Florida in the eponymous novel stands for “good health all the time”. The character determines the landscape the landscape shapes the character. Are you looking to upend conventional expectations of the relationship between landscape and narrative? The Hollywood of the title story is not the blank, affectless place described in some fiction but a tumultuous, emotional one, while your novel Florida isn’t set in Florida. I am happy when either novel or story has my full attention. Stories simply strike: any experience serves as trip wire. I had hoped to make Pure Hollywood a novel, but it turned into a novella broadly defined as a novel with story-like economy or a long story with novel-like scope. The approach to writing a novel is an ambition that when actualised has turned into what it will. Another young couple go on holiday with the toddler the mother struggles to love.ĭo you approach writing your novels and short stories in different ways, and what are the virtues of writing each? A newlywed couple fall in with a misanthropic painter, who is scarred by love. In the title story a widowed actor drives to the desert to find her roots but witnesses extreme violence, sparingly told. Pulitzer Prize-finalist Christine Schutt returns to the short story form that launched her career with Pure Hollywood (And Other Stories, paperback £8.99, Kindle £7) and opens up private worlds of longing and danger with what one critic has called her “exquisitely weird writing”.
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