Category: Publications

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Short Fiction in Theory & Practice 15.1 & 2 out now.

This double issue of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice is the second of two double issues on the theme of Landscape and Temporality, guest edited by Paul Knowles, Ana Garcia Soriano and Madeleine Sinclair. It features articles drawn from the ENSFR conference held in Manchester, covering authors including Karen Russell, Andres Barba, Daphne du Maurier, Andre Gide and  Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay as well as creative-critical contributions by Ines G. Labarta, Jennifer Cavanagh and A.J. Ashworth. Paul March-Russell’s ‘Anthropocene feminism and the Weird temporalities of landscape’ focuses on work by Zoe Gilbert, Sarah Hall, Daisy Johnson and Lucy Wood. Plus ‘”Guerilla academics”: An interview with Ailsa Cox, Michelle Ryan and Elke D’hoker, founders of the European Network for Short Fiction Research’ by Laura Gallon and the latest book reviews.

 

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Mircea Eliade: Time, Death, and the Unspeakable Secret

Translated from Romanian by Mac Linscott Ricketts, Edited by Bryan Rennie

Istros Books

The Romanian writer Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) is best known in the English-speaking world as an influential Historian of Religion, author of such works as The Sacred and the Profane and The Myth of the Eternal Return. However, Eliade’s body of work is much broader, and throughout his life he kept the world of fiction and mysticism very close to his heart. Starting at the age of fourteen, Eliade continuously produced works of fiction alongside his academic work.
This volume consists of six of his best short stories, taken from over a 30-year period, starting in 1959 with “A Fourteen-Year-Old Photograph” – the tale of a distance healing in which the patient claims miracle while the healer admits artifice – and including perhaps his most famous short story, the time-shifting “At the Gypsies,” and culminating with “In the Shadow of a Lily,” the last story Eliade is known to have written. Each of these stories is dense with allusions and interwoven with connections and references drawn from the imagination and vast knowledge of a great man. Who knows what secrets they may conceal? One thing is for sure – they will repay repeated close reading, but will also charm on the first encounter.

 

 

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Writing Short Stories (third edition) by Ailsa Cox

The third edition of Writing Short Stories has been revised and updated to provide a complete guide to the craft of writing short stories. It emphasizes the importance of voice as a foundation for work on characterization, imagery, dialogue and pace, as readers move from their first sketches to working on more complex narrative structures.

Ailsa Cox guides readers through key aspects of the craft, providing a variety of case studies of classic and contemporary core texts. The wide range of writers discussed includes Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield, Angela Carter, Alice Munro, Ali Smith, Iphgenia Baal, Octavia E. Butler and William Gibson. The diversity and flexibility of the short story genre is highlighted throughout, along with the specific challenges the writer faces. The book considers a range of genres, such as fantasy, science fiction, horror, autobiography, romance, comedy and satire. The new edition also includes extra insights into getting published, including publishing a first collection, with an updated list of resources and trends in short story writing.

This inspiring guide is the ideal companion for those new to the genre or for anyone looking to improve their technique. Each chapter contains a series of engaging exercises to help readers develop their skills and build confidence in their writing. There are also bolded key terms, with an extensive glossary at the end of the book.

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New Book: Anthologisation and Irish Short Fiction Magnitudes of Telling by Paul Delaney

This original new study explores the recent flowering of short fiction in Ireland. More specifically, it discusses the cultural, material, and ideological usages of the short form in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, engaging with the forces that have helped to shape the production, dissemination, and reception of short stories over the last few decades in Ireland. The book is generically fluid and reads short fiction in its many guises, from short-shorts to long stories, and from standalone texts included in periodicals and online forums, to stories that were published in volumes, miscellanies, and edited collections.

The book focuses especially upon anthologies and the act of anthologisation. The creation of an anthology is never a simple value-free act, since those associated with the curation of anthologies are always obliged to make decisions that are variously material, economic, formal, ideological, and aesthetic. Some of these decisions are founded upon personal preferences, others are grounded in subjective prejudices and biases; however, all have consequences for the ways that a literary culture is created, marketed, taught, and read. This new book explores this subject, and looks at the consequences for ways that we think about Irish short fiction in the contemporary moment.

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Confingo Publishing is launching The Crib and Other Stories, by Albertine Sarrazin, translated from the French by Sonya Moor.

Confingo Publishing is launching The Crib and Other Stories, by Albertine Sarrazin, translated from the French by Sonya Moor.

These short stories, which appear in English for the first time, were composed for the most part in prison, before Sarrazin’s novels were published to international acclaim in 1965. Here, Sarrazin turns her singular eye on the prison environment, charting the cruelties, small kindnesses, constraints and paradoxical freedoms of daily life in prison. By turns astute, tender and wryly humorous, Sarrazin presents a panorama ranging from the dangers
of ‘favours’ and clandestine letters, to the delights of illicit coffee and self-imposed creative limits. Sarrazin’s stories swoop the quotidian into the epic, as officers, inmates, and alter egos play out, in the small world of the prison, their comédie humaine. Against this backdrop emerges Sarrazin’s own personal battle: to be, and express, herself.