Chris Power lives and works in London. His 'Brief Survey of the Short Story' has appeared in the Guardian since 2007. His fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review and The White Review. Mothers is his first book.
The Anniversary (2023) Stephanie Bishop "In The Anniversary Stephanie Bishop expertly and mercilessly builds an atmosphere of intense uncertainty and threat. You won't want to put it down."
Seven Empty Houses (2022) Samanta Schweblin "Starting a story by the Argentinian Samanta Schweblin is like tumbling into a dark hole with no idea where you'll end up."
Homesickness (2022) Colin Barrett "Homesickness presents us with a set of characters forever losing things: other people's dogs, girlfriends, the will to live. But in the course of these stories they find things, too: courage; a crumpled sort of wisdom; the will to live. Between the comedy, and the pure thrill of the language, there's a lot of sorrow and mental illness here, but the afterglow of the stories, which settle and stay with you, is one of moving regard for the flaws and wants we battle, flee, and bargain with every day of our lives."
Fuccboi (2022) Sean Thor Conroe "A book to argue and laugh with; be appalled and impressed by. Fuccboi wrestles with big questions about masculinity and modernity, but best of all are its intimate and domestic moments: like Knausgaard, Conroe has a knack for making the mundane enthralling."
My Phantoms (2021) Gwendoline Riley "My Phantoms is the funniest and bleakest book I have read in a long time. It's also the most moving unexpectedly, perhaps, as it sets about capturing the awful comedy of a particularly English kind of sourness: one that takes perverse delight in disappointment and calamity. Gwendoline Riley's talent for making characters live, and her skill for identifying the essential moment, word or gesture, is immense."
Male Tears (2021) Benjamin Myers "Moving fast and deadly, the stories in Male Tears carry us from bleak farms to lonely reservoirs and snowbound woods. Benjamin Myers writes sentences with a charging pulse and the account they give of masculinity is a bloody one, stripped of romance and larded with wit."
Paradise Block (2021) Alice Ash "In these brilliant stories Alice Ash taps into a deep and compelling strangeness with vigour and humour and heart. This is a disturbing and moving collection, an unusual combination I'd like to encounter more often. 'I cannot look away', one of her narrators remarks; that's how I felt, too."
Natural History (2020) Carlos Fonseca "Like a certain map that appears in its pages, a map in which two versions of a city are superimposed on one another, Natural History reveals a strange reality that lives in the shadows of our own. Carlos Fonseca has written a wonderful, wildly ambitious book that builds a labyrinth from art, politics, religion, love, and obsession."
Night Train (2018) Thom Jones "Like Denis Johnson or Barry Hannah, Thom Jones's fiction thrusts you into nerve-racking proximity with the wild, the broken and the sick. His stories are so funny and so sad, and too-little read these days. If you don't know his work, this is a great place to start. If you do, you'll be glad of the chance to tune in to the final transmissions from a unique writer."
