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“At the foot of the stairs, the match went out, and he paused to strike another. And at the same moment, a knock, so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.”

A life-long fan of tales of horror and the supernatural, Sarah Water’s novel The Little Stranger is a very modern ghost story in which war trauma, grief and class tensions fuel a very modern haunting. In this episode of the Litro Lab podcast, we talk to Sarah about her favorite classic ghost story, ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ by W.W. Jacobs.

“How far could your attachment to your child go? Could you rejoin them across the gulf of death?”

She spoke to us about her childhood obsession with the Pan Book of Horror Stories, writing The Little Stranger, haunted houses, and the lasting appeal of ghosts. Listen to the interview, and Greg Page’s chilling reading of the story, using the player below.

‘The Monkey’s Paw’ by W.W. Jacobs is used with the kind permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of W.W. Jacobs.

Music credits:
"Unanswered Questions" and “Seven March” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) and licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0.

Sound effects from freesound:
Chimney Fire by reinsamba, Wind howling nighttime by dynamicell, Squeaky gate by acclivity, Footsteps concrete by freqman, Pendulum by daveincamas, Door knocks by fogma, Opening Dead Bolt by Scott-Kelly.

In the run-up to our Ghosts issue, which will go up online on Halloween, the 31st, Litro Lab celebrates with a spooky podcast. We talk to actor Robert Lloyd Parry about bringing the tales of the ghost story master, M. R. James, to the stage in his one-man show, and listen to his reading of the author's "A School Story".

The music used in this podcast is "Unanswered Questions" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) and licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0.

Flash fiction—also known as short short fiction, sudden fiction, or "a smoke long" fiction—has been around since Aesop's Fables, but it's never been more popular, with magazines and websites now dedicated solely to it. It even has its own national day.

In this Litro Lab episode, I talk to flash fiction writers David Gaffney (Sawn-off Tales, Salt, 2006), Tania Hershman (The White Road and Other Stories, Salt, 2008; My Mother Was an Upright Piano, Tangent, 2012) and Calum Kerr, director of National Flash Fiction Day (NFFD), about what makes great micro-fiction. We also hear some of their ultra-short stories, among pieces by Franz Kafka and Vanessa Gebbie.

Featured stories (in this order):

"Vegetable Mineral" by Tania Hershman, from My Mother Was an Upright Piano, Tangent, 2012.
Read by Tania Hershman

"The Cares of a Family Man" by Franz Kafka, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, from A Country Doctor, 1919. 
Read by Greg Page

"Flight" by Vanessa Gebbie, from Jawbreakers, NFFD, 2012.
Read by Claire Lacey

"Happy Place" by David Gaffney, from Sawn-off Tales, Salt, 2006.
Read by Kenny Reid

"Who's the Boss" by Calum Kerr
Read by Richard Koworld

"Of Human Kindness (Buenos Aires)" by Vanessa Gebbie
Read by Claire Lacey

MUSIC CREDITS:
'Piano Between', Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

—Emily Cleaver
See full article at http://www.litro.co.uk/?p=30641

Today we kick off a new series on Litro Lab, where we invite a writer to choose a short story they love and talk to us about why they love it. Our first guest author is Alison Moore, whose debut novel The Lighthouse—which I recently reviewed for Litro—has been longlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Alison's pick is "Adventure" by Sherwood Anderson, from his 1919 story cycle Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life, read by actor Greg Page. Enjoy, and please leave comments and suggestions so we can improve as we go along.

- Emily Cleaver
See full post at http://litro.co.uk/?p=25485