This month 4th Estate launched a new series, 4th Shorts, publishing two short story collections – Barbara the Slut by Lauren Holmes and Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny in distinctive pocket-size paperback A formats with flaps.
When we were discussing this month’s music theme on the blog, we remembered that the inimitable Nell Zink was the editor of an indie rock fanzine before she wrote scintillating novels like The Wallcreeper and Mislaid. When we asked her whether she had any pages to show us, she wrote back apologising for not owning a scanner. However, she did have a (tenuously) music-themed story to hand; the story of an anaconda who unwittingly gets stuck in the New York art scene, and ends up devouring a doyenne of the 90s underground experimental rock community.
We couldn’t wait to share it with you…
July sees the publication of Yiyun Li’s short story A Sheltered Woman, winner of the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2015. Auntie Mei is a live-in nanny for newborns and their mothers. She has worked for a hundred and twenty-six families and looked after a hundred and thirty-one babies, one set of clients easily replaced by the next. But the hundred and thirty-second baby and his mother Chanel prompts a crisis in Auntie Mei’s life – a tremor that threatens to destroy her resolute detachment. Read more…
Power is a fickle mistress, likely to flit about the room and rest at random moments with unexpected allies. Its path is hard to track. Does it lie with the person that everyone talks about, waits for, looks at: a prime minister with an iconic handbag, an iconic hairdo, a woman that cameras permanently train their lens on – a woman undergoing minor eye surgery? Or does it lie in the eye of the beholder, with the unseen watcher, the photographer / sniper? ‘Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time’ said Susan Sontag. Perhaps, ultimately, power remains with she who watches the watcher. She whose opinion can become a dagger flying straight to the heart. She whose words can capture the crucial moment that everyone else missed, the ‘one easy wink of the world’s blind eye’. Read more…
In this episode we meet Katherine Heiny, author of Single, Carefree, Mellow. The literary love-child of Nora Ephron and Bridget Jones and written by an author who is incredibly witty, irreverent and charming, the book is finally out today.
To make up for a missed post last week, today we err from the trodden path of five best internet things and bring you the six articles, videos and ideas that we’ve been sharing and discussing this week. We hope you enjoy sharing them too. Read more…
