From the Independent on Sunday 13th March 2005
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Bracket: A new generation in fiction
ed Ra Page
COMMA £7.95
The third anthology of short stories by the young, non-profit publishing group Comma introduces 20 writers, most of them recent graduates of creative- writing MA courses. Such collections are rare, and high quality ones rarer still, but Page has sourced only the finest material and it’s pleasing to discover that, for the near future at least, short fiction is in good hands. I liked Sarah Tierney’s “Five Miles Out”, a quietly powerful piece about a girl on a camping holiday trying not to think about her anorexic sister dying in hospital. Anne Kirby’s “Revelations of Divine Love” veils its harsh core with some dreamy and strikingly beautiful imagery, like a picture of contemporary urban decay painted by a pre- Raphaelite. “The Disfigurement” by Patrick Belshaw is a devastatingly simple and honest picture of a man who discovers his wife in the bathroom, robbed of her dignity by death. Adam Maxwell’s “Shooting Jelly From a Shotgun” and Philip Hughes’s “About a Boy, a Man and a Duck” are both short, very punchy pieces about hidden dangers. Though Bracket is a nominally unthemed collection, there are elements common to most of the stories. The slight flaw is that there’s also a rather uniform tone. There’s an impressive amount of control on display, but not quite the space for experimentation, comedy, lightness or wildness.
