SHORT STORIES
HITS AND MISSES by Simon Rich (Serpent’s Tail €11.20)
AGED just 34, Simon Rich has already made his mark as a humorist — he’s worked on The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live in the US. and has written funny books.
The unifying theme of these droll, comic tales is fame, and his characters’ efforts to procure it.
There’s a disappointed dinosaur TV scriptwriter surrounded by younger, sharper (human) talents, who ends up working in a bar (Dinosaur); a retired musician whose family stages an intervention when she succumbs to the siren song of rock ’n’ roll (Relapse), as well as ambitious actors, authors and an overly pious monk (Hands).
Ranging from the silly to the satirical, this collection is aptly named — a few of the tales are wayward in their aim, but most hit the mark brilliantly.
I AM HEATHCLIFF Curated by Kate Mosse (Borough Press €12.90)
INSPIRED by Wuthering Heights, these tales of toxic relationships, an entirely disturbing episode of stalking and necrophilia, blighted lives and bleak landscapes reveal that contemporary responses to Emily Bronte’s endlessly controversial classic can be equally stark, cruel and shocking.
There are, however, exceptions; Louisa Young’s furious, funny, righteous rant redresses the ‘romantic’ hero myth as she recites the violent misdemeanours of bad boyfriends in Heathcliffs I Have Known.
In the wonderful, wistful One Letter Different by Joanna Cannon, two teenagers head to the moors in silent, secretive communion, while crime writer Sophie Hannah embarks on a musical murder mystery in Only Joseph.
DAYS OF AWE by A. M. Homes (Granta €16.90)
NO ONE is happy in Days of Awe. Marriages falter, therapy fails and the body becomes a battleground as teenagers brand and pierce themselves. Another pushes rose thorns into her arms and feet as a way of dealing with her dysfunctional relationship with her mothe.
Homes’s dialogue is sharp, clever and often darkly funny, but the stories, which deal with the superficialities of America, feel provisional, as if her short fiction is unable to deal adequately with the surreal truth of the modern world.