Another playful writer, and one who is happy to get very ‘meta’ with the reader. The collection from which it comes includes a story composed of fictional book reviews, a fictional memoir compiled as an author’s account of their own bibliography, a story about (and written on) a malfunctioning typewriter, and many such conceits. What is impressive about them is how well they work: we are not simply admiring the literary equivalent of a dog riding a unicycle.

I could have chosen several stories here, but my first choice is The Examination. If this were a flash fiction – and it’s only slightly too long to qualify – it would be called a hermit crab flash: a story snuck into a different verbal form. Here, in the format of a Rwandan English Examination Answer Sheet, we see a young man’s examination answers that – while they conform to the chosen form – tell a heartbreaking personal story. We learn, for example, that he has the eight-letter word section of a Scrabble dictionary carried with him for five years in refugee camps. “There are so many of these words like LOVINGLY, MERCIFUL and OPTIMISM, and my father’s name, INNOCENT. There is also GENOCIDE.”

What is hinted at in that answer is revealed in the response to a Composition question, describing “A wedding you once intended”, where the full personal horror of civil war between rival tribes unfolds. Yet, in a coda to an earlier question, the story ends with the young man refusing to abandon the innocence and optimism he found in his Scrabble dictionary. O’Neill’s cleverness in the construction of this story is, by now, entirely beyond the point.

Published in The Weight of a Human Heart, Black Inc., 2012