MARIA DUARTE, LEO BOIX and ANGUS REID review Brides, Dead of Winter, A Night Like This, and The Librarians
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Call-out for Short Stories
ANDY HEDGECOCK invites readers to contribute short fiction to our arts pages, offers some guidance and picks a few favourites
Lenin in Smolny, by Isaac Brodsky, 1930 (detail)
[Tretyakov Gallery/CC] ![REBELS: Ebada Hassan and Safiyya Ingar in Nadia Fall’s powerful debut feature Brides [Pic: IMDb]](https://msd11.gn.apc.org/sites/default/files/styles/desktop/public/2025-09/round%20up%20web_0.jpg.webp?itok=41xI6jhN)
MARY CONWAY recommends an early Shakespearean tragedy that feels so contemporary that it mirrors our daily news
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin
DAVID NICHOLSON recommends a dazzling production of Bernstein’s opera set in a world where chaos and violence are greeted by equanimity
MARY CONWAY is frustrated by a new play that loses its drama amid the moral dilemma of re-settling children in the aftermath of WWII
Acclaimed as a masterpiece when it premiered, this study of story-telling in an Irish pub more than lives up to expectations, says MARY CONWAY
SYLVIA HIKINS relishes a comedy that dives deep into Liverpool’s divided loyalties
IN the summer of my 15th year, in a room with a view of Loch Linnhe, I read The Sixth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. I had no presentiment of the enduring influence of this 35p paperback.
I still have my copy: it includes six well-written and entertaining excursions into the supernatural and two explorations of more ambiguous territory: The Door In The Wall by HG Wells, and The Grey Ones by JB Priestley. These stories have several features in common. They were written by socialists, they undermined the anthology’s title by failing to include a single ghost and – more significantly – they are narratives of transcendent complexity and weird resonance.
For me, as a teenage reader, they were a revelation. In a few thousand words – without breaking the spell of their relentlessly engaging plots – their authors played with structure, language and symbol to challenge perception and provoke speculation.
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