Open Up

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Clarice Lispector’s electric sentences get inside me, change me. Reading Lispector is an acutely physical experience: she’s somehow able to move through thought and plug straight into feelings. Over the last few years, my most profound reading experiences have been in her company. Her novels Hour of the Star and Ågua Viva felt like blood transfusions – I came away from both books feeling simultaneously startled and renewed. Two lines from Hour of the Star, translated by Benjamin Moser, now serve as the epigraph to Open Up: That tonic gift, the sense of truth - the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own'. T he tonic comes in large doses in Thomas Morris's debut short-story collection.' Irish Times Morris had been faithfully trying to create a novel, wedded to a process that was “very literary and painful”, when he started to cheat on it, fooling around with some seahorses. This writing project was just a bit of fun, without the weight of knowing what it was about, but suddenly there was life to it; he had characters talking to each other. “It’s the same lesson I keep learning,” he says. “If I decide ahead of time what I’m going to do, it dies. The writing has to catch me off guard. Had I known I was going to spend two years writing a 15,000-word novella about seahorses, I might not have written it,” he says, laughing.

I read this short story collection as the author was recently selected for the decennial Granta Best of Young British Novelists list (2023 edition).Morris is equally clear-sighted about his industry. “Publishing can feel like a loss of innocence — once a price is put on one’s writing, it can change one’s own relationship with their work. It took me a long time to not conflate the external financial value of my writing with the intrinsic value of writing the work in the first place. I think I’ve realised now that I write as a way of being alive rather than as a way of making a living.” The psychological impact of early losses is a recurring theme, the elusive quest for identity in adulthood that seems nebulously tied to the past. Little Wizard explores this to great effect with an unreliable narrator, Big Mike, whose feelings for his schoolfriend Rhian form the surface part of a story with darker depths, a sense of menace that is underpinned, once again, by self-loathing and loneliness: “Whoever this person was, whoever had been going around pretending to be him, they were pathetic. He took a photo, to catch the imposter off-guard.” An editor at Ireland’s premier literary journal The Stinging Fly , Morris has been an IYKYK figure in the British and Irish literary scene for over a decade. While the magazine has been the sandbox that has nurtured practically all of the nation’s biggest literary names, from Sally Rooney to Nicole Flattery and Colin Barrett, Morris has stayed relatively behind the scenes and the journal’s constant editor. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? A beautiful collection of five short stories that invoke an entire range of emotions in a dazzling, highly conceptual and striking way.

The first surprise is that there are only five stories in this relatively short book, which in the hands of another writer might be too few. Morris uses the space to his advantage, taking the reader deep into the worlds and mindsets of characters who are invariably undergoing some kind of personal crisis, many of them rooted in family and legacy, others in a more general existentialist malaise. Writing Influences: Lispector; Woolf; Kafka; Italo Calvino who once wrote that classic novels - "are like comets; they travel in time and test our own place in time”; Joy Williams Taking Care I don’t identify as a novelist and I don’t identify as British. I think age restrictions on prizes can be strange, I don’t think Granta still needs the age restriction. So there was that uneasiness with it but also, at the same time, it was really cool.

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You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Everything felt familiar and nostalgic. It was the joy and blood-thrill of being understood, of being ready to give himself entirely to another. Heart-hurtingly acute, laugh-out-loud funny, and one of the most satisfying collections I’ve read for years.’ ALI SMITH, Guardian Books of the Year They drive up Caerphilly Mountain, Gareth secretly studying his father’s head. One day he’ll be able to read people’s minds. He just needs to learn to focus harder. Heart-hurtingly acute, laugh-out-loud funny, and one of the most satisfying collections I’ve read for years.’ Ali Smith, Guardian ‘Books of the Year’

With precision, wry humour and a generous heart, Morris visits life's agonies and ecstasies.' NATHAN FILER BIRTHDAY TEETH From Etheric cord to “radical honesty” to vampire teeth implants. This is one weird story and I cannot honestly say it’s a great short story on which to finish a collection. Morris was facing another challenge, however. His debut’s success suggested a mastery of the short-story form, but he felt this masked that he had reached an impasse. “I felt at the end of the first collection I had reached the limits of my potential of the form.” He wasn’t his harshest critic, though. That was his mother. Thomas Morris, 37, was born in south Wales and lives in Dublin. Ali Smith called his 2015 debut, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing – stories set in his home town of Caerphilly – “heart-hurtingly acute” and “laugh-out-loud funny... one of the most satisfying collections I’ve read for years”. In his new collection, Open Up, protagonists include a seahorse, a would-be vampire and a lonely 5ft 3in Manchester United fan whose only female friend accuses him of misogyny. Recently named one of Granta’s best young British novelists (“I can see myself writing novels at some point,” he tells me), Morris is a former editor of Irish literary magazine the Stinging Fly , where he gave debuts to Sally Rooney , Nicole Flattery and Wendy Erskine among others. In Passenger, a young Welsh man, Geraint, is on his first foreign holiday with his girlfriend Niamh, trying desperately to hide from her his emotional baggage, fearful she will leave him if she discovers who he really is. Narrated largely in the third person, shifts into the surreal, the past and the second person voice work wonderfully to highlight Geraint’s pernicious self-loathing: “And now you must dwell in this sorry place, where the tides are drawn by hostile moons … And then you say out loud: if I treated others the way I treat myself, I’d be in jail by now.”

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Associate publisher Louisa Joyner acquired UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) from Tracy Bohan at the Wylie Agency. "Philosophically acute and strikingly original," the publisher said of the collection: "Thomas Morris powerfully interrogates themes of connection and (dis)connection as he seeks to find grace, hope and benevolence in the churning tumult of self-discovery." This story is from Calvino’s astounding, beautiful, smart, funny, cosmic, human, gorgeous, tender, inventive, enlivening, and ultimately genius book of stories, Cosmicomics, which was published in 1965. Short stories are very different; discussion about short stories as a collective entity is like talking about music and saying I like “songs” From a child attending his first football match, buoyed by secret magic, and a wincingly humane portrait of adolescence, to the perplexity of grief and loss through the eyes of a seahorse, Thomas Morris seeks to find grace, hope and benevolence in the churning tumult of self-discovery. So much of my life feels unreal tome, he told her. It's as if I'm watching it all happen to someone else."