Category: Blog

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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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.