'The Book of Other People' - ed. Zadie Smith

Where have I been so long? I sat down to edit my new short story the other morning. Some time later, still inside that cushioned feeling of satisfaction, I was heading out the foor for the day job when I saw my bowl of cereal sitting untouched on the counter. I'd forgotten to eat.
I used to write many more stories. Of late they've become a form I turn to when I'm all spent and need some creative nourishing. I carry novels around in my ead for years but stories I let spring into being in the moment. I was talking to Babs Horton on the Plymouth campus the other day who's returning to the form herself. She, like me, had begun to wonder at the economic sense of writing stories with a living to make. Unlike me, she's now being approached with good short story commissions. Fornot tjhat I mind any commissions cm myself, I sniff a return to the short story form as a refuge from more commercial ventures (not that I mind any commissions coming my way of course).
Years ago, under Alan Ross, the London Magazine used to genuinely excite me. They published some classic new stories - I remember noticing William Boyd there for the first time. I'm fresh from reading the recent new collection edited by Zadie Smith, The Book of Other People. It's very fine. Some writers were new to me, some famiiar, others that I knew of only as names. I managed to check in with my own abiding grief over my mother's death with Colm Toibin's 'Donal Webster'. Edwige Danticaat's contribution with its Haitian setting made me want to seek out her novels. And David Eggar's piece was very moving, the one short story I know in which sacred mountains are personified to such poignant effect. A number of stories made me laugh too. Well worth trying.