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[[Category:New Reviews|Short Stories]]

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===[[Quick and Quirky: Short Stories with Quips! by Fred Onymouse and Ann Onymouse]]===

Quick, and indeed, quirky, are positive attributes, I'm sure you'd agree – apart from perhaps in surgeons. I like things that have a quirk, and I approve of the quicky. I've been dabbling in the world of creative writing for a few years now, and whenever anyone asks what it is I mostly write, I define it with the catch-all safety net of ''flippant''. So this book should be right up my street, being as it is a bijou selection of illustrated and fairly large-print short stories. [[Quick and Quirky: Short Stories with Quips! by Fred Onymouse and Ann Onymouse|Full Review]]

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===[[Strange Weather by Joe Hill]]===

Strange Weather is a collection of four short novels all linked by, unsurprisingly, strange and cataclysmic weather. Each novel is distinct and showcases Hill's restrained yet vivid style which takes everyday events and makes them bitingly, acerbically macabre or blindingly beautiful, often switching from one sentence to the next. As Hill himself says ''the beauty of the world and the horror of the world were twined together'', never is this truer than in Strange Weather where moments of abject horror are coupled with raw beauty. [[Strange Weather by Joe Hill|Full Review]]

===[[An Almost Perfect Christmas by Nina Stibbe]]===

Christmas – the time of traditional trauma. You only have to think about the turkey for that – once upon a time it was leaving it sat on the downstairs loo to defrost overnight, and if that failed the hair-dryer shoved inside it treatment was your next best bet. Nowadays it's all having to make sure it's suitably free-range and organic – but not too organic that you can go and visit it, and get too friendly with it to want to eat it. Christmas, though, is of course also a time of great boons. It's cash in hand for a lot of plump people who can hire red suits and beards, it was always a godsend for postmen with all the thank-you letters to aunties you saw twice a decade that your parents made you write out in long-hand as a child, and as for the makers of Meltis Newberry Fruits – well, did they even try and sell them any other time of the year? [[An Almost Perfect Christmas by Nina Stibbe|Full Review]]

===[[Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams by Philip K Dick]]===

Philip K Dick's stories were originally published in the 50s, but they are more present than past. On the big screen ''Blade Runner 2049'' relaunched the Dick-inspired cult classic to reviews of pure praise; and on slightly smaller screens, Channel 4 has adapted the author's short stories for TV. Startlingly, Dick's current relevance reaches beyond fiction and into the factual: his topics from intrusive advertising and loss of privacy to the increasing machination of society are all headline material in today's news. It is as if half a century after their inception, Dick's electric dreams are becoming reality. [[Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams by Philip K Dick|Full Review]]

===[[Fifteen Minutes by Erinna Mettler]]===

Our world is obsessed with celebrity culture - and in this advent of social media, the updates on celebrity come 24 hours a day, delivered to us on our televisions, our magazines, on our phones and our computers. In focusing on these heightened and airbrushed lives though, are we missing the more interesting and human stories that are out there? That's what Erinna Mettler considers in ''15 Minutes'' - short stories that feature celebrity encounters told through the eyes of ordinary, but no less compelling, characters. [[Fifteen Minutes by Erinna Mettler|Full Review]]

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