I’ve been leafing over short stories lately because I’m time-poor. I can commit to a whole story without knowing I’ll have to tear myself away and wade back in repeatedly. Earlier this year, I picked up two books of short works simultaneously: Shooting the Fox by Marion Halligan, and The Invisible Thread, an anthology celebrating 100 years of writing in Canberra, edited by Irma Gold.

Halligan’s short stories entice me to keep the book by my bedside. I’ve read the collection one story at a time, often aloud to my partner before sleep, and always in the same setting. It doesn’t matter if the story’s narrator is an adulterous, wealthy, middle-aged man, or a wary third wife waiting to discover the limitations of her eerily generous new marriage. I must always be in the same place, committing the same pre-reading rituals, ready to fall beneath the spell of Shooting the Fox.