The short story is my first love, but you don't necessarily marry your first love' ". The Irish Times . Retrieved 2023-07-25.

BP: You were recently announced as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, despite not having published a novel nor really being British. How has that been? BP: And they fit into this current fashion for stories of masculinity now , which are often about men having feelings, and the stories often precariously recycle the language of therapy. You steer clear of all that, however. Morris was born in Caerphilly, and Welshness threads its way throughout this book. Chris Coleman, Gareth Bale and James Dean Bradfield all get a nod by name, as does Swansea City FC, Penryheol and the University of Glamorgan. But the story locations span the broader real and unreal worlds; from Dubvronik and Split to the underwater utopia of Aberkariad which, as the seahorse Uncle Nol delightfully tells us, is “the dizziest dream made real”.Joy Williams’s sentences don’t behave like other writers’ sentences. They tremor, and I must confess they leave me physically shaken. They hook into the quiet, deep channels of my blood and they don’t let go. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned I have to space out my reading of her work or otherwise I can be left feeling overwhelmed. I have a difficulty with short story collections in that the individual stories rarely stay with me. Stories often blur together and I am left enjoying the collection as a whole without individual stories making an impact. I'm happy to say that wasn't the case here, perhaps because the stories are mostly a little longer and so have time to breathe. And while the stories are distinct (covering as they do seahorses and vampiric dentistry) there are common threads that that mean they work as a collection: growing up, alienation, masculinity, the effect of poverty and difficult family relationships. Wales' is a simple story of a child attending his first football match with his father. It’s the shortest in the collection and is perhaps a little slight, though it has all the heart that characterises the collection. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

All these elements come together to make Open Up a completely original, at times agonising, yet completely brilliant collection of short stories. Morris succeeds in creating moments of genuine emotional intensity for his characters, each at a crucial juncture in their own understanding of themselves, and the people and the world around them. In his first book, he was trying to write a really good story. Now he was trying to understand parts of himself he hadn’t encountered before, led more by instinct and following feelings rather than beginning with an idea. TM: Well, I love football. I wanted to be a footballer as a kid, I was pretty good, I had trials, and I feel a lot of men say “I had trials!” but I just wasn’t good enough. And there’s a sense of grieving still for that. I remember reading Talking to Women by Nell Dunn and in it, she just sits down with her pals and talks. And they just talk so openly, so vividly, and I realised as I read it that I don’t have this access to my inner life, and my friendship with my male friends, we don’t talk like this with each other. So I thought, what do we do? Well, we watch football.Morris articulates loneliness with great delicacy, highlighting the early traumas that could make connection difficult Thomas Morris is a Welsh writer and editor. He was born and raised in Caerphilly and was educated in the Welsh language all through primary and secondary school. He worked for Welsh TV channel S4C for a period [1] and was a trialist for Cardiff City F.C.. [2] He then moved to Ireland where he studied English and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, where he became chairperson of the Literary Society. [3] During this time he became friends with, and an early editor of, Sally Rooney [4] who described him as "the source of all her good writing advice". [5] He is also a graduate of the University of East Anglia's MA in creative writing programme. [1] Writing [ edit ] Well, have a good time, she says. And make sure you get something to eat. I’ve told your father, but you know what he’s like. 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

https://universitytimes.ie/2017/02/thomas-morris-discusses-technology-as-an-anaesthetic-and-literature-as-an-aesthetic/ Morris’s damaged protagonists also frequently seem to be in the process of accruing new harm. There are very few positive relationships in this collection; a woman tells her friend he doesn’t respect women, and he responds by asking her out; a woman lies about her mother dying; a seahorse can’t move on from the memory of a mate who could not love him. Morris’s world fills up with disconnected figures, who can’t, as the title says, “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’.The tonic comes in large doses in Thomas Morris’s debut short-story collection.’ Irish Times The five stories’ recurring themes are troubled masculinity, punishing poverty and magical thinking, fantasising or catastrophising, as characters reach a crisis point. “Poverty and precarity sneaked up on me in the stories. Poverty takes up so much mental bandwidth. It affects all my characters.”

Faber has scooped Open Up, "a dazzling, achingly tender" short-story collection from author Thomas Morris, to be published on 17th August 2023. a b c d "UCC writer-in-residence Thomas Morris came in search of an Irish wife". Irish Examiner. 2017-10-09 . Retrieved 2023-07-25. They eat outside the chippy, leaning against the window. The chips are hot and moist with vinegar. Inside, a girl with a red dragon stencilled on her cheek stands beside her dad, with a burger and a can of Coke. If she looks at Gareth, Wales will win. 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: As an aside, it seems a bit odd that he's been included on a list of the best young novelists when he is a short story writer who has never published a novel. But that isn't to suggest he doesn't deserve the accolade and if more people read the book as a result that's all to the good.Aberkariad" is a bizarre, surrealist meditation on love, loss, coming of age and the meaning of life as well as a social commentary on the culture of one-night stands and meaningless liaisons between people. Told through the perspective of an amorous seahorse (and his family) who is in pain due to the disappearance of his mother, we learn about the meaning of life. And in the last three stories we encounter Big Mike ("Little Wizard"), a football prodigy who has been told he is too short in stature to become a professional. Having just turned 30, he is frustrated at his dead-end job in an office and asks his best friend out on a date via text message due to running out of potential matches on Tinder; in "Passenger", Geraint is also on the cusp of an age milestone as he stumbles through life thinking about his fading youth and imminent middle age. His stunning girlfriend, Niamh, tries to support him and they travel to Croatia for a holiday together, but Geraint doesn't feel worthy of his other half which leads to neglecting her at her most vulnerable moments. He begins to have anxiety about the past and terrifying visions that haunt him psychologically. They stay behind to clap the players and the manager off the pitch. Gareth waves, but Chris Coleman doesn’t see him. A beautiful collection of five short stories that invoke an entire range of emotions in a dazzling, highly conceptual and striking way. 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 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.”