Ox-Tales (Fire, Water, Earth, Air)

Ox-Tales (Fire, Water, Earth, Air)
Various authors, edited by Mark Ellingham and Peter Florence
Profile Books, £5 each

Oxfam receives and sells £1.6m worth of literary cast-offs every month. Ox-Tales, a quartet of short story collections intended to raise more money for the charity, has been themed to represent its various good works. Earth is farming, air is climate change, water is sanitation and fire is arms control. The Ox-Tales are also helping to promote Oxfam’s new festival, BookFest, in which a starry roster of authors will give readings amid the shops’ clothing rails and chipped teapots.

These excellent collections include stories by some of Britain’s best-loved writers: Kate Atkinson, Zoë Heller, William Boyd, Alexander McCall Smith – though, Rebus fans be warned, Ian Rankin’s entry is a 200-word squib. It’s no surprise that some of the choicest offerings come from those masters of the short form Ali Smith, Helen Simpson and AL Kennedy. These three provide pieces that are playfully bookish, emotionally attuned and stubbornly elusive, respectively. I was disappointed, though, that Michel Faber’s piece is an underwhelming novel extract, when his stories are so wickedly good.

Of the other extracts, Esther Freud gives us a bedraggled British actor making a go of it in Hollywood; Louise Welsh offers an Edinburgh academic embarking on what looks like being an entertaining mid-life crisis; and Lionel Shriver writes of an American lawyer setting off for a new life as a journalist in a fictitious terrorist-torn country. All three make you want to read on, though Shriver is ambiguous as to whether we’ll ever get to read “The New Republic” in full.

One of the joys of collections like these is that you’re bound to come across something new. For me it was Marti Leimbach, whose “Boys in Cars” centres around a mother, her autistic son and a birthday party invite. A simple story, with a warm pay-off, it is emblematic of the series as a whole. There is very little that is edgy or difficult here. Just pick the ones with your favourite writers in, and you won’t be disappointed. In fact, with just 50p from each book going to Oxfam, you really should buy them all.

For more information go to: www.oxfam.org.uk