![]() ![]() Part of the impetus to classify these as novels rather than short story collections may of course be down to marketing – there are so many more opportunities for international awards with the novel. Over the past couple of years, there’s been a penchant in publishing for books which straddle the genres of novel and connected short story – Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Anything is Possible would be cases in point. How different the literary scene was in the previous quarter century, when the possibility of publication for the short story was largely down to the imprimatur of one individual! This proliferation has led to a remarkable, and remarkably healthy, variety of form and tone: a Mike McCormack story reads nothing like a story by Mary Costello, which reads nothing like a story by June Caldwell. If I was to put my finger on a reason for this flowering, it would be the proliferation of small independent presses that actively champion the short story here – Arlen House, Stinging Fly, Doire Press, New Island, Lilliput, Crannóg, Banshee – together with the ever widening circle of literary festivals. Just think of the landmark debut collections – Claire Keegan’s Antarctica, Kevin Barry’s There Are Little Kingdoms, Colin Barrett’s Young Skins, Danielle McLaughlin’s Dinosaurs on Other Planets, Louise Kennedy’s The End of the World is a Cul de Sac. Most commentators would agree that the Irish short story has experienced something of a golden age over the quarter century that I’ve been turning my pen to them. ![]() Do I limit the stories to the male point of view? Absolutely not! Imaginative empathy is what allowed Joyce to dream up the mighty Molly Bloom, to say nothing of a Jewish advertising salesman. I’ve never once re-attached the pounds shed for a story’s re-appearance in book form.Ībout half are narrated in the first person, half in what is termed “close third”, where the narrative register is closely allied to the protagonist’s consciousness. As it happens, the two lengths mesh well with the body-mass index of the stories as they first occurred to me, so that little trimming has been necessary, and what trimming as has taken place has invariably improved the story. It’s no coincidence that these are the upper limits of the majority of contests and quite a number of journals. ![]() The majority, though, come in just under 2,000 or occasionally 3,000 words. Suffice to say the longest story in Fugitive weighs in at 15,000 words while the shortest is just shy of a thousand. The pages of Ernest Hemingway’s Forty-Nine Stories would probably house about a half-dozen by Alice Monro. Too much ink has been spilt over what precisely a short story consists of for me to add anything useful here. At the very least, it’s meant that I got to select from 50 or 60 stories lurking on the hard drive, most of them published, most shortlisted in contests, both here and in the UK. Hopefully, this long gestation has meant I’ve managed to side-step the dreaded “second album curse”. The newest story, Distancing, is a response to marital abuse during the first Covid lockdown. It’s been eight eventful years since my first collection, No Greater Love, was published by Ward Wood.ĭubliner, the oldest story in the new collection, appeared in print a literary lifetime ago, way back in 2002 – it was my first story to feature in the hallowed pages of the Stinging Fly. Fugitive, my second short story collection, has been a long time in the making. ![]()
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