I was happy to find a new story by Ali Smith in this anthology, a lovely one too, itself packed with stories and conversations and story-memories, such as:

... every morning, your mother would wet the ends of your hair and heat it with tongs into a pageboy style, and every morning you used to go along the road to school taking the condensation off the cars with your hands and pulling your hair straight again.

Smith’s story, ‘Last Night of The’, also includes a very funny tale of mistaken identity – one that recalls Eve’s experience in the last part of The Accidental, except in reverse, since in this case the initially welcomed and kindly greeted person is then sternly dismissed.

She stopped being motherly immediately. She took the envelope from me. She took the glass of wine out of my hand and put it on the sideboard with the decent ornaments.

Then there’s Toby Litt’s ‘Paddy and Henry’, another great story. Once dubbed a ‘young gunslinger’, now Litt has family responsibilities and his prose seems rejuvenated – fresh, subtle, concise. We meet up again with characters from his novel Ghost Story:

Paddy was on Guinness, because it was Agatha’s turn to get up with Max the next morning; Henry was on bitter, London Pride, with a whiskey chaser, Bushmills, because he no longer gave a fuck – or wanted to give the impression he no longer gave a fuck. “We’re getting divorced,” he said. “May and I – of course May and I, how stupid! Who else could I say that about?”

Many of the other stories in this anthology left me with strong images – goldfish in a swimming pool, a pregnant girl with a stomach full of condom-wrapped cocaine, a grandfather dying on the terracotta tiles of Union Station in Los Angeles, a paperback book lying on a metal chair on a hot terrace in Greece (great descriptions of shimmering heat in this story, ‘Under White Light’ by Thea Bennett). All the stories are well written, often strikingly so. I couldn’t fault them, although I had a feeling of wanting something, of something being missing. What? Maybe another writer whose work I could really love and want to pursue through time.

Having said that, there’s plenty to like and admire here – Philip Makatrewicz’s ‘Boozehounds’, a charming and quirky account of a young man changed into a dog, Anna Hope’s modern take on Virginia Woolf, ‘A Gap of Sky’, Anupama Kumari Gohel’s sad and haunting ‘A Home for Bobby MacIntosh’.

The contributors’ notes are also interesting, since although they are nearly all students on the MA Creative Writing programme at Birkbeck, University of London, they are also, as Susan Elderkin says in her introduction, “people who already have proper lives, with jobs and families”.

Thanks for reminding me about this - just ordered it. Sounds fab.

Nik

Thanks, Nik - always nice to have a response to a review! I've been thinking about what Susan Elderkin says in the introduction - "proper lives, with jobs and families" - is that necessarily a good thing, for a writer? - and actually the contributors' notes don't say anything about their familes - apart from Olja Knezivic, "She has two kids who sit on her shoulders while she writes".

Frances

Hmm, not sure I agree; I know I don't! I just do this - any other work is writing related. But maybe JUST doing writing things isn't healthy; inspiration and ideas can be found anywhere.

And I couldn't write with anything on my shoulders!

Nik