365 More Short-short Stories

Some draw on elements of ancient myth and legend, others are outtakes from Scottish history and folklore; there are squibs and satires, songs and ballads in disguise, fairytales, stories inspired by dreams or in the form of interviews, and personal memories and observations.

Stories by James Robertson review – a tale for every day of the year | Books | The Guardian

Underpinning all of them are vital questions: What are we doing here? James Robertson wrote a word short story each day in Paperback , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Feb 10, Thomas rated it really liked it. Robertson's project is in danger of becoming gimicky before you've even picked it up. But it doesn't take long to realise the few factors that make a success - James Robertson is a very good writer, he has an intimate knowledge of and passion for stories and how stories come into being, and that this collection works as a whole as well as as individual experiments.

As you go through a year of fascinating little essays, vignettes, fables , word stories written one every day for a year. As you go through a year of fascinating little essays, vignettes, fables and many more, you get a sense of the depth of this ambitious project and a feeling for the writers meticulous attention to details and word counts. The majority of 's entries are seperate stories. Robertson's main preocupations are social woes and observations, politics, folktales and Scottish folklore, old age, death in a very contemplative, playful way and being a writer.

He utilizes farcial scripts, media reportage, Kafkaesque beaurocratic nightmares, historical rewrites, opinion pieces on films and literature as well as actual folk stories. Particular highlights - a very spooky remake of an old ballad called the Demon Lover, the style of which echoes Sussana Clarke fairy tale style. Insignificance and Sorrow and Love are two wonderful pieces of contemplation on the meaning of life and death.

Imagination is a beautiful ode to the power of the mind about a old soldier reliving his traumas. The Man on the Bus is a simple literary encounter about the vanity of a writer and his invisibility. There's no grand statement, no positioning himself as the miner of all stories, Robinson's work is embued with a careful modesty and a complete lack of arrogance, but it is an admirable attempt to bring closure to an immensely varied piece of literature.

He gives us an image to attach to his grand project and shows for the upteenth time his great love of stories and his desire to protect, preserve, retell and reinvent stories in a myriad of ways and forms. Jan 07, JA rated it it was amazing Shelves: I've been reading this book throughout I didn't manage quite every day but I started on the 1st of January and finished just now - on Hogmanay. It was great to be reading the stories around the same time of year he'd written each of them. It's an excellent book with a wide variety of story styles - beautiful, thought provoking, funny and sad.

Nov 29, Tim Love rated it liked it. When I read a Flash collection by a Flash specialist I often wonder about the value of printing the less good pieces, but market forces dictate that prose books can't be too short. This collection has pieces, the Quality Control put until extra pressure by the constraints that one piece had to be produced each day in , and that the pieces had to be words long i. When I read a poetry collection and sense that there's a sequence of sub-par poems, I often won When I read a Flash collection by a Flash specialist I often wonder about the value of printing the less good pieces, but market forces dictate that prose books can't be too short.

When I read a poetry collection and sense that there's a sequence of sub-par poems, I often wonder whether it's me having an off day. But in this book, it's just as likely that the writer was having an off week or two. So was I grumpy on Sunday morning, 26th April , or was he off-form in January ? I think he gets into his stride in mid-March 6th, 7th, 10th, 12th, 18th, 28th, 30th.

I liked April th; May 7th, 8th, 27th; June 12th, 13th, 16th, 17th my favourite so far , 20th; July 3rd, 6th, 14th, 23rd; Sep 14th, 16th; Nov 9th; Dec 6th, 11th. Thanks for sharing your experience!

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I have started reading more short stories, more for learning than entertainment, and because I have a wealth of what I believe are solid ideas. Also, at least the newer ones are available with Kindle Unlimited so that makes it convenient for me. I recently started doing this with personal essays. I had literally never read ONE, but I was trying my hand at writing one, which is insanity.

And I agree that reading this stuff makes you a better writer. I feel like if I can write an essay I can write a book. Question for you though — any short story collections you would recommend? As a side note, it sounds like your introduction into reading personal essays is a lot like my intro to short stories. I was working on writing them and thinking, man this is hard. Struggling at it helped me realize I needed to real a lot more stories to understand the mechanics. As I write flash fiction I tend to read a lot of flash fiction, but short stories and novels work well for me too.

Yeah, I think that it is a good habit to have versatile reading habits. If you write novels, read short stories and flash anyway. If you write flash, read novels and short stories as well etc.

365 Short Stories 2013

All fiction, regardless of length, is going to have the same core qualities and you never know which will provide you the must instruction. Like you, I have recently started reading one short story per day, in a bid to improve my own fiction writing. Ray Bradbury said that a writer should spend at least a year writing one short story a week before even attempting a novel.

Do you know of any free online pubs where I can read a short story a day? Where do you pull short stories from? Great idea about reading at the start of the day rather than end. Skeleton Crew is my favourite. And The Raft the best single story on it.

The distance between impulse and outcome

Short, not sweet, and leaves you thinking after it. I just started doing this and I really like it for the same reasons. Poe is a good source. I also like J.

Michael Gelven, the philosopher, wrote a number of good books, but you could treat each chapter like a short story. The short stories are very good. Gonzalez has written short papers on Plato, which make many of the dialogues come alive. I loved these lines.

And there will always be a place for us in the circus: Great writer, excellent person, and Willow Springs is one of my favorite print journals.

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Narrative Magazine is well-known, well-funded, and generally an easy go-to for good on-line fiction. And to close, on my way home, at a layover in the Chicago airport, rain beating on the glass behind my seat, I could not help but think of Stuart Dybek. Sad, dark, lyrical and true. My daughters with me, their mother. Ours was one of the last families in our little foothill town elementary school to purchase a home computer earlier in this century.

And I still yearn for the printed page, the paper in my hands. I straddle both worlds. So do many of the literary magazines I admire, so why angst about it?

Why not save the unease for my characters? True of all good fiction, no? But something about the inner struggle, the doing it alone even when among others seem to ring true in the fictions that chose me this week. They talk about money and shoes and bosses and medication and who has screwed whom and who is more righteous and when will they learn.

You can read my thoughts on print lit mags here. And, of course you may hear half a dozen super short pieces by Robert Vaughan in the interview at Lake Effect. My own thoughts on flash may be read here. The big presents were great! But the little ones were shinier, extra sweet, and more and more interesting as I went further into the toe. Fiction is not dead or even dying and good shorts are available with a click and a scroll, or maybe you have to try out two or three before you read the one you want to share, for some reason, any: When I scanned the batch of stories I was compelled to review, a common theme I found among them was family: Once again, I was drawn to a different story each day, randomly, and as a group they held a common thread.

But perhaps in fiction the two things you can count on are: