This summer, we've heard from AL Kennedy, Pete Segall and Ali McClary. We'll be bringing this series to a close with Sheyla Smanioto, but this time Dafydd McKimm steps into the consulting room with his short story The Nosebleed.McKimm tells us how The Nosebleed was a story that came to him with the ending already in place, citing the translator Michael Hofmann and his notion of Kafka time, where it's "already too late".With this type of story, the author says, "You just set the ball rolling and the characters fruitlessly struggle against the inevitability of that ending."Even though McKimm tries to keep politics out of his stories, it's a notion that feels very 21st century."We do certainly seem to be living in a world where, if it wasn't too late ten years ago, it certainly is too late now," he says. "We might be fighting a losing battle."While the sharp divisions in the bookshop between fantasy and surreal fiction are something of a mirage, McKimm continues, there is still a difference of approach."Even though you might write a secondary-world fantasy, where the world is very different to the world we live in," he explains, "it's going to have dragons or whatever, or magic exists, the tone of the world is very similar. Whereas in a surrealist story, or an absurdist story, it's the feverishness of the tone that is turned up. You turn up the dial on your paranoia, on your madness essentially, your internal madness."Next time we'll be turning up the dial with Sheyla Smanioto and her short story Intruder. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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