New Welsh Short Stories (Seren New Welsh Short Stories) - Softcover

Francesca Rhydderch; Penny Thomas; Maria Donovan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178172234X ISBN 13: 9781781722343

Publisher: Seren, 2015

Synopsis

The best of contemporary Welsh short-story writing, Seren New Welsh Short Stories 2015 offers a wide-ranging view of a country from new and established writers including Stevie Davies, Trezza Azzopardi, Joe Dunthorne, Cynan Jones, Deborah Kay Davies and Rachel Trezise. Stories range from the personal to the universal; from the streets of urban south Wales to the wilder reaches of small town and countryside; from film sets to the limits of time and space.

About this title

Review:

New Welsh Short Stories is an excellent collection that shows the vibrancy of the current crop of Welsh literary talent. With short stories going through something of a golden period, Seren have compiled a selection that shows just how far the form can be taken. This anthology comes highly recommended for short story fans, as well as those keen to try something a bit different. - Bookstrust --Booktrust

When reviewing a collection of short stories one has to single out a few for special mention. The difficulty here is that I d give special mention to all 19 of these stories, by writers either born or living in Wales, if space allowed. The collection has no theme, as such. Yet certain commonalities can be observed: clarity of writing, a strong sense of place, a recurring tinge of melancholy, an interest in youth and adolescence, night-time. Tom Morris's 17 is a marvellous coming-of-age story told in short, numbered scenes, combining humour and pathos; Joao Morais' Yes King Fu is a great slice of comic Cardiff urban realism, as if written by a Welsh Irvine Welsh; No One is Looking at You, by Deborah Kay Davies, is about puberty and family power struggles and a bikini, with an ending I still can t quite work out (I will go back to it); A Letter from Wales, by Cynan Jones, is a brilliant scientific detective story in the manner of H G Wells; Kate Hamer's Crocodile Hearts is a twisted tale about a neighbour who keeps crocodiles in the garden like many of these stories, the action takes place at night and one might also mention here Tyler Keevil's Night Start, which is about an epiphany on a hot June night with a hint of the supernatural about it. Carys Davies' Mr Philip is a story about bereavement, in which a pair of shoes becomes a symbol for grieving yet it has an unexpectedly uplifting ending. Not all the stories are set in Wales: Eluned Gramich's Pulling Out is about a Japanese boy who returns to Tokyo after a year in England, to find that his brother has not left his bedroom the whole time he was away. I'm sorry I have no space left to mention the others. --Brandon Robshaw in The Independent

About the Author:

Francesca Rhydderch has a BA Joint Honours degree in Modern Languages from Newnham College Cambridge, and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Wales. Between 1997 and 1999 she was Editorial Assistant and subsequently Associate Editor at Planet: The Welsh Internationalist. Following a stint at Gomer Books as Editor of their English-language list, she took up the editorship of New Welsh Review in 2002. In 2008 she left the magazine in order to focus on and develop her writing. She published the Rice Paper Diaries (2013) with Seren (Wales Book of the Year: Fiction 2014) and was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2014 with her story 'The Taxidermist's Daughter'. Penny Thomas has a BA English Language and Literature from Keble College, Oxford. She trained as a journalist and worked for 14 years in regional journalism before moving to Seren where she has been fiction editor since 2006. She has also worked as a freelance editor for publishers including Chicken House, Parthian and Honno Welsh Women's Press, before setting up Firefly Press, a Wales-based children's publishing company in 2013.

About this edition

• Publisher: Seren
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 178172234X
• ISBN 13: 9781781722343
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200
• Editor: Francesca Rhydderch, Penny Thomas