Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories

Brian Howell is an author and teacher living and working near Tokyo, Japan. He has published three novels and over thirty-five short stories online and in print, including one short story collection in 2004 and inclusion in Best British Short Stories 2018 (edited by Nicholas Royle). His novels have often dealt with themes around Dutch genre painting and optical devices. He writes poems, is a keen cinema-goer and cyclist, and listens to many podcasts.

Brian Howell’s latest collection of short stories, The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories (Salt, 2022), is wonderfully weird. What can be done in a short story, which is much harder to sustain over the length of an entire novel, is to explore feelings and situations that are off-kilter, at odds with the norm. These are narratives that push the boundaries of acceptance and conjure feelings of uneasiness, sometimes even repulsion, but that also challenge views on how people choose, or are forced, to live. Bearing in mind these elements, I feel The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories, although not for everyone, is not only wonderfully weird, but also weirdly wonderful.