Something Special, Something Rare - short stories by various authors: book review

Something Special,Something Rare: Outstanding Short Stories by Australian Women (2015) is a compilation of 20 short stories.

The themes of the stories are wide and diverse, incorporating bushfires, rural life, dogs, childhood, school, adolescent sex, nostalgia, friendships, men, father-son relationships, mother-daughter relationships, families, brothers, pregnancy, children, the meaning of life, lies, loss, sadness, and death, but rarely about career and work.

Many are personal, including stream of consciousness, while some are stories told in the third person. The third person is not only a woman’s voice, but there are a few short stories written using a man’s personae.

I liked ‘One of the Girls’ by Gillian Essex, first published in 2010. It is a mother and teenage daughter relationship from the mother’s perspective in stream of consciousness: one long sentence. Essex’s stream of consciousness is easier to read and more understandable than James Joyce’s 1922 novel, Ulysses.

I also liked ‘The New Dark Age’ by Joan London, first published in 2002. George is a recovering cancer survivor who returns to work in his own music store, called George’s. The long short story, written in the third person, is a tender piece. ‘He’d put on Kancheli’s Abii Me Viderem. He’d been longing for it all evening. He was listening these days to composers from small, almost unforgotten countries on the outskirts of the old Soviet Union. Countries which had known great suffering. Kancheli was Georgian. There was something pure and unsparing about this music, like walking over a strange harsh landscape. I turned away so as not to see, that was what Abii Me Viderem meant.’

All of the short stories were previously published in Australia from 2001 to 2014. Contributors include: Rebekah Clarkson, Tegan Bennett Daylight, Gillian Essex, Delia Falconer, Kate Grenville, Sonya Hartnett, Karen Hitchcock, Cate Kennedy, Anna Krien, Isabelle Li, Joan London, Fiona McFarlane, Gillian Mears, Favel Parrett, Alice Pung, Penni Russon, Mandy Sayer, Brenda Walker, Tara June Winch, and Charlotte Wood.

The writers come from varied backgrounds including indigenous Australian, Asian, Chilean, and European, and from all ages, with the common element being that they are all are award winning authors.

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