Tag: Christopher Burns

‘Junction’ by Christopher Burns

Christopher Burns has published short fiction and several acclaimed novels. ‘Junction’ is one of his most recent short stories and is included in his new collection of short fiction – Mrs Pulaska and Other Stories, from Salt Publishing.

What would you say to your younger self if you could meet them? In this case you are already dead.

An old man arranges to meet his younger self in a park, just before the young man is killed in a road accident outside the gates. “This can’t happen, can it?” his younger self asks. He is surprised at how he has aged, losing his hair and wearing glasses. The older man has memories of things he believes he did, in the intervening period. It is an awkward conversation. He cannot tell his younger self that he is about to die. There are musings and questions, disagreements and regrets. What can we know? Who are we without memory and can memory define us? What is left behind when we die? The story haunts us with possibilities. One doesn’t expect resolution or answers, but the reading is a meditation.

First published in Mrs Pulaska and Other Stories, from Salt Modern Stories, 2024

‘Dealing in Fictions’ by Christopher Burns

Two of the stories in Christopher Burns’s excellent collection About the Body (Secker & Warburg, 1988) appeared first in London Magazine. ‘Dealing in Fictions’ was the first of them chronologically, although it comes last in the book, which makes sense, because of its extraordinary explosive power. There’s a jolting shift of point of view, which is totally justified, coming at a pivotal moment when, like in Burns’s recent Nightjar Press publication ‘The Numbers’, everything changes. I don’t understand why Burns is not winning the accolades and prizes that some of his contemporaries, like Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan or Graham Swift, have been enjoying. At the very least, there should be a second collection to gather up some of the excellent short fiction he has published since 1988 including, for instance, one of my all-time favourite stories, ‘Nitrate’, which appeared in Shorts: New Writing From Granta Books in 1998.

(London Magazine, August/September 1985)