SHORT CIRCUIT VISITS THE SHORT REVIEW BLOG

See - it gets everywhere. My batty writer says...

The next stop on my bloggy tour is with The Short Review blog. Editor Tania Hershman has a great essay in the book - actually, an essay that had one writer (an editor as well) messaging me this week to say it had completely changed her view of flash fiction, and above all, the flash writing process.)
Tania asked me a very good question - would readers, as opposed to writers, find Short Circuit an interesting book? Would it make them read more short stories??? Get thee over there to find out what I said.

And visit The Short Review too! I reviewed a book called The Town of Fiction, by The Atlantis Collective. And there are some terrific collections up this month - so much to read, so little time!

I HATE that book...

I HATE Short Circuit. It is a snooty, horrible piece of work if you ask me. Well, OK, no one did ask me but I'm saying it anyway.

Its only been around for six weeks, and today, O dreadful day - my batty writer looked at the Amazon statistics for Salt Publishing, and Short Circuit is at NUMBER TWO!!! Out of hundreds of books.

Well. Someone must be mad, that's all I can say. BUY ME!!! I am MUCH better than him!

(I was at Number Three, which isnt baaaaad. But still. Id like to ovetrtake him. Must be a bloke, dont you think?)

Its not fair...I have a rival!

Well, I dont know. A girl goes to sleep for a few weeks on her shelf and wakes up to find she's got a rival. Huh. My batty writer seems to have another book out there.
I dont like the title - its called Short Circuit. What sort of title is that? And whats more there is just a brain on the cover, a lightbulb and a plant. I ask you. Not a whiff of a pink jumper.
And what's worse, people seem to be buying this monstrosity. Look! It got higher than moi in the Salt bestsellers list before christmas and that is sheer poo.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall when they open the thing though! There isnt a decent story in the whole book. It's all boring old essays by people I've never heard of. About how to write. Codswallop. I can write. I've got a crayon. I didnt need a book with a brain on the cover to show me how.

Salt Publishing bestsellers of all time

Well, I can't tell you how many books Salt Publishing has been midwife to, over the years. A lot.
And it is extraordinary, extraordinary...to see that there are a few familiar books in their All-Time Bestseller list, posted this week on their website.

Who Says?

People have been talking about moi and I didn't even know. It's all that batty writer's fault, she never bothered to teach me to READ did she, silly woman. Mind you, I cant say I am surprised. It's all on a silly place that calls itself Amazon, apparently, well who wants to be called after a smelly old river anyway, that's what I want to know. And I wouldn't read it anyway even if I could.
So I dont know what they are saying, but my batty writer seems pleased. Doesn't take much, that's all I can say.
And do you know WHAT?? Not ONE has the decency to remark on my pink jumper. I call that rank ignorance. (Did I spell that right?)


Brave New Writing
The characters in Vanessa Gebbie's stories are perfectively idiosyncratic and developed with sensitivity, bravery and a robust sense of wit. It is no coincidence that Gebbie's craft is at the forefront of a new-wave of literary storytellers. Her work is fine-tuned and Words.. comes as a remarkable debut for a versatile and extraordinarily talented writer.
Melissa Lee Houghton

Exquisite, disturbing, compassionate
This is an exceptional collection of short stories. I am not usually a great short story reader, preferring the immersion one gets with the world of a novel, but there have been a few short story collections recently that have created as much impact as a novel in just one story. This is one of them. 'I Can Squash the King, Tommo' is my favourite - understated yet emotionally devastating. Almost every story made me put the book down to savour the writing and think about the layers that are so skilfully floated under the surface of the story. On second reading I enjoyed them just as much in a different way and suspect I could read them again and again and find new meaning. This is an exceptional achievement. The two other collections I'd recommend are Junot Diaz's 'Drown' and Christopher Coake's 'We're in Trouble.'
Umi Sinha


Brilliant
Loved this collection of short stories, some funny, some tragic, some downright dangerous and all written expertly.
Nik Perring

We read this collection in our book club and found it fascinating - and not all of us are fans of short stories. There was a majority verdict, too: the style and narrative of each story sat perfectly within the format, and the format provided a compulsion to read on. We look forward to Ms Gebbie's next book of short stories!
The content is often centred around loss, providing a springboard for acute observations of human behaviour. Ms Gebbie has created page-turner stories by looking at the minutiae of life from vivid angles, and by dealing deftly with the challenge of beginning, developing and ending a critical episode in the life of each of her protagonists.
V. Down

One of the finest collections available
I have admired Vanessa Gebbie's short stories since she first started to write fiction seriously, and it was no surprise to me when prestigious prizes and awards began to come her way. Many of the stories that won those accolades are included in this collection, and I urge anyone who enjoys good literary fiction to buy this book.
Gebbie has a gift for creating memorable, often quirky characters, and conjuring up the appropriate situation that will bring them out in a multi-layered, memorable story that conveys much more than the words on the page. Her stories can be poignant, funny, all things between but above all they are alive, as only character-based stories can be.
DJM King

Absorbing and thought provoking,
I'm not usually a short story reader but I was lucky enough to meet Vanessa on a recent holiday and so decided to 'take the plunge' and I am so glad I did. As soon as I started to read 'Bones' I could visualise the Jewish cemetery in Prague and have found out that it was indeed that cemetery that was Vanessa's inspiration. I don't know if I have a real favourite among the collection but I thought 'I can squash the King, Tommo' utterly brilliant. I'm looking forward to Vanessa's next collection.
Linda Witts

A Brilliant Storyteller
Intriguing, gripping and poetic stories whose characters live in your mind long after you've finished the book.
Fia Mackenzie

Superb
Beautiful, lyrical writing, by turns thoughtful, passionate and funny. I loved it.
My favourite stories would have to be 'Dodie's Gift' and 'Harry's Catch' - they are masterpieces of understanding and compassion, without ever seeming mawkish or overly sentimental.
All of the stories are great, though. I just can't recommend this highly enough.
Lee Williams

Highly recommended
It's just a brilliant collection, from start to finish. It has a number of different moods that intertwine through the course of the book to create a marvellous smorgasbord of stories There are colourful epic tales, steady, mellow meditations, and shorter piquant and mordant interludes.
Ogden Gnash


Magical reading
These are wonderful, insightful stories, the sort that make you want to tread more carefully through life after reading them; stories which enrich and deepen the reading experience. And such range! Humour, history, anger, love and pathos. Everything you could ask for from a short story collection. All beautifully packaged in a slim hardback volume that feels just right in your hands. Writing - and reading - at its very best. Brava, Vanessa!
Franky

For lovers of great writing
This book is exactly what a short story collection should be: vivid, varied, moving, lyrical, disturbing, entertaining, thought-provoking, original. Ms Gebbie is award-winning, and reading her stories it is clear why they stood out for the judges. A wonderful read.
Tania Hershman


Bubbling Over With the Good Stuff
Words from a Glass Bubble" by Vanessa Gebbie is a collection of nineteen of her short stories, compiled in a handsome hardback from Salt Publishing. There's no overarching narrative, but although the stories are very different, some themes and images crop up more than once.
Gebbie's talent is to shine a light onto her characters, giving us brief insights into their lives, their hopes, their disappointments, and--most of all--their mistakes, before moving on, leaving us with the hope that the characters too will carry on, make better decisions, have better luck, once the spotlight is removed.
Each story has its own voice, from "Words in a Glass Bubble" itself, where a family tries to come to terms with the loss of their son, to "Smoking Down There", where a child naively recounts her friend's story of how she almost inadvertently saved her baby brother from being disposed of at birth. The fragmentary, butterfly narrative convinces as that of a child. 'But then, if you smoked down there why didn't the hairs catch fire? That's what I wanted to know. But the bucket. Why wash out of a bucket when there were perfectly nice china things?'
Gebbie doesn't shy away from the darker side of life. One story, "Irrigation", goes into great detail--too great detail for this reader--about an enema. In "Dodie's Gift", the central character is left lost and wondering, "...if someone takes something you were going to give them anyway, is that stealing?' Reading this story, it's hard to decide whether to give her a hug or a good shake. Either, you think, might damage her beyond repair.
This story contains an image that recurs--'But there, at the bottom of the hollow, a gull has had a meal, and the sand holds white bone, red bone, skin....' The predator devours, leaves what it doesn't want, and moves on. What's been devoured, abandoned, somehow has to move on, too. Its life now may not be what it envisaged, but it still holds significance.
None of the stories is too long, although it's easy to feel some are too short. The characters live on in our minds and we can't help wondering what will happen next. If they'll come out all right.
This collection is definitely one to savour. Read a story, put it down, think about it, come back--the whole can't be devoured in an afternoon.
D R Moorhouse


Powerful work by Gebbie!
Gebbie is a huge talent. Get in early on this author as this is a name that is soon going to be very well known indeed. People are already starting to talk and the tipping point for success and fame these days is far shorter than it used to be. Her gentle, lyrical voice is a sponge filled with emotional power. With each story I found myself with a knot in my throat and tears seeping down my face. Brilliant work!
Dr Gail Louw


A must for anyone who loves great writing
Vanessa's writing really paints pictures in your imagination, but what raises this above the rest is that they are so (un)usual and arresting. These stories will stay with you long after you've put them down.
Andrew Marshall


Sharp, smart and sad
Vanessa Gebbie has won more prizes for her short stories than you can shake an HB pencil at, and this debut collection shows off the best of them. She tackles tough themes with originality, subtlety and shows a humungous tenderness towards humanity's most vulnerable. Her language is often poetic, calling to mind Dylan Thomas or John Banville.
Really, really worth investigating if you're a fan of original literature.
Mrs Gene Hunt


My batty writer would like them all to know how much she appreciates their lovely words. But secretly, I KNOW they arent as lovely as MINE. So there.

I am utterly invisible.

This is fun! No one can find me at all, and I am invisible. It's a good game.

It's too late to be sent to Ireland now, well goodie. I didn't want to go anyway. I LIKE Eastbourne. I think I shall go and play on the beach.

Yah boo sucks. It just serves them all right for taking me out of my nice hard covers and putting me in a paper one.

Batty as ever....

My batty writer was very naughty, and telephoned the distributors today. Oooo er. They were OK, and said they didn't know where I was. The lovely Salt Publishing have sent tlots of me and I have got lost. I have arrived, but no one seems to know where I am. They even sent a second lot cos there were some orders stacking.

I have absconded.

That is all very well, but my batty writer has got a lot of stuff lined up, and if I am not there, she will get all upset.


Well poo. I am hiding.

heard of hide n seek?

MUMMEEEE!

I have gone and got lost! I don't know where I am! help! I am in a big box and it is veeeery dark.
I am in a place called Eastbourne. I know this cos I heard them talking.
"What a dump," they said before driving off and leaving moi in my boxes on a floor somewhere.
Thing is, I am only wearing my paper coat. It is hot at the moment, but if I am not found until the winter, I may die!

(I am in Eastbourne, in a load of boxes, at the distributors. I have been here for ages, and I need the loo. Please will someone put moi on a shelf? I need to be bought, and read, and I need people to tell me I am beautiful again. or I shall cry.....)_

Where's my covers gone???

Well. Huh. They took my nice hard covers off, they did. They put me in a paper cover. Well, I tell you something, it's COLD. I don't like being paper. I need a thicker covering, me. Oh yes.
I know this jumper looks nice and warm, well it isn't its a FASHION item.
Anyway. My batty writer seems to think it's OK putting me in paperback. She is leaping about the place talking about new words on the cover... new reviews or something.
Now look here. You'll see LESS of me of there are more words... so why the joy, I ask?

No consideration for my feelings, that's what.
Huh.

I Went to University..

I dont know what all the fiuss is about. Anyone can go to University.

Yes they can. I did. Look. I went to a University called Oxford. It is not true at all that you have to have exams to go there. I have not even started school yet and I am there, on a table, in something called a Literary Festival.

My batty writer was there, on a panel for another book. Not moi. So I wont mention it but you can go and read it on her other blog. If you must.

But I was there, too. Lots of me, and she signed me lots of times, and seemed pleased. I am on a special table for signed books, right in the middle of a huge tent caklled a marquis. Or a duke. or something. They go to Universities like Oxford, you see.

Mind you, I reckon they must be a bit hard up. Their buildings are so OLD. You'd think they could afford to build something more up to date, wouldnt you?
Look, there I am, sitting up. next to the other book, which I wont mention but its called One World.

My Batty Writer

Is lazy and boring. She says she is working on another book, and I say there IS no other book.

Especially today, when my batty writer has been invited to attend a reading group who are reading MOI (and she doesnt know any of them) and a second invitation, to attend a U3A group. Which is venerable people, she says, and I will be going to a PUB!!!

I am a bit young for that, though. I will have lemonade.

However. She did reasd out of MOI a week or so back, at Waterstones, with the lovely Alison MacLeod, who read out of another book that didnt look like MOI at all.

I GOT BANNED!!!

Well I think I got censored, anyway, which is brilliant news. They'll put me in prison next and I'll yell until the News of the World hears and make a mint.

e-bay did it!. They wouldn't print GLASS (because ASS is naughty... huh?)

so I was Words from a GL*s* Bubble!!! And so no one of the thousands who were looking for me could find me. Isn't that a hoot as my batty writer would say?

I think they might have changed it back now, which is boring.

PARTY AT A LIBRARY!

Last night my batty writer went to a party at a Library (a big place full of books like moi!). All these nice people had read bits of moi and wanted to meet HER. Not moi. HER. That stinks.

However what made it OK was that there were crisps and a drink called mulled wine that made my toes warm, and biccies with icing on.

And my bartty writer talked a lot. And then she read a story NOT out of moi (whats going on?) but the people laughed so that must be OK.

CHARLES LAMBERT: SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE

My batty writer has put this on her blog. So I'm having it too.







It is a real privilege to host the Cylone stop of Something Rich and Strange, the blog tour for Charles Lambert's super collection, The Scent of Cinnamon. Charles and I had a quick natter, and decided to concentrate on two stories, Air and Moving the Needle Towards the Thread.

Hi Charles. I am interested but not surprised to see that you had chosen to set both these wonderful stories on islands. That works on so many levels. There is a deep and resonant sense of loneliness, of 'something fracturing, separating', of displacement arising from the setting, and from the characters,. In Air, an important layer of the theme being explored here seems to be voiced by the man met in the bar. Am I right? Can you talk about this? The choice of island for setting for example... was it a deliberate thing? Did it appear as a 'surprise' to you, the writer, from some part of the creative spirit that allows preoccupations to surface in this way... see what I mean?

Well, the two stories came from different places, creatively speaking. Moving the Needle towards the Thread was triggered by one of those what if? things I spoke about with Elizabeth: in this case, the idea of the compromising photograph and the circumstances in which it was taken and found. After which I had to do some work on who and where. I’d just come back from a holiday on Cephalonia, where I’d come across the wonderful, and awful, concept of the pharmacos, essentially a scapegoat but with the idea of healing so firmly implanted in the word, and I know that fed into my choice of setting. This is one of those stories that I wrote and re-wrote (my patient Zoetrope reviewers may remember this!) and I only got it right when I realized it was her story, not theirs, and turned it round to first person. But the fact that it’s set on an island obviously isn’t casual. The story deals with isolation, of the individual and of the couple, and how this both protects us and renders us vulnerable.
Islands, like holidays, are experimental conditions in a way; there’s no escape. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the holiday sensation - I hope short-lived - of being trapped within a relationship and of having nothing else to fall back on because you’re stuck in some place that isn’t yours, with the one person who should be everything and suddenly, disastrously, isn’t. Moving the Needle towards the Thread carries this to extremes. The island I drew on for some of the details, by the way, isn’t Greek, but Italian. It’s Ponza, just off the coast from where I live.

The second story, Air, is also the result of an island holiday, this time on Rhodes, and most of the details in the story are drawn from our experiences. We really did go to the island with the half-baked idea of buying a bar and settling, and so on, and anyone who’s entertained similar thoughts may be able to corroborate the whole Greek business of buying the ‘air’ in order to take a place over. The bar we went to may still exist, and I’m sure the aquarium is just as depressing now as it was then.
So I had a bundle of scenes that felt like material for a story. What I didn’t have was a dynamic, until the final scene came back to me, much distorted, from another incident on another holiday some time before. Once again, the story focuses on a relationship and what happens to it under stress, but here the island becomes a metaphor not only for laboratory conditions, but also for escape. The contrast between the two characters – home-loving, stick-in-the-mud Julian and restless, ever-seeking David – is also, as you say, a contrast between normality and a sense of being special, and this is made explicit when David talks to Brian, the man they meet at the bar, who says: ‘Special? We’re two a bloody penny, we are. You want to know what’s special about us? I’ll tell you what’s special about us. We don’t belong here or there or anywhere else.” The story isn’t sure about this, about who’s right, about whether belonging and exile might be the same thing, and its uncertainty is what drives the narrative on.
Charles, reading at his launch party, in Borders, Oxford Street, London.
Thanks. Now... let's continue exploring your work from this perspective... "We don’t belong here or anywhere else." In the wonderful modern fairy story you read at your Borders launch, The Growing, a child and a parent who live miles away from the city wear masks to make a visit there. Seems to me this explores a similar thing... our need to fit in, to be part of the team. The dissonance that plagues us if we do not, or 'think' we don't. Do we as writers wear masks, in that we explore the world and our places in it through our fiction, our characters, who are invented things, but who still retain the essence of 'us', the writers?

Well, to misquote Frank O’Hara, I am the least introspective of men, so I’m not quite sure what to do with this question, which actually seems to me to be two questions, one about wanting to belong and one about what we’re up to when we write. As far as the first question goes, I’d certainly agree that one of the themes that occupies me is what it means to fit in, what fitting in involves and asks of us. What’s interesting about the girl in The Growing, though, is that she isn’t so much driven by a desire to belong as by a dissatisfaction with the world she’s being offered, and by the fact she’s expected to hide her true self - which she finds beautiful - in order to conform to it, as though fitting in weren’t really a need at all, but a failure of the will. David and Julian are also dissatisfied, in their different ways, by Brian’s analysis in the tavern, and I think they’re right.
Wanting to belong is often a way of saying that we’re prepared to settle for less, and neither of them is willing to do that, which is also, of course, why their relationship is bound to end. The story sides with Julian but I’d be inclined to stick up for David and his claim to be special, primarily because I also regard myself as special (which, I hasten to add, doesn’t mean ‘better’).

And this leads me, indirectly, to the second half of the question. My twin sense of myself as gay and as someone who identifies himself as a writer emerged at the age of eleven or twelve, under the benign influence of Kenneth Allott’s Penguin anthology of contemporary verse, from which I somehow learned that Auden was homosexual. My reading/writing and my sexual self-discovery went hand-in-hand from that point on. Later on, and I’m back to O’Hara, I came across the line, ‘It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate,’ and I think that what I try to do with my writing is not so much wear the various masks of fiction as use the various voices at my disposal to investigate what matters to me, and to make something unique from it. Which is, I’m now aware, pretty much what you’re saying, Vanessa, albeit in slightly different terms.
I think what I want to say is that I don’t see the writing of fiction as the wearing of a mask in the sense that I hide behind what I write; I’ve always seen writing as an opportunity to offer to others the open book of myself, in a cavalier rather than a confessional sense. I particularly like your framing of the question as ‘exploring the world and our places in it’, rather than ourselves, which has always struck me as a rather solipsistic and doomed enterprise, except as an inevitable collateral effect – of course what I write reveals something about me. How could it fail to? What good writing does, though, surely, is engage - through the writer - with what’s outside the writer. And that’s what’s interesting, finally. One of my favourite quotes comes from Ruskin, and I’ll use it to round this off: “A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel”.


Charles, you've given us a fantastic insight into your work. May I wish The Scent of Cinnamon every success... not that it will need it. The collection is superb. Many congratulations indeed.

Best Reads of 2008

Wheee! I am a reader's choice by the lovely, clever and amazing lady I met in Cork, Nuala ni Chonchuir. On her blog. HERE

She says I am poignant. I dont know what that is, but I bet it has something to do with having a pink jumper.

SCHOOL? Yerk.

I have got to go to school. Not only that I have got to go to something called Universisisisty.

Now look. I am not old enough, and I know I an a PEN but that's enough.

My batty writer (who is getting battier by the minute) says I am going to be used at a University to teach from.

I am in a few school libraries too. Which is not a good idea if you ask me.

I AM A PEN!!!

I am loads of pens!

I can now do my own writing stories (when I've learned to spell and stuff) and I don't have to rely on that batty woman any more.

Wheeeeeeeee!

I went to Ireland again

I did. I went to a place called Cork (I thought those were what stops wine coming out of wine bottles?) because there was a festival called FRank O Connor.

Remember? He's the nice man who said I could go and gave my batty writer a few days there as an early Christmas present. Actually, I met his daughter, who was a really lovely lady. I wish SHE had written me. She's much nicer than my batty writer. I wish she hadn't come to Cork, really. I am a real party animal, and she only spoils it.

Still.

There were lots of me on a table every day, and we moved about. One day I was next to Jhumpa Lahiri's book, (Unaccustomed Earth, the one that won the big prize) and the next I was with An Instruction manual for Swallowing, by Adam Marek. He's great. Looks like a film star. I must grow up fast. He bought moi, actually...so there.

There were loads of readings, and they were really good. My batty writer talked to a lot of the writers, and drank far too much Corona which is not pop, like it used to be when she was a girl, but is beer.

One day, my batty writer went for a walk with Mrs Salt (a lady called Jen Hamilton Emery). They went all round Cork, and into this park where there was a Peace Festival. oooo-er. It was full of tents, and music, and clothes and dogs and children and drums and hats and the air was full of sort of blue smoke. My batty writer was dancing, and I was sooooooo embarrassed.

When we came out, my batty writer said 'I feel a bit light headed'. Mrs Salt said she did too.

I doont think it had anything at all to do with the blue smoke.

But anyway. I had lunch with Jhumpa Lahiri who is dead famous. Only even though she is called Jhumpa, mine is better.

My writer takes loads of photos. Only they are all of walls. I SAID she was mad....

LOVELY MESSAGE FROM A READER

My batty writer got this letter today:

Dear Vanessa,

Hello, hope you're all keeping very well.

I just wanted to send you a note to say how much I liked your book. Thank you.

I think that your writing is very intense and compassionate and also very brave in that it deals with painful subjects. I found the stories gripping.

I hope you go from strength to strength and book to book.

Nice innit?

BUBBLES DOWN UNDER!

I am now big in Australia.

Well, sort of. There is one copy of moi in a library in a place called Perth.

So if you want to see me, yuu can call by but I'm not on loan, you can only sit and read moi. Upside down.