Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails

A few months ago, I asked Twitter users to recommend their favourite literary magazines. The response was pretty impressive, and not least from the magazines themselves, many of whom are active on Twitter. I wound up with a list of a good dozen publications to explore, and first among these was Dublin-based The Stinging Fly, a triannual publication of new writing: poems, fiction, essays, reviews.

As well as the magazine, there’s The Stinging Fly Press, which publishes novels and anthologies. Among other titles, they’ve published Kevin Barry’s There are Little Kingdoms, and Fighting Tuesdays, a collection of stories by fourth year students from Larkin Community College.

Their latest publication is Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails, an anthology of new short stories edited by Philip Ó Ceallaigh.

The short story demands the concision and accuracy we associate with poetry, while using all the modalities—place, character, progression, drama—we associate with more sprawling narrative forms. And yet it has to come off naturally and gracefully, like any practised art, showing no sign of the work.

– Philip Ó Ceallaigh, from the introduction

There are twenty-two authors in the book, and a few more stories (one author offers five slices of flash fiction). Kevin Barry is here, and other highlights, at least on first reading, include stories by Marcus Fleming and James Moynihan. The authors are drawn from across the world, and several (Alex Epstein, Goran Petrovic, Zakhar Prilepin) appear in translation. They’re diverse enough to keep things interesting, but for the most part they share a fairly bleak outlook: the stories’ protagonists regularly disappoint themselves or others, or are disappointed by others. That said, this is a good, diverse collection of short stories, and an opportunity to encounter a great many authors you won’t have read before.

The author list in full:

Madeleine D’Arcy (Ireland) – Waiting For The Bullet
Luke Woods (USA) – Stag
Emily Firetog (USA) – The Boys
Shih-Li Kow (Malaysia) – The First Time
James Moynihan (Ireland) – A Lot You Don’t Know
Radu Pavel Gheo (Romania) – Fake
Brian Kirk (Ireland) – The Girl in the Window
Alex Epstein (Israel) – Five Stories
Andrew Fox (Irish) – The Blizzard
Charlotte Grimshaw (New Zealand) – The Master Plan
Gerry McCullough (Northern Ireland) – Giving Up
Grace French (Ireland) – Italian Lessons
Goran Petrovic (Serbia) – Our Fellow Creatures
Dónal Moloney (Ireland) – The Grind
Benjamin Arda Doty (USA) – Proud Of You No Matter What
Marcus Fleming (Ireland) – For Display Purposes Only
Kevin Barry (Ireland) – The Girls and the Dogs
Zakhar Prilepin (Russia) – The Killer and his Little Friend
Colin Barrett (Ireland) – You’re The One We’ve Been Waiting For
David Mohan (Ireland) – Some Facts About Sonora
Julian Gough (Ireland) – Tiger, Tiger
Christine Dwyer Hickey (Ireland) – The Yellow Handbag

(Philip Ó Ceallaigh published his own collection of short stories, The Pleasant Light of Day, last year. Read a review on The Asylum here.)