PAGE D'OR

Ra Page's latest short story anthology fills you with hope for the form, says Nicholas Royle.

'Bracket' (Comma Press, £7.95), the new anthology of short stories edited by Ra Page is packed with excellent pieces, just as 'Comma' (2002) and 'Hyphen' (2003) were before it. With these series of anthologies and the regional short-fiction pamphlets he has overseen (Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle), Page has demonstrated not only an extraordinary level of commitment to the short story but also an outstanding consistency of good taste and sound judgement. If the short story is in trouble (see www.saveourshortstory.org.uk) it's not for want of effort from the part of people like Ra Page. It's because of a book trade that increasingly promotes celebrity books and novelty items alongside the narrow range of contemporary fiction it deems acceptable, at the expense of genuinely ambitious anthologies such as those edited by Page. 'Bracket' is published by a north-west collective and distributed by Manchester-based Carcanet Press, yet you struggle to find it even in Manchester bookshops, never mind nationally. 'The biggest problem we face is distribution, says Page. 'Because un-themed multi-author anthologies haven't been a staple in the past, as a format, they aren't given a chance in the present.'

There's not a bad story in 'Bracket' and several are very good indeed. In Sarah Tierney's 'Five Miles Out', Cass visits the seaside with her cousins, while her anorexic sister lies in hospital, flirting with death. She connects with a boy, a lone night-swimmer. 'I don't fancy you,' she tells him. 'Good, you're not my type,' he retorts. But something about his desire to swim through the deep-water cave in the dark attracts her. Tierney creates a powerful sense of place, the metaphysical status of the dark, impassable cave difficult to ignore. Tim Cooke's narrator in 'The Priest' is cracking up. 'Two years ago I thought I had completely lost my self. Now I realise I have lost even that loss. In the paranoid events that characterise his depression he focuses on the titular incumbent of the downstairs flat. What happens when he ventures on to the Priest's property taps into one of our primal fears and Cooke handles his material with great skill and control. A banal encounter outside Tesco Metro takes the narrator of Annie Kirby's 'Revelations of Divine Love' back to a crossroads in her adolescence, a crossroads that is actually a confluence of two rivers. Kirby describes sublime moments with careful precision and evokes the brooding power of buried trauma. A sense of place is again important and a sense of wonder suffuses the writing and indeed the anthology as a whole.

Page, who was born in Dorset and grew up in the Peak District, blames the 'LateReviewification' of our culture for the difficulties he faces in publishing short story anthologies. 'Once upon a time there was news and there was arts. Now the arts side of publications/magazine programmes has to justify itself as effectively an appendix to news. Being new work isn't sufficient - there has to be a news angle. So arts has to shoehorn itself into the perceived and pre-existing interests of the news reader, who obviously is only casually passing through the arts section as an afterthought.' He laughs. 'The idea of news having to justify itself in art terms is hilarious - but the contrary is unquestioned fact.'

Some of those seeking to 'save our short story' promote the form as bitesized and disposable, more suitable for the hectic modern lifestyles than most novels. Page reacts against this utilitarian approach. 'Short stories, as Flannery O'Connor used to say, are "long in depth". Unsettling, disturbing. You can't read and digest a book's worth of short stories in one sitting the way you can a novel. Each takes its own time to percolate through. Each takes more to process than to actually read in the first place - something you can't say about most novels, which is why they don't occupy us for the duration the way a novel does. They take longer. This misconception about the short story is the reason they're marketed so badly - when they're marketed at all. It puts people off.'

Judging purely in terms of quality and vitality of material, 'Bracket' along with Page's two previous anthologies, is ten-times better than recent volumes of the British Council-sponsored 'New Writing' series published by Picador. But guess which receives ten times the marketing budget, ten times the amount of coverage and ten times as much shelf-space. Readers are being badly served and expectations could hardly be lower.

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