Karin Warnaar on In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot by Greville Texidor
Going All Houdini
Diane Brown on The Father of Octopus Wrestling by Frankie McMillan
A Quiet Pooled Intelligence
Michelle Elvy on Selected Stories by Vincent O’Sullian
Short, Sharp Shocks
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 – […]
River of Truths
Rajorshi Chakraborti False River by Paula Morris (Penguin Random House, 2017), 288 pp., $35 Among the many delights, for me, of reading Paula Morris’s wonderful, unclassifiable prose collection, False River, was the recurrent sensation of being reminded of other incredible writers, of feeling Roberto Bolaño suddenly close by, or Patricia Highsmith, or Joyce, or the […]
Turning Blue
Breton Dukes Low Life by Michael Botur (Createspace, 2017), 244 pp., $27.99; Fresh Ink by multiple authors (Cloud Ink Press, 2017), 224 pp., $28 It’s a tough time to be writing short stories in New Zealand. Anecdotally, we hear collections aren’t selling well. Competitions have disappeared or had prize money slashed (the Katherine Mansfield and […]