Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - Short Fiction as World Literature, Oct 2023

This article reads Annie Dillard’s short text ‘Death of a Moth’ (1976) in a comparative context, focusing mostly on the description of the scene of the moth’s self-immolation in a candle flame. After considering the challenges that the text poses to the category ‘short fiction’, the article discusses the different uses of the image of ‘the moth and the flame’ in different cultures. Focusing especially on the Persian literary tradition, the historical variability of interpretations of the image is outlined, and closer parallels are drawn between Dillard’s text and Aḥmad Ghazzālī’s interpretation of ‘love’ through their respective narrations of the moth’s death in the candle flame. In a closer reading of Dillard’s text, an uneasy coexistence is revealed between a mystical inclination and an ironic, self-consciously literary use of imagery and figurative language.

In 2015, the North American short story writer Lucia Berlin (1926–2004) was ‘rediscovered’ when her posthumous collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, became a New York Times bestseller. It has since been translated into more than twenty languages, and has been received with particular enthusiasm in Spain and Latin America. Many of her stories are set in Chile or Mexico, where she lived for many years. This article proposes that Berlin’s adolescence in Santiago, her bilingual education, and her studies with Spanish novelist Ramón J. Sender at the University of New Mexico had important impacts on her writing. This connection has yet to be made: Berlin is most often associated with North American ‘dirty realism’, or other anglophone movements. I argue that we are wrong to place her work exclusively in the context of her country of birth, and propose that we read her alongside the hispanophone writers she learned from. In my first section, I describe Berlin’s experience in Santiago as a young, privileged North American, and explore how this formed her identity as an outsider–insider, or insider–outsider. In my next section, I focus on Berlin’s undergraduate years in New Mexico, charting her interests in liminal and domestic spaces, which may have been encouraged by Sender. In my final section, I examine the stories with Chilean settings that she published in 1988, and ask what prompted her to return to the country of her adolescence on the page.

‘Unaccustomed Earth’ presents us with an instance of dis-location that is not just connected with geographical displacement but with a melancholy that runs deep in Lahiri’s fiction. Somewhat unexpectedly, dis-location also works as a force that challenges fixity and inertia and becomes part and parcel of a process of mourning. This article proposes to approach Lahiri’s story through the notion of heterotopia, which Foucault defines as a paradoxical place, a place which is real, unlike utopia, yet ‘outside all places’. In the opening story of the collection, it is a garden created from scratch by a child and his grandfather which offers a beautiful example of how place itself may be displaced and efface itself behind place-making. Lahiri’s story challenges the too obvious association of the garden with rootedness and disturbs the binary opposition between place and placelessness: as it is, the garden that is being shaped means something different and works differently for everyone, opening a space not just for expectations but for the indeterminate and the unexpected. Just like the small patch of earth it contains, the limited space of the short story turns out to encompass far more than what appeared at first. Firmly inscribed in a part of the world that can be placed on a map, Lahiri’s story also detaches itself from that particular location as its metafictional and intertextual dimensions assert themselves with greater clarity.

This article examines the short story/essay ‘My Name is HannaH’ (2005) by South African-born writer Zoë Wicomb, focusing on its generic hybridity, its translocal quality and its deeply intertextual structure. Retracing the life and works of the South African poet Arthur Nortje through the artifice of fiction, Wicomb exposes the discursive and relational nature of space and identity. By analysing the story’s extremely heterogeneous intertexts and its playful generic inbetweenness, I seek to show how Wicomb refuses any form of categorization or fixed notion, exposing, rather, the seams and fissures of the textuality of reality. Ultimately, I argue that the thematic and formal features of the selected narrative can foreground the relationship between world literature and the short story as a liminal, cosmopolitan and mutable genre, particularly appropriate for the representation of the interconnectedness of our society.

This article focuses on Zadie Smith’s experimental short story ‘Kelso Deconstructed’, published in her first short story collection Grand Union (2019). The story reimagines the last day in the life of Kelso Cochrane, who migrated to Britain during the post-war period as part of the Windrush generation, and who was murdered in 1959. The aim of this article is twofold. Firstly, I situate ‘Kelso Deconstructed’ within Smith’s preoccupations with matters of intimacy, writing and resistance in Grand Union, and in her essay collection Intimations (2020). Secondly, I examine Smith’s rewriting of this historical event through her use of intertextual references to Toni Morrison, Francis Ponge, Leo Tolstoy and Toni Cade Bambara. Ultimately, this article argues that Smith uses multiple strategies to create proximity between readers and the historical events depicted, and to deconstruct the symbol of Kelso Cochrane to instead offer an intimate representation of a singular human being.

Review of: Like a Prisoner: Stories of Endurance (Trans. J. Hodgson), Fatos Lubonja (2022)

London: Istros Books, 180 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-91254-585-8, p/bk, £9.99

This report is an edited transcript of a speech Livi Michael gave as keynote speaker at the European Network for Short Fiction Research (ENSFR) conference in Lisbon 2022. She argues that despite the need to support and promote short fiction, corporate, commercial publishing is not the best way forward. Short fiction needs to retain its links to the independent sector, and to the academy, where different values apply. Corporate publishing necessarily relies on marketing and commercial success, whereas independent publishers, and researchers, continue to value excellence and virtuosity. She also argues that greatness in fiction is mainly to be found in the short form, and that, while it has become a politically compromised, overused term, ‘greatness’ it is still a useful concept for writers and researchers who are driven by what inspires them and it should therefore be reclaimed. Writers and researchers are regularly involved in judging short fiction, and while judgement of any kind should be interrogated, the ideal of greatness is more appropriate as a standard for the short form than commercial success.