The closest I get to knowing what short fiction is and how it works is when Ben Pester and I talk about them together. I could do this as a Pesternal Anthology. I think I might. For now, though, I’d direct you to ‘Grass Laminate’. Ben writes short stories for the voice: under and within this one, I can hear the click of a glottis, the nervous motion of spittle, the panic-whimper retuned into a proper syntax music. I feel like a lot of them could stand comfortably beside the speaker of Not I, only they wouldn’t be comfortable, because discomfited, upset, and yet doggedly continuing is more the mood Ben operates in, and it makes me feel less alone in my sense of this. When we talk, we end up talking about Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. Few people come as close to touching that book, which is my favourite one, as he does.
To be published in a forthcoming collection
A Personal Anthology 