Author: Willesden Herald

Story of the Month, June 2020

In the second of our 2020 lockdown series, you are the writer. Have you ever missed a step on the stairs or turned back in fear? Have you ever given someone a piece of your mind? Are you an object of desire or the subject? Stay home.

Ed.

The Willesden Herald Short Story of the Month

June 2020: Imagine that this Page is Empty by Nick Holdstock

“As Richard tends the first patient of the evening – a young woman with black eye make-up and an arm wound – he thinks of the pills, safe in their bottle, doubly safe in his jacket, safer still in his locker. The arm wound is self-inflicted. It is too precise.”

Nick Holdstock is the author of The Casualties, a novel, and several books about China.

“Imagine that this Page is Empty” is from his collection, The False River (Unthank Books, 2019).

Society of Authors awards shortlists 2020

Direct link: https://societyofauthors.org/News/News/2020/May/SoA-Awards-2020-shortlist

It is gratifying to see two former Willesden Herald New Short Stories contributors, namely Carol Farrelly and Diana Powell, short-listed for this year’s ALCS Tom Gallon award for a short story.

Story of the Month, May 2020

Looking for respite from the lockdown?

You’ve come to the right place.

Ed.

The Willesden Herald Short Story of the Month

May 2020: The Time Capsule by John O’Donoghue

“They all fell silent for a moment. I could see them trying to look into the future, to imagine themselves as adults, married maybe, perhaps with families of their own, working away in jobs like Uncle Tommy in the Post Office, or Auntie Lizzie in the nursing before she was married, or gone to England, like my mother and father, or even further afield.”

John O’Donoghue

John O’Donoghue is the author of Letter To Lord Rochester (Waterloo Press, 2004), The Beach Generation (Pighog Press, 2007), Brunch Poems (Waterloo Press, 2009), Sectioned: A Life Interrupted (John Murray, 2009), Fools & Mad (Waterloo Press, 2014), and The King From Over the Water (The Wild Geese Press, 2019). Sec­tioned was awarded Mind Book of the Year in 2010. His journalism, essays, and reviews have been published in The Observer, The Guardian, The Times Educational Supplement, The London Magazine, PN Review, Acumen, and Orbis. He lives in Brighton and teaches Creative Writing at the Brighton Writers’ Centre.

The Time Capsule comes from The King from Over The Water (The Wild Geese Press, 2019).

New Yorker Fiction: A rare prose poem

In a change from the usual New Yorker long short story genre, the 20 April 2020 issue features a self-described prose poem by Ben Lerner. It’s a marvellous jumble of words and thoughts in search of something.
Want to know more after reading “The Media”? Here you go…

The last of “New Irish Writing”?

Terrible news but surely a new sponsor will come forward? Guinness? RTÉ? Gov.ie?

Story of the Month Submissions: Open

April 2020: Partly as a response to and respite from the Coronavirus lockdown blues, we’ve opened up the Story of the Month submssions window again. It would be great to hear from writers who have not been featured before in this online series.

Stories previously published in print but not online will be considered. Please advise details so that acknowledgement of the original publication can be included.

We have a rolling deadline of the second-last Friday of every month but often select the featured short story before then.

There is no reading fee. Recompense is limited to one copy of our latest anthology. Copyright: apart from permission to display it on our website online, you retain all rights in your story.

For full details please visit our Our Submittable page.

The New Yorker: Out There by Kate Folk

“The early blots had been easy to identify. They were too handsome, for one thing.” (Out There by Kate Folk)

This is a story about indistinguishably lifelike robots released by criminals to lure people into relationships on dating apps and in real life, in order to gain access to their credit cards and bank accounts. Or is it? It has a very dry line of wit just below the surface and a lot about not knowing whether someone is real sounds suspiciously like normal life for a woman of a certain age looking for love. There’s a lot more to it than that. It’s terrifically enjoyable in a grim, somewhat hopeless way.

“Kate Folk is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.” (The New Yorker)