Author: Ailsa Cox

Ailsa Cox is Professor Emerita of Short Fiction at Edge Hill University, UK. Her books include The Real Louise and Other Stories (Headland), Alice Munro (Northcote House) and Writing Short Stories (Routledge).
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Edge Hill Prize Shortlist Announced

The shortlisted titles for the Edge Hill Prize 2024  for a published collection from Britain and Ireland are as follows:

  • Forgetting is How we Survive by David Frankel (Salt)
  • After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape)
  • Encounters with Everyday Madness by Charlie Hill (Roman Books)
  • Monstrous Longing by Abi Hynes (Dahlia Publishing)
  • Parables, Fables, Nightmares by Malachi McIntosh (The Emma Press)
  • Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by CD Rose (Melville House Publishing)

A new £1,000 Debut Collection Award will also be presented to one of the shortlisted authors to celebrate the best new voices in short story writing, and a £500 prize will be awarded for the best entry from an Edge Hill University postgraduate creative writing student.

The winner will be announced in February 2025 at an award ceremony in London.  More details of judges and news about the prize are on its website.

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Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 14.1

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 14.1: Special Section on ‘The Short Story and Ecology’

 Guest edited by A. J. Ashworth and Aleix Tura Vecino

 

Vol. 14.1 of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice includes a special section on ‘The Short Story and Ecology’ with original fiction by Claire Dean and Ashley Bullen-Cutting, plus articles discussing short fiction and hybrid texts by Nirmal Ghosh, Sam Cohen, D. H. Lawrence, Juliana Spahr and Sarah Moss. A.J. Ashworth interviews the American writer Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature.

In the general section, you will find articles by Karla Cotteau, Ariela Freedman and Ines Gstrein, discussing fiction by Anthony Burgess, Souvankham Thannavongsa, Anthony Veasna So and Janice Galloway. Paul March-Russell reviews Glimpse: An Anthology of Black British Speculative Fiction.  Din Havolli reviews Kurdistan + 100: Stories from a Future State

Available now at https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/fict/browse.

 

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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.

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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.

 

 

 

 

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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.

 

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
  • 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 1 September 2024.

 

 

 

 

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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.

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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.

 

 

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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.

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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:

 

 

 

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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.