British Author Challenge February 2023: Short Stories & Novellas

Short works for the shortest month.

Suggestions
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard by J. G. Ballard
Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions by Neil Gaiman
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Short Stories of Saki by Saki
Gothic Tales by Elizabeth Gaskell
Grand Union: Stories by Zadie Smith
The Inimitable Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
Illuminations by Alan Moore
Dragons at Crumbling Castle: And Other Tales by Terry Pratchett
The Murders of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson
The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker
Ermyntrude and Esmeralda by Lytton Strachey
Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh
Farmer Giles of Ham by J. R. R. Tolkien
Witches of Lychford by Paul Cornell
Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles by Jeanette Winterson
Once upon a time in the North by Philip Pullman
A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr
Time Was by Ian McDonald
Cove by Cynan Jones
Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

With my 79th Birthday coming up, I have a bit of an excuse for getting mixed up -

and so have ended up with both A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY and A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY!

Both promise great, though very divergent, reading.

I love this theme. I have so many short story collections and shorter works. Some possibilities include short stories by Penelope Fitzgerald, A. S. Byatt, Penelope Lively, Elizabeth Gaskell and one novella The Lady of Launay by Trollope. And I just got Nocturnes from the library.

>2 m.belljackson: Marianne, A Month in the Country is a wonderful little book. I may re-read it if I have time.

And if you can find it, there is even a movie from 1987 with a very young Colin Firth (his first leading role) and even younger Kenneth Branagh (his very first film role).

I'll be reading (or maybe listening) to The Third Man by Graham Greene.

>3 kac522: Completely agree about A Month in the Country. The film is streaming on Prime, Tubi, and Plex.

>2 m.belljackson: I agree with everyone about A Month in the Country, Marianne. Great little book.

I will read The Lost Art of Sinking by Naomi Booth as my novella
and Metamorphosis : Selected Stories by Penelope Lively

>1 amanda4242: Lots of books go choose from! Choosing is hard…

I decided on The Monastery Cat and Other Animals by Joyce Stranger. The title short story will be my main read for this challenge, but I'll probably finish the book.

I found Farmer Giles of Ham as an audio on YouTube. It was nice to listen to, well read. I wondered, is this something he wrote first, before his better known books?
It was fun, and a quick read. I liked the talking dog best.

>9 EllaTim: I read the story collection from my middle school library and forgot the author a few years before The Lord of the Rings became a thing - or at least became known to my contemporaries in the mid-60s. Later I was surprised when I found it shelved with the better known works.

What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

Abigail is one of my favorite characters in the Rivers of London series, so I was very pleased that she got her own novella. This stand-alone outing finds our heroine searching for missing kids with the help of a new friend and some talking foxes.

The story is a bit by the numbers, but Abigail's character truly shines here: she's intelligent, resourceful, and has a major distrust of authority figures. I do hope Aaronovitch writes another tale for her.

I’m reading An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One who Saw It by Jessie Greengrass winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2016. I enjoyed her High House when I read it last year.

Completed The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. This is not the best collection but it does contain the one where Doyle tries to do away with Sherlock. His readers could not bear it so we know he resurrected Sherlock.

Completed my book for this month's challenge:


The Monastery Cat and Other Animals by Joyce Stranger

Mixed lot of stories by one of my favorite authors. Some I loved, some were just okay, but the collection is worth reading. I especially enjoyed the title story about a kitten that is rescued by a monastery full of monks.

>14 fuzzi: I woke up early and my sleep-deprived brain read the last bit as "a kitten rescues a monastery full of monks"!

I've finished an An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It Jessie Greengrass.



Here's my review:

The first published work by Jessie Greengrass whose The High House I enjoyed last year. Short stories are always difficult to review and the twelve short stories in this collection are no exception. These are thought-provoking and puzzling stories, frequently heart-wrenchingly sad, where the protagonists agonise over their choices in life, or debate the circumstances which have led them to their current position.

Of the twelve stories, my favourites were:

'Dolphin' - a young child's visit to the dolphin enclosure takes a tragic and unexpected turn.

'The Comfort of the Dead' - a very average and unambitious man finds that he begins to be haunted by the ghosts of those that he has lost from his life, whether alive or dead.

'An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It' - a heartbreaking account of the extinction of the great auk, by one of the men responsible.

'Looking at them, at the numbers of them, you would have thought them infinite, you would have thought there could be no end to them, to their proliferation. This island was larder to us then, store and pantry for all it bore no vegetation, not grass or moss, no tree, no soil, nothing but the rock and the spray and the birds, and now not even the birds.

These are beautifully written stories that are well worth reading.

I listened to the audio of The Third Man. Even though I've never read it before, it felt like a reread since I've seen the film. Martin Jarvis is one of my favorite narrators. I thought that the use of the film's theme music as a bridge between sections was a nice touch.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke, illustrated by Charles Vess

These are the kind of fairy stories you'd get if you lived in the world of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: a little dark, a little academic, often witty, and completely entertaining.

The March thread is up!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/348887

I read the following this month:

--The Means of Escape, Penelope Fitzgerald--10 short stories, from 1975-2001, and ranging from settings as diverse as Tasmania, Stamboul, Turkey, Mexico, Scotland and London. All interesting, but "The Axe" (1975) was brilliant.
--The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West (1918); a re-read, just as intense as on the first reading--maybe more. Set in Spring 1916, a shell-shocked soldier returns with amnesia.
--The Lady of Launay (1878) and Two Heroines of Plumplington (1882), Anthony Trollope--both long short stories, or perhaps short novellas. The latter is set in Barsetshire 30 years after the main series.
--Two stories, "The Story of a Panic" and "The Other Side of the Hedge" from Selected Stories of E. M. Forster. I hope to read the rest during Forster month.

And maybe I'll be able to squeeze in Ishiguro's Nocturnes before the month runs out.

>20 kac522: The Return of the Soldier is a heartbreaking work.

I enjoyed Nocturnes both times I read it, but I found I could recall little of what I read a week later.

>21 amanda4242: I was struck on this reading how precisely and minutely West describes the characters & their surroundings in terms of class: their appearance, clothing, language, furniture, buildings, grounds. Steely new & cold vs. shabby & earthy.

I just picked up Clive Barker’s Books of Blood I read volume 1 last year so starting volume 2. I read the short story Dread. It’s a good one but I could do without the slasher component but Barker writes tough horror.

I finally got around to Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro (2009). These stories are all told by a first-person narrator (different narrator for each story) who is a musician.

In the first 3 stories, the musician-narrator finds himself (sometimes reluctantly) helping to repair relationships through music. Two of the couples are strangers to the narrator; one couple are old friends from college.

The fourth story, which is the funniest and uses a character from the first story, is rather a wild tale involving plastic surgery and believing in yourself.

The last story, about two cellists, starts in first person and drifts back and forth into third person. This story was the least memorable and didn't work as well for me.

The first four stories all have at least one significant scene at night, but I don't recall much about the night in the last story. Overall I enjoyed the reading experience, especially the musical discussions in the stories.

US kindle sale: The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke is on sale for $4.99.

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1596912510/ref=nosim/librarythin06-20