There are the celebrated authors: Checkov, Joyce, Mansfield, Munro. There are the big questions: “what makes a truly great short story?”. “Where does the form originate?” “What can short stories do that other forms of literature can’t?”
But before any of this, there’s a question that’s not that easy to answer at all:
What is a short story?
This week I’m joined by Dr Paul March-Russell, Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, and author of The Short Story: An Introduction and Colin Walsh, an award-winning short story writer from Galway, Ireland, to discuss the art of the short story.
Guests
Colin Walsh is a writer from Galway whose fiction has been published internationally to great acclaim. He was named Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year 2019. He won the RTE Francis MacManus Short Story Prize in 2017 (listen to the winning story here) and the Doolin Flash Fiction Prize 2018 (listen to the story in this episode!)
You can follow him on Twitter here
Paul March-Russell is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, and author of The Short Story: An Introduction
You can read his full bio here
He is a member of the European Network for Short Fiction Research. You can find out more about the group here
Works & Authors Mentioned
O. Westin: Micro SFF
Guy de Maupassant
Anton Chekhov
James Joyce
Katherine Mansfield
Jorge Luis Borges
Wendy Erskine: “77 Pop Facts (You Didn’t Know About Gil Courtney)”
Flannery O’Connor
Alice Munroe
Joy Williams
Claire Keegan
Mary Gaitskill: Bad Behaviour
Grace Paley
Thomas Morris: We Don’t Know What We’re Doing
Kevin Barry
Colin Barrett
Danielle McLaughlin
Mary Costello
Nicole Flaherty: Show Them a Good Time
Lucia Berlin
George Saunders
Music
Music this week was by Saso, Cloud Castle Lake, and The Jimmy Cake
Track Listings
Saso (Mysterium) – High Speed
Saso (Mysterium) – Mysterium
Saso (Exitudes) – Silent Earth
The Jimmy Cake (Spectre & Crown) – Hugs For Buddy
Cloud Castle Lake (The Meeting OST) – Woolgathering
If you’re looking for more author interviews try this episode on weird fiction or this one on adapting novels for TV and film.
For more on fiction and how we consumer it, this episode is on the history of book clubs.
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Do you somehow need more book recommendations!? Let me know in the comments below or check out the Words To That Effect Facebook Page or on Instagram too!
Words To That Effect is a member of the Headstuff Podcast Network. Check out a whole host of great podcasts here
Transcripts
Coming soon!