This article investigates how the American short story responded to the Covid-19 pandemic. It shows how several authors turned to an aesthetic that Barbara Claire Freeman defined in 1995 as the “fe...

Join us as we honour the enduring legacy of Charles E. May’s Short Story Theories (1976), a landmark work that reshaped how we read, teach, and think about short fiction. This special event …

Meet Tom Conaghan, founder of Scratch Books! In this episode, I ask Tom what it takes and what it's like to run a publisher entirely dedicated to short fiction. Find out more about the origins of Scratch Books, their amazing publications and short story competition! Works cited (in order of appearance): John Cheever, “Reunion”, in A Vision of the World: Selected Stories, ed. by Julian Barnes (Vintage, 2021), pp. 199-203.  Reverse Engineering, ed. by Tom Conaghan (Scratch Books, 2022).  Reverse Engineering II, ed. by Tom Conaghan (Scratch Books, 2022).  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans by. Maria Jolas (Beacon Press, 1969).  Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. by Stephen J. Burn (University Press of Mississippi, 2012).  Yiyun Li, Wednesday’s Child (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2023).  Lydia Davis, “The Cornmeal”, in Can’t and Won’t (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2014), p.33.   Louis MacNeice, “Snow”, in Collected Poems (Faber&Faber, 2015).  Tessa Hadley, After the Funeral (Penguin, 2023).    Organisations mentioned: Scratch A4: https://www.scratch-books.co.uk/scratcha4competition  The word factory: https://thewordfactory.tv/  City Lit: https://www.citylit.ac.uk/ 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, .

Intro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, .