A Small, Good Thing

• The Facts and Fiction of Short Story Writing (with Ailsa Cox) [Part one]

  Ailsa Cox is a Professor Emerita at Edge Hill University (UK) and a short story writer. In this first part of the interview, we discuss famous claims about short stories and short story writing, like reading short stories in one sitting, the connection between short stories and poetic language, and much more. Listen to find out if they are facts or fiction!  Works cited: Ailsa Cox, Writing Short Stories. Third Edition (Routledge, 2025). Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, in Essays and Reviews (Library of America, 1984) Leila Martin, Kodavision (Nightjar Press, 2025) Colm Tóibín, Mothers and Sons (Picador, 2006). Helen Simpson, Constitutional (Vintage, 2006). Allan Weiss, The Mini-Cycle (Routledge, 2021). Zoe Gilbert, Folk (Bloomsbury, 2018) Paul March-Russell, ‘Anthropocene feminism and the Weird temporalities of landscape’, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, 15:1-2 (2025), pp. 81-95. Katherine Mansfield, ‘Bliss’, in Selected Stories (Oxford University Press, 2002). Janice Galloway, Blood (Vintage, 1991). Raymond Carver, ‘Fires’, in Call If You Need Me (The Harvill Press, 2000), pp.  93-106. Alice Munro, Runaway (Chatto & Windus, 2005).Nightjar Press, https://nightjarpress.weebly.com/Podcast intro and outro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

  --------  

  30:54

  --------

  30:54
• The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (with Andrew Levy)

  Andrew Levy is professor of English and Creative Writing and the Edna Cooper Chair of English at Butler University in Indiana (USA). In this episode, I get to ask him a few questions about his book The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (Cambridge UP, 1992), a real watershed in short story criticism.Works referenced (in order of appearance)  Andrew Levy, The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 1992). Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne’, in Essays and Reviews, ed. by G. R. Thompson (The Library of America, 1984), pp. 568-88. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, in The Penguin Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Viking, 2011), pp. 216-20. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition,’ in Essays and Reviews, ed. by G. R. Thompson (The Library of America, 1984), pp. 13-25. John Cheever, ‘The Swimmer,’ in A Vision of the World: Selected Stories, ed. by Julian Barnes (Vintage, 2021), pp. 241-56. Ruth Suckow, ‘The Short Story’, Saturday Review of Literature 4.17 (1927), pp. 317-18. Percival Everett, James (Doubleday, 2024).Andrew Levy, Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece (Simon and Schuster, 2015).Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Penguin Classics, 2006). Jocelyn A. Chadwick, The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn (University Press of Mississippi, 1998). Ralph Wiley, Spike Lee’s Huckleberry Finn, (unpublished screenplay) © copyright Ralph Wiley, 1997. Kelly Link, ‘Skindler’s Veil’, in When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson, ed. by Ellen Datlow (Titan Books, 2021).Podcast intro and outro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

  --------  

  32:12

  --------

  32:12
• Short Fiction and Knowledge for Living (with Michael Basseler)

  How does the short story form contribute to our understanding of life and the world? To find out, listen to this episode of the podcast, in which I get to interview prof. Michael Basseler, from Justus-Liebig University, author of the monograph An Organon of Life Knowledge: Genres and Functions of the Short Story in North America.Works cited:Michael Basseler, An Organon of Life Knowledge: Genres and Functions of the Short Story in North America (Transcript Verlag, 2019).Ottomar Ette, ‘Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living’, PMLA 125.4 (2010), pp. 977-93.Charles Baxter, ‘Against Epiphanies’, in Burning Down the House. Essays on Fiction. (Graywolf Press, 1997), pp. 51-78. Sherwood Anderson, ‘I Want to Know Why’, in The Triumph of the Egg (W. B. Huebsch, 1921). Washington Irving, ‘Rip Van Winkle’, in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories (Penguin, 2014).Zach Williams, Beautiful Days (Penguin, 2024).Podcast intro and outro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

  --------  

  28:04

  --------

  28:04
• Failed Summer Vacation (with the author, Heuijung Hur)

  In this episode I get to interview Heuijung Hur on her collection Failed Summer Vacation, which has recently been published in English by Scratchbooks. Listen to Heuijung talk about her favourite stories in the collection and what it feels like to read her own work in translation.Works cited:Heuijung Hur, Failed Summer Vacation, trans. by Paige Aniya Morris (Scratchbooks, 2025).George Saunders, Tenth of December (Bloomsbury, 2013).Han Yujoo, The Impossible Fairy Tale, trans. by Janet Hong (Graywolf Press, 2017). Gu Byeong-mo, The Old Woman with a Knife, trans. by Chi-Young Kim (Canongate Books, 2022). Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, trans. by Jamie Chang (Scribner, 2016). Ivan Turgenev, First Love, trans. by Isaiah Berlin (Penguin Classics, 2004).Podcast intro and outro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

  --------  

  30:17

  --------

  30:17
• Contact Zones (with Michael Collins)

  Michael Collins is Reader in American Studies at King’s College, London and co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (2024). In this episode, I ask him why the short story is so popular in the US and yet relatively underrepresented in academic research.  Works cited:Michael J. Collins, The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800-1865 (University of Michigan Press, 2016).Michael J. Collins, “Introduction”, in The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Michael J. Collins and Gavin Jones (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Frank Norris, ‘An Opening for Novelists. Great Opportunities for Fiction-Writers in San Francisco’, in Novels and Essays, ed. by Donald Pizer (The Library of America, 1986), pp. 1112-14. Bret Harte, ‘The Rise of the “Short Story”’, The Cornhill Magazine, 7.37 (1899), pp. 1-8. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (Schocken Books, 1968). Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, in Poetry and Tales (Library of America, 1984). Eric D. Walrond, Tropic Death (Liveright, 2013).Studies in the American Short Story, (https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/sass)Podcast intro and outro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

  --------  

  30:31

  --------

  30:31

Altri podcast di Arte

Podcast di tendenza in Arte

Su A Small, Good Thing