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Book Review: Povídky: Short Stories by Czech Women, edited by Nancy Hawker

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Telegram Books is an independent publisher of international fiction and a few years ago they published several themed collections featuring women writers from different countries. Povídky: Short Stories by Czech Women is the first of these collections that I have tried. I really enjoyed it and will definitely try to read more of the collections from this series.

The writers are from a wide range of backgrounds and thus the stories in the collection are very varied – some more overtly political and others more personal. Some are snippets of memoir, others are fictional fables. A list of all the writers, with titles and synopses for the stories, can be found on the Telegram website here.

My favourite story in the collection has to be ‘A Day in the Half-Life of Class 4D’ by Kateřina Sidonová, which follows a group of teenage girls as they battle with teachers, smoke in the boys’ toilets, joke and tease each other, and try to avoid humiliation, all during one day at school. I enjoyed it so much that this story alone would make the book a keeper.

I was also amused by ‘The Path of Medium Sinfulness’, by Viola Fischerová, about a little boy who struggles with the idea that animals don’t go to heaven, after the death of his pet dog, and the imaginative bargain he makes in the end. ‘How I Went to School’, by Tera Fabiánová, is a memoir about going to school as a Roma girl, which was shocking and sad but is written with enough comedy to make it easy to read.

I would recommend Povídky to readers that enjoy short fiction and that would like to broaden their horizons.

Book Review: Good Bones, by Margaret Atwood

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Photo by Just Chaos

Good Bones is a collection of (very) short stories by Margaret Atwood, probably best-known and loved for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. I picked this up in hardback at a university book sale I organised a couple of years ago, having previously read The Handmaid’s Tale and Negotiating With The Dead, a collection of essays about writing. I was already part way through a book of short stories at the time so it went to the bottom of my TBR, until I pulled it out to read on the train in March. I don’t read short story collections very often but this year I’ve already read three. I think they’re a great way to have a break from teen/YA books that isn’t too long! I also think they’re fantastic for commuting, because if you know your reading speed and choose wisely, you can read a whole story or more during one journey. If I’m part way through a really good novel I find it really annoying when I then have to go do something else for seven or eight hours before I can pick it up again, but with short stories, I can finish one a couple of minutes before I get off the train. Perfect.

The first short story collection I read this year was Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, and Good Bones was quite similar in that there were often feminist messages behind the stories that I had to try to puzzle out. Again, this was a nice change from YA, which is usually quite straightforward. Not that YA novels don’t make me think, but it’s a different kind of contemplation. Usually I don’t have to wonder what a YA book is about, though I may ponder the issues raised in the story at length.

Good Bones is also quite a witty collection – some stories made me laugh, or at least had me smiling at their cleverness. I enjoy it when books make me smile whilst I’m on the train because other commuters always notice and I reckon it makes me seem mysterious but also happy!

My favourite stories were ‘The Little Red Hen Tells All’, which is a retelling of the children’s story about the little red hen who planted a grain of wheat, and ‘ Gertrude Talks Back’, which is from the point of view of Hamlet’s mother, but I liked all of the stories. Most of them are only three or four pages long, even in my little hardback edition, so they’re very quick to read. Unfortunately this makes some of them quite easy to forget, but on the other hand it seems to amplify the power of others.

I would recommend Good Bones to anyone who has enjoyed any of Margaret Atwood’s other works, anyone who likes short stories, and most especially to anyone who wants to try reading more short stories.