My Mother Was An Upright Piano by Tania Hershman

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Melissa El.

Thought, Gosh, someone wants me to do some more of this. They said something like “We are interested to see what she does next”, and I The judges was utterly life-changing, it gave me a enormous confidence boost. Writers, an award open to novels, novellas and short story collections, and toīe one of only two books – and the only short story collection – singled out by The collection was commended for the (then) Orange Award for New Accepting praise is uncomfortable, especially, it seems, for Published), to allow others to say what they think my work means, and to enjoy World (I did know this on a small scale from having individual stories What I think my own stories are about, to let go of them once they are in the To be reviewed, oh my! I learned from this that it's not important To have other people reading what really only I and maybe another 10 people hadĮver seen. But it was also terrifying, to be “out there”,

To see your name on the spine of a book, for me that I have found – and otherĪuthors have said the same – that Life Before A Book is completely differentįrom Life After A Book. But again and again, out of a very short piece, a fuller story blooms.First book, a short story collection, The White Road and Other Stories, was published, by Salt Publishing, inSeptember 2008 and it really was life-changing. These aren’t incomplete excerpts the reader doesn’t want or need any of these fictions to go on longer or somehow become another form entirely. The diversity of subject on offer in the collection is brilliant, but what really impresses is how Hershman succeeds in establishing longer, more complicated narratives within each short piece. This last example is the kind of fiction that mostly fills Tania Hershman’s My Mother Was an Upright Piano, a collection of 56 short and very short fictions that play across a wide variety of human experience and emotion-loss, irreverence, love relationships, family relationships, grief, anger, curiosity, escape.

But they are more than hints or teasers, they become like a puzzle piece so intricately detailed and formed that it no longer needs the puzzle. They can willfully ignore or resist this idea of “boundaries,” and, in this way, they create a sharp and refined glimmer of a much longer story. This week at Necessary Fiction I reviewed Tania Hershman’s collection My Mother Was an Upright Piano:īut flash pieces can also work in another direction entirely. Tania Hershman – My Mother Was an Upright Piano

My Mother Was An Upright Piano by Tania Hershman