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Bill Naughton and the art of the short story

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    #51
    Originally posted by elguapo4 View Post
    Best of luck Imp, hope you mention us in your victory speech.
    I like that idea - thanking every OTFer by name. "[20 minutes in] And thanks too to Felicity I Guess So, the amazing Everiste Euler Gauss, over there on the other side of the Irish Sea, Bohemians FC stalwart elguapo4, and Mr. Beast, of course..."

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      #52
      Best of luck imp!

      ha ha re my overdue re-review of Watling Street! I love this thread! I wish I had something more insightful to say, and to be fair it's a year or so since I re-read it, but all I can say is that, leaving aside the nostalgia value for me of re-reading something I'd read in school in about 1977, I really enjoyed it. Simple, powerful writing, curiously moving, and brilliantly evocative of that lost world of early post-WW2 British society. I read LNOWS itself then a few others from the collection before other things sidetracked me and I forgot to read the rest.

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        #53
        The Scottish Arts Trust was spared my acceptance speech, as I didn‘t place in the top three. One designated judge for each story read out an appreciation of why the story was nominated, though, and my particular judge nailed nicely what the story was about and what it was trying to do. Very lovely evening in the company of several benevolent Scottish pensioners, several of whom want younger blood in the Trust, if you happen to live near Edinburgh, have 500 quid a year to spare, and want to get involved. That 500 quid, I fear, is the exact reason there‘s a shortage of interest and recruits.

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          #54
          Who won? And what did you think of it.

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            #55
            Top three were: 1.Overdue. 2. Rip and 3. Sammy etc. I would have had Rip in first place, but have no complaints about those three stories making the podium.

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              #56
              Congrats on being nominated!

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                #57
                Here's an interview with me at the London Independent Story Prize website, pontificating about short fiction and the creative process.

                The story's on this page if you scroll down.
                Last edited by imp; 27-03-2020, 17:41. Reason: adding link to story

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                  #58
                  Finished reading Jamel Brinkley's 'A Lucky Man', and what a superb collection it is - consistently impressive, beautiful writing through every story. Here are a couple of random samples:

                  "For most people there is a gap, for some a chasm, between the way they dream themselves and the way they are seen by others. That gap might be the truest measure of one's loneliness." (from Infinite Happiness)

                  "On the corner, Kitty Towns slouched against a pole, having her breakfast of cigarettes. Kitty was in her forties, younger than Rhonda's mother, but she was always bent, looking over the edge of her own precipice." (Wolf and Rhonda)

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                    #59
                    Am reading the collected stories of Elizabeth Bowen, about one ninth of the way through the 900-page volume but loving every word so far. This from the 'The Shadowy Third':

                    "The maid came in to say supper was ready, and they went into the dining-room. Here the curtains were undrawn and they could see the lights twinkling out in the windows of the other houses. He often felt as though those windows were watching him; their gaze was hostile, full of comment and criticism. The sound of the wind among the bushes in the garden was like whispered comparisons."

                    Why have so many writers struggled to convey the tedium and oppression of suburbia when it was already done to perfection around a century ago in the final sentence of that paragraph.

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                      #60
                      Elizabeth Bowen is stunning. Maybe i should read some more.
                      Last edited by Nefertiti2; 20-04-2020, 06:22.

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                        #61
                        She definitely deserves a place on the bookshelf between Jean Rhys and Somerset Maugham.

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                          #62
                          Originally posted by imp View Post
                          She definitely deserves a place on the bookshelf between Jean Rhys and Somerset Maugham.
                          Really... I’d put her next to Borges. I’m not that much of a fan of William Boyd so I guess Ray Bradbury would be on the other side.

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                            #63
                            Heh, no alphabetical ordering on my bookshelves. There's some categorisation, including three shelves devoted to short story collections, but also randomly arranged.

                            Just read 'The Parrot'. I think it's about sexual awakening, but it's so subtle that I can't be completely certain.

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                              #64
                              The Town & Country collection of Irish short stories was very good in the main, though it isn't exactly current. I haven't actually read any Bill Naughton, but imp's tips have been very good so I think I'd better seek him out. I may also attempt Dubliners, which I haven't read since I pretended I had read it at Uni. Don't let anybody tell you educational standards are slipping.

                              I also enjoyed the Jennifer Egan collection, so thanks to Nef for that tip.

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                                #65
                                Just stumbled across this thread.

                                A special mention for Gordon Legge's 1991 short story collection, 'In Between Talking about the Football'.

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                                  #66
                                  Originally posted by imposs View Post
                                  Just stumbled across this thread.

                                  A special mention for Gordon Legge's 1991 short story collection, 'In Between Talking about the Football'.
                                  Any particular reason why? I like the fabricated NYT plug, but would need to know a bit more before making a commitment.

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                                    #67
                                    No answer - maybe 'imposs' was an 'imp' parody account.

                                    On the final stretch of the Elizabeth Bowen collection, which I've been steadily dipping in and out of all year. One of the later stories, 'Summer Night', is such a perfect piece of writing that I almost wept when I'd finished it - not because of the content, but because I'd finished it. Several of her paragraphs I read two or three times over.

                                    Here's a nice snatch of dialogue from 'Songs My Father Sang Me':

                                    "Peace," he said. "Look hard at it; don't forget it."
                                    "What's peace?" I said.
                                    "An idea you have when there's a war on, to make you fight well. An idea that gets lost when there isn't a war."

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                                      #68
                                      And to finish off with, this gem in the final paragraph of 'Hand in Glove':

                                      "In the end, the matter was hushed up - which is to say, is still talked about even now."

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                                        #69
                                        Here's another one of my stories - it came second in the Fiction Factory 2021 competition, another one from my cycle of 'Market Rasen in the 1970s/80s' short stories. Scroll down from the winner to reach it.

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                                          #70
                                          Very good, winner is excellent as well, I've no idea how judges decide.

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                                            #71
                                            Originally posted by elguapo4 View Post
                                            Very good, winner is excellent as well, I've no idea how judges decide.
                                            Thank you. I've no idea how judges decide either, but it's best not to think too hard about the mind of a judge when you're writing a story. True, when I'm in the futile endeavour of sending off my annual entry to the BBC short story competition, I erase all swear-words given that winning entries are broadcast on BBC4. I've also more or less given up entering US competitions - the entrance fees are often extortionate, and my success rate there is nil. They always tell you 'write whatever you want in any style - surprise us!', then when you read the winners - although in many cases impressive, and even excellent - you also get the feeling that there's a certain kind of writer that wins these things. More careful writers, say, within a limited field of universal themes, possibly the graduates of creative writing schools and courses. But that could just be me being a poor loser.

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                                              #72
                                              imp, the description of how one teacher loses control of their class while another with their sheer physical presence commands instant respect resonated with me on both sides of the teaching fence.

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                                                #73
                                                Sporting That dichotomy was what eventually put me off becoming a teacher, although I was on the verge of applying twice - I had the application form filled out, but ended up not sending it off. On one level, I thought it could be the job I was born to do - I wanted to be a teacher who would make every class interesting, or at least tolerable. On the other hand it terrified me that I might not pull that off, especially thinking of how unforgivably we as pupils behaved towards some of our teachers, pulling them out of shape until they snapped. The story's partly an attempt to atone for that by putting the narrator in the head of a teacher filled with fury, misery and insecurity.

                                                I've enjoyed coaching kids' football teams, and developed ways to mainly keep things under control, but 2-3 hours out on a football pitch in the evening is an entirely different proposition to standing in front of a reluctant, moody and potentially volatile classroom all day. The state of Hessen is trying to recruit trainee primary school teachers due to a chronic shortage. Part of me thinks that, even at 55, I should take the plunge and apply. Another part of me thinks, "Why on earth would you do something insane like that at your time of life?"

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                                                  #74
                                                  I've just finished Flannery O'Connor's collected short stories. I bought the volume the last time I was in the US, completely unaware of who she was and her background - Southern Catholic writer who wrote in the post-WW2 era, and died at the age of 39 from lupus the year before I was born. Her stories, while often brilliantly executed, are disconcerting, to say the least. Apparently, her estate stipulated that none of the language be changed in future publication. That means extremely frequent use of the n-word, both in dialogue and in prose. Her advocates have said for decades that she was just reflecting the time and place of her background and upbringing. Neither white nor black characters are sentimentalised, but you feel while reading that O'Connor is struggling with her own conscience on what she called "that issue". Subsequently and recently available letters, though, as covered in this excellent piece in the New Yorker (you'll need to open an account to read it, but it's a very quick process, and worth it), reveal that she had a huge problem with race, and that she knew it. It wasn't like she was writing in the 18th. century, she was writing just as the civil rights movement was on the rise.

                                                  Anyone else read anything by her? She also published two novels, but I think I've had my fill.

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                                                    #75
                                                    I'm half a dozen stories into the Lucia Berlin A Manual for Cleaning Women collection that you mentioned earlier in the thread and loving it so far. I'll say more once I've read further into it.

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