More to come when I get back

Malcolm Lowry

Just off to Vancouver for Malcolm Lowry: A Centenary Celebration (July 23-25, 2009). I'll be giving a paper on sound in Lunar Caustic and flying home on his hundredth birthday, 28th July. I'll be raising a glass to him on the plane.

Manchester Book Market

Friday 17 to Sunday 19 July 2009 - St Ann’s Square, city centre Manchester

The Manchester Book Market, which first took place in Sep 2006, returns this summer as part of the Manchester International Festival for a three-day market accompanied by back-to-back performances from the cream of Manchester's spoken word scene. I'll be reading on Sunday at 3.30. See http://www.literaturenorthwest.co.uk/event/1454

Edge Hill Prizewinners' Reading

This year's winner, the very modest Chris Beckett, read alongside last year's winner, Claire Keegan, last Sunday at the Bluecoat. Claire always has some interesting things to say about the short story, especially what she calls the 'reluctant voice'. She says Irish writers are good at short stories because the Irish talk a lot without saying anything.


See my account of the build-up to the Award Ceremony at http://theshortreview.blogspot.com/. What I don't tell you there is that a certain website accidentally leaked our embargoed press release the day before the winner was announced. It was gone by that evening, but word gets round very fast these days and possibly Chris was the only person in the room who knew that he'd won. That is a genuine look of bemusement on his face the following morning.

Picture: Tim Power

Alice Munro

I was mopping the floor when I heard Alice Munro had won the International Man Booker Prize. I carried on mopping, listening to Jane Smiley enthusing about her work. When I started my Phd research on Munro in the early 90s no one had heard of her - except for the writers. She was more widely known by the time I published Alice Munro (Writers & Their Work). But it seemed as though Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2002) would be her final book. In interviews she said she'd stopped writing, and and there was a valedictory feeling about the stories; and so I grimly entitled my last chapter 'Ageing, Decay, Abjection'. Two collections later, and with a third on its way this October, she is coming to Dublin to get her prize.

Articles on Munro stress small town life, relationships, the domestic. They sometimes make her sound comfortable and nice. She is not. This is from the title story in The Love of a Good Woman (1998):

In the dreams that came to her now she would be copulating or trying to copulate (sometimes she was prevented by intruders or shifts of circumstances) with utterly forbidden and unthinkable partners. With fat squirmy babies or patients in bandages or her own mother. She would be slick with lust, hollow and groaning with it, and she would set to work with roughness and an attitude of evil pragmatism.


Alice Munro's stories are full of dreams, misconceptions, deceit and distractions. Distraction is an art, I think, listening while mopping (inadequately - there's still plaster dust, only now it's more like runny foundation). What I learnt from her is that stories can go off at a tangent. They don't have to have a theme or to hang together, symbolically or otherwise. Now I'd better go and rinse the mop.

Photo competition

Tim Power took the picture in Dublin. Send in your photo captions! The winner gets a copy of The Real Louise.

Real Louise Launch

The Real Louise and Other Stories (Headland Press) was launched at the Bluecoat, Liverpool, on 7th May, during the Writing on the Wall Festival. Here I am, reading 'November' and with my publisher, Gladys Mary Coles, answering questions. The whiskey helped, and so did the wine, not to mention the glasses of mineral water.

Pics by Tim Power http://www.flickr.com/photos/gonzopix/

…

The miniature made big, frighteningly big: this is what short stories should be. – Rob Shearman

Brilliantly detailed, intimate, and often darkly funny. - Graham Mort

The Real Louise is available from Headland Press, 38 York Avenue, West Kirby, Wirral, Merseyside CH48 3JF. UK orders £10.99 inc. p&p. Or contact ailsacox@hotmail.com.