Author: Karla Cotteau

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Spotlight PhD/ECR Interview Series: Maddie Sinclair, by Ines Gstrein

  1. Why did you choose to work on short fiction in your PhD thesis?

During an MA at Durham University, I became interested in the genre’s marginality in the context of literary production.  I encountered an interesting quote from J.G. Ballard which got me thinking about the hierarchy of genres and the unevenness of literary space. In an introduction to a collection, he describes short stories as the “loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit” (Ballard 2023: 80). My PhD research was inspired by this conceptualization of the short story as a kind of literary loose change in the “treasury of fiction” – a treasury largely dominated by the privileged genre of the novel. It worked to highlight the distinct political affordances of short fictional forms emerging in the twenty-first century.

  1. In your opinion, what is an essential quality for a short story?

I’m certainly not the first person to suggest this, but for me, the best short stories work to defamiliarize reality as we know it. I’m thinking, for example, about Julio Cortázar’s description of the “peculiar” atmosphere of the short form in “Aspects of the Short Story”. For Cortázar, while the novel “progressively accumulates effects upon the reader”, the short story paradoxically illuminates – through its inherent brevity – something “beyond itself” (Cortázar 1980: 8-12). I’m interested in writers who experiment with the short story as a distinct site of surrealist disruption, which potentially illuminates human experience, or catalyzes political thought.

  1. Could you tell me about something you found particularly striking when analysing the twenty-first century short story?

During my PhD research at University of Warwick, I was really struck by the efflorescence of short forms emerging in the twenty-first century which push the aesthetics of brevity to its literary extreme, such as digital fiction and flash fiction. I’m excited to read future research which unpacks the possibilities offered by these experimental subgenres, as they respond to our fragmentary yet hyper-connected modern world.

References

Ballard, J. G. (2023). Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007. United Kingdom: MIT Press.

Cortázar, Julio. (1980).  ‘Some Aspects of the Short Story’, trans. By Aden Hayes, Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature Culture and Theory, 38:1, p. 8-18.

Maddie is an Early Career Teaching Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning at the University of Warwick, UK. She has recently completed her Wolfson Foundation funded doctoral research in English and Comparative Literary Studies, which focused on world literature, feminist studies, and the politics of the short story in the twenty-first century.

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Best British Short Stories 2024 edited by Nicholas Royle

Salt Press has recently published Best British Short Stories 2024, edited by Nicholas Royle. It features stories by Alan Beard, Kevin Boniface, Paul Brownsey, Claire Carroll, ECM Cheung, Jonathan Coe, Rosie Garland, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Timothy Jarvis, Cynan Jones, Bhanu Kapil, Sonya Moor, Alison Moore, Gregory Norminton, Nicholas Royle, Cherise Saywell, Kamila Shamsie, Ben Tufnell, Charlotte Turnbull and Cate West.

 

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Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices, by J.R (Tim) Struthers, Ailsa Cox, Corrine Bigot, and Catherine Sheldrick Ross

Edinburgh University Press releases Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices, by J.R (Tim) Struthers, Ailsa Cox, Corrine Bigot, and Catherine Sheldrick Ross – an engaging and authoritative assessment of the middle period in the career of Alice Munro, and an exciting new model for how criticism can be collectively written.

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The South African Short Story in English, 1920–2010: When Aesthetics Meets Ethics, by Marta Fossati

The South African Short Story in English, 1920–2010: When Aesthetics Meets Ethics, by Marta Fossati

Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 289. ISBN: 9780198910978

This book explores – through a close reading and several deep dives into the history of print culture – the development of the South African short story in English, from the late 1920s to the first decade of the new millennium. It explores a selection of short stories by Black South African writers – Rolfes and Herbert Dhlomo, Peter Abrahams, Can Themba, Alex La Guma, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Ahmed Essop and Zoë Wicomb – with particular focus on the dialogue between ethics and aesthetics performed by these texts with regard to the evolution of South Africa’s socio-political situation.

By focusing on Black short fiction, this book problematizes and complicates the often-polarized readings of Black literature in South Africa, torn between the notions of literariness, protest and journalism. Owing to material constraints, short fiction in South Africa primarily circulated first through local print media, which this study analyses in detail, with a focus on the cross-fertilization between journalism and the short story. While rooted in the South African context, this book is also alert to the translocal dimension of the short stories considered, exploring the ethical and aesthetical practice of intertextuality. It is thus also a book that complicates the aesthetics/ethics binary, generic classifications, and the categories of the literary and the political.

 

 

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Precipitation, by Ailsa Cox, with images by Patricia Farrell

Precipitation is a collection of three stories by Ailsa Cox, two of which are published for the first time. It also features images created by the artist Patricia Farrell in response to the stories. The book is the fifth in a series of collaborations between writers and artists – the first, Interpolated Stories by David Rose and Leah Leaf, was published in 2022.

Set mostly in North West England, with excursions to Wales, Paris and the Arabian desert, these stories map the inner and outer world of their characters, excavating layers of time and memory. Two of the stories take place on the fictional street of Bethel Brow, where a grandmother nurses a long-held grievance, while two young incomers live the dream of a house in the country. In the third, the thwarted ambitions of a disappointed novelist take him on an imaginary journey.

Sharply observed and often darkly comic, they hinge upon those small moments that can change your life for ever – a missed train, a turn in the weather, or a puzzling encounter with a neighbour.

Publication: 9 January 2025 | Pre-order: Confingo Publishing | Manchester Book Publisher.

 

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Short fiction in a flash: a bite-size interview with Nicholas Royle, by Sonya Moor

Which short-story last made you cry – for good reasons?

Good question, because I thought I would be able to answer it easily. I thought about anthologies and collections and favourite writers and came up blank. I reread Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Blackness’ and remained dry eyed. The short story is my favourite form, and I cry a lot, but not, it seemed, at short stories. But then I reread Robert Coover’s ‘Going For a Beer’ – ‘life is short and brutal’ – and here they came. Actual tears.

You have a nine-hour train journey and can take one short story to read, several times over – which do you choose?

Maybe that very short Kafka story – is it ‘Before the Law’? – that everyone rather annoyingly says is better than all the longer, more obvious Kafka stories, to see if I can work out what they’re on about. Or Alison Moore’s ‘When the Door Closed, It Was Dark’, to try to work out exactly how she creates that sense of dread. Or Robert Coover’s ‘Going For a Beer’ – it’s good to cry on a long journey.

Describe your writing space, and your ideal writing space?

Seat 48, coach A, the so-called Quiet Zone, on the Manchester–London train. Seats 47 and 48 are reserved for cyclists, but few turn up. The Quiet Zone ‘rules’ are often broken, but I use earphones and listen to carefully chosen music that blocks other people’s noise without disturbing anyone and I write. My ideal writing space could be recreated if the café on the corner of Belgrade Road in Stoke Newington were to reopen.

 

Nicholas Royle is the author of five short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories, London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny – and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited more than two dozen anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who also published his books-about-books, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector and Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf. In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press.

 

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Call for Contributions: Short Fiction in Theory & Practice Special issue: ‘Uniquely Canadian Cultural Narratives’, guest edited by Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka (University of Debrecen)

Short Fiction in Theory & Practice ISSN 2043-0701 | online ISSN 2043-071X 2 issues per volume | First published 2011

Special issue: ‘Uniquely Canadian Cultural Narratives’, guest edited by Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka (University of Debrecen)

In 1972, seventeen-year-old Heather Scott submitted a memorable entry – ‘As Canadian as possible under the circumstances’ – to radio host Peter Gzowski’s contest seeking the perfect Canadian aphorism. But even before this iconic phrase, the question of what it means to be Canadian had been debated for generations. From garrison mentality and biculturalism to multiculturalism, Canada has frequently relied on such notions to define its identity, while simultaneously attempting to erase First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities and downplaying the contributions of various other minority groups. Today, amid increasing global migration, calls for reconciliation, bids to recognize and celebrate diverse communities, and official measures such as Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy (2024 2028), the question of what – if anything – constitutes ‘Canadianness’ is still open.

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 2026 that seeks to explore how short fiction reflects on historical and contemporary notions of ‘Canadianness’. We invite proposals for scholarly papers.

 

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Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) N. 80-81

We are pleased to announce the publication of numbers 80-81 of the Journal of the Short Story in English/Cahiers de la nouvelle, which is the special 40th anniversary issue. It finds a balance honoring the past and looking forward to the future of the short story and of short fiction research. Many of the scholarly articles were written by ENSFR members. It features stories by Angela Carter, Elizabeth Cox, Jill McCorkle and Charlotte Arnautou, and an interview with Lisa Alther, Elizabeth Cox, and Jill McCorkle about their ideas on the American short story today and on the genre itself.  It is available online.

 

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Call for Contributions: Special issue on Thomas Pynchon in Eastern Europe: Translation, Dissemination, Reception

Guest editors: Sergej Macura (University of Belgrade), Gábor Tamás Molnár (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)

The international reception of Thomas Pynchon’s work has not received much scholarly attention, even though Pynchon is generally recognized as one of the most influential American prose writers of our era. The guest editors of this special issue intend to focus on Pynchon’s reception in a specific region, a broadly conceived Eastern Europe (potentially including the Balkans, the Baltic states and former Soviet republics such as Russia and Ukraine). Since Pynchon’s early career covered parts of the Cold War period, the study of how his works were received beyond the Iron Curtain may reveal tendencies of censorship, institutions of cultural politics – and ways for translators, publishers and critics to work around them – in Soviet satellite countries. The period around the first wave of Pynchon’s reception in the Warsaw Pact countries is also a field of change, since introducing a US-American author to Poland or Romania in the 1970s and 1980s was a whiff of a completely new literary culture and carried with it a sense of clash between communism and capitalism. The political institutions of publishing were not the same in any two countries, and studying the publication history of Pynchon’s work can provide a lot of ground for the discussion of ideological dynamics in this part of the continent.

We ask contributors to investigate the overall diachronic context of transplanting Pynchon’s works into the recipient cultures, the political history of the region being an obvious point of reference. How did the fall of communism and the later Eastward extension of Western institutions and frameworks influence the reception of American writers, Pynchon in particular? Which works were published first, in what venues did they appear, and did they have any documented impact on the recipient cultures? Probably for reasons of brevity and accessibility, The Crying of Lot 49 was the first fully translated book by Pynchon in several countries (including Yugoslavia and Hungary), appearing around 1990. However, individual chapters of V. were published in literary journals in Romania and Poland earlier. An anthology of contemporary American short stories, named Entropy and containing Pynchon’s story of the same title, was published in Hungarian as early as 1980. The first translations often influence later ones, especially if the same translator translates multiple books. From the 1990s, decisions on which volumes to translate and publish may have been influenced by considerations of profitability, the availability of translation grants, and the (re)emergence of a readership that has had access to the international book market and could read works in English.

On a related point, we are also interested in the critical reception of Pynchon’s work in the region. We expect relatively sparse evidence of critical studies up to the late 1990s and the spread of online communication. When studying later periods, fan sites, blogs, interviews and media content may be relevant, but we are mainly interested in books, articles appearing in academic and literary journals, and MA and PhD theses. We would like to better understand the ways in which regional scholars working in American Studies or Comparative Literature have found to connect with international research trends, frameworks, and institutions. We are interested to see how the advent of the current publishing industry has influenced, benefitted (or hindered) the regional reception of Pynchon’s works. Which theories have made the most significant impact on the study of Pynchon in Eastern Europe? Which critical studies, which monographs have been the most influential, and how has the situation changed in the last two decades? Is there an inevitable belatedness in studying an English-speaking author in a non-English-speaking country, or can scholars in this region make original contributions to the field?

Overall, we are inviting one of two types of contributions to the issue:

1) Historical overviews of one or more aspects of Pynchon’s reception in a particular country and language, either in isolation or in comparative perspective. Such essays may focus on the history of translation, publication, circulation, critical reception of Pynchon’s stories, essays and novels. Such  essays could take a contextualist approach and may benefit from framing their object historically, using either traditional methods of intellectual history and comparative literature, or more recent approaches such as distant reading and quantitative methods in translation studies.

2) In-depth studies of the problems of translating Pynchon’s works into a particular language or languages. Essays of this type may focus either on a single work or a single set of issues—some aspects of Pynchon’s style, segments of his vocabulary, even specific passages. We expect essays of this type to offer copious textual detail and use theoretical framing derived from translation studies.

Timeline:
January 31, 2025: submission of article proposals of max. 300 words and a short (150-word) biographical note to molnar.gabor.tamas@btk.elte.hu and sergej.macura@fil.bg.ac.rs February 20, 2025: decision of acceptance or rejection of proposals by the editors
May 31, 2025: deadline for article submissions