Royle - The Best British Short Stories 2014

The Best British Short Stories 2014

There is no more carefully chosen yet eclectic anthology series in existence in Britain today SUSAN HAIGH, The Short Review

Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover or more accurately, by its title. This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editors brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume.

Featuring: Elizabeth Baines, David Constantine, Ailsa Cox, Claire Dean, Stuart Evers, Jonathan Gibbs, Jay Griffiths, David Grubb, M John Harrison, Vicki Jarrett, Richard Knight, Philip Langeskov, Sin Melangell Dafydd, Anna Metcalfe, Louise Palfreyman, Christopher Priest, Joanne Rush, Mick Scully, Joanna Walsh and Adam Wilmington.

Praise for Best British Short Stories

Another effective and well-rounded short story anthology from Salt keep up the good work, we say! SARAH-CLARE CONLON, Bookmunch

This annual feast satisfies again. Time and again, in Royles crafty editorial hands, closely observed normality yields (as Nikesh Shuklas spear-fisher grasps) to the things we cannot control. BOYD TONKIN, The Independent

Highly recommended KATE SAUNDERS, The Times

NICHOLAS ROYLE is the author of more than 100 short stories, two novellas and seven novels, most recently First Novel (Vintage). His short story collection, Mortality (Serpents Tail), was shortlisted for the inaugural Edge Hill Prize. He has edited sixteen anthologies of short stories, including A Book of Two Halves (Gollancz), The Time Out Book of Paris Short Stories (Penguin), 68: New Stories by Children of the Revolution (Salt) and Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds (Two Ravens Press). A senior lecturer in creative writing at the Manchester Writing School at MMU and head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize, he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks.

Also by Nicholas Royle:

NOVELS

Counterparts

Saxophone Dreams

The Matter of the Heart

The Directors Cut

Antwerp

Regicide

First Novel

NOVELLAS

The Appetite

The Enigma of Departure

SHORT STORIES

Mortality

ANTHOLOGIES (as editor)

Darklands

Darklands 2

A Book of Two Halves

The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers Dreams

The Time Out Book of New York Short Stories

The Ex Files: New Stories About Old Flames

The Agony & the Ecstasy: New Writing for the World Cup

Neonlit: Time Out Book of New Writing

The Time Out Book of Paris Short Stories

Neonlit: Time Out Book of New Writing Volume 2

The Time Out Book of London Short Stories Volume 2

Dreams Never End

68: New Stories From Children of the Revolution

The Best British Short Stories 2011

Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds

The Best British Short Stories 2012

The Best British Short Stories 2013

Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

All rights reserved

Selection and introduction Nicholas Royle, 2014

Individual contributions the contributors, 2014

The right of Nicholas Royle to be identied as the editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

Salt Publishing 2014

Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-1-84471-995-2 electronic

In memory of Joel Lane (19632013)

Introduction

They say theres no accounting for taste and it plays a large part in the assembly of an anthology such as this. Zadie Smiths The Embassy of Cambodia, published last year as a handsome stand-alone volume by Hamish Hamilton, was beautifully written and you couldnt fault the authors grasp of the language, unless you objected to her use of presently to mean now, but was it to your taste? (It did seem to be to many peoples.) What was it anyway? A short story? A very short novella? About 8000 words in length and described by the publishers blurb simply as a story, it came in 21 chapters tricked out with white space, generous leading and wide margins, to look more like a novella or even a short novel. It lifted the spirits to see a major imprint publishing an original short story on its own, even in its crafty little disguise; it would raise them even further to see the same thing happen with authors who dont enjoy the same level of media attention as Zadie Smith.

Smaller publishers, although they have less to spend, may also have less to lose. Daunt Books better known, in the form of James Daunt, as a classy bookseller who came to the rescue of Waterstones has started putting out very smart-looking chapbooks containing individual short stories, among them Philip Langeskovs wonderfully tense Barcelona, reprinted herein. I hope readers will forgive my including a story first published in chapbook form by my own Nightjar Press M John Harrisons Getting Out of There.

Unthank Books, 3:AM Press, Oneworld Publications, Unlocking Press, The Fiction Desk, Tindal Street Fiction Group, TTA Press and Freight Books are all small publishers with the vision and good taste to take on authors and projects that would grace bigger imprints lists if only the editors at those bigger imprints were not obliged to dance to the tune of sales and marketing. The above small publishers are all represented in the present volume. As are literary magazines The Reader and Ambit , as well as high-achieving online outlet The View From Here . Two stories were shortlisted in the Manchester Fiction Prize and the author of one of them, Adam Wilmington, walked off with ten grand as the winner. But the development of the year in short fiction yes, more exciting, perversely perhaps, for this observer, than either Alice Munro winning the Nobel or Lydia Davis nabbing the Man Booker International was the emergence of Lighthouse , a little magazine from Norwich publishing short stories, poems and essays of exceptional quality, including one (Anna Metcalfes Number Three) that was later shortlisted in the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award worth 30,000. Lighthouse , with its excellent editorial judgment and attractive modishly old-fashioned design, is a publication to cherish.

Its especially cheering that in the digital era, print publications, rather than merely clinging on, are flourishing, and there are more deserving stories being published than there is room for reprints in this book. I was much taken by two stories in the August 2013 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Jennifer Reeves A Case of Mis-Identity and Val McDermids Ghost Writer as well as Jason Goulds All Items of Value Have Been Removed, in Structo 10, Two Parties by Alan Beard, which appeared in The Sea in Birmingham (Tindal Street Fiction Group), and Krishan Couplands Men of the Waste, shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and so included in the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Volume Six (Bristol Review of Books).