‘Derland’ by Kathryn Scanlan

“Uncle Dick – he was always unbuckling. He unbuckled all across this great land of ours. Eventually he headed south of the border to continue his life’s work, and was never heard from again.”

I love a short story collection you can treat like an album of pop songs: play it again and again, allow it to become part of the texture of your daily life, find your own personal bangers. Kathryn Scanlan’s The Dominant Album is one of those. Sharp, sharp sentences, stories that turn on a dime, and such artful use of the em dash.

Collected in The Dominant Animal, Daunt Books 2020

‘The Candidate’ by Kathryn Scanlan

One of the things I like about Scanlan’s stories is the permanently shifting ontologies of the central characters, be they animal or human. This is achieved within a broadly realist form, but those fuzzy edges bring an omnipresent sense of threat and contingency to her stories. I first read ‘The Candidate’ on a plane at night, and in the gloaming between sleep and waking at nothing o’clock in the morning I convinced myself that it was actually about a dog, whereas on the second reading it was clearly about a child. But I love that the story could make me think that, and I think that quality of uncertainty of being is there in all her work, similar to the way that, say, Joy Williams can set out a familiar scenario and then flip the table over. Scanlan’s stories are so short and sharp that they sting; they leave you spinning.

First published in The Daily Telegaph, May 2020, and available to subscribers to reader here. Collected in The Dominant Animal, MCD x FSG Originals/Daunt Books, 2020

‘The Hungry Valley’ by Kathryn Scanlan

This collection of miniatures demonstrates the exquisite skill of revealing so much with so little. I could have chosen any of the short stories in this book. Epic in vision.

First published in American Short Fiction 61, Winter 2016 and available to read here. Collected in The Dominant Animal, FSG/Daunt Books, 2020