Tuesday 3 September 2013

For genuine short story lovers: PELT GIVEAWAY !

prosecco in San Marco, Venezia. Move over, Mr. Clooney
The past few days have been heady, full of champagne, white wine and lovely September light. The Pelt Blog tour has kicked off. It started with a radio interview - in Italian - with Australian national multi-cultural radio station SBS (links will follow when I have them - it's not been broadcast yet) and was followed by my guest post Sex and the Short Story (somebody had to write it!) on Averil's naughty blog. Next, a guest post about assembling an interlinked story collection on the talented Tom Vowler's literary blog.

Prolific Mel Ulm of the vastly followed blog rereadinglives.com has written an insightful and appreciative review. And I have interviews and guests posts to follow in a lazy fashion over the two months (by then you'll be sick of this book!). Here goes. I'll insert the links as they happen:

Interview with Maria Gismondi - SBS Radio Australia 
Sex and the Short Story - chez Averil Dean
Guest post on Tom Vowler's blog
Interview with Rae Fenton - Snow Like Thought blog
Guest post on Kimberly Sullivan's Blog

Guest post with Nuala ni Chonchuir - Women Rule WriterGuest post on Ether Books 
Guest post with Vanessa Gebbie - More News from VG
Radio Interview with Hannah on Talk Radio Europe
Interview with Cate Allen - Aerogramme Writers' Studio
Guest post with Liane Spice - Novel Spaces
Interview with Sue Terry - Whispering Gums

There'll be reviews hopefully, and I'll post a few snippets without driving you mad.

I'd love to offer a virtual glass of champagne and invite you to a mild (not wild after the Young Adults last week) party out in the garden. But, failing that, I can still do a super giveaway. Just tell me: Who is your favourite short story writer and why? Come on, I love competitions! Write your comment below and my soprano daughter will choose a random winner next week.


***BTW If you are near London do come to the Pelt and Other Stories Book Launch!
7pm, Friday 13th September,
The Big Green Bookshop,
Unit 1, Brampton Park Road,
Wood Green
London N22

Venice across the lagoon from San Servola island

for an evening of red wine and raw tales from a dreamy author currently in a Pelt Daze !

16 comments:

  1. Hi Catherine!
    Just to say I mentioned your new book of stories at my reading group on Monday...chuffed to be able to tell you my positive comments elicited some interest for a future meeting('you know the author?!'),although next month we're tackling your recommendation Unigwe's "On Black Sister's Street" when I will wave, & rave, about my personally signed copy of "Pelt..." as I will endeavour to make next Friday's launch@ Wood Green's finest book emporium...with one of my female acolytes in tow!(Wishful thinking?).I hope you get the recognition you deserve,& good luck with all the promoting! I remain convinced that your potent stories will blow the dust from a few old bibliomanes' snoods! There!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey Mangiagatti this is wonderful news! I'm over in the UK again at the beginning of November for the Short Fiction launch so perhaps we could do a book club evening? But - do you go to the pub afterwards?? Hope your mates enjoy Chika's book - surely they will - and looking forward to catching up at the Big Green Bookshop. Mi raccomando! And yes let's cross fingers for 'Pelt' (more beer required here!)(champers??)Xcat

      Delete
  2. It is hard to decide who my favorite short story author is of all time, whether I should go with someone who brought me to an appreciation and love of the short story (for example going all the way back to Poe, or closer to now with Flannery O'Conner and Hemingway who are 2 of my faves or even the descendent of the Hemingway line, Raymond Carver, whose stories I have to go back to now and again, and each for different reasons). Of course there are authors fundamental to the origin and development of a 20th century tradition, like John Cheever, or of a cultural tradition, such as the great Isaac Bashevis Singer or Louis Erdrich. Should I instead think about authors more recently stumbled upon and loved, such as those I appreciated in the 80s and 90s--Denis Johnson ("Jesus' Son"--an instant classic), TC Boyle (for ex for the collection "If the River Was Whiskey") and Ethan Canin (for "The Emperor of the Air"). There are recent highly acclaimed authors whose books transformed my world, whose characters will eternally live with me such as Jhumpa Lahiri and her amazing "Interpreter of Maladies", S Rushdie's stories or those of the wacky world of Angela Carter. In translation, I could not live without the unexpected world of G Garcia Marquez's or Julio Cortazar's magical realism stories. One of the traditions from the US I admire most, or relate to the explorations of, are the astounding challenging suburban writings of AM Homes (I adore "The Safety of Objects" and think it is an important book) or Los Angeles as portrayed in the work of Richard Lange (his collection "Dead Boys")--2 authors still newer to "the scene" and still working on creating a body of their work. I also think perhaps I should alight on someone whose works were formally unexpected and peculiar, like Carole Maso, or the radically skewed visionary tales of Stephen Graham Jones' story collection "Bleed into Me" (SGJ has been called a Native American Stewart Dybek") or the challenging work of David Foster Wallace. However, in the end I find myself, despite my great appreciation for the force of the US short story telling tradition, thinking of translated works--including a vast array of Russian 19th and 20th century stories (who doesn't still feel the cold, viceral pain of "The Seven Who Were Hanged" by Leonid Andreyev). In the end the final winner for me, someone whose work I am still going to and have not fully absorbed, is Jorge Luis Borges. His stories do much of what many of the above authors do, but all at once--they are smart, formally inventive, challenge my cultural limits and make me reflect, love, ache, long, shiver, cower, adore and puzzle out their and then my own universes. His characters linger with me, echo, recall the real and the fictive. I see new translations in English and just want to snap them up, to see whether a new translation may give me insight into an older one, or into the story writer and his voice. I feel his stories have become like some thread in my neural pathways, making me think and see the world differently. This is why, in the end, I have selected an Argentinian author from Buenos Aires--and an author who did not write novels and yet managed to be awarded the Nobel Prize (no mean feat)--as my official favorite short story writer: Jorge Luis Borges is it!

    ReplyDelete
  3. PS: I noted that the other comments here are about your book--KUDOS and congrats on that, too! My comment was reacting to your request to know who people would name as their favorite short story author. Hope that's what you wanted posted here. I do wish I would be able to be in the UK for your reading event--I would love to discover your book and hear you! Alas, I will be teaching (and in France) at that time. Again, congrats.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dear Jennifer,
      Thank you for this spectacular reply! I have more writers to add to my reading list now and I thank you. Borges is incredibly inventive, slow and neural yes - I still have so much to absorb. And 'The Seven Who Were Hanged', I will be looking this up straightaway. Haven't read AH Homes yet and adore TC Boyle. I've been reading a lot of the Paris Review interviews with short story writers specifically, and find there are other elements - more compactness, more risk, a different ardour. Or perhaps I just choose to read them this way. Love Frank O'Connor too and his interview is hearty with insightful points I'd never even considered. Will be combing your words and making lists! Merci beaucoup, Catherine

      Delete
    2. ps: I'm doing an event in Paris at the end of January - are you anywhere near? Will keep you posted. And thank you for your kind comments about Pelt!

      Delete
  4. William Saroyan,an exiled Armenian living in San Joaquin Valley?, California wrote a short story (in the 40s?) called 'Seventy Thousand Assyrians'; about the potential extiction of ancient races.Simple story,tremendous resonance! Man goes into barber-shop for hair-cut & tells barber about his people,the Assyrians,& why so few of them still live. As Hitler so famously said,when asked about the extermination of the Jews "Who remembers the Armenians?"(a reference to the Turkish-Ottoman annihilation of 1,500,000 Christian Armenians in 1915-16;I read Michael Arlen's moving memoir 'Passage To Ararat'.) Saroyan wrote some great,if popular,short stories & sentimental novels,but,for me,the story 'Seventy Thousand Assyrians', is a classic.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have never read Saroyan and, as I said below, am fascinated by Assyrians! Must read this. Have you read Gilgamesh by Australian Joan London, set partly in Soviet Armenia??

      Delete
  5. My all time favourite short story writer is Katherine Mansfield, for The Doll's House: a story I go back to. But there are so many I love:

    Chekhov is probably a close second tie with Hemingway, David Down for "Paper Boy", Angela Carter for "The Company of Wolves", Ma Jian for "The Woman and the Blue Sky", Hans Christian Andersen for "The Little Sea Maid" and "The Little Match Girl" - because they still make me cry!, anything by Nathan Englander is superb, Etgar Keret, Italo Calvino, Thisbe Nissen's "Deer at Rest" was a story Nuala NĂ­ ChonchĂșir mentioned recently, and I was blown away when I read it here:

    http://www.obscurajournal.com/Nissen_Deer_at_rest.pdf

    and I've read a heap of great ones in the last couple of weeks - but mind going blizzard now - there are too many!!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am also being drowned out by my blizzard mind! I heard Nathan Englander speak with very daunting elegance at the Mantova festival last year (alongside a very inventive translator). Oh yes Katherine. I'm wondering why Jane Campion hasn't made a film about her - has someone? I always thought she was squashed by JMM, was she? Beautiful stories, how lovely to return to their shores, I read one recently. And Chekov who I know less is just startling. 'Little Match Girl' always made me cry too and will check out Nuala's link thanks! xx

      Delete
  6. The aforementioned Saroyan story was from 1933! The narrator,an Armenian, goes into a barber-shop,& has his hair cut by an Assyrian...almost weirdly topical with maters in the Near-Middle East in such a state of breakdown.
    I loved shourt stories from my boyhood(8-14)...& remember being bowled over by O.Henry,Somerset Maugham & H.E.Bates!But James Joyce's 'Dubliners' almost qualifies too!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I love the sound of this story, MG. And anytime anyone says Assyrian I am already thinking of the man lions in the British Museum, so perhaps I should hunt this story down. Somerset Maugham - a reader's delight!

      Delete
  7. So hard to choose just one.James Joyce comes to mind first. Araby and the one about Mr. Duff, A Sad Affair, I think. I'm teaching Carson McCullers stories when school starts in a couple of weeks. I like hers about kids--Correspondence, a story composed of unanswered letters. Oh, Joyce Carol Oates is definitely my favorite.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Isn't it lovely it feels like we are talking about old friends - or friends we have in common. I loved Carson McCullers when I was a young woman, her work really sang to me. And Araby - yes! - so long ago now. I also read a lot of Joyce Carol Oates in the eighties but seem to remember novels more than short stories. It might be time to look up my old friends! Thanks for commenting Jill.

      Delete
  8. Launch date today - congrats, Catherine! Ooh, favorite short story author? Hard to choose one. Love Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino, Henry James, Helen Simpson, Alice Munro, Somerset Maugham. But, maybe above all others, I love Edith Wharton. There are images and feelings in her stories of women and their place in society that I always return to.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for your good wishes and the air space over at your blog, Kimberly! And I also love Edith Wharton, Somerset Maugham, Henry James.. Haven't read Nabokov's stories yet !

      Delete