Tag: shortstories

Top Ten Tuesday: Favourite Novellas/Short Stories

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Top Ten Tuesday new

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

  • Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want.
  • Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to The Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post.
  • Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists.
  • Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

This week’s topic is Favourite Novellas/Short Stories.  This was quite a tough one for me because I generally favour full length novels.  However, book blogging has made me more open to different book formats and, when I set my mind to it, I realised I had read quite a few short story collections  – and one or two novellas – over the past few years.  Enough, at any rate, to come up with a list of ten I’d recommend.  Click on the title to read my review of the book description on Goodreads.

Beautiful Star & Other Stories by Andrew Swanston

I was introduced to this collection by the lovely Emily at The Dome Press when she invited me to take part in the blog tour.  The author has taken what might have been considered footnotes in history and fashioned them into compelling, character-driven stories

A Sea of Sorrow by David Blixt, et al.

Subtitled A Novel of Odysseus, this is in fact six stories each by a different author (who collectively style themselves ‘The H Team’).  Each story focuses on one of six “supporting” characters in Homer’s The Odyssey.

The Watcher by the Threshold & Other Tales by John Buchan

This is a bit of a cheat because it’s a book I’m currently reading for my July Buchan of the Month.  However, I’ve read a couple of the stories before in other collections and know they have a nicely supernatural feel.

Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James

Reading, listening to or watching one of the great BBC adaptations of the ghost stories of M. R. James are an annual Christmas tradition in our house.  Favourites include ‘The Mezzotint’, ‘Number 13’, ‘The Ash Tree’, ‘Casting the Runes’ and ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’.

The Visitor at Anningley Hall by Chris Thorndycroft

As a fan of M. R. James, it won’t be a surprise that this novella caught my eye.  It’s a skilful prequel to one of the stories mentioned above, ‘The Mezzotint’.

In A German Pension: 13 Stories by Katherine Mansfield

Divided between vignettes of guests staying at the Pension, which are gently mocking in tone, and much darker stories that often have a sting in the tail, this collection is notable for the precision of the writing and its dark humour.

Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro

This is a great collection of stories that illustrate Munro’s gift for observation and ability to reveal the petty snobberies of small town life.

CWA Anthology of Short Stories: Mystery Tour edited by Martin Edwards

A conspiracy of prominent crime authors take readers on a world mystery tour with plenty of dead bodies along the way.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Subtitled A Novel in Stories, the eponymous Olive is the main character in some of the stories but in others has the equivalent of a walk-on part.  I found some of the stories bleak, many thought-provoking, others heart-warming and hopeful.  But, in every case, I felt as though I was reading about real people.

Sherlock Holmes Short Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

So many of the famous stories – ‘The Red Headed League’, ‘The Copper Beeches’, ‘The Final Problem’ – are brought together in this fabulous collection.

 

Buchan of the Month: Introducing…The Watcher by the Threshold

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Buchan of the Month

The Watcher by the Threshold is the seventh book in my John Buchan reading project, Buchan of the Month. To find out more about the project and my reading list for 2018, click here.  If you would like to read along with me you will be very welcome – leave a comment on this post or on my original challenge post.  I’ll be sharing my review later this month.

What follows is an introduction to the book (no spoilers!).

The Watcher by the ThresholdThe Watcher by the Threshold, a collection of novella/short stories, is another book by John Buchan I’ve not previously read.  I’m really looking forward to approaching it with fresh eyes.  It’s also a book that I don’t yet own a physical copy of so I’ll be relying on an ebook version.

The Watcher by the Threshold was published on 8th April 1902 by William Blackwood & Sons.  The book contains five stories: ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’, ‘No-Man’s Land’, ‘The Outgoing of the Tide’, ‘The Far Islands’ and ‘Fountainblue’.  The stories are all set in Scotland and all but one have a supernatural element.  Written in 1898, they first appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.  Buchan wrote them partly as a way of supporting himself financially while he read for the Bar after graduating from Oxford.

David Daniell, author of The Interpreter’s House: A Critical Assessment of the Work of John Buchan, sees signs of Buchan’s future books in many of the stories.  For example, in the climax to ‘No-Man’s Land’, Daniell sees Buchan exploring his thriller-writing technique.  He sees ‘The Outgoing of the Tide’ as ‘a first go’ at Witch Wood and ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’ and ‘No-Man’s Land’ as pointing to The Dancing Floor.  Arguably, ‘Fountainblue’ also touches on a theme explored later in The Power House, namely the thinness of civilization.  At one point, the hero of the story, Maitland, remarks on the division between ‘the warm room and the savage outdoors’ being no more than ‘a line, a thread, a sheet of glass’.

As an early offering from a writer who had not yet reached the peak of his fame and since short story collections don’t generally have the same popularity as full-length novels, it’s perhaps not surprising that The Watcher by the Threshold was only a modest commercial success.  Buchan’s biographer, Janet Adam Smith, reports that by 1960 the book had sold 63,000 copies (compared with, say, 368,000 for Greenmantle).  She also notes that, rather surprisingly, Blackwood brought out a new edition of The Watcher by the Threshold a few months before they published The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1916 but that it quickly sold 6,000 copies.

Sources:

David Daniell, The Interpreter’s House: A Critical Assessment of the Work of John Buchan (Nelson, 1975)
Kate Macdonald, John Buchan: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction (McFarland, 2009)
Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan: A Biography (OUP, 1985 [1965])