Showing posts with label Sam Byers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sam Byers. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

Review / Audition by Katie Kitamura

 


Audition

by Katie Kitamura


The opening pages of Katie Kitamura’s fifth novel establish a nervy, fraught physicality. The narrator is meeting a man at a restaurant. She is anxious, hyper-vigilant.

Saturday, March 7, 2026

The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine review – a polyphonic portrait of class and trauma in Belfast

 




BOOK OF THE DAY
Review

The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine review – a polyphonic portrait of class and trauma in Belfast

This article is more than 8 months old

The acclaimed short-story writer brings her characters vividly to life in this debut novel about a teenage girl’s assault and its aftermath


Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura among authors longlisted for Women’s prize for fiction


Sam Byers
Mon 16 Jun 2025


That we tend to regard the shift from the short story to the novel as a natural authorial progression perhaps speaks to a failure to recognise the shorter form as its own distinct discipline. Short stories are not novels in miniature, or parts of novels pruned to stand on their own. Without the luxury of space and looser pacing, they demand of the writer a linguistic precision and compression that, at its most radical, borders on the poetic, and which across the breadth of a novel would feel wearying. Novels need room to breathe. The writer expanding their scope therefore faces a difficult adjustment: guarding against density while ensuring they don’t get lost in the space.

Thursday, December 7, 2023

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez review / Political horror

Mariana Enriquez


Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez review – political horror

Set in the decades during and after Argentina’s military dictatorship, this occult treatment of the ‘dirty war’ fuses political allegory and gleeful gore


Sam Byers
Thursday 27 October 2022


In 2017, Things We Lost in the Fire by Argentinian writer Mariana Enríquez introduced a compelling new voice to English readers. Tough-edged and tightly honed, her short stories inhabited the space between high gothic horror and cruel sociopolitical reality. At its best, her writing had a cool, brutal economy:

We moved. My brother still went crazy. He killed himself at twenty-two. I was the one who identified his ruined body … He didn’t leave a note. He told me his dreams were always about Adela. In his dreams, our friend didn’t have fingernails or teeth; she was bleeding from the mouth, her hands bled.