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. 
Podcast: Small Pleasures, with Livi Michael and Sonya Moor
Tom Conaghan shares insights on publishing short fiction – ‘the literary antimatter’ – and Mahreen Sohail’s story ‘Hair’, featured in Reverse Engineering published by Scratch Books.
Small Pleasures: Small Pleasures Episode 18: Tom Conaghan’s ‘Reverse Engineering’ Anthology – the podcast on great short stories and greatness in the short-story form.
The South African Short Story in English, 1920–2010: When Aesthetics Meets Ethics, by Marta Fossati
The South African Short Story in English, 1920–2010: 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.
Short fiction in a flash: a bite-size interview with Nicholas Royle, by Sonya Moor
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 a lot, but not, it seemed, at short stories. But then I reread Robert Coover’s ‘Going For a Beer’ – ‘life is short and brutal’ – and here they came. Actual tears.
You have a nine-hour train journey and can take one short story to read, several times over – which do you choose?
Maybe that very short Kafka story – is it ‘Before the Law’? – that everyone rather annoyingly says is better than all the longer, more obvious Kafka stories, to see if I can work out what they’re on about. Or Alison Moore’s ‘When the Door Closed, It Was Dark’, to try to work out exactly how she creates that sense of dread. Or Robert Coover’s ‘Going For a Beer’ – it’s good to cry on a long journey.
Describe your writing space, and your ideal writing space?
Seat 48, coach A, the so-called Quiet Zone, on the Manchester–London train. Seats 47 and 48 are reserved for cyclists, but few turn up. The Quiet Zone ‘rules’ are often broken, but I use earphones and listen to carefully chosen music that blocks other people’s noise without disturbing anyone and I write. My ideal writing space could be recreated if the café on the corner of Belgrade Road in Stoke Newington were to reopen.
Nicholas Royle is the author of five short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories, London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny – and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited more than two dozen anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who also published his books-about-books, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector and Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf. In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press.