The Short Story
Editor: Ailsa Cox
Date Of Publication: Sep 2008
Isbn13: 9781847186690
Isbn: 1-84718-669-6
Long regarded as an undervalued and marginalised genre, the short story is undergoing a renaissance. The Short Story celebrates its unique appeal. Practitioners and scholars address the issues facing short story criticism in the 21st century. Author A.L. Kennedy shares the pleasures and frustrations of writing the short story in the literary marketplace. This is followed by an assessment of recent attempts to promote short story readership in the UK. Other contributors look at forms such as the short-short and the short story sequence. The range of authors discussed includes Martin Amis, Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie and James Joyce. The short story is the most international of genres; this is reflected in chapters on Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino and on Japanese short fiction. Postcolonial and translation theory are combined with the close reading of specific texts. Neglected authors, such as the Welsh writer Dorothy Edwards and the colonial figure Frank Swettenham, are re-evaluated and we also consider genre writing, with chapters on crime fiction and Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. Integrating theory and practice, The Short Story will appeal both to writers and to students of literary criticism.

Ailsa Cox is the author of Writing Short Stories (Routledge) and Alice Munro (Northcote House Writers and Their Work). She has also published her own short fiction in magazines and anthologies in the UK. Ailsa Cox is Reader in English and Writing at Edge Hill University.

“I am delighted to write in support of this publication. The Short Story opens with a brilliant discussion by the writer A.L. Kennedy of the particular qualities and strengths of the short story form. Her essay ‘Small in a Way That a Bullet is Small’ moves our thinking beyond the twentieth century linking of the short story with the transitory, as she emphasises instead the form’s ability to capture moments of irrevocable change. As she writes, ‘There is a moment when you weren’t in love and then you are. There is a moment when your mother isn’t dead and then she is….There are defining moments in anybody’s life, which mark them forever, which don’t actually take an awful long time: that’s what the short story is about.’ (3) This powerful opening is complemented by a wide-ranging set of essays which explore topics as diverse as the (post)colonial stories of Frank Swettenham and those of Anita Desai, the ‘Martian’ stories of Ray Bradbury and ‘female sadism’ in the stories of the Japanese writers Junichiro Tanizaki and Hitomi Kanehara. Ailsa Cox’s authoritative and engaging introduction draws out the connections between these diverse manifestations of the short form and the collection as a whole is a testament to the richness and vitality of contemporary work in and on the short story.”

- Professor Clare Hanson, Head of English, School of Humanities, University of Southampton

"This [book] creates an assortment of writing covering a broad range of topics from artistic, practical and scholarly perspectives on writing and studying the short story and its subsidiaries...there is something here for everyone no matter how obscure your interests are. This book is stimulating for both reader and critic"

Laura Tansley, University of Glasgow, The Kelvingrove Review, Issue 4, 2009

Price Uk Gbp: 34.99
Price Us Usd: 52.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)