"Evie" by Sarah Hall

"Evie" by Sarah Hall  (2012)

March 1 to March 31
A Sunday Times Finalist
An ISSM3 Special Event

Sarah Hall

My Favorite Sunday Times Short Stories So Far

1.  "Miss Lora" by Junot Diaz

2.  "The Shot" by Mark Haddon

3.  "The Beholder" by Ali Smith

4.  "Evie" by Sarah Hall
6.  "The Dig" by Cynan Jones -no post on this story

5.  "Call It ‘The Bug’ Because I Have No Time to Think of a Better Title" by Toby Litt-I did no post on this story

For what it is worth, I thought "Miss Lora" was for sure the best of these stories.

In my posts on the first three stories I have explained why I feel justified including the six final stories for The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award as part of ISSM3.  Basically these are example of what are perceived as in demand style short stories that professional think will sell.

"Evie" by Sarah Hall has even more sexual content in it than "Miss Lora" by Junot Diaz, and that is saying a lot.  "Evie" is a well done story.   Married men, have you ever wished your wife would initiate more sex, do things that only girl friends or even hookers are supposed to do?  This story is about what happens when this comes true for Evie's husband.  The plot is very linear and once you get the idea fairly predictable.

Evie first changes her eating habits, craving high sugar foods she had always avoided, then she starts drinking a lot, whiskey.  Then she starts demanding sex in a way bolder fashion than she ever had before.  Soon she wants sex several times a day (yes I told you this was a frightening story) doing things she would never do, other than maybe on her husband's birthday before.   He walks in on her watching hard core porn while naked and stimulating herself.  Shades of a sexual exorcism seem in order to him when she tells him she wants to have sex with him and their old friend Richard at the same time.  Soon she comes home with a letter from work saying she has been acting inappropriately.   She has asked several of the men there to have sex with her.   Of course the husband knows something is very wrong with his once very proper wife.  I will tell just a bit too much of this story.  One day as he and his friend Richard are just done with a joint session with her she begins to foam at the mouth and pass out so of course they rush her to the hospital.  

When the ending comes, I went "Oh so that was what it was".

This is a decent enough story, some fun to read sex scenes (OK maybe the only parts that were entertaining) but over all I did not like it nearly as much as any of the other three stories I have so far read.  If I want to read porn, I will take it straight.  

Author Data

Sarah Hall is the author of Haweswater (2003), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first novel, The Electric Michelangelo (2004), which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Prix Femina Etranger and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and The Carhullan Army (2007), which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was listed as one of the 100 Best Books of the Decade by The Times. Her most recent novel, How to Paint a Dead Man (2009), won the Portico Prize for Fiction 2010 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Mel u

"The Shot" by Mark Haddon

"The Shot" by Mark Hadden  (2012)

March 1 to March 31

A Special Event

A Sunday Times Short Story Award Finalist

Mark Haddon

My Favorite Sunday Times Short Stories So Far

1.  "Miss Lora" by Junot Diaz

2.  "The Shot" by Mark Haddon

3.  "The Beholder" by Ali Smith

The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award is the richest short story prize in the world at 30,000 Pounds.   Last year Ireland's Kevin Barry won and this year Junot Diaz won for "Miss Lora", a gritty story of the life of a young Dominican man in New York City.  In addition to the prize story, I am posting on, as part of ISSM3 on all five finalists.  I am doing this for one simple reason. All of the writers in this collection are a commercial success as a writer.  These are the kind of stories editors and publishers believe the short story buying anthology public wants.   These are the kind of writers who regularly publish in The New Yorker.  They will influence the styles of aspiring short story writers world wide.  

"The Shot" is a very interesting for its narrative mode and how it goes in an out of different periods in the life of the narrator, from a young boy to a man in his fifties.   We meet the narrator as young man, less than ten.  He has an older brother, father, and mother.  Like most older brothers, he does not want the narrator in his room but one day he invites him in telling him he has something to show him.  It is a rifle.  As I read this I thought at once of the dictum attributed to Anton Chekhov in which he said if you show a gun in the first act of play you must fire it before the play is over.  I at once began to wait for the gun to be fired and I think that is what most readers will do.  Of course the gun is a symbol of manhood.  It also gives the brother the ability to rise above petty morality by killing another boy.  Some how, and I guess this is just me, this reminded me of the theme of Crime and Punishment played out for British school boys.  

There are a lot of interesting very intelligent things said by the narrator.  It is fascinating to see how he still things back on what did happen when the gun was fired  after many years latter.  I think the best things about this story are the almost in passing observations about life made by the narrator.   I am for sure glad I read this story.  It is interesting, somehow it felt derivative to me.  Others have said it was by far the best work in the collection.

Mark Haddon is best known for his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), which won the Whitbread Book

of the Year Award, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Booktrust Teenage Prize. It has also been adapted into a successful and critically acclaimed stage production. He has also written A Spot of Bother (2006), which was short-listed for the Costa Novel Award, and The Red House (2012). Besides being an accomplished author, Haddon is also an abstract painter and has worked as an illustrator and cartoonist.

Haddon, Mark; Hall, Sarah; Diaz, Junot; Smith, Ali; Jones, Cynan; Litt, Toby (2013-02-13). Six Shorts - The finalists for the 2013 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award The Sunday Times. Kindle Edition. 

I intend to post on the other four stories soon.

Mel u

"The Beholder" by Ali Smith

March 1 to March 31

A Reading Life Special Post

"The Beholder" by Ali Smith

You participation in ISSM3 (which I am open to extending until April 7 to get all the Q and A Sessions properly done) is invited and desired.  E Mail me if you are interested.  

Yesterday I did a post on the Sunday Times short story award winning work, "Miss Lorca" by Junot Diaz. (My post is here.)  This is the biggest prize for a short story in the world at 30,000 Pounds.  Last year Ireland's Kevin Barry won.   I included the post within the framework of Irish Short Story week as Diaz is the very epitome of a literary success story and his work will serve as role model for countless other writers.   There were five other short stories short listed for this prize.   All of the other stories are by British writers and they are published in a fairly prize Kindle book.   The other writers are all English, not an Irish writer made the cut this year.  Nevertheless, these stories are what publishers want, what big name judges feel are the best of short stories and they will serve as role models, admit it or not, for many aspiring Irish short story writers.   I mean who would not want to win the prize and enjoy the literary super-star status of Junot Diaz or Kevin Barry.   Short story styles go in an out of fashion and I guess these stories are the trend setters at least this month.

Ali Smith is one of my favorite contemporary short story writers.   I really like a lot her "True Story Short".  In addition to that I have posted on two other of her short stories and her series of meta-fiction lecture given at Oxford, Artful.  In fact I took a line from "True Story Short" and incorporated it into some of the Q and A Sessions with Irish writers this month when I asked them if this line from the story makes sense to them "Is the short story a goddess and nymph and is the novel an old whore?"


"The Beholder" is a very interesting story which combines elements of magic realism with a story about a medical mystery.

A woman has a strange growth on her chest.  The doctors do not really know what it might be.  Of course it could be cancer so they send her for a lot of tests.

She meets a Gypsy in the park one day (lot of Gypsies in older Irish stories, gypsies are often confused by the ill-informed with Travellers, who tells her, without seeing it that she has a nice licitness growing on her chest and to be sure and water it.   She also takes all of her money, the doctors would get it any way.

Now the story gets real weird.  Here is her conversation with the gypsy:

"I think that may well be a very nice specimen you’ve got there in your chest, if I’m not wrong, a young licitness. A young what? I said but a couple of community police officers were strolling up the street towards us and she was busy tucking away her sprigs of heather into her many coat pockets, in fact it looked like her coat was more pocket than coat. Give it a few hours of sun every day if you can, she called back over her shoulder as she went, stay well"

Did I tell you thinks were getting strange.  It turns out what she has growing on her chest is a rose named after Milton's "Lycidas".   At times it seems the woman is almost changing into a rose bush or perhaps that is what she always was.

This was an interesting story, will make you go "humm" but of this and "Miss Lora" if I were a judge I would go with Diaz on this.  

Author Data

Ali Smith was born in Inverness, studied at Aberdeen and Cambridge universities and lives in Cambridge. She’s been writing novels, stories, plays and occasional journalism since 1995. Her most recent books are Artful (2012), a work of melded fiction and essay based on a series of talks she gave at St Anne’s College, Oxford in 2012 as Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of Comparative European Literature, and There But For The (2011), which won the Hawthornden Prize and SMIT Best Scottish Fiction Award.

There are four other stories in the collection for 2013 and I plan to post on the other four soon.  For sheer fun I will rank them.

So far

1.  Diaz
2.  Smith

If you have read any of these stories please share your thoughts with us


Mel u

"Miss Lora" by Junot Diaz

"Miss Lora" by Junot Diaz  (2012)

March 1 to March 31

The Reading Life Side Trip

"Miss Lora" by Jonot Diaz 

Winner the Sunday Times 2013 Short Story Prize

Your participation is welcome, contact me if you are interested.

Yes this post on Junot Diaz born in the Dominican Republic and now an American citizen who writes mostly about immigrants from the Dominican Republic living in New York City is a vital part of Irish Short Story Week for one very big reason.  It is the kind of short story the magazine editors, the publishers, teachers at MFA programs in creative writing like.  If you can write like Junot Diaz you have the potential to make big money, to be a writer in resident at world class universities and command huge fees for speaking engagements.  By now most  short story writers and readers  who follow these things online know that yesterday it was announced that his story "Miss Lora" was awarded the Sunday Times Short Story of the Award for 2012 which comes with 30,000 Pounds, the richest short story prize.  The other five shortlisted writers were all English.    Most writers who want to sell their work will at least probably want to read this story to see what it takes to achieve real commercial success mostly as a short story writer.  Last year Ireland's own Kevin Barry won.  

Junot Diaz (born 1968, Dominican Republic) won the Pulitzer

Prize in 2008 for his novel The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Pao.   A number of his short stories have been published in The New Yorker.  He has published two collection of short stories, Drowned and This is How You Lose Her.  (I read his novel and his first collection of short stories before I began The Reading Life.)   He is the darling of the short story world, this week anyway.

"Miss Lora" is about the relationship of a young man of Dominican background living in New York City.  It is told in the first person and it is mostly about the man's relationship to a teacher, much older than him, called Miss Lora with whom he eventually forms a sexual bond.  It is a story of the rough side of town, where every other word used is "f***" (OK the Irish can match this.)   Women are described using street slang and appraised brutally on their bodies.   The narrator stereotypes people based on where they are from.  He describes his girlfriend as "Only Puerto Rican girl on the earth who wouldn’t give up the ass for any reason."  Miss Lora is a school teacher and we learn the Spanish girls do not liker her but the white ones do.  

There is really a lot in this story.  It starts with an account of his brother, dying way to young. He won't speak to anyone and the narrator says this shows he is an "asshole", a word used a good bit in this story.  The story is kind of about him roaming around trying  to get laid.   Miss Lora encourages him to go to college and even gets him applications.  He is very smart.  He sees through people and sort of reduces them down to the basics as seen in the rough barrios of New York City and New Jersey.  Everybody is kind of reduced to a racial or cultural stereotype like his Puerto Rican girl friend was.  It is about surviving, about family ties, about moving on, about what it means to the narrator to be a man.  It is also about Miss Lora, we learn some things about her that I found fascinating.  In away Diaz is kind of showing us OK all these people may seem like just caricatures until you get to know them then they are as human as you are.  It is about being a parent also as we see in his long suffering mother and the Irish will see his weak and missing father as something found in much of their literature.  This is also a very funny story.  It is only to be seen as degrading to women and ethnic groups if we do not see it is how the man sees the world based on his life experiences. The women in the stories seem stronger than the men and to have better sense and he men are lead around by their hormones. I have not yet read the other five stories (but I think I will) but this story is what the market place now seems to want.   I am glad I read it both for its own worth and so I will know what sort of story the market place wants.

You can read about the award in  The Guardian

Haddon, Mark; Hall, Sarah; Diaz, Junot; Smith, Ali; Jones, Cynan; Litt, Toby (2013-02-13). Six Shorts - The finalists for the 2013 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award . The Sunday Times. Kindle Edition.  I read the story here.  

I am pondering if I will read his new collection.  

Please share your thoughts on the award or Junot Diaz with us.

Mel u