The Mechanics' Institute Review: Short Stories: 15 - Softcover

Deft, urgent and poignant, these stories are necessary dispatches from the now. --Jean McNeil

It doesn't matter if a story is as traditional as Dickens or if it's out there at the gleaming edge of the avant-garde - all that matters is if the story is good or bad. The work here, in this latest edition of the always impressive MIR, uses a variety of techniques and approaches, both traditional and experimental, but it coheres at the level of its high accomplishment. A fabulous collection. --Kevin Barry

Daring, intimate and zeitgeisty stories that showcase an assortment of bold new voices. These are emerging authors with edge. --Arifa Akbar

The novels and stories of the future need to tell us how to live now, not how we lived then. And the new emerging voices reflect much more fragmented, jagged experiences. So writes Julia Bell in her foreword to this fifteenth issue of The Mechanics Institute Review. How do we live now? These 28 stories take us to and over life s front lines, from atavistic violence to Odyssean victory, transcendent transdom to self-realising robots, rush-hour revelations to human hibernation. Chase dragons, flee demons in mist-mountained Wales. Share lives entwined and extinguished in firebombed Hamburg. Know face-palming patronage and chance-denying prejudice. Touch the grotesque in a pagan game of dare, excise a growth in a bathtub. Witness obsession, abduction and a toaster s primal power. Crossing genres, styles and boundaries, this collection of new writing from throughout the UK includes work by acclaimed authors Megan Bradbury (Everyone Is Watching), Jonathan Kemp (London Triptych) and Leone Ross (Come Let Us Sing Anyway), and short-story exponent Ailsa Cox. Read these stories to learn how we are living and what is worth fighting for which includes the short story itself.