Special Issue of The Journal of the Short Story in English 89 (Autumn 2027) Deadline for abstract submissions: 1 June 2026. Full details here From its roots in the oral tradition, the short story genre has continually adapted to societal and cultural factors. Although undergoing mutations which have fuelled the vitality of critical debate and research, “the…
Chigozirim Nwaosu is a PhD candidate in English Literature in the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Surrey (UK). Her research focuses on the intersectionality between race, gender and sexuality and how it affects contemporary societies. In this episode, Chigozirim discusses the representation of gender and sexuality in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009…
What can fictional representations of blocked short story writers teach us about writer’s block and what causes a writer to feel blocked? Andrea Marzocchi discusses these questions with Aaron Colton, Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of English at Emory University in Atlanta, and author of Writing Through Writer’s Block: Lessons from Modern American Fiction,…
A hybrid conference convened by the University of Warwick and Manchester in partnership with the European Network for Short Fiction Research. We are excited to announce this call for papers on Ecological Futurity in ShortFiction. We welcome papers that consider the ways in which short fiction envisions radical alternative futures to a world threatened by…
During the meeting, we will be discussing Maddie’s reading suggestion: the short story “A Song for Sleep” by Bora Chung. The text can be accessed from this link. Our conversation will focus on the following key questions/themes that Maddie has selected: The first-person narration of the short story The use of language / the “language”…
The contemporary American short story lives in a context where ‘short’ has tended towards the increasingly economic. Alongside a renewed interest in flash fiction, the 21st century has witnessed an explosion in literary terse forms extending within the web of the digital age, such as twitterature and nano-fiction. Beyond the written form, YouTube launched its…