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joecam79's review
4.0
I recently took out a subscription in the anthology series published by The Fiction Desk. I was intrigued by the idea of a periodical showcasing literary short fiction by new and more established authors. Soon the latest issue – “Long Grey Beard and Glittering Eye” – plopped through my letterbox.
Through regular contests, The Fiction Desk seeks to discover promising authors which it then features in its anthologies. This collection, for instance, includes the 2015 winner – Mark Newman with his chilling Before There Were Houses, This Was All Fields. The story takes as its starting-point the common crime/thriller trope of a missing young girl and turns it into an exploration of memory and nostalgia, before delivering a final (narratively satisfying) blow. The runner-up story – Tim Dunbar’s A Series of Circles is no less compelling: a drunken pick-up line by a woman he meets at a bar turns the narrator into a David-Bowie-obsessive, with darkly comic results.
The Fiction Desk does not shy away from so-called “genre” pieces, including works of “speculative fiction”. This issue for instance includes Jacki Donnellan’s I Don’t Blink – a commentary on our obsession with social media which imagines a not-so-far dystopian future where the world is literally seen through glasses equipped with W’Eye-Fi – and the apocalyptic Sky Burial by Richard Smyth with its England taken over by wild animals and ripped apart by civil war. In his Jonathan, Louis Rakovich uses a ghost story of sorts to approach themes of memory, relationships and guilt.
The anthology includes nine stories in all. They are of a consistently high quality, all striking in their own way. Here are voices which have not yet been edited into blandness by over-eager publishers, voices which deserve to be heard and enjoyed.
Through regular contests, The Fiction Desk seeks to discover promising authors which it then features in its anthologies. This collection, for instance, includes the 2015 winner – Mark Newman with his chilling Before There Were Houses, This Was All Fields. The story takes as its starting-point the common crime/thriller trope of a missing young girl and turns it into an exploration of memory and nostalgia, before delivering a final (narratively satisfying) blow. The runner-up story – Tim Dunbar’s A Series of Circles is no less compelling: a drunken pick-up line by a woman he meets at a bar turns the narrator into a David-Bowie-obsessive, with darkly comic results.
The Fiction Desk does not shy away from so-called “genre” pieces, including works of “speculative fiction”. This issue for instance includes Jacki Donnellan’s I Don’t Blink – a commentary on our obsession with social media which imagines a not-so-far dystopian future where the world is literally seen through glasses equipped with W’Eye-Fi – and the apocalyptic Sky Burial by Richard Smyth with its England taken over by wild animals and ripped apart by civil war. In his Jonathan, Louis Rakovich uses a ghost story of sorts to approach themes of memory, relationships and guilt.
The anthology includes nine stories in all. They are of a consistently high quality, all striking in their own way. Here are voices which have not yet been edited into blandness by over-eager publishers, voices which deserve to be heard and enjoyed.
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