Firebird 1: Writing Today

Firebird #1

by Tim Binding (Editor), William Trevor (Contributor), Graham Greene (Contributor)

Scenes from an Opera by Ron Butlin
First Snow of the year by Dermot Healy
Thoughts by Desmond Hogan
Not While the Giro by James Kelman
Life Drawing by Bernard McLaverty
America by Clive Sinclair
The Watch by Graham Swift

336 pages, Hardcover

First published December 16, 1982

About the author

Novelist Tim Binding was born in Germany in 1947. A former editor at Penguin Books in London, he is a part-time commissioning editor at London publishers Simon & Schuster. He is the author of the novels, In the Kingdom of Air (1993), A Perfect Execution (1996) (shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize), Island Madness (1998), set on Guernsey during the Second World War, and Man Overboard (2005).

He co-wrote a comedy drama series for BBC television in 1998, entitled The Last Salute, working with Simon Nye, creator of the Men Behaving Badly comedy series. On Ilkley Moor: The Story of an English Town (2001), is a memoir and history of the area where he grew up. Anthem, a moving and entertaining story of the horror of war and its consequences, was published in 2003. His latest novel is Sylvie and the Songman (2008) and is illustrated by Angela Barrett.


Tim Binding lives in Kent with his wife and daughter.

Reviews

[Izy Carney · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. I bought this book at a bookstall under a bridge in London. I love short stories, and it's harder to find a collection of short stories from lots of authors rather than just one, so I was excited to read this book which featured a bunch of British authors. Unfortunately, it seems like in the 80s the literary world required that all short stories have some weird or violent sex thing in order to make it interesting (read "The Comedy of the White Dog" if you want to know what I mean). If a story didn't have some weird sex thing, it instead featured Englishmen being uncomfortable in previously colonized countries and wondering why everyone hated them.

The best story in this by far was Desmond Hogan's "Thoughts," which I would give five stars.