Colette Paul, "A Complete Success"

 

Colette Paul was born in Glasgow. She is the author of Whoever you Choose to Love (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/ Phoenix) , a collection of stories which were serialized on Radio 4, and shortlisted for The Spirit of Scotland Writer Award. Colette’s work has appeared in several anthologies and magazines, including Mslexia, Edinburgh Review, Stand, and Litro. Colette’s story ‘O Tell me the Truth About Love!’ won the Tom Gallon / Royal Society of Authors Prize, and three of her stories were included in Victoria Hislop’s edited anthology, The Story: 100 Great Short Stories by Women. Her second collection of stories, A Complete Success, is due to be published this Autumn. Colette lives in Cambridge, where she teaches Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University. 

About A Complete Success, by Colette Paul

This is a sharply observed collection which finds comedy and sadness in the ordinary lives of ordinary characters—teenage girls, middle-aged divorcees, a man facing his last night alone in hospital. The stories are linked by a sense of lives in transition, with the attendant fear, exhilaration, and sense of loss those moments can bring. Time after time, characters struggle to understand and communicate their feelings, to their loved ones and to themselves. Despite the melancholy theme, the stories are shot through with humour and lightness, a sense of life in all its complicated messiness. 

You can read more about A Complete Success on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the opening story of the collection. 

From A Complete Success

From 'Rats'

Before my boyfriend leaves for work he says, ‘I saw another rat last night. You better talk to that neighbour today about feeding the birds.’

‘You talk to her,’ I say. 

‘You’re the one who’s lumbering around the house all day,’ he says. ‘I’ve not got a minute to myself from the moment I get into the lab.’

‘Lumbering,’ I say, ‘that’s very nice!’

‘You were still in your dressing gown when I came home last night.’ 

‘Because I didn’t feel well!’ 

He stops fiddling with his bike helmet and says quietly, ‘Why are you crying?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Why do you think I’m crying?’

He lets out a sigh of frustration. ‘It’s really annoying how you answer a question with another question.’ He sits down next to me with a look of defeat. ‘Do you think you might be depressed?’

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘is that a question? I thought we weren’t allowed to answer a question with another question.’ 

Since we moved here six months ago, we argue all the time. I blame my boyfriend for bringing me here, where I have no job and no friends. It doesn’t matter that I’d just got made redundant, or that my best friend had moved to Spain, or that I was actually excited to move somewhere new—I still blame him. It’s not fair, I know, but that is one of the downsides of being such a decisive and definite person, like my boyfriend. 

*

I get dressed and put on some makeup and knock on my next-door neighbour’s door. She is a tiny, stooped old woman, with bright eyes like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. From our bedroom window we have witnessed her throwing bird seed around her garden with surprising energy.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I say, ‘but we live next door, and we’ve been getting a lot of rats in our garden. The internet says it might be because you’re feeding the birds—the rats are attracted to anywhere they can find food.’ 

‘Oh dear,’ she says, ‘have you got them as well?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Loads of them. They seem to be coming from your garden.’ 

‘I hear them scurrying around, scratch-scratch-scratch, all hours of the day.’ 

‘In your house?’ I say, horrified. 

‘I don’t know,’ she chuckles. ‘The council’s been round a few times, but they can’t see where they’re coming from either.’

‘Well maybe you could try stopping feeding the birds,’ I say. ‘That’s the biggest way to get rid of them, the internet says.’ 

‘Oh I love my birds,’ she says. ‘I sit and watch them all day. They’re the only thing that keeps me going since my husband died.’ 

Catherine Tudish, "A Thousand Souls: A Novel in Stories"

 

Catherine Tudish is the author of the novel American Cream and the story collection Tenney’s Landing. She has taught writing and literature at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, and the Bread Loaf School of English. She now lives in a village in central Vermont, where she teaches a community writing workshop at the local library.

About A Thousand Souls: A Novel in Stories, by Catherine Tudish
The fourteen stories of A Thousand Souls interweave the lives of three generations in the remote village of Neptune, Vermont, as they inevitably touch the outside world. Even as their loyalties and traditions are tested through times of loss, betrayal, and discovery, these characters embody an abiding connection to place. Sharply observed, wry, and deeply tender, these stories resonate with both the intricacy and cost of interconnection as the years pass, and ordinary lives take unexpected turns.

You can read more about A Thousand Souls on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the title story. 

From A Thousand Souls

My name is Stewart Prime. I drive a rural mail route, which gives me a lot of time to think. Lately I’ve been thinking about how a tiny thing—a worn-out gear, say, or a word misspoken—can change a person’s life forever. It’s hardly a new topic with me. The turning point of my life came early, not long after my sixth birthday, when my mother and father and older brother Henry died in the collapse of a carnival Ferris wheel. They happened to be in the seat at the very top when things went wrong. Others were injured, but no one except my parents and my brother was killed. I was in the hospital at the time, recovering from a tonsillectomy. Henry had promised to win a prize for me at the pitching booth and bring it to my hospital room. I don’t know if he won a prize or not. They might have gone on the Ferris wheel before playing any of the games. 

*

For some time after the accident, I met my family in a dream. I would walk outside in the early morning to find my mother and father and brother waiting for me on the cool grass. The sun would be rising behind them, and in that gauzy light I could see they were angels with beautiful wings, like the angels in the church window. As I got closer to them, they would take off their wings and lay them gently on the ground.

“Why are you taking off your wings?” I would ask, fascinated by the pearly whiteness of the feathers.

“It’s the only way we can be with you, sweetheart,” my mother would say.

“We don’t mind,” Henry would add, casting a wistful glance behind him.

When my father smiled at me and opened his arms, I would know it was true. They had come back to me. I couldn’t help it, I cried for joy.

*

I must have been about nine when I understood, even while I was dreaming, that the angels were not real. My family was never coming back. 

Jennifer Maritza McCauley, "Neon Steel"

 

Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of the cross-genre collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF (Stalking Horse Press), the short story collections When Trying to Return Home (Counterpoint), and Recognition (U. Wisconsin Press, forthcoming 2027), the poetry collections Kinds of Grace (Flower Song), VERSUS (Texas Review Press, 2027) and Tumbao (Texas Review Press, 2029) and the speculative collection Neon Steel (Cornerstone, Feb 2026). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and CantoMundo and her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Must-Read by Elle, Latinx in Publishing, Ms. Magazine and Bookshop. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her website is here. 

About Neon Steel, by Jennifer Maritza McCauley
Set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Neon Steel is acclaimed writer Jennifer Maritza McCauley's love letter to millennial nerd culture. Anime fans, vampires, indie rappers, robots, comic book fans, and thrill seekers find their way through the Steel City's neighborhoods and haunts. A young girl discovers an underground world of Afro Otaku who change the way she sees the city; a high school student discovers a kindred spirit in a Bomba girl; The Terminator (1984) is reimagined as a josei story featuring a purple loc'd robot; and a secret coven of vampires who hide out in Pittsburgh steel mills risk being discovered after they lose one of their own. Magical realist and neon-lit, Neon Steel faithfully follows a group of nerds and the magic that excites them, bringing to life a city and a state of being.

Below, you can read a sample story from the collection, originally published in Latin@Literatures here. 

From Neon Steel

The Girl in Bomba Dress 

Adrienne was late, per usual. She hated being late, but here she was, late for Algebra II and she wasn’t going to embarrass herself in front of all of those white kids by being late. What would they say? Dumb girl from Sharpsburg, of course she’s nothing. Or their eyes would do all the gibbering. Pin-points and spitfire that’s what they’d give her. Who cared? Either way.

She ran from her place on Chapman Street, fast, faster than she normally ran, her backpack slamming up and down on her little back and causing her red pain. As she was running, past trash-thick cans and darkened bars and coffee shops bright and yanking folks in for heavy caffeine, she was thinking about how all she needed to do was get to the bus stop and make it to homeroom and she’d be fine. She could be quiet, nobody would notice her if she blended in and said nothing. She just had to get there. They all knew her, after all she was the only Black girl in the school outside of Tiana, and they knew Adri as the one who Always Did School Right. But here she was late. Per usual.

Halfway through Adri’s sprint down the high stacked rust-red buildings she heard a grunt. It was a woman’s grunt but it was stark enough that Adri stopped in her tracks, thinking someone was hurt. She turned around and approached the alley behind her, black and garbage-filled, the cans drooping with shit and pizza.

She walked past the alleyway and toward an opening behind her, flanked by grafitti’d brick of Black people, hollering and wearing purple, looking royal. In the center of the open space there was a young woman, a little older, but not much more than Adri’s sixteen years. She had long hair in fluffing curls. She wore an ivory dress crimping and flying as she danced. Her eyes were closed. She was meditating, meditating, her muscles tensing, tensing. She sang Bambula, Bambula. Adri stared at this girl, not knowing exactly what to say, and while she was trying to gauge how fast she should run to class, the girl’s eyes snapped open and she saw Adri.

"Who are you?" she said.

"What?" Adri whispered. She could tell this bomba girl was beautiful, her body bronzed and blazing. The bomba girl could be a terrifying stranger but Adri felt soft around this girl. What was she doing in an alley in the middle of Pittsburgh of all places?

"Where are you going?" the bomba girl asked gently, her voice deeper than whatever young age she was.

"To school," Adri gulped. "Aren’t you in school?"

"No," she said. “I work in the night. I practice bomba in the day, preparing myself."

"For what?"

She turned back to her swishing work and spread her hands out, she shook them. The bangles on her wrists clanged and clacked.

"You do this without drums?" Adrienne asked. Her family in Puerto Rico would bomba sometimes, she knew you couldn’t flail and shake without a good beat.

She pressed her hand against her chest. "It’s in here."

"I don’t believe that."

"That’s very American. To be so cynical."

Adrienne shrugged. "Girl, I’m a junior. I’m just trying to get into college."

She smiled, a half-grin and went back to the quick work of moving her hands about.

"Okay," she said, in that unnervingly dark voice and Adrienne didn’t know what to do with her. "That’s your path."

"This is a sacred art," Adrienne opined. "Why do you do it?"

"Girl," she mimicked Adrienne and swept her hands out. "Aren’t you a sacred art?" Adrienne’s face said "WTF," and it was true. Adrienne didn’t value herself at all. She was just a high school girl from Sharpsburg with nothing to her name but a bunch of slurs hurled at her face and here was this gorgeous girl talking about how she was something beautiful.

"I guess I am."

"Say it with your chest, mami."

"I want to do what you do, freely," she said. Then she said it with her chest, another cliché: "Puedo hacer cualquier cosa …"

"O le ṣe," she tried, in a language Adri didn’t know and as she spun around Adrienne saw her own face in her spinning. "There you go," she said gently. She stopped dancing and came over and tugged at the belt around her waist. "Me quiero tal como soy …"

She reached out and clutched her hands. Adrienne remembered she had homeroom but as she gripped her heated fingers back she suddenly didn’t care. They could say what they wanted. She stretched her back and Adri stretched hers. They were dancing, dancing, dancing African-Boricua music, taking them to palm tree’d places they’d never been, in Pittsburgh’s aching center, not worried about the time.

Elizabeth Baines, "Five Different Stories About One Thing"

Elizabeth Baines is the author of the novels The Birth Machine, Too Many Magpies and Astral Travel, and the story collections Balancing on the Edge of the World and Used to Be. She is also a prizewinning playwright for radio and stage, and an audiobook of her comedy radio series The Circle is published by Audible.

Elizabeth's website is here. 

About Five Different Stories About One Thing, by Elizabeth Baines
A ghost story, a love story, crime, science fiction and a postmodern story: here are the different experiences and attitudes of five linked characters, all affected by the same thing in the past. This is a slyly subversive experiment in genre, exploring the legacy of generational trauma.

You can read more about Five Different Stories About One Thing on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Five Different Stories About One Thing

Extract from "Home," a ghost story

As she opens the garden gate, something flicks, a crack in the light. A black bird flying up from the hedge.

"Male blackbird," says her twelve-year-old nephew, Sam. He has come up behind her with one of the boxes out of the van.

Her sister Sarah follows, carrying another. "Emma, it’s so quaint!"

They stand and survey the tiny terraced cottage, the place where she’ll be now, a single woman once more, beginning again. The stone walls, the deep-set little windows, their paint flaking, the uneven-looking slates on the roof. The unkempt garden, which Sarah says she’ll get in shape in no time, pale primroses half-hidden in the long grass. A cherry tree, its basket of still-bare branches glinting in the afternoon light.

Sam, mad on birds, mad on nature and science, peers into the hedge. "I bet there’s a nest."

Sarah’s husband and his mate lug in the bed and struggle with it on the angle of the narrow stone stairs.

Sarah spins in the little add-on kitchen. "You’ll be OK here." Big sister protector. Leaning back into the role she had in their childhood, their troubled childhood. It’s way in the past now, their father long dead and gone, yet here she is still playing the little sister-mother. "Lick of paint, new units, maybe, in time."

"Cool," says Sam, opening the iron door beside the fireplace in the one downstairs room, the old oven.

She would like them to go now. She wants to be alone with her new independence, and to savour the house for herself.

At last, in a tangle of voices and banging van doors, they’re off, Sarah and her family away back to their impenetrable domestic life.

The atmosphere of the house sifts around her. Smells of wood and stone, a slight whiff of mould that, now the house is occupied, should soon be banished. A soft pressure of history. A new history for her to belong to, she thinks.

Something shifts in the room above, a sound like a shove, and for a split-second she thinks someone’s still there ...

"The Subtle Art of Short Fiction," ed. Isabelle Kenyon

About The Subtle Art of Short Fiction, ed. Isabelle Kenyon
The Subtle Art of Short Fiction explores the power of short fiction in today’s fragmented world. Renowned authors and critics offer advanced techniques for crafting nuanced, impactful stories.

Learn to master short story structure, subtext, micro-tension, and sensory minimalism. Ideal for experienced writers seeking to refine their skills in this sophisticated art form, or those who love short fiction, and want to learn about the craft behind it.

The book includes essays and writing exercises by Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Daisy Johnson, Matt Wesolowski, Sascha Akhtar, David Hartley, Mahsuda Snaith, Jonathan Taylor, Sarah Schofield, SJ Bradley and Farhana Shaikh, and has an introduction by Dr Paul March-Russell.

You can read more about The Subtle Art of Short Fiction on the publisher's website here. 

About the editor
Isabelle Kenyon is the Managing Director of Manchester publishing house Fly on the Wall Press, and was named a Leader of the Year by the Bookseller in 2025. Founded in 2018, she has led Fly on the Wall Press from Small Press of the Year finalist status at the British Book Awards 2021-23 to their win in the North, in 2024. She is the MA Module Leader for "Publishing in the 21st Century" at Arts University Bournemouth, and the author of psychological thriller The Dark Within Them and poetry collections including Growing Pains (Indigo Dreams).​ She previously coordinated the Northern Fiction Alliance and runs PR campaigns for writers and publishers under Kenyon Author Services. 

From The Subtle Art of Short Fiction

From The Art of Anticipation and Revelation

by Daisy Johnson

I have noticed something recently about children. It is the waiting that they love. My sons sit at the kitchen table watching me, spoons floating half way to their open mouths, eyes wide. I am doing something silly, making a noise or pretending to hide or doing a funny walk. Each time when I stop they call for me to do it again, again, again. I pretend not to, I cannot possibly, no, I am very busy, but they know I am lying. It is this moment of withholding that they find most joyous. The best short stories, for me, carve out most perfectly that delicious space of anticipation.

In Miranda July’s short story "The Metal Bowl," the protagonist describes herself acting in a porn video when she was younger. "I wasn’t directed so much as given a series of props to make my way through, like an obstacle course. A turquoise Teddy bear, a pillow, an empty beer bottle, a metal bowl. Not everything was clear to me (the bowl), but I was too nervous to speak." From this moment we move through the story with a growing question. What was the metal bowl for? The question is an elastic tension which connects us to the protagonist.

In Shirley Jackon’s "The Lottery," the very title of the story is a question which we go in asking: what is The Lottery? The people of a small village begin to gather in the square: "Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example." As with the mysterious metal bowl, we wonder, what are these stones for? Unlike July’s story it is clear that the characters know more than us, that the trembling, questioning tension belongs only to the reader ... 

Karen Stevens, "Brilliant Blue"

 

Karen Stevens writes short fiction and has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, including The Big Issue, Fish Publishing, Salt Publishing and Valley Press. She was runner-up for the prestigious ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award in 2023. Her edited collection of essays Writing a First Novel: Reflections on the Journey was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. Her co-edited collection of short stories High Spirits won a Saboteur Award for Best Anthology in 2019. Karen is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester and lives in West Sussex. Brilliant Blue is her first collection of short stories.

About Brilliant Blue, by Karen Stevens
Welcome to the infamous Duncock Estate. Nestled on the South English coast, it is a place where identity matters; where people hold down jobs and do their best. Where taboos are broken, adultery is committed, and problems can’t be wished away. But even tragedy can be tinged with fragile hopes and humour.

You can read more about Brilliant Blue on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories in the book. 

 

From Brilliant Blue

Extract from ‘Among the Crows’

It was knocking on four o’clock when Andy decided he’d had enough. There was no end to it: road after road of council houses with verges that he needed to strim. He’d taken his time again; just couldn’t be bothered. A full hour for lunch and several tea breaks, while Maciej – Mac, they’d nicknamed him at work – kept on going. The man was a machine. Intensely efficient.

The heat was doing Andy in; his throat felt scorched. He switched off the strimmer, removed his goggles and ear defenders. The sudden stillness alarmed him. He glanced behind, half expecting a drugged-up maniac to lunge and nick his strimmer. Mac was on the opposite side of the road, further on, heading for the finish line. For health and safety, the council’s rules were that workers must stay in pairs, but it was impossible for Andy to keep up with Mac, and impossible for Mac to slow down.

Andy watched Mac’s automated motion. His biceps were loaves. He swung his arms from left to right, chopping swathes of nettles and grass, getting the job done. No work, no cake, he’d say simply, whenever Andy griped about being sent into the dark heart of the Duncock Estate.

He sat on the verge and took in the council houses, their concrete walls bleached dirty-white from the sun. Objects poked out from the parched grass of a ramshackle garden opposite.

A rusting fridge revealed its mouldy interior. A child the same age as his Cora could fit in there, closing the door to hide, suffocating within minutes. He kept his eye on the fridge and felt relieved that he lived on the outskirts of this sprawling estate, where things were less desperate and hostile.

Katy Wimhurst, "An Orchid in My Belly Button"

 

Katy Wimhurst is a writer and visual poet. She has had three collections of short stories published — An Orchid in My Belly Button (Elsewhen Press, 2025), Snapshots of the Apocalypse (Fly on the Wall Press, 2022) and Let Them Float (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Guardian, Writers’ Forum, Cafe Irreal, Kaleidotrope, and ShooterLit. Her first book of visual poems, Fifty-One Trillion Bits, was published by Trickhouse Press (2023). She occasionally writes literary essays on speculative fiction and interviews writers for 3AM Magazine. Her website is here. She is housebound with the illness M.E.

About An Orchid in My Belly Button
These short stories savour the surreal, flirt with magical realism, dabble with dystopia. A boy sees the ghosts of dead crabs. A girl with a fox tail is bullied. A disenchanted woman sprouts orchids from her belly button. Fashion models pursue the trend of having plants as hair. Electronic goods amassing all over London herald an apocalypse. Darkness and wonder, the strange and the ordinary, interweave to offer an environmental and social portrait of our times. Guaranteed to evoke a response, whether a giggle, a gasp, or a nervous gulp, these stories will stay with you, enriching your perception of the world.

Surreal, absurdist, magical realist: Katy Wimhurst writes speculative fiction that meditates on our reality. Although bleak themes are examined – dystopian futures, the climate crisis, bullying – a quirky imagination and wry humour lift the tales above the ‘realm of grim.’

An Orchid in My Belly Button is published by Elsewhen Press. More about it can be found on the publisher’s website here. An extract from one story is below.

From An Orchid in My Belly Button, by Katy Wimhurst

Snow on Snow

Snow flutters down in her living room, even though the windows are closed. She blinks. The flakes pattern the carpet into white lace and dust the top of her cacti collection. She can’t afford to heat the flat, so she puts on a woolly hat and curls up on the sofa, tugging a tartan blanket around her. She gazes at the icy miracle. How remarkable! 

When the snow stops before bedtime, she makes hot chocolate and changes into fleece pyjamas. Snuggling under the covers with a hot water bottle, she remembers camping in the garden for a week one December when she was a teenager, sixty years ago; she preferred the quiet, cold tent to the heated rows of her parents. Before she drops off to sleep, the icy tingle on her face tells her more flakes are falling. 

She awakes to a flat carpeted in snow, which reaches a few centimetres up the skirting boards and collects footprints when she crunches over it. Nature has adorned the place festively, even if she hasn’t bothered to put decorations up. She puts on warm clothes, a woolly hat, mittens, a jacket, and boots. Her bones are chilly, but the magic of this arctic interior lifts her spirit. 

Hot porridge warms her. Then, using a pastry brush, she flicks the snow off her cacti collection—the Fairy Castles, Old Ladies, Moons, Stars, Bunny Ears, and Golden Barrels. Her ex-husband said they were like her, prickly but resilient. Worried about what the cold might do to the plants, she wraps strips of hessian around their bases, pricking her finger twice.

With a duster, she wipes the snow off a photo on the wall, revealing her niece and two great nieces in Montreal, Canada; so far away. She doesn’t bother wiping the one of her nephew and his family outside Tate Modern, London. 

Ailsa Cox, "Precipitation," with images by Patricia Farrell

Ailsa Cox is Professor Emerita in Short Fiction at Edge Hill University. Her stories have been widely published and collected as The Real Louise (Headland Press). Other books include Writing Short Stories (Routledge) and Alice Munro (Liverpool University Press, Writers and Their Work). She is also the editor of the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Press). Born in Walsall, she is now based in West Yorkshire.  

Patricia Farrell is a poet and visual artist. She has collaborated with other writers, artists and musicians on a range of projects and publications. Her work is published in magazines and collections, as well as individual pamphlets: most recently, High Cut (Leafe Press). 

About Precipitation, by Ailsa Cox
Precipitation is a collection of three stories by Ailsa Cox, two of which are published for the first time. It also features images created by the artist Patricia Farrell in response to the stories. The book is the fifth in a series of collaborations between writers and artists - the first, Interpolated Stories by David Rose and Leah Leaf, was published by Confingo Publishing in 2022.

Set mostly in North-West England, with excursions to Wales, Paris and the Arabian desert, these stories map the inner and outer world of their characters, excavating layers of time and memory. Two of the stories take place on the fictional street of Bethel Brow, where a grandmother nurses a long-held grievance, while two young incomers live the dream of a house in the country. In the third, the thwarted ambitions of a disappointed novelist take him on an imaginary journey. Sharply observed and often darkly comic, they hinge upon those small moments that can change your life for ever – a missed train, a turn in the weather, or a puzzling encounter with a neighbour.

You can read more about Precipitation on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an extract from the opening of one of the stories. 

From Precipitation

Heavy Showers and Thunder

He stops for a minute to take in the view – the hills unfolding, wave upon wave, the village hidden deep inside the valley – the faint susurration of traffic only accentuating the stillness and the silence here at the edge of the moor. Above the ruined house where the farmer feeds his cattle, the clouds are rolling in like enormous grey whales, but they’ve been that way all day, with no more than the briefest scattering of rain. Pale from lack of water, the paths are hard as concrete; the stony tracks that turn into streams in wintertime have run dry. He swigs a mouthful of water, cycles on. This is where he comes to get away.

Soon the rain’s falling sheer as a curtain – the noise Barbara thought might be a plane was definitely thunder. The view from the window is quickly erased, the dingy outlines of buildings dissolving into the landscape. The culvert will be rushing with the force of cannon fire, rain boiling up against the manholes on the towpath, and the waterfall surging like dark beer. Tonight’s a night to stay indoors, listening for the warlike wail of flood sirens. George and Barbara are safe up on the hillside. They don’t mind the rain; they’re glad of it. The ground could do with a soaking. All the same, Barbara wishes George would pay some mind to the flashing on the chimney.

‘Luke’s rung,’ George says, coming back from closing up the greenhouse.

‘Luke?’ Barbara’s salvaging some bendy carrots, the tips disintegrating when she tries to peel them. 

‘He’s been on a bike ride.’

‘Oh, that Luke.’

‘The line’s flooded. He can’t get home.’

‘So he wants to stay the night?’

‘You don’t mind, do you?’

‘I’ve no choice, have I?’

F. C. Malby, "A Place of Unfinished Sentences"

F. C. Malby writes novels, short stories, and poetry. She has travelled widely, teaching English in the Czech Republic, the Philippines and London. She is a qualified teacher and a photographer, and is currently studying for a Masters in Theology. Her debut novel, Take Me to the Castle, set in early 1990s Czech Republic, won The People’s Book Awards. Her second novel, Dead Drop, set in Vienna, is a lyrical, daring thriller about the undercover world of art crime. Her debut short story collection, My Brother Was a Kangaroo, includes award-winning stories published in literary magazines and journals worldwide. Malby's poetry has appeared in journals, magazines and podcasts, and her second collection of short stories, A Place of Unfinished Sentences, includes stories that have been published in anthologies with Reflex Press and Pens of the Earth, and placed in competitions. She is a contributor to four print anthologies (the forth is forthcoming with Pens of the Earth in Oct 2024). She is also a contributor to anthologies published by Reflex Press, Unthank Book and Litro. Her short fiction won the Litro Magazine Environmental Disaster Fiction Competition, and was nominated for Publication of the Year in the Spillwords Press Awards. Her stories have been widely published both online and in print. Her website is here. 

About A Place of Unfinished Sentences, by F. C. Malby

This second collection concerns the sentences we leave unfinished, questions surrounding sudden loss, a decision on a train. It covers themes of relationships and memory, exploring what happens when memory fails. It looks at beginnings and endings, weaving through themes of generations, family, uncertainty, and what happens when experiences change us.

From A Place of Unfinished Sentences

The woman sitting opposite me looks like the guy I used to date. Her face is angular, her eyes fixed to the page of a book I cannot see. I wonder why she reminds me of him. The door clunks back into the frame of the train’s carriage. A thud as it stops makes me jump, and a man with a trolley walks through and scans the seats.

“Tea? Coffee?” he asks, glancing at the ex-boyfriend lookalike.

“Neither,” she says, her eyes remaining fixed on the pages in her hands. 

He looks at me. “Coffee, black, no sugar,” I say, without waiting to be asked. He lowers his shoulders, exhaling slowly as he pours me a cup from a large metal coffee pot. Steam rises from the spout, the scent of it licking at my nostrils. Saliva fills my mouth in anticipation.  

“Snacks,” he says, almost as a statement. I can hear my Grandmother telling me that it's rude not to form full sentences. Nobody is in a full sentence mood this morning. The trains have been delayed by three hours because of a ‘body on the line’ and the weather is damp and oppressive. Normally, the announcement is ‘leaves on the line.’ This morning it's a body. An elderly lady told me it was a young man. Such a waste of a life, she had said with a tone of disgust, eyebrows raised, as though taking your own life was comparable to a child throwing away a gift they no longer wanted. I had started to explain that you don't know what's going on in someone else's life, but she walked away mid-sentence. 

London was a place of rush, a place of interchange, a place of unfinished sentences. The young boy's life might have been an unfinished sentence: a friend in a rush, too busy to hear that he had felt low for months; an interchange of parents going to and from work, passing like ships in the night; a sentence about feeling hopeless, left unfinished. 

Omar Sabbagh, "Y Knots"

 

Omar Sabbagh is a very widely published poet, writer and critic. Over the last two decades, his poetry has appeared in many prestigious venues, such as: Poetry Review, PN Review, Agenda, Acumen, New Humanist, (T&F) New Writing, The Reader Magazine, Stand, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Banipal, The Warwick Review, The Wolf, among many others. For Echo was his sixth poetry collection with Cinnamon Press, Spring 2024. His first collection and his third were, respectively: My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint and To The Middle of Love (Cinnamon Press, 2010/17). His fourth, But It Was an Important Failure, was published in early 2020. And Morning Lit: Portals After Alia, his fifth collection with Cinnamon Press, was published in early 2022. His Beirut novella, Via Negativa: A Parable of Exile, was published with Liquorice Fish Books in March 2016; and his Dubai novella, Minutes from the Miracle City, was published with Fairlight Books in July 2019. He has published much short fiction, too, some of it prize-winning. A study of the oeuvre of Professor Fiona Sampson, Reading Fiona Sampson: A Study in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, was published with Anthem Press in 2020, and was released in revised, paperback edition at the end of 2021. His book of Lebanese verse narratives, Cedar: Scenes from Lebanese Life, was published with Northside House in summer of 2023; and a collection of his published short fictions, Y Knots, was published with Liquorice Fish Books in autumn of 2023. RIP: Poems after Gaza & Words after Waddah is his latest work, a pamphlet published with Cinnamon Press, March 2024.  He holds a BA in PPE from Oxford, three MAs in English Literature, Creative and Life Writing, and Philosophy, all from the University of London, and a PhD in English Literature from KCL. From 2011-2013 he was Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and he taught at the American University in Dubai (AUD), where he was Associate Professor of English from 2014 to 2024. He has just begun a new role in Creative Writing and Literature at the Lebanese American University (LAU) in Beirut.

About Y Knots: Short Fictions 
Y Knots is a collection of short fictions, some prize-winning, collating in one volume most of Sabbagh’s best short imaginative prose published between 2004 and 2022. Of the twenty-one entries collected in this book, the fictions vary from the serious-minded to the highly playful and satiric, from realistic narratives to surrealistic ones, as well as from fully-formed stories to extracts from putatively longer narratives. Characters leap off the page and stories rivet, whether the tensions that spur the narratives are resolved or merely explored. Linguistically dexterous and scintillating with intelligence and wit, this book combines deep and compassionate observation with humour and drama, making use of a variegated array of forms and styles, rendering this collection a flaring exhibition of highly engaging and insightful prose.  

You can read more about Y Knots on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the book

From Y Knots, by Omar Sabbagh

Dye

‘Should I dye my hair this weekend?’

The woman who asked this, whisper-thin in body, had hair the colour of cinnamon, though closer to sparkling raven at times.

‘Well … hmmm … it’s not as bright or juicy as I’ve seen it …’  The woman who responded was no such wraith; she was voluble in body, and bone-deep with goodness because her father had been a baker, and she had grown up, nay, she had leavened with the smell of bready genesis and flour in her nostrils from the early hours.

Twirling her black-pecked white skirt as though to skitter the scent of one who was solicitous, the first woman said, ‘Xavier started on my good side this morning. He told me my hair was nice in brown and if I was German because German women have brown hair.’

The bigger woman chuckled.

‘So should I? Should I dye my hair? I can, this weekend, I mean, I have enough.’

‘Dye your hair or don’t dye your hair,’ the second said. ‘Either way, you’ll still look fabulous.’ Given what we know of this second woman, one might have expected her to have formed some sort of metaphor or simile from the repertoire or the arsenal of bread. And so in fact she did.

‘You’ll always be like a sweet bun, honey, the kind my old father used to make. Oooo … But they were good! The first bite of your mouthed morsel would be a nomad, in some land over the tongue, melting and chewed and unchartered …’

The first woman put a finger to her lips, playfully, grinning from ear to ear, as though she were a child being coddled by a favourite aunt; a tad odd, for these two women, colleagues and friends were very close in age. Indeed, the far more carrot-haired lady, a sliver of coquetry, and the more bounteous woman, whose chocolate skin resonated with a vital periwinkle sheen, were named Mathilda and Marie-Rose, respectively; the one from San Francisco, the other form Trinidad.  

rob mclennan, "On Beauty: stories"

 

Born in Ottawa (Canada’s glorious capital city) and raised on a farm near Maxville, Ontario, rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. With recent titles including World’s End (ARP Books, 2023), essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023), On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) is his fourth work of fiction, after the novels white (The Mercury Press, 2007) and Missing Persons (The Mercury Press, 2009), and The Uncertainty Principle: stories (Chaudiere Books, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], and co-founded the ottawa small press book fair in fall 1994, which he’s run twice a year on his own since. He is the Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and he regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices on his blog here. 

About On Beauty: stories, by rob mclennan
The thirty-two stories in On Beauty exist as lyrically dense bursts of short prose that move across wide swaths of narrative in compact spaces, offering explorations of characters working through small or large moments. The stories include parenting, pregnancy, the death of a parent, complications between friends, spouses, etcetera. These stories, in their own ways, explore moments as potential sequence, and how each of those moments might impact each other. To ask where, when, how or who: the “why” is the story; all else are facts.

You can read an excerpt from On Beauty below. You can read more about the book on the publisher's website here. 

On beauty
Upon the death of her widower father, there came the matter of dismantling his possessions. Emptying and cleaning the house for resale. It wasn’t as though either of the children were planning on returning to the homestead, both some twenty years removed, but it fell to them to pick apart the entirety of their parents’ lives from out of this multi-level wooden frame, a structure originally erected by their grandfather and great-grandfather immediately following the Great War. Theirs was the first house in the area, constructed on seventy-five acres of farmland, long since disappeared to development. Across the street, a smaller house of similar design and build, where the hired man and his family had lived. Where, originally, their widowed great-grandmother spent her final days, sixteen long years past the death of her husband.

The house was a local oddity, an obvious construction decades before the brown brick and stone-grey on either side, and contemporary infills. Where the neighbouring bungalow was once their back garden; another, where livestock spent fallow days. Where most likely a barn stood, then a shed, which now hold driveway and garage. Foundation maintenance that routinely uncovers the roots of an orchard. The difficulty of inground pools, and the puncture of linings.

Their father’s house: now that he was dead, it was though it had died as well. They had no choice but to bury it. Not a word. Silence. My wife and her sister, dismantling what would never exist again, and by dismantling, removing it from all but their memory. This, too, will fade.

Abi Hynes, "Monstrous Longing"

Abi Hynes is an award-winning drama and fiction writer based in Manchester, UK. She wrote the first four episodes of historical audio drama Dark Harbour for Audible, and is currently developing many original dramas for TV. Her script Long Lost was on the Brit List in 2022, and she has recently adapted Anne of Green Gables for audio drama for Audible, starring Catherine O'Hara and Victor Garber and narrated by Sandra Oh.

As a playwright, her work has been staged in theatres across the UK, and she works regularly with LGBT History Month, bringing forgotten queer stories to life on stage. Her short stories have appeared in a wide variety of journals, magazines and anthologies; she won the Cambridge Short Story Prize in 2020, and her debut short story collection, Monstrous Longing, was published by Dahlia Books in October 2023.

About Monstrous Longing

A desperate mother buys a love potion to win back her daughter’s affection. An actress has a forbidden encounter with her animal body double. An idyllic new home comes with an unexpected lodger – a poltergeist.

Exploring themes of desire, womanhood, and obsession, Abi Hynes’s collection of short stories is sometimes funny, sometimes uncanny, but never too far from the truth.

You can read more about Monstrous Longing on the publisher's website herehere. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories in the collection. 

From Monstrous Longing, by Abi Hynes

From "The Something"

It was hard for Andrea to pinpoint the exact moment she became aware of the Something in her house. It had always had a sort of personality, squat little new-build that it was. Its roots spread deeper than was immediately obvious from outside. Its kitchen delved into the ground in a bizarrely old-fashioned design that left its little windows peeping just above the front lawn, offering an ankle-only view of passers-by to whoever did the washing up.

Other aspects of its layout seemed to defy logic and good sense. The two first floor bedrooms connected with each other, corridor-style. You had to pass through the ensuite to reach either of them, rending the guest room ... Well. Bloody inappopriate for guests.

The house asserted its own character with a pleasing confidence. It was one of the reasons Andrea had bought it. (An impulsive purchase, a Fuck it, why shouldn’t I? Giving off that dizzy rush of power. I am master of my own destiny!) Quickly, the house felt like a companion. It was co-conspirator in her emancipation from sharing unsatisfying flats with unsatisfying friends. She liked the Something, especially coming home on quiet, dark nights. The house’s confidence was catching.

The Something started small. It was the towel she noticed first (though there might have been other things before. Andrea could be dreamy. Unobservant). Clean and dry and folded neatly on a now-closed toilet lid. It was an unambiguous gesture, as there was no question of Andrea having put it there herself. Her towels were never folded, never carried in preparation to the bathroom. Her journey, dripping and shivering, to the airing cupboard in the guest bedroom, and then back, was part of her morning routine.

As a gesture, it didn’t frighten her. Her house wasn’t like old houses. It didn’t groan and whistle and scrape when the wind got up. It only sat there, resolutely silent, its burglar alarm and double-glazing primed against intruders, all its corners clean and cheerful. The Something was not a grisly intruder, Andrea was sure. It was just … the house itself.

Siobhian R. Hodges, "Untitled Decade"

 

Siobhian R. Hodges is a Leicestershire writer, author of the Young Adult novel Killing a Dead Man and anthology Untitled Decade. Siobhian has a BA in Creative Writing and Film Studies from De Montfort University and an MA in Creative Writing from Loughborough University. During her studies, she was both scriptwriter and script editor for Gatling Gun Productions (the not-for-profit film company she set up alongside her dad and sister). She has since written, edited and supervised several scripts, and even directed her own book trailer under the production company. With her experience in and passion for film, Siobhian’s novels and short stories can often be described as cinematic. In her free time, Siobhian enjoys reading and taking long walks in the countryside with her daughter and fiancé. Her favourite authors are Patrick Ness and Kevin Brooks – if you haven’t read their work, you definitely should! Killing a Dead Man was published in October 2019. Siobhian is currently busy working on her next big project. Her website is here. 

About Untitled Decade
By the end of each decade, we all have stories to tell. Here are mine …

A coming-of-age anthology like no other ... This part-fiction, part-memoir anthology spans the years of the author’s youth with a unique collection of twelve individual short stories. Like an encrypted diary, each story was written between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five and reflects the events that she (like many) faced during that time. 

With moments of heart, humour and horror, Untitled Decade is a personal exploration of a young adult’s imagination. This anthology will draw you in with its twisty, fast-paced stories as much as the relatable journal accounts.

From Untitled Decade, by Siobhian R. Hodges

“Just shut the f**k up.” His words, cold as ice, slap me like the hit I knew was to come. His eyes were glazed over from the joint he’d finished half an hour ago and his hands were shaking in unwarranted anger. But I couldn’t back down. It’s not the way I was raised.

“All I was saying,” I said, as calm as I could, “was that everyone deserves the right to vote.” 

He presses a button on his laptop, pausing the game he’d been playing. “Yes, but you’re missing the point,” he said.

“Which is …?”

“That some people are stupid and don’t know what they’re voting for.”

I shrug. “Still doesn’t mean you should take away their vote.”

He slams his hand down hard on his desk, making the line of ash hanging from the incense stick break off. Shame, I was seeing how long it could hold on.

“What the hell do you know about politics anyway?” he said.

“More than some, less than others,” I admit. “But I’m not arguing politics. I’m on about people’s rights to –”

“Just SHUT UP!”

He stood up from his computer chair and I instinctively rose from the settee I’d been slouched on. He came at me, spittle flying from his dry lips. “Dumb bitch, you think you know everything, don’t you?”

I could feel my knees trembling. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut. “I don’t think I know everything,” I said.

“Damn right, you don’t,” he said. “Because you’re stupid too.”

“No I’m not.”

“YES YOU ARE!”

I flinch, and then he begins closing the gap between us. Not good.

I stuff my phone into my jeans back pocket and keep moving: down the hall, past the kitchenette … until I eventually back into the front door of our flat.

Angel Dionne, "Sardines"

 

Angel T. Dionne is an Associate Professor of English literature at the University of Moncton Edmundston campus. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Pretoria, and she is the founder/head editor of Vroom Lit Magazine. Her writing has been featured in several journals and anthologies. She is the author of a full-length collection of short fiction, Sardines (ClarionLit, 2023) and two chapbooks, Inanimate Objects (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and Mormyridae (LJMcD Communications, forthcoming). She also served as co-editor for Rape Culture 101: Programming Change (Demeter Press, 2020). She currently lives in Canada with her wife and cats. 

About Sardines
It is a universal enough truth that human beings are social by nature. There is space within us which normally fills up with relationships and rich experiences. When we are rendered solitary by circumstance or temperament, however, that space fills instead with the symptoms of loneliness. Angel Dionne’s dry, observant short stories pull back the lid of that claustrophobic way of life, giving us a vantage on the minor existential pains of people talking most often to themselves.

In this, the author’s first collection, readers will find twelve tinned tales of a world both familiar and disquietingly austere. For all of her economy of expression, Dionne’s investigations into the scenes - hair salon, butcher’s, library, zoo, café - and occurrences - a read-through of the paper, a conversation at the cash-out, an inquiry into the open job - of everyday life are meticulously observed.

Dionne’s story-telling is a kind of narrative atomic theory, in the same philosophical school as the writing of Nancy Huston, Édouard Louis, Valeria Luiselli, Thomas Bernhard, I. L. Peretz. Life, Dionne shows, is not so abstract or so complex that it cannot be made sense of. With sympathy, wit, and a relentless eye for detail, she demonstrates how to discern the commonplace minutiae of human existence, and how to see the ways they interact and compound until the mundane begins to resonate with human meaning.

You can read more about Sardines on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories in the collection. 

From Sardines, by Angel Dionne

Sardines (excerpt)

Antoine had always marveled at the way the concrete walls and darkened windows of city buildings were transformed at night. By day, they stood benign, but at night they rose and became towering giants looming high over narrow streets. The tenement buildings and brick storefronts, in crowded desperation, attempted to blot out the moon, and the city sank into a tepid darkness from which Antoine wasn’t certain it would ever rise.

Antoine had been born in this city, had grown up in this city, had toiled and agonized and would, as far as he was concerned, die in this city. At sixty-two years of age, he awaited death like one awaits a long-departed lover. He occupied a little ground-floor apartment in a tenement building, facing neither the sunlight by day or the damp luminescence of moonlight by evening — the perfect place for a forgotten pensioner burdened with arthritis and a stubborn cough.

Although thin-walled, the apartment was good enough to suit him. It wasn’t quite home. In fact, the city never really had been despite the fact that he’d never left it. The oppressive air and colourless pavement made up the sum total of his life. Sometimes, he wished things had been different for him ... 

Charlie Hill, "Encounters With Everyday Madness"

 

Charlie Hill is a critically-acclaimed writer of novels, short fiction and memoir, whose work has been compared by his peers to Kafka, Georges Perec and Beckett. His new book of short stories, Encounters With Everyday Madness, is published by Roman Books, as part of the Stretto Fiction series. His website is here. 

About Encounters With Everyday Madness, by Charlie Hill

Encounters With Everyday Madness is a collection of short stories about the manifestations and causes of contemporary "madness." Looking at grief, PTSD, romantic obsession, domestic oppression and work, it asks the reader to reconsider what they know about "difference" and the psychological other.

Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Encounters With Everyday Madness

A New Job

Today there is a difference. He wakes as usual to a residual fear from dreams that seep and overflow, his eyes are heavy-lidded – it is as if he knows he will not like what he sees when they are open – and yet, despite it all, his heart is light. This is because today is a new day. Today he will catch a bus he doesn’t know and travel to work in a new job in a different part of town. Today he will begin again.

He was in his old job for five years. Five will-sapping, personality-crushing, energy-draining years. People there joked about his leaving. They referred to it as his escape but they were missing the point because this is precisely how he views the change. It has been a long time coming. It is not just the particulars of the position – it is, nominally at least, a promotion – but the fact that it will allow him to make a fresh start. He understands this concept is a loaded one but it is no less a necessary goal for all that, for he was tired. He was tired of his job and he was tired of the people he worked with; he had played out the novelty of spending time with "colleagues" – a word he finds strangely infuriating – who, if asked to name his favourite music or novels or TV, if asked to describe his hopes, dreads and perversions in a sentence or two, would have been so far off the mark they may as well be talking about a different person: he was tired of the fact that the incremental degradations of this supposed familiarity made him somehow smaller and less vital than he was or could have been.

Now fully awake, he is ready to begin the process of renewal. He showers, deciding not, for once, to condition his hair. He dresses in a stripy shirt before choosing to wear instead one decorated with bold flowers; for breakfast, for a change, he takes an omelette, made with a shake of soy sauce, and a hefty dusting of the chilli powder he keeps for every other Friday night. He has never eaten this much spice in the morning and the effect is invigorating; he  blinks his eyes and there it is, his kitchen, hall and bathroom the same of course, but shifted on their axes too ...