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Scratch Books Duets.
Eight astounding short stories written by sixteen superb authors.
Woven back and forth between two writers, the stories in Duets are lyrical and exhilarating, their drama formed by the harmonies and tensions in their creation.
It features Eley Williams writing with Nell Stevens, Jon McGregor with Gurnaik Johal, Ben Pester with Tim MacGabhann, Jo Lloyd with Adrian Duncan, Zoe Gilbert with Jarred McGinnis, Leila Aboulela with Lucy Durneen, Anna Wood with Ruby Cowling, David Rose with Roelof Bakker.
Woven back and forth between two writers, the stories in Duets are lyrical and exhilarating, their drama formed by the harmonies and tensions in their creation.
It features Eley Williams writing with Nell Stevens, Jon McGregor with Gurnaik Johal, Ben Pester with Tim MacGabhann, Jo Lloyd with Adrian Duncan, Zoe Gilbert with Jarred McGinnis, Leila Aboulela with Lucy Durneen, Anna Wood with Ruby Cowling, David Rose with Roelof Bakker.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
176 pages, Paperback
Published October 17, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 28, 2024
Duets is the latest publication from Tom Conaghan’s wonderful Scratch Books, the short story specialist:
Their publications to date, all of which I have read comprise:
- two Reverse Engineering anthologies - curated collections of great modern short stories, each story accompanied by an interview with the author deconstructing the writing process. My reviews: Reverse Engineering 1 and Reverse Engineering 2
- An original collection, The Unreliable Nature Writer by Claire Carroll - my review
And now this fascinating concept - Duets - a collection of 8 short stories, each a work of collaboration between two authors, with a brief afterword on each story from one or both of the authors explaining how they collaborated.
Prizes are not everything but it speaks to the quality of the writers featured here that between them they have won the Republic of Consciousness Prize, Caine Prize, Saltire Prize, White Review Short Story Prize, London Short Story Prize, Saboteur Award for Best Short Story, Galley Beggar Short Story Prize, Costa Prize, Somerset Maugham Prize, James Tate Black Memorial and IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. And been featured on short or long lists for the Edge Hill Prize, Goldsmiths, Barbellion Prize, Booker, Women’s Prize for Fiction, Orwell Prize, Walter Scott Prize and Dylan Thomas Prize.
The winner of the first of those, Eley Williams whose Attrib and Other Stories took the RofC Prize in the year I was a judge, is featured here with her partner Nell Stevens, and their story Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily is a great start, and perhaps typical of the style, with two intertwined stories from different perspectives - a woman moving into a new flat, and the ghost of a former inhabitant. In a particularly nice nod to the form the latter finishes the former’s incomplete songs:
Watching her, l have learned that she sings to herself sometimes too, but never seems to complete a tune. I wonder whether she knows that about herself, or is it entirely thoughtless? When I am able to recognise the lyrics, I pitch in and finish the songs as her own voice trails away - that is, when her interest in sustaining the song trails off, or her memory of its words trails off, or something better dislodges the song from her mind. On a bicycle made for two, I sing, once she's finished with her Daisys as she is scrubbing the bathroom floor; Crying 'Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!', I add while she's respooling the vacuum cleaner's cable, having given up on her Molly Malone; at the end of a particularly dispirited rendition of half of Row Row Row Your Boat, I trill the final cheery Life is but a dream. She cannot hear me, naturally - or otherwise - but I notice that her dog wags his tail in something like recognition.
This was perhaps the one story where I would most easily hazard a guess as to who wrote each part - the ghost part seeming to have Williams prose style:
There are parallels between us in many ways, of course. If I revealed myself to her, maybe it's such things that we have in common that might form a basis for any kind of understanding?
Woman to once-woman? Homeowner to previous tenant; dust to dust. I find it useful to think of myself as the dust itself, sometimes. Why would that be? Better to be a sweepable presence than an inhabited absence? Moted and moping and unmopped in the corners. Maybe it's comforting to think that people, alive and vivid and blundering and beat-hearted are pre-dust. Maybe it is comforting to think that I might swirl.
To think dust could ever be so fanciful.
By contrast the afterword to Ruby Cowling and Anna Wood’s, ‘The Backyard of Fuck Around and Find Out’, tells us “we cannot speak as individual writers; our souls are now irrevocably merged as a result of this process. JL Borges and C Rooney sometimes make an appearance too.’ The Borgesian influence on this metaphysical mystery is clear although I was unclear if C Rooney referred to an author or to the famous Wagatha Christie.
Jon McGregor and Gurnaik Jobal’s collaboration is two separate but related stories in parallel columns based on “such an elaborate set of starting points and rules that I can’t quite remember how we ended up at ‘Junction 11’”, but which appear to involve, inter alia, starting and ending parts of the stories using the lyrics of duets such as The River by Diane Cluck and Jeffrey Lewis.
Each story in the collection is strong but my personal highlight was ‘The Girl Chewing Gum’ by Adrian Duncan and Jo Lloyd, which is inspired by John Smith’s fascinating 1976 film of the same name, where a ‘director’ shouts ‘instructions’ over a scene of a busy London street, the game being that the viewer gradually realises this is dubbed commentary after the event on what happened, rather than orders as to what will. The story here imagines versions of the titular girl’s story.
We are named after a strange sensation - the feeling of stroking the soft fur of a cat, to discover later as you walk away, that it scratched you. Which, for us, is what a short story is like...
Their publications to date, all of which I have read comprise:
- two Reverse Engineering anthologies - curated collections of great modern short stories, each story accompanied by an interview with the author deconstructing the writing process. My reviews: Reverse Engineering 1 and Reverse Engineering 2
- An original collection, The Unreliable Nature Writer by Claire Carroll - my review
And now this fascinating concept - Duets - a collection of 8 short stories, each a work of collaboration between two authors, with a brief afterword on each story from one or both of the authors explaining how they collaborated.
Prizes are not everything but it speaks to the quality of the writers featured here that between them they have won the Republic of Consciousness Prize, Caine Prize, Saltire Prize, White Review Short Story Prize, London Short Story Prize, Saboteur Award for Best Short Story, Galley Beggar Short Story Prize, Costa Prize, Somerset Maugham Prize, James Tate Black Memorial and IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. And been featured on short or long lists for the Edge Hill Prize, Goldsmiths, Barbellion Prize, Booker, Women’s Prize for Fiction, Orwell Prize, Walter Scott Prize and Dylan Thomas Prize.
The winner of the first of those, Eley Williams whose Attrib and Other Stories took the RofC Prize in the year I was a judge, is featured here with her partner Nell Stevens, and their story Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily is a great start, and perhaps typical of the style, with two intertwined stories from different perspectives - a woman moving into a new flat, and the ghost of a former inhabitant. In a particularly nice nod to the form the latter finishes the former’s incomplete songs:
Watching her, l have learned that she sings to herself sometimes too, but never seems to complete a tune. I wonder whether she knows that about herself, or is it entirely thoughtless? When I am able to recognise the lyrics, I pitch in and finish the songs as her own voice trails away - that is, when her interest in sustaining the song trails off, or her memory of its words trails off, or something better dislodges the song from her mind. On a bicycle made for two, I sing, once she's finished with her Daisys as she is scrubbing the bathroom floor; Crying 'Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!', I add while she's respooling the vacuum cleaner's cable, having given up on her Molly Malone; at the end of a particularly dispirited rendition of half of Row Row Row Your Boat, I trill the final cheery Life is but a dream. She cannot hear me, naturally - or otherwise - but I notice that her dog wags his tail in something like recognition.
This was perhaps the one story where I would most easily hazard a guess as to who wrote each part - the ghost part seeming to have Williams prose style:
There are parallels between us in many ways, of course. If I revealed myself to her, maybe it's such things that we have in common that might form a basis for any kind of understanding?
Woman to once-woman? Homeowner to previous tenant; dust to dust. I find it useful to think of myself as the dust itself, sometimes. Why would that be? Better to be a sweepable presence than an inhabited absence? Moted and moping and unmopped in the corners. Maybe it's comforting to think that people, alive and vivid and blundering and beat-hearted are pre-dust. Maybe it is comforting to think that I might swirl.
To think dust could ever be so fanciful.
By contrast the afterword to Ruby Cowling and Anna Wood’s, ‘The Backyard of Fuck Around and Find Out’, tells us “we cannot speak as individual writers; our souls are now irrevocably merged as a result of this process. JL Borges and C Rooney sometimes make an appearance too.’ The Borgesian influence on this metaphysical mystery is clear although I was unclear if C Rooney referred to an author or to the famous Wagatha Christie.
Jon McGregor and Gurnaik Jobal’s collaboration is two separate but related stories in parallel columns based on “such an elaborate set of starting points and rules that I can’t quite remember how we ended up at ‘Junction 11’”, but which appear to involve, inter alia, starting and ending parts of the stories using the lyrics of duets such as The River by Diane Cluck and Jeffrey Lewis.
Each story in the collection is strong but my personal highlight was ‘The Girl Chewing Gum’ by Adrian Duncan and Jo Lloyd, which is inspired by John Smith’s fascinating 1976 film of the same name, where a ‘director’ shouts ‘instructions’ over a scene of a busy London street, the game being that the viewer gradually realises this is dubbed commentary after the event on what happened, rather than orders as to what will. The story here imagines versions of the titular girl’s story.
January 3, 2025
A three for me, right up until the last story. Apricots was beautifully written, and balanced a level of absurdist fantasy with its darker undertones better than any of the other stories...
Some hits, some misses, but on the whole I liked it very much.
Some hits, some misses, but on the whole I liked it very much.
July 22, 2025
Fantastically weird book that you should read if you are interested in the art of writing. The stories are hard to understand but that’s the whole point. The core of the book is two writers coming together and creating a story, having fun.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews