A collection of previously unpublished short stories, novel extracts, non-fiction essays and poetry, New Writing offers the brightest and the best, all in one volume
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Book Description
As editors Toby Litt and Ali Smith explain in their introduction: "newness is quite a venerable category. There's not much that's new about it. In the 1930s, when a magazine called New Writing was first published, it had to compete with New Signatures, New Country, New Verse , the New Statesman and Nation and New Theatre, and what with the New Woman of the 1890s and new everything else, even then, new wasn’t the new new. . . If we’ve achieved diversity, it’s because our submissions were themselves diverse; and the final selection is representative of the proportion of short stories to novel extracts, poems and essays that were submitted. Originality is only proven over time, paradoxically. We are confident that some of the names here you’ve never heard before will become very familiar. They may even disgrace themselves by winning prizes, becoming established, etc. But they’ll be the kinds of writer, like the known names published here, for whom everything they write is a renewal - of language, of place, of the senses and of the contemporary."
About the Author
Toby Litt is the author of various novels and short story collections including Beatniks, Adventures in Capitalism, Corpsing , Deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism and, most recently, Finding Myself. He lives in London. Ali Smith, whose novel, Hotel World, was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction 2001, has written two collections of short stories, entitled The Whole Story and Other Stories and Other Stories and Other Stories. Originally from Scotland, she now lives in Cambridge.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By Eileen Shaw
TOP 500 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback
There is some outstanding poetry in this collection (which dates from 2005 - and I've only just got around to reading it!). The short stories included here are more patchy, though still with some superb examples of a genre that won't lie down and die. Publishers don't like short stories, indeed, they are convinced that readers don't like them, yet anthologies such as this demonstrate that the form persists for new young writers and - exceedingly encouragingly - for major names in the literary canon.
Poetry first then: eight poems from Ramona Herdman, all of them lucid, beautiful, harsh and uncompromising - seeming to speak with both an astounded vigour and heart-break about the world. There is a defiance here, a steely connectedness that I found mesmerising. Ian Duhig, a Leeds-based poet who I have found in the past to be intellectually demanding with a historical bent, but also tremendously rewarding, defies any such category here with a beautiful poem about the indestructible nylon monofilament nets that escape from trawlers and fish for themselves. This is the fourth verse:
To rise, to fill, to fall a feast -
Shape-memory may fish for years
That never-never land of plenty,
The shelvy deserts of our seas
Other poems, by Nick Laird and Jen Hadfield, also deserve a mention.
Two novel excerpts are included. An incomparable section from David Mitchell's book Black Swan Green concerning the Hangman who waits to trip his protagonist's tongue, and from Kate Atkinson a section from When Will There Be Good News concerning the wonderful Gloria, whose unlovely husband Graham has pegged out on top of a prostitute, leaving her free to start a life long deferred, along with a good amount of his ill-gotten gains.... Read more ›
Poetry first then: eight poems from Ramona Herdman, all of them lucid, beautiful, harsh and uncompromising - seeming to speak with both an astounded vigour and heart-break about the world. There is a defiance here, a steely connectedness that I found mesmerising. Ian Duhig, a Leeds-based poet who I have found in the past to be intellectually demanding with a historical bent, but also tremendously rewarding, defies any such category here with a beautiful poem about the indestructible nylon monofilament nets that escape from trawlers and fish for themselves. This is the fourth verse:
To rise, to fill, to fall a feast -
Shape-memory may fish for years
That never-never land of plenty,
The shelvy deserts of our seas
Other poems, by Nick Laird and Jen Hadfield, also deserve a mention.
Two novel excerpts are included. An incomparable section from David Mitchell's book Black Swan Green concerning the Hangman who waits to trip his protagonist's tongue, and from Kate Atkinson a section from When Will There Be Good News concerning the wonderful Gloria, whose unlovely husband Graham has pegged out on top of a prostitute, leaving her free to start a life long deferred, along with a good amount of his ill-gotten gains.... Read more ›
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