Litfest

Guest Post by Carys Davies

I’m delighted to be introducing the short fiction programme at Litfest this year – four celebrated writers, all very different from each other, all masters of this notoriously tricky, deliciously entertaining art form.

Panos Karnezis’s collection Little Infamies opens a door into a nameless Greek village, a hot and dusty world where no one has ever seen a camera, where the local doctor performs operations with the help of a mail-order manual. It’s peopled with a delightful cast of eccentrics – a priest and a bartender, a barber, a prostitute, a man dressed up as a centaur, and many others. It’s a place of yearning and stalled hopes and unrequited love, of sly tricks and underhand cunning and murder. Hearing these tales, with their deadpan humour and lyrically precise language it’s almost impossible to believe that Karnezis only began to write in English in 1996.

Alison MacLeod’s taboo-breaking stories, meanwhile, deal with desire in its many manifestations: her Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction are by turns disturbing, comic, and affecting. Known for her willingness to experiment with form, MacLeod skilfully mixes the erotic with the erudite – meditations on chaos theory, dark matter and entropy co-exist in a collection where a teenage hairdresser is drawn to a man who has died beside her on a park bench; where a man pursues a heavily pregnant woman through an IKEA store. MacLeod is also a passionate performer – I’ve heard her read her heart-breaking story ‘Dirty Weekend’ and it moved me to tears.

James Lasdun – who grew up in the UK but is a long-time resident of New York – won the inaugural National Short Story Prize with ‘An Anxious Man’. Lasdun is an accomplished poet and novelist and his short fiction is blessed with the graceful restraint of the poetry and the page-turning creepiness of the novels. What I love about ‘An Anxious Man’, and many of Lasdun’s other stories, is the sense of entering a world where something dreadful is going to happen. Invariably it’s a world peopled by those (most of them men) so tortured by their neuroses that seemingly everyday situations – a family holiday by the beach, a walk in the country, an invitation for drinks – morph and swivel into something far more sinister and threatening.

Many will be familiar with Sean O’Brien the poet but not, perhaps, with his darkly entertaining foray into short stories, The Silence Room. Mostly set in an eerily gothic Newcastle-Upon-Tyne these tales are shot through with a sense of unease, of the uncanny, a blurring between reality and the fantastic. In them, the city becomes a place of mysteries and ghosts and puzzles. They are funny, surprising, beautifully written and, on occasion, deeply moving – I particularly adore the opening story, which follows the narrator on a journey through the city’s strange and nightmarish landscape as he follows a series of mysterious messages, only to discover, in the end, that they have come from his father, who he can never reach.