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
and use the discount code NEW30