![]() In The Smallest Woman in The World (1960), the African pygmy Little Flower inspires a variety of unhealthy emotions, while the subject of A Chicken (1964) appears to be deeply loved by a family – until it is casually killed and eaten. Slightly more down-to-earth is the charming A Friend of Kafka (1970) which sees a garrulous ex-actor of the Warsaw Yiddish Theatre regaling the narrator about his friendship with the great Czech writer.Ĭlarice Lispector’s highly original oeuvre embraces madness and passion in equal measure. In 1979’s Teibele and Her Demon, a woman is tricked into a liaison with a man masquerading as a demon, only to find herself falling in love with him. They are frequented by devils and imps, real or imagined, and an endearing cast of eccentrics and fools. The stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer largely take place in Eastern Europe before World War Two. If you like your fiction tinged with a little oddity Her stories uncover the complex lives of supposedly ordinary people in locations as diverse as tsarist Russia and London during the Blitz. Munro’s contemporary, Edith Pearlman, spent four decades under the radar before 2011’s career-spanning Binocular Vision brought her belated acclaim. In Wenlock Edge (2005), a tale of college life takes an unexpected turn when the narrator goes to dine with her roommate’s much older lover, while in Silence (2004), the sudden disappearance of Juliet’s daughter, Penelope, leads to a gradual exploration of the holes in a seemingly idyllic mother-daughter relationship. Her tales reveal the fundamental unknowability of character and the uncertainty of what really makes people tick. ![]() If you need reminding that ‘normal life’ is never actually that ‘normal’Īlice Munro is routinely referred to as the finest living writer of short stories. In The Kiss (1887), a gawky young soldier discovers a new lease of life when an unknown woman kisses him in a darkened room, only to sink back into despondency once he is forced to accept that it was a case of mistaken identity. His work could also be incredibly poignant. He simply turned an exquisitely observed mirror on contemporary Russian society, and then left the reader to come to their own conclusions. And yet he was no moralist or writer with a message. His work is peopled by brutish, ignorant peasants, pompous officials, frustrated wives and spineless husbands. Shying away from a neat narrative conclusion, he pioneered an effortlessly formless form which was almost unbearably lifelike. If you want to discover the original master of the formĪnton Chekhov understood that life was godless, random and cruel, good people suffered, and lazy mediocrities often flourished. From early masters of the genre such as Chekhov to the contemporary genius of Zadie Smith, there is something for every taste and mood. Ten or 20 pages are an easier commitment to make than several hundred, and if we can manage to focus our swirling brains for one, we can always go on to another. ![]() Now is surely the time to turn to the short story in all its myriad formats.
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