Some Of Us Glow More Than Others

by Tania Hershman

"This beguiling collection of writing defies categorisation and is unlike anything I've ever read before. SOME OF US GLOW MORE THAN OTHERS is like a 21st century Edgar Allen Poe meets Margaret Atwood, with a sprinkling of Ursula Le Guin. The bright and sometimes eerie thread of science runs through it, reminding us of our fundamentally biological nature, and illuminating the boundaries between us an technology."
Farrah Jarral, broadcaster and doctor

About the Author

Tania Hershman is a former science journalist living and working in the UK. Her first short story collection, THE WHITE ROAD AND OTHER STORIES (Salt) was commended by the judges of the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers. She is also the author of the poetry collection TERMS AND CONDITIONS (Nine Arches Press, 2017), MY MOTHER WAS AN UPRIGHT PIANO:Fictions (Tangent Books, 2012), NOTHING HERE IS WILD, EVERYTHING IS OPEN (Southword Editions, 2016), and co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writes and Artists Companion (Bloomsbury, 2014). Tania is founder and curator of ShortStops, www.short-stops.info, the UK and Ireland short story hub. Visit Tania's website www.taniahershman, follow her on twittter @taniahershman, and listen to her read her work at www.soundcloud.com/taniahershman/

Genres: Short Stories

152 pages, Paperback

Published May 2, 2017

About the author

A queer writer of odd things, short, very short, and longer, writing teacher and editor based in Manchester, UK, my tenth book, It’s Time – A Chronomemoir, a hybrid creative non-fiction book about time, is published on July 17th 2025 by Guillemot Press.

I also have four books of poetry, three short story collections and two further hybrid books out in the world. My second poetry collection, Still Life With Octopus, was published by Nine Arches Press in July 2022, and my debut novel, Go On – a hybrid fictional memoir-in-collage partly inspired by being writer-in-residence in Manchester’s Southern Cemetery – by Broken Sleep Books in November 2022.

I am editor of the charity anthology FUEL: 75 Prize-Winning Flash Fictions Raising Funds to Fight Fuel Poverty (Feb 2023), and was honoured to be Arvon’s writer-in-residence from Nov 2022-April 2023.

Reviews

[Richard Watson]

The title of Tania Hershman’s third collection comes from one of the stories inside – ‘We Are All Made Of Protein But Some Of Us Glow More Than Others’ – and is an appropriate reflection of the book’s contents. That particular story, with its laboratory politics and buckets of jellyfish, was published in Litmus: Short Stories from Modern Science, and many of these could also have found their way into that publication. These are all stories made of modern science, and some of them do glow a bit more than others.

Review for SabotageReviews.com, full review here: http://sabotagereviews.com/2017/05/30...

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a singularly beautiful and inspiring read.

Review to come

[e.e. · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a thought-provoking, very enjoyable collection, with a wonderful title. There's no overall traditional category for these story-telling pieces, which vary in length, style - some more like poems, some flash fiction, others longer. In the intro her work is described as full of "passion and playfulness." I agree. And also "mystery". This book is influenced by her interest in science. One of my favourite is what happens (or not) when all the scientists in the world go on strike. In her final acknowledgements, Tania thanks all the scientists and curious people everywhere. And urges us all to "keep asking questions."

I love this Louis McNeice quote (from Conversation) Tania uses to introduce her book and which gives a sense of what she's about in her own writing - the strangeness of our "ordinary" human lives:

Ordinary people are peculiar too:
Watch the vagrant in their eyes
Who sneaks away while they are talking with you
Into some black wood behind the skull,
Following un-, or other, realities,
Fishing for shadows in a pool.

[theshortstory.co.uk (TSS Publishing)]

Read Rupert Dastur's full review at: https://theshortstory.co.uk/the-short...