The Not-Dead and the Saved – Kate Clanchy’s first short-story collection

The short stories in this debut collection possess a raw, unsettled urgency and are exactly what we need to be reading now

In the late 1990s, when I was studying writing in the US, there was much argument over the nature of the short story. Should a story be a novel in miniature, with fully developed characters – replete with backstories and clearly defined motivations and intents – and, of course, a cracking plotline? Or could it simply be a visitation with a character, a sketch, an exploration of voice or a moment in time, without the complicated demands of the novel? Perhaps short stories were meant to raise questions, rather than answer them?

This was, of course, the era in which realism’s death grip on the story began to loosen a bit. Stateside, “dirty realists” such as Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff were giving way to fabulists such as David Foster Wallace, Judy Budnitz and Aimee Bender, whose elaborate sentences turned cartwheels off the page, and whose fictions showed the influence of magical realism, dada and any host of more experimental literary strains. I, for one, felt caught in the middle, unsure if my allegiance lay with the neorealists – who offer plots aplenty – or with the postmodernists, whose language enthralled me.

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