrounded by such furniture, among them ex-pats returning after careers in Hong Kong or India, their houses full of the sad paraphernalia of former empire: elephant’s foot umbrella stands or old watercolours of Bengal. Many are seeing out their days in some poverty and solitude, occasionally visited but seldom comforted by their resentful grown-up children. There is no saccharine here. Relations between offspring and parents are marked by mutual disdain and almost wilful misunderstanding,

One of these is by Lydia Davis, acclaimed American writer. One is not. They are whole pieces, by the way, not extracts. This morning I went into the park I often pass on my journeys to somewhere else. I can now say that I have been into this park and not always passed it by. Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before. One of these accounts of a dream is by Lydia Davis. One is not. I am a college girl. I tell a younger college girl, a dancer, that the sun is very low

It isn’t very often that a writer’s work is so striking that you can remember exactly where and when you were when you first read it. I was in a parked car in a hilly suburb of Cardiff last summer when I first became aware of George Saunders, from reading a speech he’d addressed to his American students printed in that day’s edition of the International Herald Tribune. Within the first two or three lines it was evident that this was someone quite out of the ordinary, someone of unusual intelligence, curiosity and compassion. This speech — an exhortation to be kind — is wonderful. And so are these short

Any new book by Lorrie Moore is a cause for rejoicing, but her first collection of short stories for 16 years demands bunting, revelry and tap-dancing. She is one of a handful or two of writers (I’d nominate Anne Tyler, William Trevor, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro among the rest) whose work is always worth buying. With lesser authors a tepid review might discourage purchase, but Lorrie Moore can fall foul of critics yet still be immensely entertaining. So it is with Bark. The book begins with an absolutely marvellous long story, ‘Debarking’, in which almost every paragraph contains a fresh delight, something so funny and so true that the reader

The Albek Duo are two astonishingly beautiful and talented Venetian musicians, Fiona and Ambra, who are identical twins. Hearing the sisters perform inspired Christopher Ondaatje to create this book. He tells a story — ‘Love Duet’ — in which he imagines what would happen if the twins both fell in love with the same man. They agree that one should marry, and they should carry on as before. For the sisters, abandoning their music or each other is unthinkable. This is an anthology of stories on the theme of music and how it can govern our lives and express our emotions. You don’t need to be a concert-goer to enjoy

Ann Patchett’s novels revel in the tightly constructed ecosystems imagined for their characters: an opera singer besieged among diplomats in the Orange Prize-winning Bel Canto; State of Wonder’s pharmacologist in the Amazon; a fugitive wife hiding in a home for unwed mothers in The Patron Saint of Liars. In this new collection of personal essays collated from publications including the New York Times, Vogue and Granta, Patchett maps out her own life, her own constructed universe. From a post-divorce stint at TGI Friday’s and an early writing career in women’s magazines (a world where some of the greatest writers cut their teeth, not least Jorge Luis Borges), we move towards

If not equal to his best novels, Kingsley Amis’s short stories are still wonderfully entertaining, says Philip Hensher Some writers of short fiction — there doesn’t seem to be a noun to parallel ‘novelist’ — are dedicated craftsmen, like Chekhov, Kipling, William Trevor, Alice Munro or V.S. Pritchett. Others, like Evelyn Waugh or E.M. Forster, are more haphazard, producing stories to commission, or as a sketch, to try something out in moments when an idea on a small scale seems to be all that inspiration can supply. The result, when the collected edition finally surfaces, is generally more varied in surface than the works of the specialist — just think

Francis King celebrates Margaret Drabble’s distinguished career and vividly recalls their first meeting I first met a youthful Margaret Drabble when, already myself an established author, I was working at Weidenfeld and Nicolson as a literary adviser. The editorial director was an Australian woman called Barley Allison, sister of an MP, who constantly boasted of having ‘grabbed’ (her word) yet another new author for her distinguished list. Her latest ‘grab’ was a sometimes pensively grave and sometimes energetically argumentative woman, an admired actress when up at Cambridge, with the totally unsuitable surname Drabble. ‘You must meet her,’ Allison told me. ‘Quite remarkable.’ When the three of us sat down to

Juvenilia is an unfortunate word, with its connotations of the derogatory ‘juvenile’. Juvenilia is an unfortunate word, with its connotations of the derogatory ‘juvenile’. When they reach adult estate, most writers prefer their early work to be forgotten. But publishers have long ferreted about to unearth the juvenilia of anyone with half a name.Though the reading public has never been so easily conned, such works are appreciated mainly by scholars of an author’s entire ouevre, wanting to trace early influences. So, if you could buy only one book this week, would it be The Doll, which contains a dozen very early short stories by Daphne du Maurier, and one rather

A story in Edna O’Brien’s new collection — her 24th book since 1960 — shows us a mother and daughter who are thrilled to be taking tea with the Coughlans, posh new arrivals in their rural west of Ireland parish. A story in Edna O’Brien’s new collection — her 24th book since 1960 — shows us a mother and daughter who are thrilled to be taking tea with the Coughlans, posh new arrivals in their rural west of Ireland parish. But the afternoon is a washout: their haughty hostess has a neck rash and is too distracted for chit-chat. Trudging home, the girl suddenly craves tinned peaches. No, says her