The Scott Prize for short fiction collections

Entries are now open for Salt Publishing's Scott Prize for novel-length (30 to 70 thousand words) short story collections from authors who've not had a collection previously published. Submissions close 31st October 2012. First prize is £1,000 and a publishing contract with Salt. More details may be found here. 

The Milton Rooms Story Competition

Stories of between 2,000 and 3,000 words, on the theme of "Yorkshire" may be entered into this competition. There are categories for over and under 18s. Entrants should be based in Teeside, Yorkshire or the Humber regions. First prize in each category is £75, a performance of the story, and publication. Closing date is 15th September 2012. Full details? Here. 

Jeremy Mogford Prize for Food and Drink Writing 2013

Entries to this short story competition should be up to 2500 words in total in English and have a food and drink theme at its heart. Entries should be submitted by October 1, 2012. The winning entry will be announced at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival in March 2013. The winner will receive £7500. There are full details here. 

Costa Short Story Award 2012

This award is for a single, English-language, previously unpublished short story of up to 4,000 words by an author of 18 years or over. The closing date is 7th September 2012. A shortlist of six entries will be announced in November and the public will be asked to vote for their favourite. The winner will receive a cheque for £3,500. Two runners-up will each receive £750. More details are available on the competition homepage.

2012 Barthleme Prize

The 2012 Barthelme Prize for Short Prose is open to pieces of "prose poetry, flash fiction, and micro-essays of 500 words or fewer". First prize is $1,000 and publication in the journal. The competition closes 1st September 2012.  More details are here. 

Glimmer Train open to submissions from new writers

Glimmer Train's current quarterly call for fiction from new writers (definition: with no fiction in publications with circulations over 5,000 copies) is open until August 31st 2012. Stories of any length up to 12,000 words may be entered. There's a first prize of $US 1,500, publication, plus twenty contributor copies. More details may be found here. 

Robert B Parker: The Professional

Boston, present day. Private detective Spenser is hired by four rich women who are all being blackmailed by the same man to discreetly call him off without having to involve their husbands’ wealth.

This, the thirty-eighth Spenser novel, is the first I’d read for some time. All the elements are in place: the lead character’s no-nonsense attitude, tempered with a dark wit and cool grace under pressure, plus a satisfyingly old-fashioned noir-ish murder-mystery to unravel. The central puzzle may be a little straightforward to unpick, but Parker’s skill with dialogue and in sketching vivid supporting characters makes this a satisfying and in places very funny read.   

Parker, Robert B. 2010. The Professional (London: Quercus), 289 pages, 978-1849162234

Stephen King: 11.22.63

Maine, present day (and the wider US between the late 1950s and 1963). Teacher Jake Epping has a dying friend who runs a low-rent diner. But it’s a diner with a secret; the backroom is a portal to 1958. Jake’s offered a startling offer – use the portal to travel to the late 50s and stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating President Kennedy in 1963. Jake accepts. In the five years he spends in the ‘time of Ago’ as he calls it, he works on his novel, falls in love, investigates Oswald and, as the drama escalates, has to fight elements of time itself, as the past seems to work to prevent itself being changed.

11.22.63 is two very different novels sandwiched together and, like several of his books, is a lengthy rewrite of a formative piece of fantasy fiction. The Tommyknockers, for example, is Quatermass and the Pit. Here, the source is Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, which gets namechecked. However, where Bradbury was able to pull off the story in a few pages, King needs the thick end of a thousand. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it may irk some.  The novel’s topped and tailed by the outright fantasy elements and these are by some way the weakest aspects of the book. However, they’re largely mechanisms to get Jake where the story needs him to be and if (and for some readers it might be a big one) you can get over the generic contrivances, then there’s a great evocation of late 1950s small town America here.

Two stories run parallel: Jake’s running of his new life - an at-times quite touching love story - and a more procedural approach to his keeping watch over Oswald. King’s able to indulge both his fascination with his own youth (in some ways the novel’s a revisiting of It, which is also referenced here) as well as showcase some of the more overt research that he’s ever displayed in fiction. 11.22.63 successfully distils several books on Oswald, most notably Normal Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale. A useful postscript from the author gives some insight into his approach and sources.

If there’s a subtext here, it’s that like 9/11, the date of Kennedy’s assassination marks a transition from some state of relative innocence to one of paranoia and despair. From bobby-soxers, rock-and-roll and drive-in movies to Vietnam in a single bound. King’s politics tend to the left-liberal and perhaps the naive and that’s a good fit for what he presents here.

Like King’s previous novel Under The Dome, the set-up (in that book, the dome over a small town) is purely a mechanism to get to a world of his creation. As portal fantasies go, 11.22.63 is a straightforward one, with much play being made of the differences in America between then and now. It’s a book happier with its nostalgia than with the thriller/SF/fantasy elements and even though it’s not wholly successful in integrating the two into a novel which works as a piece, there’s plenty to enjoy here.

King, Stephen. 2012. 11.22.63 (London: Hodder), 740 pages, 978-1444727333 

Harry Sidebottom: The Wolves of the North (Warrior of Rome 5)

AD263. Ballista is commissioned to lead a diplomatic mission into the steppes north of the Black Sea; he must work to set the nomad tribes there against each other so that they do not continue to raid territory held under Rome. His party is tracked across the steppes and subject to attacks. More than that, one of their party is a murderer, killing them off one by one.

Perhaps on a smaller scale than the previous Warrior of Rome novels (this is the fifth in the series), this is something of a fresh entry point to those new to the series. As before with Sidebottom’s writing, there’s an impressive balance of narrative, character and history (you pick up quite a bit in passing on specific Roman terminology, battle tactics, philosophy and psychology). In Ballista, the well-read barbarian, the character’s reliance on his classical reading allows both reference to the ancients and lets Ballista think smart, rather than just bludgeon his way through his travails.

The novel’s backed up with extensive additional material: maps, four appendices covering the historical background, a glossary, a table of emperors of the time, a dramatis personae. That’s perhaps a little overkill for the casual reader, but if you want to explore further and understand where Sidebottom’s drawing his fiction from, there’s plenty of useful support here.  

Sidebottom, Harry. 2012. The Wolves of the North (London: Michael Joseph), 411 pages, 978_0718155933

Ben Aaronovitch: Whispers Under Ground

An American student is found murdered on the London Underground. Magic is suspected, so the Met Police’s small magical specialist unit is brought in to assist with the enquiry.

This, the third in the Peter Grant series of novels, is a slick and often amusing urban fantasy which maintains, as with the earlier novels Rivers of London and Moon Over Soho, an impressive balance between the fantastic and the mundane. As usual with Aaronovitch, the mix of authentic-sounding police detail and evidence-gathering psychology melds with a satisfying mystery and a beguiling and slowly-developing alt-London of the occult. A few nods to the early 70s horror movie Death Line help matters along enormously, as do the occasional friendly snipes towards those whose understanding of the fantastic extends about as far as the last Harry Potter movie. Recommended.     

Aaronovitch, Ben. 2012. Whispers Under Ground (London: Gollancz), 418 pages, 978-0575097643

Greenacre Writers Short Story Competition 2012

Finchley-based Greenacre Writers is running a competition for short stories of up to 2,000 words. First prise is £100. Winners and runners-up will also receive anthology and website publication. The competition closes 31st October 2012. More details? They're on the group's website, here.

The New Writer Prose and Poetry Prizes 2012

The New Writer magazine's annual competitions for prose and poetry are now open to entrants. There are two fiction categories: short stories of between 500 to 5,000 words, and micro fiction of up to 500 words. There's no restriction on genre, though children's writing is not called for. First prizes are £300 and £150 respectively, plus runners-up awards and publication in the magazine. The competitions close 30th November 2012. Full details (including details of poetry and non-fiction competitions with the same closing date) are on the magazine's website.      

The Yellow Room Autumn short story competition

The Yellow Room magazine is running a short fiction competition and a flash fiction competition for women writers. Short stories should be up to 1,500 words and flash pieces no more than 300 words. First prizes are £100 and £50 respectively, with runners-up prizes in both categories. Stories may be in any genre except writing for children. The competition closing date is 30th September 2012.  You can find more information about the competitions and the magazine's guidelines here. 

The Short Story competition 2012

This annual short story competition is now open for 2012. Stories of between 1,000 and 5,000 words may be entered, though the organisers aren't interested in either SF/fantasy or children's writing. The competition closes on 15th September 2012. There's a first prize of £300, with runners-up prizes too. Winning stories will be featured on the competition website. Submission guidelines are here, and there are other hints and tips here. 

Flash 500 quarterly flash fiction competitions

Flash 500 runs quarterly competitions for fiction of up to 500 words. There's a £300 first prize plus runners-up awards each quarter (the next cut-off date is 30th September 2012). More details may be found here. 

Chorley and District Writers "Dangerous Liaisons" short story competition

This short story competition, with the theme "dangerous liaisons", is for stories of up to 3,000 words. There's a £100 first prize. The competition closing date is 30th September 2012. More details? You can find them here. 

Writers and Artists Yearbook 2013 short story competition

This annual competition, run in conjunction with the publication of the 2012 Writers' and Artists' Yearbook, is for original short fiction up to 2,000 words. The competition theme is "freedom". There's a first prize of £500, plus publication and an Arvon writing course. The competition closes on 13th February 2013. Entries should be emailed to shortstorycompetition@bloomsbury.com with the subject line WAYB13 COMPETITION. More details are in the Yearbook, and may be also on the accompanying website. 

Christopher Ransom: The Fading

Noel Shaker can make himself invisible. We follow him from birth to his mid-twenties; his struggles and eventual acceptance of his condition. His life is one of broken relationships on the run; he’s increasingly paranoid about being found out and captured by the US government. He ends up in Las Vegas, where he meets another man with the same condition, who offers to show him to extract the maximum from its potential.

The Fading has a go at several different genres (picaresque, character study, straight horror, Dean Koontz-ish examination of an ‘odd’ central protagonist) before settling down into a Vegas-set supernatural confrontation between apprentice and master. The episodic nature and the shifts in tone are a little awkward, and we’re left with a cliffhanging conclusion that opens up sequel possibilities. We get some hints about the background to Shaker’s condition, and there are some interesting side-effects (ability to commune with the dead), but the novel feels as though it’s been developed as it was being written rather than being wholly conceived – the rules aren’t quite arbitrary, but they come along as they’re useful to the narrative, which makes for awkward reading sometimes. 

Ransom, Christopher. 2012. The Fading (London: Sphere), 487 pages, 978-0751548426

Histflix: The Sting (1973, directed by George Roy Hill)

Sixth in an occasional series of trailers for historical movies. 

In fairness, The Sting is more a period than a historical movie per se, but with this week's death of composer Marvin Hamlisch, there's an opportunity to pay something of a tribute to a formative movie (and soundtrack) for me.

Chicago, 1936. Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) is a street-level conman, or grifter, who stumbles upon a big payday when he and his cronies inadvertently swindle a mob boss's runner out of gambling money. His partner killed in reprisal, Hooker seeks the aid of legendary conman Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) to get revenge on the gangster Doyle Lonnigan (played by Robert Shaw) who had his buddy killed, through pulling off a complicated betting scam. 
    
The Sting is a movie, not a film, make no mistake. Conceived in part as a thematic sequel to the George Roy Hill / Redford / Newman Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the movie shares some of the earlier flick's balance of lightness of touch and underlying darkness. There's a balancing act throughout of procedural thriller and levels of deceit as Hooker deceives Gondorff, both work to deceive Lonnigan as well as the film-makers work to pull a succession of reverses and surprises on the audience. 

The re-release trailer underlines how successful The Sting was on first release:

It's (pretty much) all bright smiles and jokes, with an impossible sunny backdrop (actually the Universal Studios LA backlot, where the movie was shot) some neat kinks in first-time screenwriter David S Ward's screenplay, and the sure grip of a professional job of entertainment being done all round. The Sting is very much the kinda movie they don't make any more (only the first and third Soderbergh / Clooney Ocean movies come close) in that there's a mix of European New Wave, Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks, studio-era Hollywood star power and anti-authoritarian permissiveness that makes it very much a film of its early 1970s time. A sequel followed a decade later, but with different casting and direction, it didn't make a dent in either the box office or the collective memory.

Composer Marvin Hamlisch reworked ragtime pianist/composer Scott Joplin's ragtime music for the film. Though anachronistic (Joplin died in 1917), the score remains on of the best-remembered elements of the film. 

A piano-only track, faithful to Joplin's original "Solace":

An an orchestral arrangement, also from the soundtrack:

 

Joe Eszterhas: The Devil's Guide to Hollywood

Second (after American Animal) of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas’s (Jagged Edge, Showgirls, Flashdance, Jade, Betrayed, Basic Instinct) books on the business of film. This volume is less straightforwardly autobiographical than its predecessor, taking the reader on a potted tour of a film’s production from inception to critical reception after release.

Throughout, Eszterhas, as one might expect, is arrogant, boorish, indiscreet, funny, revealing and ebullient. He defends the writer throughout, buries several hatchets in collaborators’ heads, dishes dirt whenever he can, holds his hand up to his own excesses and weaknesses and sticks the boot in to a range of other writers on film, not least fellow screenwriter William Goldman. About one third is his own experience, one third the experiences of others he’d collaborated with at some point, and one third Tinsel Town myth and legend.

The book’s assembled as a patchwork of short stories, filthy yarns and sweary epigrams; you don’t learn that much about the process of writing (for Eszterhas it seemingly involved plenty of alcohol and cigars and occasional wielding of an edged weapon in business meetings), but you will learn the importance of standing your corner, and always getting paid. 

Eszterhas, Joe. 2009. The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood: The Screenwriter As God (London: Duckworth Overlook), 397 pages, 978-0715637197

Madeline Miller: The Song of Achilles

The story of Achilles and his participation in the siege of Troy, told from the perspective of his lover Patroclus.

In some ways The Song of Achilles is a very straightforward retelling of aspects of The Iliad. The battle-lines are clearly drawn, we understand something of Greek life (particularly on relationships between mortals and the divine). We follow Patroclus and Achilles from their initial meeting through their tutorship under the centaur Chiron to being drawn into the war against Troy.

Told from Patroclus’s perspective, The Song of Achilles would make a decent introduction to these classic stories, though one feels that it’s a book not written particularly for regular readers of historical fiction or of mythic works. The central relationship feels at once domesticated and distanced (we never really get to know Achilles, or find out really why Patroclus loves him; these seem somewhat taken for granted). Achilles is idolised, not loved. 

There are a couple of narrative tricks employed, one of which works really well (a mid-chapter shift from past to present tense as the third act of the drama begins) and one of which is less successful and frankly a cheat, though one perhaps necessitated by the climax and the focalised narration.

That said, there’s lots to appreciate if not always enjoy in The Song of Achilles. Some of the supporting characters are finely drawn and employed (especially Thetis and Odysseus) if a little one-note in places.

If you don’t know the story, The Song of Achilles is a great place to start. If you do, it’s an interesting take, and the writing is clean and expressive throughout, but it doesn’t offer much that’s new. Mind you, if it ain’t broke...  

Miller, Madeline. 2012. The Song of Achilles (London: Bloomsbury) 352 pages, 978-1408821985

Histflix: The Name of the Rose (1986, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud)

Fifth in an occasional series of trailers for historical movies.


Arriving at a remote Italian monastery a few days before a debate which threatens the existence of the Fransiscan order, monk William of Baskerville is commissioned to investigate an ongoing series of murders which seem to be prophesying the end of the world.





Distilling Umberto Eco's novel into a two-hour movie is an impossible task: fortunately director Jean Jacques Annaud doesn't try. Cheekily advertising itself in an opening title as "a palimpsest of the novel", the film version strips out the central murder-mystery narrative thread (which turns out not to exist in the book version) and plays that straight, like the world's classiest version of an Agatha Christie-style remote-location puzzle.  

Though this isn't the book (something Eco expounds on in his "Reflections on The Name of the Rose"), it's nevertheless posh fun throughout, with a storming cast of some of the most distinctive-looking character actors around, some scenery-chewing from F Murray Abraham, a laconic touch throughout from lead Connery, plus killings, heresy, accusations of witchcraft, puzzles, drugs, mazes, a little semiotics and an apocalyptic finale. Frankly, what's not to love? 

Simon Scarrow: Praetorian

Rome, 51AD. Serial protagonists Cato and Macro have been despatched to the empire’s capital as spies to infiltrate the Emperor’s Praetorian Guard. Claudius is being moved against; grain supplies are being throttled in order to foment disorder and our heroes must find out who is behind this restriction to the city’s food and outwit the conspirators. As they investigate, they find that the politics of the city are more complicated and dangerous than they’d anticipated.

The eleventh Cato and Macro novel is something of a development from the last couple in the series. The previous books’ straightforward military siege / manhunt narratives have been expanded on to encompass rather more politicking and suspense than recently, though not without sacrificing regular opportunities for action and bloodshed.

The character dynamics might be a little worn (Macro’s the bluff old hand, Cato’s the rich kid with a good education) in places and some of particularly Macro’s asides a touch obvious, but this is an entertaining and dramatic piece with a couple of good set-pieces and a pleasingly light touch to the historical elements evident throughout. 

Scarrow, Simon. 2012. Praetorian (London: Headline), 497 pages, 978-0755353798

Angus Donald: King's Man

England and Europe, 1194AD. King Richard is being held hostage on the continent. At home, Robin Hood is charged with diabolism. Alan Dale is forced into both betraying Hood and journeying to Europe to find Richard so that his release may be effected.

The third in Angus Donald’s Outlaw series plays with, among other tropes, the legend of troubadour Blondel finding Richard through a call-and-response lyric. One of the pleasing aspects of the series is Donald’s willingness both to pay homage to the known legends as well as putting his own spin on matters. Hood is often a background figure, part opportunist and entrepreneur, part charismatic thug. Some of the plotting is on the straightforward side, particularly involving peripheral characters from previous books in the series, but there are plenty of rambunctious thrills here and some neat period detail among the double-crosses and frequent fights.  

Donald, Angus. 2012. King’s Man (London: Sphere), 502 pages, 978-0751544824

Sam Bourne: Pantheon

London and the United States, 1940. James Zennor, a fragile, occasionally violent academic returns home one day to find his wife and child has disappeared. He investigates to find that they’ve been despatched to the US, and that friends and colleagues have conspired against him to facilitate this. Zennor engineers passage to the States and attempts to both locate them and understand why many other young children have been ‘evacuated’ to America.

After a succession of vaguely Dan Brown-ish modern day thrillers, Bourne (Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland) turns his hand to something that’s more like an old-fashioned mash-up of the alt-history of Robert Harris and 1970s wartime-set paranoid SF like Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil. The title gives the game away as soon as you understand (either from the back cover or the first few pages) that there are children involved. If you can’t guess where this is going, then you really need to go back to thriller school.

Though there are a few obstructions thrown in the somewhat unlikeable hero’s way (a murder investigation, a femme fatale, Ivy League secret societies), Pantheon hedges its bets somewhat, and can’t really decide if it wants to go for noir pastiche (Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels do that kind of thing a lot better), race-against-time antics, or conspiracy sci-fi. Perhaps understanding the weakness / second-hand nature of its premise, Bourne doesn’t commit himself till the last minute. The result is admittedly fast-paced easy summer reading, but little more than that, and ultimately unsatisfying, and the story’s direction isn’t pursued to its full potential.

      

Bourne, Sam. 2012. Pantheon (London: Harper Collins), 426 pages, 978-0007413645

MC Scott: The Eagle of the Twelfth

Roman Empire, first century AD. Young Demalion is separated from his mentor, the spy Sebastos Pantera, and recruited into the maligned XII legion. Abandoned, he discovers over time the values of loyalty, brotherhood and honour as he develops himself into becoming an adult soldier. Demalion and his companions are tested when their legion’s Eagle is taken; they resolve to take it back and restore their honour. In doing so, Demalion comes across his former mentor, and now sworn enemy, Pantera.

This, the third in the Rome series begun with The Emperor’s Spy, takes a somewhat different tack to the two earlier books and would make a fine entry point to those who haven’t engaged in the series so far. Essentially a novel of military basic training, of youthful idealism turned into experienced cynicism, The Eagle of the Twelfth is nevertheless also a fascinating exploration into different (though allied) kinds of devotion and affiliation – to person as well as to concept (here given physical form by the titular Eagle). Scott’s careful to pay a debt of honour to Rosemary Sutcliff, as well as finding another way to explore what might happen if a roman Eagle were lost, and what it would mean to have to get it back.   

Part of the fun and appreciation in reading the novel is watching Scott keep the narrative both foregrounded and propulsive (not always easy when the storyline covers several years) but is also able to explore serious ideas about duty and obligation as well as deliver a convincing portrait of first century life, and work these into a wider series arc. I’m not sure it’s as radical and ambitious a novel as The Emperor’s Spy, but if anything it’s more accomplished. Perhaps the best book of its kind since Steven Pressfield’s The Afghan Campaign. Highly recommended.

Scott, MC. 2012. Rome: The Eagle of the Twelfth (London: Bantam Press), 400 pages, 978-0593065440

Full disclosure - Manda Scott was kind enough to arrange to have a copy sent to me. Thanks again!