Sarah Hall is one of those rare writers whose short fiction has the same luminosity as her novels. But the short form allows her more room to probe and roam, to experiment with form, to sink her fingers into the earth. Pregnancy haunts a number of the stories in her second collection, Madame Zero (Faber £12.99). Several are set in and around hospitals. The body is often treacherous and the self is slippery. In the delicately dystopian Theatre 6 a doctor does what she can to help a miscarrying woman in a world where the life of the unborn child takes precedence. In Evie, a woman starts to crave things, first food, bars of chocolate gobbled swiftly, then sex, gorging on porn, hungering for men other than her husband. Hall writes of the body with the same grace she writes of the earth, the cool slap of water, the scent of the air. She is alert to all things wild.
The stories in Mary Gaitskill’s third collection, Don’t Cry (Serpent’s Tail £8.99), are altogether more jagged, like glass glimpsed beneath the surface of a stream. They are crammed with damage, with sweat, snot and all the body’s little leakages. She does not write tidy stories. They lie splay-legged on the page. In Mirror Ball, a soul is stolen. In An Old Virgin, a woman’s father hangs on the edge of death. In The Agonized Face, a story about a literary festival and the people who attend it morphs into an account of a mother’s tangled-up fears for her daughter and the world of women and men that awaits her as she grows up.
Gaitskill is good at the throb and pop of cities and populates her stories with startling ugly-beautiful sentences. In The Little Boy, a small child who has wet the bed becomes “a white sardine briny with pee”.
The stories in James Kelman’s latest collection, That Was a Shiver, and Other Stories (Canongate £14.99), are windows, some a page long, others more expansive. Using his considerable facility for voice, he journeys inside minds. Two men stand before a dead body; a man stares at his own reflection and wonders at what he sees.
After killing a man during a robbery in 2014, Curtis Dawkins was sentenced to life without parole. The stories in his debut collection, The Graybar Hotel (Canongate £14.99), were written in prison in Michigan, where the author remains. For the most part, they eschew or explode prison cliches. They focus on the monotony and intense boredom of life on the inside. There is violence, a suicide, but in the main the men use fantasy to fill the time, stories and outright lies.
Dawkins writes with emotional clarity and attention to detail. In prison, fleeting moments of tenderness and humour are magnified. While some of the stories feel like character sketches, others are more complex and together they form something bigger. There’s an arc to them, too, a sense of a man moving through the system and towards freedom.
The stories in A Life of Adventure and Delight (Faber £12.99), the debut collection by Indian American writer Akhil Sharma, are often spectacularly bleak – a young boy comes to terms with the fact that his brain-damaged brother will not recover; another boy’s mother sets about drinking herself to death only to be murdered by her husband’s family – but this bleakness is offset by moments of emotional insight and strange radiance. Cleanly written, they have a force to them and like The Graybar Hotel they contain flashes of humour where you would least expect to find them, though in both books the humour is intermingled with pain.
Most of Sharma’s characters are grappling with social and cultural isolation in some form. In Cosmopolitan, Gopal awkwardly tries to instigate a sexual relationship with a neighbour. Arranged marriages offer little in the way of escape, rather, at best, another form of loneliness.
The title of American author Joshua Ferris’s first collection, The Dinner Party (Viking £14.99), feels apt. There’s a pristine, plated feel to the writing. The stories are constructed with immense care and there are some immaculate lines, but Ferris’s dissections of 21st-century neuroses can feel wearying after a while.
The debut collection of poet and essayist Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart (Bloomsbury £16.99), meanwhile, presents its readers with stories of families crammed into minuscule apartments, exhausted immigrant parents doing multiple jobs just to stay afloat and the mess of adolescent sexuality, all told through the eyes of young Chinese American women. The writing is vibrant, the smells of the city vivid. Zhang’s is an exciting voice and a welcome one.
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