Twelve Stories (anthology)

Twelve Stories was a 2009 short story anthology written by Paul Magrs, and published by Salt Publishing.

Seven out of the twelve short stories in the anthology are not DWU-related, so they are outside of the scope of this wiki. In the Sixties is an Iris Wildthyme story, and Kept Safe and Sound was previously published in Short Trips: Companions.

The anthology also has an earlier, shorter version of Never the Bride, which later got adapted into a novel as the first book in the Brenda and Effie series. However, neither version of Never the Bride is covered by this wiki.

The Great Big Book Exchange also features elements from Exchange, a novel published one month prior. Enter Wildthyme and Wildthyme Beyond would be written as sequels to these stories in 2011 and 2012 respectively, but Exchange and The Great Big Book Exchange are also not covered by this wiki.

Collecting Ada Jones is about the titular Ada Jones, who previously appeared in Exchange and The Great Big Book Exchange as well.

Publisher's summary
This is Paul Magrs' first collection of short stories for twelve years. I've always written them, alongside my novels. These twelve pieces all began with a moment of observation – a face, an overheard exchange of a few words, an interesting dynamic between two people glimpsed in a café. The stories all began in one of the notebooks the author take everywhere and gradually – very slowly, in some cases – worked themselves up into full-length stories.

Some of these are macabre fables, from when Paul Magrs was toying with Gothic motifs. Some are pure dirty realism, introducing us to the messy circumstances of someone's life. Some of these stories give us a tiny sliver of 'real time', but there's always that sense of a huge backstory alluded to.

These are the stories that Margs has blazed away at and tinkered with and put away carefully, after their first publication, as they bided their time for collecting up. Some of these characters are the author's favourites: the Roman priest who takes his ex-lady friend on a trip round the Vatican supermarket; the squirrel gang of Levenshulme, lamenting the death of their most charismatic member; the boy who goes to visit a strangely-ailing talking dog on a market stall.

As with all of his writing, Margs is zig-zagging across different genres and conventions and forms – taking what he needs and what appeals to him, in order to bring to life these particular characters and their predicaments.