- Neu
E-Book, Englisch, Band 15, 224 Seiten
Reihe: Best British Short Stories
Bevan / Magarian / Biggin Best British Short Stories 2025
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78463-354-7
Verlag: Salt
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, Band 15, 224 Seiten
Reihe: Best British Short Stories
ISBN: 978-1-78463-354-7
Verlag: Salt
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
David Bevan is a 2021 graduate of the Manchester Writing School's Creative Writing MA programme. 'The Bull' is one of two stories first published by Nightjar Press.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
This is the fifteenth volume of Best British Short Stories. To mark the occasion, here are fifteen lists that pertain, in one way or another, to the short story.
Fifteen UK publishers that aren’t afraid of short stories
British Library Publishing
CB editions
Comma Press
Confingo Publishing
Dead Ink Books
Faber & Faber
Fitzcarraldo Editions
Fly on the Wall Press
Galley Beggar Press
Influx Press
Jacaranda Books
Nightjar Press
Peepal Tree Press
Salt Publishing
Scratch Books
Fourteen UK print literary magazines that publish short stories
Confingo
Extra Teeth
Granta
Gutter
Lighthouse
London Magazine
New Welsh Review
Open Pen
Remains
Seaside Gothic
Shooter
Stand
Tears in the Fence
Wasafiri
Thirteen writers best known for their short fiction
Robert Aickman
Jorge Luis Borges
Ray Bradbury
Raymond Carver
Julio Cortazar
Roald Dahl
Lydia Davis
Shirley Jackson
Franz Kafka
Katherine Mansfield
Alice Munro
Edgar Allan Poe
Saki
Twelve individuals who do a great deal to support the short story in the UK (with apologies to those people whose names will come to me only when it’s too late)
Jess Chandler, publisher Prototype Publishing
Ailsa Cox, founder Edge Hill Prize
Jonny Davidson, production editor British Library
David Gaffney, author, deviser short fiction projects
Cathy Galvin, founder Word Factory
Jonathan Gibbs, author, creator A Personal Anthology
Dominic Jaeckle, author, publisher
Johnny Mains, anthologist, author, genre researcher
Alberto Manguel, author, critic, anthologist
Chris Power, short story writer, critic, broadcaster
Amanda Saint, founder Retreat West
Tony White, author, founder Piece of Paper Press
Eleven great films based on short stories
Don’t Look Now
Rear Window Blow-up
2001: A Space Odyssey
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
They Live
The Swimmer
The Birds
Minority Report
Total Recall
Memento
Ten short story collections published by Picador, 1972–1999
Alan Beard, Taking Doreen Out of the Sky
Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories 1933–1969
Rebecca Brown, The Terrible Girls
Robert Coover, Pricksongs & Descants
MJ Fitzgerald, Ropedancer
Ellen Gilchrist, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams
Jamaica Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River
Ian McEwan, First Love, Last Rites
Bridget O’Connor, Here Comes John
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
Nine short story anthologies published by Picador 1972–2001 with the caveat that some of these include novel extracts
Dermot Bolger, The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction
Amit Chaudhuri, The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature
Carolyn Choa & David Su Li-qun, The Picador Book of Contemporary Chinese Fiction
Clifton Fadiman, The World of the Short Story
Frederick R Karl & Leo Hamalian, The Naked i
Patrick McGrath & Bradford Morrow, The New Gothic
Peter Kravitz, The Picador Book of Contemporary Scottish Fiction
George Lamming, Cannon Shot and Glass Beads
Alberto Manguel, Black Water
Eight random notes
- Hats off to Extra Teeth, the only UK literary magazine, possibly the only literary magazine anywhere, to employ a vibe consultant. In fact, Nyla Ahmad is described on the Extra Teeth website as both ‘vibe consultant’ and ‘vibes consultant’. So, which is correct? I asked the question. On social media, the response came back: ‘Both are correct! Vibes is used when consulting on the multiple different vibes of a person, place or thing, whereas vibe relates to the general overall impression.’ I’m now wondering if Best British Short Stories needs a vibe – or vibes – consultant and, if so, who it should be.
- Since the publication of Best British Short Stories 2024, three readers have contacted me, to say they liked my story reprinted in that volume. I explained to them that I was not the author of ‘Strangers Meet We When’ by Nicholas Royle, taken from David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine, by Nicholas Royle; that it was the work of the author I call the other Nicholas Royle; that he and I are two different authors; that he even suggested adding a note to his biographical note explaining all of this, but I decided against it, perhaps unwisely. What could or should I have done differently so that readers would not think that I had committed the ultimate act of vanity and narcissism, as an editor, by selecting a story of my own to be included in a book with the word ‘best’ in its title? Should I have included that explanatory line in Royle’s biog note? Does anyone read biog notes? My thinking was that anyone who thought I had included a story of my own had only to read Royle-the-author’s biog note and Royle-the-editor’s biog note and they would see that these were two different writers. This was naïve of me and so I decided to write about the issue in this introduction for the record. What, then, should an editor do? I felt that his story deserved to be picked. Should I have not picked it, simply because we write under the same name? Should the Writers Guild or the Society of Authors have a rule stipulating that there may not be two authors with the same name, that the newcomer should come up with a new name, as Equity demands of actors? Royle published his first book – Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (1990) – before I published either the first anthology I edited, Darklands (1991), or my first novel, Counterparts (1993). How would I have reacted had I been obliged to come up with a different name? I would not have been pleased. And now that I think about it, I had been publishing short stories, in magazines and anthologies, under what I regarded as my own name, since 1984, some of which I forwarded, precociously, to Giles Gordon in the hope that he and David Hughes might select one of them for their series, Best Short Stories, which they never did. Indeed, as I have written in one of these introductions before, so I’m sorry to repeat myself, but it is a story told at my own expense, Gordon eventually wrote to ask me, in the gentlest, politest, but still quite a direct way, to desist. ‘In truth your stories just don’t appeal sufficiently to us,’ he wrote. ‘They are certainly most competent but they don’t, for us, sing out with the necessary individuality and voice. I’d suggest that in future we contact you if we see a story of yours which appeals rather than your going to the trouble of sending stories to us.’ My name did appear in the introduction to Best Short Stories 1992, when the editors acknowledged Darklands, from which they reprinted Stephen Gallagher’s ‘The Visitors’ Book’. Gordon and Hughes wrote, ‘Above all we congratulate Nicholas Royle, himself a prolific short-story writer, for editing and publishing the first of what he intends as a regular visitor to the scene, based on his belief that good writers of horror were missing out. We might easily, had space allowed, have fallen for more of his choices than Stephen Gallagher’s restrained treat of a ghost story.’ My stories since have been reprinted in anthologies containing the word ‘best’ in their title, but they were selected by the editors of those series (Karl Edward Wagner, Stephen Jones, Ellen Datlow and...
