Link 7

East of the Web and Wordia have collaborated on a new project. It's called Link 7 and this is what East of the Web has to say about it:

In partnership with Wordia, the video dictionary, East of the Web presents Link 7, a series of stories linked by seven words:

case, fast, light, note, refuse, row, wound

Each story centers on one of the words and also contains the other six words somewhere in the text. Clicking on any of those words in a story will take you to another random story that centers on that word.

Explore the meaning of the seven words through the stories, or click on the 'Wordia' logo at the top of a story to hear an author define the story's word on video.

Link 7 contains stories by Alan Beard, Charles Lambert, James Ross, Sarah Salway and Kay Sexton along with many others.

One hand clapping

You've been waiting for me to post some nasty little comment about the Pope's fractured wrist, haven't you? Some spiked gratuitous remark about repetitive strain injury. A snide reference to the lovely Georg, at the holy one's side. The fact that it was the first story on the national TV news here in Italy. Maybe a jibe about the speeding nun, with the two in the back, rushing to succour his infallibility in what the Guardian bizarrely calls a 'mercy dash'. Well, I'm sorry, but I'm going to disappoint you. This post is merely to announce that I've finished a short story that's been on the boil for some time and that I'm very happy with it. Thank you.

His right wrist. Hmm. No more Roman salutes for a while then, Benny?

Shelf life

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 website has been doling out its authors with such parsimony that I was beginning to wonder whether it would ever get to me (and Susan Straight, and Adam Haslett, who may have written my favourite, and Ariel Dorfman, and...). Then, all at once, we're being tipped out, one on top of the other, with an abandon that suggests the 2008 anthology is about to appear and space is needed, so in with the new and out, out with the old. I feel rather like something on the bargain shelf in Tesco's. Still, if you aren't put off by my sell-by date and want to see what I had to say about the O. Henry prize and various other things, click here. (Though I don't know why my photograph wasn't used. I'm sure I sent one... Should I be worried?)

PS This image has nothing at all to with O. Henry or my story (or indeed my missing photograph).

Keith Banner: The Smallest People Alive

This is an extraordinary book that finds its truths and lyricism in lives that seem to offer almost nothing. The stories are peopled by the clinically obese, retards, workers in dead-end jobs, the lonely, the handicapped: the smallest people alive. What's more, they're wise and self-aware enough to know who they are and how little they're owed. What saves them is love, or the possibility of it, of crumbs from love's table. Most of the stories deal with gay men or boys, but that should exclude no one from their power and, often, humour. I was touched and amused, and deeply impressed, by Banner's capacity to make the world he describes not only real but of value.

You can read a story from the collection here. And don't miss the links for other stories at the bottom of the page.

The Cusp of Something

"Jai Clare’s stories are filled with the disaffected, those who kick against their everyday lives, who crave the mystic when seeking their spirituality, and who are desperate to be alone as much as they are desperate to be with someone. Whether in North Africa, Greece, or Britain her characters’ concerns remain the same. To find meaning in the universal and the personal, through transient sex or emotional depth. All told with a fluid intensity of prose that cuts to the heart of them, lays them bare to misfortune and fortune, and stands them waiting on the brink of discovery."

Want to know more? Click here.

De Groei

You can find the contents page of Vrij Nederland, with a three-line extract from my story The Growing (or De Groei) here (at the top of page two). It's all double single Dutch to me, but I like the sound of deze dingen dragen very much indeed and wonder if maybe I shouldn't always be translated, immediately, into such musical non-sense. Its nursery rhyme feel is particularly suitable to this story as well. I'm teasing you non-Dutch speakers out there...

Chinese whispers

As someone who's made a (poor) living from academic translation in the past - I now make a poor living from editing my own dear language into UN-speak - I'm deeply impressed by good literary translators. I would never have read some of my favourite authors (Balzac, Bernhard, Perec, Saramago, Sebald, etc.) without them. I look at the Italian-to-English work of Tim Parks and William Weaver and a dozen others and marvel at how they manage to convey sense so effortlessly from one language to another. I do have some files of translations of poems by Pasolini and Sandro Penna tucked away, made in those heady youthful days when I felt it my duty to do such things, and I've translated a chunk of a wonderful novel by Renata Crea, a friend of mine, for the sheer pleasure of seeing it work in a second language (as it splendidly does), but I'd shy away from anything more, well, contractual. I think I'd get in the way.

Which is why it feels odd to discover that a short piece of mine, titled The Growing, is about to appear in a very smart-looking left-wing weekly in the Netherlands called Vrij Nederland (Free Netherlands). In Dutch. In the whole world of my acquaintance, I know two people who will be able to read it, so I may have to ask them to back-translate it for me in the hope that something amusing emerges. It usually does. Repeated back-translation can effectively send a text haywire, to the general hilarity of those involved. The story itself is creepy and part of a longer thing I've been working on for, effectively, years now. One day, who knows? it may appear in English too.

I remember being disappointed some years back when The Barcelona Review did a story called The Time it Takes because I was under the impression they translated everything they published into both Spanish and Catalan and I was dying to see what it read like in both. But my impression, alas, was wrong and the story remained as it was. And now it feels oddly incomplete.

Invitation

This title is both what it says and the name of a story by a fine short story writer, Maria Donovan, which you can hear on Radio 4 at 3.30 pm on 21 June (i.e. later today). The summer solstice, in case you didn't know.The story comes from a recently published collection, Pumping Up Napoleon, the title story of which can still be read on East of the Web. See somewhere down to the right for the link (I know. I'm tired.)

If you miss the story and want to hear it you can go to the Radio 4 website and then the Afternoon Reading page and click on Thursday. Or go to Radio 4 and their Listen Again page. Whatever you do, enjoy!

The Crack

A story of mine is posted at East of the Web. If you'd like to read it, you can click above the cover image to the right of this (it's the picture of the orange cat), or here.

I hope you like it.

An Easter Tale

Thirty years ago, I went from Turin to Rome for Easter, with two friends, Charlie and Sue, and Sue’s dog, a boxer called Lucifero. We looked for a room in the centre of Bologna, but nowhere would take Lucifero and Sue refused to leave him asleep in the car, convinced he’d be stolen and used for breeding purposes. Finally, when it was almost eleven and there seemed to be no more hotels to try, Sue decided we’d head for Florence across the hills. There was bound to be somewhere on the road, she said.

We’d been driving for half an hour along ever darker, steeper roads when we came to a village. There was a scattering of houses and then a church and what seemed to be shops. All the shutters were closed, except for those of a small bar in the central square. A tall man with a yellow pullover was turning off the lights behind the counter as I ran in. ‘Prego,’ he said. ‘Un albergo,’ I stammered. ‘Cerco un albergo.’ He shook his head. I watched him as he glanced behind me, towards the corner of the bar, then turned to see what he was looking at.

Four old men were playing cards around a table. I hadn’t noticed them as I came in. They had earth-coloured clothes and stubby workmen’s hands, the creased, soiled cards minute in their fingers. They were playing with cards like the minor arcana in a Tarot pack: clubs and coins, cups and swords. They turned to stare at me, then one of them pointed up the road and started to talk. I didn’t understand what he was saying at first. ‘Un albergo?’ I said again and he nodded. ‘Si!’ he said. ‘Ad un chilometro.’

We drove along the road he’d indicated until, three or four minutes later, a light appeared to the left. We took out our bags, while Lucifero bounded around the car, peeing against the back wheel, taking in the air with great meaty sniffs.

The hotel looked like a converted farmhouse. A single sign above the door said PENSIONE, its light flickering on and off as we opened the door. Immediately in front of us, standing behind the desk, there was a tall man in a yellow pullover. ‘Prego,’ he said. He smiled as I turned round, and saw the table, and the four men playing cards, and one of them turning a card up with his stubby workman’s hand.

Sue didn’t believe me when I told her; I don't remember what Charlie thought. Lucifero growled under his breath, then edged towards the stairs, while I stared at the men and the one who had sent us there nodded slowly, gathering the cards into his hands and mixing them, then dealing them out.

I didn’t sleep that night. The next morning we drove back down to the village so that I could see who was in the bar. The building was there, exactly as it had been the night before, but there was no bar, only a door and a doorbell, with a column of names. I stood in the square, looking round wildly, until a woman walked across from one of the shops and asked me what I wanted. Was I lost? I asked her about the bar. She shook her head, and smiled. I climbed back into the car.

‘You must have been dreaming,’ said Sue.