Lawrence Patchett
Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Michelle Elvy, Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe (Canterbury University Press, 2018), 293 pp., $39.99
There’s a feeling of currency about flash fiction right now. The editors of Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand seek to capture – and capitalise on – this excitement around the form. Flash fiction is ‘arguably the fastest growing literary form worldwide’, they say, pointing to strong journal and competition submissions as evidence of a related surge of interest here in New Zealand. But although editors Michelle Elvy, Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe celebrate the form’s current energy, they don’t claim any special newness for its most recent iterations. Instead they acknowledge the ‘deep roots’ of the compressed form in New Zealand literature, reaching back to the work of Katherine Mansfield and Frank Sargeson, as well as the more recent short short-story anthologies edited by Graeme Lay and Stephen Stratford from 1997. The nod to Sargeson in particular seems important. Published more than eighty years ago, his very short stories like ‘A Piece of Yellow Soap’ still read with extraordinary urgency. But if, like me, you’re relatively new to the more recent variations on shorter forms, Bonsai provides an exciting entry point. [Read more…]
Rajorshi Chakraborti
Breton Dukes