There is life beyond the novels! Although you are having the approval of a wider audience, there are other ways to enjoy reading such as collections of stories and stories that we propose today. New voices and classics invite us through these recently edited collections to discover the most diverse characters and experience disparate situations. Discover them!
Tales
- Author: Carlos Castán
- Publisher: Foam Pages
There are books whose reading should never end –to avoid a certain feeling of helplessness–, just as there are books that should never cease to be available to those readers who want to get closer to them. That is why there is this edition of the Tales of Carlos Castán, which recovers and collect three storybooks that - if they are not already - are called to be classics of contemporary literature.
Cold to live, the Museum of Solitude and Solo de lo perdi (along with his longest story, Polvo en el neon) have been, for more than twenty years, the resounding example of a highly personal aesthetic. Not only in the formal and stylistic concern, where Castán has clearly shone, but in the thematic and in his way of looking: a life dedicated to narrating loneliness, the fragility of what surrounds us, the wounds of love, and the tireless struggle against memory, ghosts and guilt. And the hope.
Complete Gothic Tales (1880-1922)
- Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
- Publisher: Alba
Although it was undoubtedly Sherlock Holmes who gave him his fame and his place in the history of literature, Arthur Conan Doyle was a little annoyed by such an absolute identification with the detective story: in fact, he always wanted to be remembered as historical novelist. But it was the gothic genre the one that perhaps most widely occupied his imagination.
Darryl Jones has brought together in this volume his Complete Gothic Tales, thirty-four pieces that, from 1880 to 1922, reveal the original contribution to that genre that ended up bringing to light some of the obsessions and unresolved tensions of the victorian culture: the possibility that the familiar becomes monstrous, the fear of a colonial revenge that will destroy the British Empire, the existence of spirits beyond death that communicate with the living, the doubt - in short - that thought scientific and rational on which society is based can explain everything. Or perhaps the sinister and the infamous are of the same nature.
Mamie Saloam and other stories
- Author: Djuna Barnes
- Publisher: The Swiss Army Knife Editors
Djuna Barnes' youth stories draw a map towards the maturity of this writer who, over time, has been recognized as a full member of the "lost generation" and admired by authors such as James Joyce, Dylan Thomas and Carson McCullers. These stories, published in leading New York magazines and newspapers of the early XNUMXth century, let you know the bohemian, the origin of Barnes's work and understanding the position he decided to adopt throughout his life, fleeing from neon lights and literary parties and salons. A young woman who, with little experience, somehow "reinvented" the genre and questioned the journalism of the time, masculine and sensationalist.
Worlds of the end of the word
- Author: Joanna Walsh
- Publisher: Periférica
This new collection of short stories by Joanna Walsh is the merciless and humorous stalking of a subject: solitary confinement, in this case, the impossibility of establishing a comprehensive contact.
The protagonists of these stories (first-person narrators) categorize reading habits according to the relationships of a small, somewhat envious community; or they go out onto a busy street to sell an impossible merchandise; or they wait for months in a foreign train station for their appointment to arrive; or they write an "old" postcard to break a relationship at a time when people have learned to speak to each other with interjections. They are life projects as misplaced as they are loquacious: launched into the world with the mission of usurping an identity, their own.
Funny and cruel, imaginative In the choice of her formats and precise even when she names the most ambiguous affections, Joanna Walsh is an unrepeatable writer, comparable only to those teachers (from Kafka to Lydia Davis) who have given the short story the subversive capacity to think the unthinkable.
Private property
- Author: Lionel Shriver
- Publisher: Anagrama
A very personal wedding gift becomes a source of disputes; a tree faces two neighbors, who will be swept away by a growing hostility; a thirty-year-old is reluctant to leave the family home; a postman spies on the letters he delivers; an aid worker in Kenya lives an unexpected adventure; a father and son find themselves in a difficult situation at an airport; a couple gets into a brawl over the purchase of a house; a fugitive from justice is fed up with the paradise in which he has hidden; two foreign women meet in Belfast in the middle of a conflict ...
The diverse characters that populate the stories of Lionel Shriver live tense situations caused by the fixation by property. For the effort to own real estate, objects or people. As is customary for the author, everyday situations can spill over at any time, and apparently more sane people are perfectly capable of losing their roles to unsuspected limits.
Do any of these collections of stories and stories catch your attention? Personally, I have only enjoyed one of them, Private Property, but there are two more from this selection on my wish list.