Output details

Ice

Stand Magazine, founded by Robert Silkin in 1952, is affiliated with the English Departments at Leeds University and Virginia Commonwealth University. It has a historical record of publishing internationally recognised authors and its impact is widely recognised on both sides of the Atlantic. All submissions to the magazine are peer-reviewed. The short story 'Ice', appearing in Stand 11(3), continues my exploration of the uses of the hard-boiled voice in the exploration of place and traumatic memory. The relation between the two works of creative fiction included here centres on their intervention in the ideological separation between aesthetic qualities of the popular and the literary. These two short stories were described by reviewers as 'high literary', though the narrative strategies they deploy were developed in earlier decades by writers in popular genre forms. These strategies, and their particular effects in terms of time and affective sensibility, were developed consciously as embedded interventions in both social politics and literary form. The works here use these stylistic effects to explore and comment on this generic history.