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.

 

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.

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

The South African Short Story in English, 19202010: 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.

 

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

CFP Blue Short Stories — Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) — Deadline for proposals 15 December 2024

Painting by Julia Himmelstein, “3 a.m”, from her Portland exhibit Bodies of Water

Blue Short Stories

Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE)

 Guest editors : Bénédicte Meillon, Université d’Angers, and Frédérique Spill, Université Jules Vernes Picardie

Since the turn of the century, the stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be indissoluble from the threats affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of the ocean, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. As a matter of fact, we have come to realize that the future of our predominantly blue Earth and its myriad co-dwellers hinges in great part on the blueing of our minds. Following the recent “blue turn” in the humanities and ecocriticism, which seeks to remedy the rampant “ocean deficit disorder” diagnosed by Dan Brayton and to draw our attention beyond “green,” land-based issues to “blue” ones, the call for papers for this volume arises from the awareness that blue short stories deserve more attention that they have been getting. This special issue of the JSSE will consequently focus on blue short stories, i.e. short stories dealing with marine matters and, more largely, aquatic and terraqueous beings and places in ways that depart from anthropocentric land-based studies and frameworks. The overall aim is to explore short stories that help us venture into largely uncharted dimensions of experience and knowledge, and that may thus promote urgently needed ways of blueing our perception, worldviews, and ways of life. Continue reading “CFP Blue Short Stories — Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) — Deadline for proposals 15 December 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.

 

 

 

 

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.