The European Network for Short Fiction Research was established in 2013 with the aim of fostering and promoting the study of short fiction in European universities and in interaction with short fiction writers. After an inaugural meeting early in 2014, the ENSFR has organized annual conferences as well as sponsored several other study days and events. This website aims to be an interactive platform for sharing research, expertise, ideas and information about short fiction in its diversity of linguistic traditions and forms.
Eighteen short stories from the pages of Dublin’s iconic literary magazine The Bell (1940 – 1954) with responses by eighteen of our foremost contemporary writers.
Available at: https://stingingfly.org/product/the-writers-torch/
Cover Design: Catherine Gaffney
Vol. 12.2 , the second of two special issues on ‘the health of the short story’ guest-edited by Lucy Dawes Durneen is now available. Lucy’s editorial
‘Breaking ourselves open: Recovery and survival in the short form’ reflects on the process of editing and arranging articles that speak to and across the individual issues, and the way in which this itself mirrors the short story’s trifold ability to diagnose, observe and potentially suture together resolutions for the challenges of the human condition, both within the boundaries of the text, and as a discrete tool for personal recovery.
Other articles discuss pandemic literature; medical short stories in the 1890s; the early 20th century US writer Fanny Hurst; monstrous motherhood in Renaissance short fiction; and running writing workshops for health workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are creative contributions from Moy McCrory, Virginia Hartley and the Chilean author Carolina Brown, who is also in conversation with Lucy Dawes Durneen. Plus book reviews on the modern short story and magazine culture and the German short story by Aleix Tura Vecino and Livi Michael.
Out now, Vol. 12.1 of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice . This first of two special issues, guest-edited by Lucy Dawes Durneen, is dedicated to ‘The Health of the Short Story’. It includes articles, short fiction and reflective texts responding to that broad theme from many directions, including discussions of authors ranging from E. Nesbit to Diane Williams and Kristen Roupenian; and of themes including writing trauma, the maternal body, loneliness and grief. There’s also an in-conversation with the British writer Irenosen Okojie, book reviews, and an afterword from Kirsty Gunn.
This new book contains a selection of the short stories of the Irish writer, Ethel Colburn Mayne, who published her first stories in The Yellow Book but later also contributed to modernist magazines and was routinely compared to Katherine Mansfield. Her work has been wrongly sidelined and really deserves to be more widely read. Copies can be ordered here.
Continue reading “Ethel Colburn Mayne: Selected Stories, edited by Elke D’hoker”
This collection of original essays highlights the intertwined fates of the modern short story and periodical culture in the period 1880–1950, the heyday of magazine short fiction in Britain. Through case studies that focus on particular magazines, short stories and authors, chapters investigate the presence, status and functioning of short stories within a variety of periodical publications – highbrow and popular, mainstream and specialised, middlebrow and avant-garde. Examining the impact of social and publishing networks on the production, dissemination and reception of short stories, it foregrounds the ways in which magazines and periodicals shaped conversations about the short story form and prompted or provoked writers into developing the genre.
Launch discount: save 30%
Visit https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book/9781474461085
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Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 10.2 special issue on Short Fiction as Humble Fiction, guest-edited by Christine Reynier, following the ENSFR conference at Montpellier in October 2019 is now available from Intellect Press. It also includes an interview with Sarah Hall, book reviews by Corinne Bigot and an interview with film-maker Eric Steel on his adaption of David Bezmozgis’ ‘Minyan’ .
ARTICLES
Editorial :’The power of short fiction as a humble genre’
CHRISTINE REYNIER
‘Humbling the human: Posthuman explorations in contemporary short fiction’
ELKE D’HOKER
‘The singular effect of brevity: Why Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly” could not have been a novel’
LISA FEKLISTOVA
‘Regionalist short fiction as humble fiction’
ALDA CORREIA
‘Tourism, tourists, humility and the humble in E. M. Forster’s “The Story of the Siren” (1920)’
EMMANUEL VERNADAKIS
‘Humility and the humble: A reading of the Nepali short stories of Maheshbikram Shah’
KRITIKA CHETTRI
‘”The extremely private literary giant”: Alice Munro’s poetics of humility’
AILSA COX
We are pleased to announce the publication of number 72 of the Journal of the Short Story in English/Cahiers de la nouvelle, devoted to Elizabeth Spencer. This issue is dedicated to our colleagues specialized in American literature, Michel Bandry, Danièle Pitavy-Souques and Claude Maisonnat (who authored one of the articles), but also to Spencer herself, who passed away in December 2019. Two previously unpublished short stories and two interviews are collected in this issue. Three writers have also agreed to share their memories of Spencer.
You will find below the table of contents, as well as links to the websites of the Presses Universitaires de Rennes and OpenEdition, where the beginning of the articles can be accessed.
Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 10.1 contains original fiction by Zoe Lambert on the theme of illness and caring, plus co-written fiction from Amy Lilwall and Rupert Loydell. There are articles on writers including Agatha Christie, Margot Lanagan, Flannery O’Connor and Patrick Gale, plus an unpublished short story by the British writer Carl Tighe, who recently died from Covid-19, accompanied by an appreciation by Elizabeth Baines. Paul March-Russell reviews Borders and Border Crossings in the Contemporary British Short Story and Moy McCrory reviews Being Various, the anthology of new Irish Irish short stories edited by Lucy Caldwell. And you can find out about how oral ghost stories mingle the discourse of fact and fiction.
10.2, coming early in 2021, will be a special issue on Short Fiction as Humble Fiction, and will include an interview with Sarah Hall.
Vol. 9.2. of the peer-reviewed journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice is out now with articles on A.M. Homes, Thomas Harris, Lydia Davies, Samuel Beckett, Carson McCullers, Anton Chekhov and more. Plus Jonathan Crane reflects on realism in his own fiction. Robert M. Luscher on the American short story cycle, Felicity Skelton on Canadian fiction and Sarah Whitehead on Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture; and Ailsa Cox interviews Lucy Wood, the Cornish-based author of Diving Belles and The Sing of the Shore.
We welcome submissions of articles, book reviews, interviews, reports and translations on any aspect of short-story writing. For more information contact Ailsa Cox at coxa@edgehill.ac.uk.
In today’s world, there is ample evidence of the return of borders worldwide; as a material reality, as a concept, and as a way of thinking. Edited by Barbara Korte and Laura Lojo-Rodriguez, Borders and Border Crossings in the Contemporary British Short Story focuses on the ways in which the contemporary British short story mirrors, questions and engages with border issues in national and individual life. It discusses the work of wide range writers including Zadie Smith, Anne Enright, Kamila Shamsie, Valda Jackson, Andrea Levy, Sarah Hall, Hanif Kureishi, China Mieville, Daisy Johnson, Jon McGregor and Helen Simpson, and includes a chapter in which Pete Kalu reflects on his own practice as a Black British writer.