Egypt + 100 poses a question to twelve contemporary Egyptian authors: what might your country look like in the year 2111 – exactly a century after the failed Tahrir Square Revolution? Might Egypt still be in the grip of ‘friendly authoritarianism’, clinging to power with all the weapons of futurism at its disposal: protest-avoidant architecture, excessive surveillance, the slow replacement […]
The Unreliable Nature Writer is the eagerly-awaited debut collection of exhilarating, unsettling and dreamy short stories from Claire Carroll.Carroll portrays an unsettlingly hot world of people facing the strain of intimate and global anxieties – trying to live alongside new technologies and failing environments. Delightful to read and unsettling to imagine, these are haunting stories […]
You will laugh, weep and roll your eyes at these unreliable characters, among them a man in love with the voice of his GPS, a teenage couple hiding flaws as they discover love, and a young wife inspired by a dead seagull to do what she needs to do. These stories deal with the vulnerability […]
An anthology of flash fiction and conversations on craft with South Asian writers This is a unique collection of flash fiction, writing prompts, and interviews by and about talented writers of South Asian heritage. The stories range from math problems to the moon, from food to families, and everything that makes people want to share […]
This brilliant new collection by Jude Higgins showcases her mastery of condensed storytelling. Subtle, nuanced, and full of depth, Clearly Defined Clouds is run through with dreams and magic, the unexpected and the playful (see the Greek god piloting a paraglider). Higgins’ characters are peculiar, intelligent, flawed, and seeking. There’s an exquisite balance of richness and white […]
From the internationally bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies comes an exquisitely crafted work of fiction. In these short stories Jhumpa Lahiri sets her gaze on the eternally beautiful city of Rome, illuminating the frailties of the human condition and dissecting lives lived on the margins. A man recalls a summer party that awakens an […]
A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. A professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until […]
The nation’s favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its fourteenth year Inspired by Giles Gordon and David Hughes’s Best Short Stories series, which ran to ten volumes between 1986 and 1995, Best British Short Stories this year reaches its thirteenth volume. Best British Short Stories 2024 showcases an excellent and varied selection […]
Princesses who never wanted to be rescued… debutantes who are unwilling to keep quiet about politics just to preserve their marriage prospects… fairy tale characters who question key motivations in their own, now-famous stories… The protagonists of Sara Maitland’s remarkable short fiction all seem to be bursting at the seams of their own characterisation, challenging our […]
Two teenage girls fixated on each other’s bodies enter into a destructive competition; a woman’s encounter with her ex forces her to reflect on the women’s group that saved her; a couple’s future is called into question after the damp expert they hire for their bathroom offers them free counselling; an older man’s buried grief […]