short stories « A Common Reader

Review: Apricot Jam and Other Stories – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A new book by by Russian giant of literature Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) seems like a throwback to the 1960s and 70s when the Soviet Empire was threatening the world with nuclear holocaust and American politicians spent their days worrying about the spread of communism. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, Cancer Ward, the [...]

Review: Screwtop Thompson – Magnus Mills

Magnus Mills first novel, The Restraint of Beasts (1998) was a wondrous creation, comic and tragic at the same time, portraying an episode in the life of two fencing contractors Tam and Richie and their un-named supervisor. A deceptively simple read, it addressed issues of crime and punishment in a setting quite unlike anything I [...]

Review: The Empty Family – Colm Tóibín

I am writing this review early in the morning in the strange half-light reflecting into the house from the eight inches of snow which fell overnight down here on the South Coast of England.

I often find short-story collections disappointing, mainly because so many writers try to create impact by giving their work an unwarranted [...]

Review: Some German-language short stories

I recently read two books of short stories by early 20th century German writers – Selected Stories of Robert Walser (actually a Swiss national, but writing in German), and Boys and Murderers by Hermann Ungar. These writers are almost equally strange. Hermann Ungar was a Czech Zionist who died at the age of 38 in [...]

Review – The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

My only knowledge of Lydia Davis, before coming to The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, is that she was the translator of Marcel Proust’s Swanns Way, in the Penguin edition which adorns my shelves – and its one of the six volumes of Remembrance of Things Past which I’ve actually read (only three to go).

However, [...]

Review – Are We Related? Granta Books

This is the 200th full-length review I’ve published on A Common Reader. A sort of milestone. . .

I have been subscribing to Granta magazine for quite a few years now and enjoy its quality writing on a vast range of subjects. Its a well-produced journal, not the sort of thing you want to [...]

Review: Best European Fiction 2010 – Editor, Aleksandar Hemon

The Dalkey Archive Press is a unique enterprise, being a publisher of literary fiction that is both independent and non-profit making. This gives them the freedom to publish a unique range of title which, to quote the website, “in some way or another, upsets the apple cart, that they work against what is expected, that [...]

Review: The Lottery and Other Stories – Shirley Jackson

I am impressed with the new Shirley Jackson collection which has been published by Penguin Modern Classics, especially the book of short stories, The Lottery, but also the novels, We Have Always Lived in The Castle and The Haunting of Hill House.

American writer Shirley Jackson wrote in the middle of the last century and [...]

Review: Memoirs of an Anti-Semite – Gregor von Rezzori

I came to read Gregor Von Rezzori through reading an article, Chronicle of Loss, by John de Falbe in Slightly Foxed magazine no. 15. As a book reviewer, it is easy to concentrate on new books to the exclusion of many excellent novels which are fast-fading from public gaze. Who for example reads Somerset Maugham, [...]

Review: Missing Persons – Hartmut Lange

According to the Toby Press website, Hartmut Lange was born in Berlin in 1937 and is well-known in Germany as a contemporary novelist and playwright. He has been awarded numerous literary prizes.

Missing Persons contains three longish short stories, all in one way or another covering the theme of disconnection: a sense that all is [...]

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