The Middle of a Sentence
The Middle of a Sentence is a short prose anthology from The Common Breath, a publishing imprint based in Glasgow.
It opens with a wonderful introduction from Brian Hamill, the managing editor of The Common Breath, who discusses the form of the stories in this collection. He explains that they have rejected all descriptive labels with this anthology (such as micro-fiction, flash fiction, fragments, and prose poems), since "Story is a story is a story is a story." I loved the variety of stories in The Middle of a Sentence, all of which packed an incredible amount of detail and power into a few pages, sentences, or even lines.
Hamill also talks, in his introduction, about the immersion of the reader, using an excellent line from The Overcoat (Nikolai Gogol, 1842) to illustrate his point: “…only then did he realize he was not in the middle of a sentence, but in the middle of the street…” I felt this level of immersion not only in all of the stories in this anthology, but in the anthology as a whole.
Some of my favourites from this anthology include That Here They Call Castles by Ranbir Sidhu, Blood Cancer by Wayne Connolly (his biography at the end was a delightful conclusion), Posterity by Stu Hennigan, and The Space Between by Kirsten Anderson. But there are so many more I could have named here.
Of course I enjoyed some stories more than others, but it was the experience of losing myself in this anthology that I loved. The Middle of a Sentence is definitely one of my favourite books of 2020. You can order a copy here.
It opens with a wonderful introduction from Brian Hamill, the managing editor of The Common Breath, who discusses the form of the stories in this collection. He explains that they have rejected all descriptive labels with this anthology (such as micro-fiction, flash fiction, fragments, and prose poems), since "Story is a story is a story is a story." I loved the variety of stories in The Middle of a Sentence, all of which packed an incredible amount of detail and power into a few pages, sentences, or even lines.
Hamill also talks, in his introduction, about the immersion of the reader, using an excellent line from The Overcoat (Nikolai Gogol, 1842) to illustrate his point: “…only then did he realize he was not in the middle of a sentence, but in the middle of the street…” I felt this level of immersion not only in all of the stories in this anthology, but in the anthology as a whole.
Some of my favourites from this anthology include That Here They Call Castles by Ranbir Sidhu, Blood Cancer by Wayne Connolly (his biography at the end was a delightful conclusion), Posterity by Stu Hennigan, and The Space Between by Kirsten Anderson. But there are so many more I could have named here.
Of course I enjoyed some stories more than others, but it was the experience of losing myself in this anthology that I loved. The Middle of a Sentence is definitely one of my favourite books of 2020. You can order a copy here.
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