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”…
1. Can you remember the first short story you ever read? I remember thinking Kafka’s The Metamorphosis was ridiculous. Later I fell in love with short fiction and thought differently about Kafka’s work, considering story but also themes related to society, working life and family. Ideas or moments in reading often inspire my writing. For…
What can short stories expect from readers? I expect you to remember that I am not a novel. If I say, ‘the queen died, then the king died of grief’, don’t ask what happened before or after. I shine a light on the particular, an event, a character, a time. The rest remains in the…
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….
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…