17th International Conference on the Short Story in English

The 17th International Conference on the Short Story in English directed by Dr Maurice A. Lee will take place in Killarney, Ireland, in June 2025.

Theme: “How it Works: The Uniqueness of the Short Story.”
Often, the short story is defined by what it is not: the novel. Yet perhaps the better question to ask is what does it uniquely offer that other forms of fiction cannot? What effect does the concentration of story and human experience into a few thousand words have on the reader? The shortness of form puts focus on individual experience, containing ‘an intense awareness of human loneliness’ (Frank O’Connor). It is a form that insists on removing everything non-essential and demands a ‘large deal of detection’ (Mary Lavin). This spareness requires total concentration from its reader to understand its profound wordless elements. Most importantly it seduces, with seeming simplicity, calling on our empathy; it creates a ‘transference of emotion’ (James Joyce) with a few carefully crafted lines. It is a form that is effortful, in some respects, for the reader, yet maintains a keen focus and is unmatched in its precision. What is so unique about this conference is that writers of fiction in English (Irish, British, American, Canadian, Australian, Caribbean, South Africa, Indian, Sri Lankan, Indonesian, etc.) and writers who have had their work translated into English, together with scholars of the genre will all come together to discuss that seductive unmatched precision.

Further details on the conference website.

16 September 2024

Special issue, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, ‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’, deadline extended to November 15th.

Short Fiction Theory and Practice

‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’, guest edited by Corinne Bigot, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and Christine Lorre, Sorbonne Nouvelle University

“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

(Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971. ShrThroughout her fourteen collections of short stories, Alice Munro has shown a clear interest in how her characters’ inner life and perception of the world are defined by the material things most immediate to them, as exemplified in the epigraph, a well-known quotation from Lives of Girls and women. Materiality is an integral dimension of culture (Tilley et al., 2006), and in Munro’s work, it is central to an understanding of social, gendered and individual existence, as the two are interconnected. Material things nurture the imagination, where they stick and develop as significant, unfathomable images. They embody the mystery of life, being paradoxically, like landscape, both “touchable and mysterious” (Munro, 1974). They physically anchor characters in the here and now, but they also speak to mind and spirit. They can embody connections as well as disconnections. Whether they are kept or discarded, over time, they haunt the protagonist and lead on to chains of memories, repeatedly re-membered, and with variations. They may become symbols of something larger than themselves, but more often than not they remain images stored up in memory, as so many active links to the past that transform the perception of the present. Objects act as signs that relate to the signified – and often as an index of atmosphere – but also, beyond that, to coded concepts, in a dual dynamic that binds surface and depth, that fuses realism and myth.

The international, peer-reviewed journal, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Books) is inviting original submissions for a special issue to be published in Spring 2025, that will explore material culture in Alice Munro’s work. We welcome critical articles, short fiction, and reflections on practice that investigate any aspect of the question of materiality in Munro’s short fiction.

Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:

Material domains: architecture, home furnishing, technology, food, clothing, style.
Everyday materiality: houses and their contents, the materiality of domesticity.
Materiality and social class: class markers, social distinction, social belonging, Marxist theory.
The lifecycle of things: things made, exchanged, consumed.
Things and their meanings: performance, transformation, obsolescence.
Things and social identity: politics and poetics of displaying, representing, conserving material forms.
Material forms and the (gendered) body: embodied subjects, body care, role of the senses, phenomenology.
Material forms and sociality: subjectivities, intimacies, social and familial relations, worldviews.
Materiality and remembrance: signs of time passing, change, transformation, evolving interpretation.
Materiality and circulation: exchange and consumption, technology.
Materiality and discards: remains, junk, waste.
Archeological or ethnographic situations: materiality in alien settings.
Material memory: cultural memory, monuments and memorials.

Articles should be 4,000–8,000 words long and must not exceed 8,000 words including notes, references, contributor biography, keywords and abstract. All submissions are peer-reviewed. Contributions should be submitted electronically through the journal webpage, by clicking the submissions tab here https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.

For style guide and submission details, please see https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.

For further enquiries, please contact the editor, Professor Ailsa Cox, coxa@edgehill.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is extended to 15 November 2024.

NB: This call for papers was produced before Andrea Robin Skinner, Alice Munro’s daughter, made public revelations about her stepfather in the summer of 2024. The guest editors will pay due attention to this event and its repercussions in their editorial to the issue.

26 March 2024

Call for papers, ‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’, guest edited by Corinne Bigot, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and Christine Lorre, Sorbonne Nouvelle University

‘People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.’

(Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971)

Throughout her fourteen collections of short stories, Alice Munro has shown a clear interest in how her characters’ inner life and perception of the world are defined by the material things most immediate to them, as exemplified in the epigraph, a well-known quotation from Lives of Girls and women. Materiality is an integral dimension of culture (Tilley et al., 2006), and in Munro’s work, it is central to an understanding of social, gendered and individual existence, as the two are interconnected. Material things nurture the imagination, where they stick and develop as significant, unfathomable images. They embody the mystery of life, being paradoxically, like landscape, both “touchable and mysterious” (Munro, 1974). They physically anchor characters in the here and now, but they also speak to mind and spirit. They can embody connections as well as disconnections. Whether they are kept or discarded, over time, they haunt the protagonist and lead on to chains of memories, repeatedly re-membered, and with variations. They may become symbols of something larger than themselves, but more often than not they remain images stored up in memory, as so many active links to the past that transform the perception of the present. Objects act as signs that relate to the signified – and often as an index of atmosphere – but also, beyond that, to coded concepts, in a dual dynamic that binds surface and depth, that fuses realism and myth.

Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:

Material domains: architecture, home furnishing, technology, food, clothing, style.
Everyday materiality: houses and their contents, the materiality of domesticity.
Materiality and social class: class markers, social distinction, social belonging
The lifecycle of things: things made, exchanged, consumed.
Things and their meanings: performance, transformation, obsolescence.
Things and social identity: politics and poetics of displaying, representing, conserving material forms.
Material forms and the (gendered) body: embodied subjects, body care, role of the senses, phenomenology.
Material forms and sociality: subjectivities, intimacies, social and familial relations, worldviews.
Materiality and remembrance: signs of time passing, change, transformation, evolving interpretation.
Materiality and circulation: exchange and consumption, technology.
Materiality and discards: remains, junk, waste.
Archeological or ethnographic situations: materiality in alien settings.
Material memory: cultural memory, monuments and memorials.

For style guide and submission details, please see https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.

For further enquiries, please contact the editor, Professor Ailsa Cox, coxa@edgehill.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is 1 September 2024.

21 February 2024

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 13.2 Short Fiction as World Literature

Out now – the special issue of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice , ‘Short Fiction as World Literature’

Guest-edited by Amandio Reis, the issue follows on from the ENSFR conference in Lisbon, October 2022. It includes articles on Janet Frame, Annie Dillard, Lucia Berlin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zoe Wicomb and Zadie Smith from a host of international contributors. It also features an essay by Helena C. Buescu on Eca de Queiros, and Livi Michael speaking ‘On Judging and Being Judged’ plus book reviews on fiction from Ireland and Albania.

17 April 2023

Keynote Speakers confirmed for ENSFR conference, Short Fiction: Landscape and Temporality, Manchester 2023

We are very pleased to confirm our distinguished keynote speakers for this year’s ENSFR Conference, Manchester University 23-25th October 2023.

They are:

Jon McGregor, short-fiction writer and novelist, author of This Isn’t The Sort of Thing That Happens to Some One Like You (Bloomsbury 2012)

Paul March-Russell, author of The Short Story: An Introduction (EUP 2009)

Maria Christou , author of Eating Otherwise: The Philosophy of Food in Twentieth Century Literature (CUP, 2017)

Livi Michael and Sonya Moor, fiction-writers and co-presenters of the Small Pleasures podcast.

14 December 20223 February 2023

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 12.2

Vol. 12.2 , the second of two special issues on ‘the health of the short story’ guest-edited by Lucy Dawes Durneen is now available. Lucy’s editorial
‘Breaking ourselves open: Recovery and survival in the short form’ reflects on the process of editing and arranging articles that speak to and across the individual issues, and the way in which this itself mirrors the short story’s trifold ability to diagnose, observe and potentially suture together resolutions for the challenges of the human condition, both within the boundaries of the text, and as a discrete tool for personal recovery.

Other articles discuss pandemic literature; medical short stories in the 1890s; the early 20th century US writer Fanny Hurst; monstrous motherhood in Renaissance short fiction; and running writing workshops for health workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are creative contributions from Moy McCrory, Virginia Hartley and the Chilean author Carolina Brown, who is also in conversation with Lucy Dawes Durneen. Plus book reviews on the modern short story and magazine culture and the German short story by Aleix Tura Vecino and Livi Michael.

28 September 202223 November 2022

ENSFR Annual Conference Lisbon 2022: Short Fiction as World Literature Oct.27-29

Registration is now open for the 2022 ENSFR conference, Short Fiction as World Literature hosted by the University of Lisbon, School of Arts and Humanities Centre for Comparative Studies October 27-29th.

Keynote Speakers are:

Helena C. Buescu (University of Lisbon)

Stefano Evangelista (University of Oxford)

Olivia Michael (Manchester Metropolitan University)

To register, please click on the link below and fill in a simple two-step registration and payment form:

http://eventos.letras.ulisboa.pt/evento/ensfr-conference-2022

24 August 2022

Edge Hill Prize 2022 shortlist

The prestigious Edge Hill Prize is now in its 16th year and is the only national literary award to recognise excellence in a published, single-authored short story collection.

This year’s shortlist includes two previously shortlisted writers and two debut collections, with the winner set to scoop a £10,000 prize.

The five shortlisted books are:

Man Hating Psycho by Iphgenia Baal (Influx Press)
Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell (Faber)
Dance Move by Wendy Erskine (Stinging Fly/Picador)
Dark Neighbourhood by B(Fitzcarraldo Editions)
Send Nudes by Saba Sams (Bloomsbury)

A £1,000 Readers’ Choice Award will also be presented to one of the shortlisted authors, as well as a £500 prize for the best short story submitted by an Edge Hill University MA Creative Writing student.

The winners of this year’s awards will be announced in November.

The judges of the 2022 prize are 2021 winner Kevin Barry, literary development agent Arzu Tahsin; and Sarah Schofield, Edge Hill University lecturer, whose collection Safely Gathered In is published by Comma Press.

28 May 20223 February 2023

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice Special Issue: The Health of the Short Story

Out now, Vol. 12.1 of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice . This first of two special issues, guest-edited by Lucy Dawes Durneen, is dedicated to ‘The Health of the Short Story’. It includes articles, short fiction and reflective texts responding to that broad theme from many directions, including discussions of authors ranging from E. Nesbit to Diane Williams and Kristen Roupenian; and of themes including writing trauma, the maternal body, loneliness and grief. There’s also an in-conversation with the British writer Irenosen Okojie, book reviews, and an afterword from Kirsty Gunn.

22 May 2022

Study Day on Crime Fiction Lille Catholic University, France – 7 October 2022: New Date

Deadline for abstract submissions: 31 May 2022

Modern detective fiction is usually considered to have started with Edgar Allan Poe’s three Dupin short stories and it is certain that the Sherlock Holmes short stories in The Strand magazine brought the new genre to the attention of the world. Other notable writers who helped shape the genre in the early 20th century, including G. K. Chesterton and Melville Davisson Post, stuck to the short form and managed both to innovate and to produce works which are still appreciated today. For Ellery Queen, writing in 1942, it was still possible to state that “the original, the ‘legitimate’ form” of detective fiction “was the short story” and to perceive the detective novel as an inflated short story. According to Catherine Ross Nickerson, “[t]he mechanisms of a detective narrative are more apparent in a short story, since there is less upholstery for hiding the ropes and pulleys. The shorter form also forces writers to make a more clear decision about whether to focus on the puzzle or on the character.”

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However, today, some readers, writers and critics seem to prefer the longer form. For P. D. James, this is because novels give “opportunities for even more complicated plotting and more fully developed characters” and because writers “if visited by a powerful idea for an original method of murder, detective or plotline, were unwilling ̶ and indeed still are ̶ to dissipate it on a short story when it could both inspire and form the main interest of a successful novel.” In spite of this, short crime fiction still has enthusiastic readers, as has been proved by Martin Edwards’ and Mike Ashley’s numerous commercially successful anthologies, which combine long forgotten gems unearthed from various archives and stories on a particular theme written by contemporary authors. Two collections of P. D. James’s own short stories, published posthumously, have also sold extremely well; the prolific Joyce Carol Oates comes to mind as well for she regularly brings out collections of “mystery and suspense” stories which are instant successes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Short crime fiction is published in various contexts. Sherlock Holmes’s unexpected resurrection from the Reichenbach Falls is probably the reasons for many authors preferring the open series, with a beginning but no end except the author’s death, like Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. Several authors have however produced closed collections like Agatha Christie’s Labours of Hercules or Chesterton’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. Others, like Ellery Queen, have found the short format ideal for radio or television episodes. For authors who mainly write novels, like Ellis Peters and Kate Charles, a short story may provide a useful prequel or sequel to a series of novels. Equally, while detective novels are almost exclusively concerned with murder, authors frequently use the short story format to write about other, often less serious, crimes as Susan Pettigru King does in her series of stories, Crimes Which the Law Does Not Reach, published in Russell’s Magazine in 1857 and 1858.

We are looking for 20 to 25-minute papers about any aspect of short crime fiction in the English-speaking world including stories published individually in magazines, short story series, cycles or collections, anthologies, radio and television series or short plays. Papers on short crime fiction for young adults or children as well as adults are welcome.

How to Submit

Please send your proposals (approx. 300 words) to Suzanne Bray (suzanne.bray@univ-catholille.fr) and Gérald Préher (gerald.preher@univ-artois.fr) for the revised deadline of 31st May 2022.