Short stories: Frank O'Connor, writing in the 1960s, famously argued that the short story is the preserve of the lonely voice. The brevity and focus the form allows, its often painful disconnectedness from any grand narrative or wider vision, microscopically renders the isolated minutiae of life as it is lived.
In an increasingly fragmented global existence, the short story, perhaps now more than ever, is the perfect outlet for mapping the experiences of the modern world.
Certainly the editor of this collection is aware of the short story's endless possibilities in the contemporary moment. Declan Meade, in his introduction, calls attention to the fact that The Stringing Fly is better known as a magazine committed to publishing new writing - poetry and fiction - from Ireland and elsewhere. As he acknowledges, this present issue is both magazine and book, thus - in a way - attempting to be both utterly up-to-the-minute and relevant, as well as trying to be a more enduring snapshot of the maelstrom that is the present moment. Either way, it is a celebration of new voices in fiction, sprinkled, too, with some more established names. And it is, fittingly, dedicated to the late John McGahern whose artistic credo centred round the belief that the writer must firstly write well, and then only out of that local engagement and understanding will universal connections be necessarily made.
Twenty-two writers are gathered together here, each offering their own particular take on the human condition. Claire Keegan's beautifully shaped story, Dark Horses, carries on with McGahern's work of detailing lives of desire and loss in rural Ireland. Philip Ó Ceallaigh's A Very Unsettled Summer is written in a clear, uncomplicated prose, impeccably matching a deliciously clever story centred on the power struggles inherent in relationships. Kathleen Murray's Your Star Is In The Ascendancy excellently captures the nuances of a complicated life that requires juggling the demands of work and family and love.
Diversity is the key to this anthology's success. Realism is juxtaposed with the fantastic; the world of youth with its drugs and casual sex is found side-by-side with stories of seemingly more mundane lives. DW Lewis's She Fed Her Heart on Fantasies is set in a dystopian future of consumerism gone mad where designer cosmetic surgery - in the form of body and organ transplants - is all the rage. Nonetheless, even in this imagined world of science fiction, basic human wants and needs prevail. Róisín McDermott's Desire centres on an unfulfilled relationship between a professor and his student, the title itself encapsulating the taut reality of wanting but not being able to finally possess. In Words Spoken Aiden O'Reilly brilliantly offers the reader a story of contemporary Dublin and the ordinary choices made in order to simply get by and survive.
International writers are also well represented. Toby Litt's tourbusting4 is a somewhat slight story about a rock band that decides to go back on the road.
More thoughtful and powerful, though, is David Albahari's Holding Hands. A writer and translator from Serbia, now living in Canada, his story delicately focuses on the rituals and the customs of everyday interaction, honouring the need for those precious moments of human contact.
Traditionally fiction promised its readers knowledge - of people and places, of lives not their own. Perhaps that kind of ultimate knowledge was never really attainable, such understanding always just maddeningly beyond our grasp. Now, of course, when all aspects of life appear to be reducible to a category or a specific group, stories that play with the possibility of such knowledge challenge our conception of the status quo. These stories, which revel in mood and atmosphere, do precisely that, offering us images and depictions of the way we live now. Because of this, the aptly named These Are Our Lives is a collection worth having.
Derek Hand was awarded a Research Fellowship 2005-2006 from St Patrick's College, Drumcondra where he teaches in the English Department. He has just edited a special issue of the Irish University Review on the work of John Banville
These Are Our Lives: Stories. Edited by Declan Meade. The Stinging Fly Press, 203pp. €12