Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - Current Issue

Michel Faber has been writing short fiction for 50 years. His works are hugely various – some fantastic, some realist, and he is known for an unusual restlessness across genre, also for unusual blends of genre within individual stories. But there are key commonalities to be found, also some very consistent patterns, over hundreds of his individual pieces. Often, his stories are set in extreme, faraway or otherwise alien landscapes, exploring a consistent emotional territory concerned with the search for connection between humans, animals and places. This article traces the reasons why he has kept returning to extreme settings, using four case studies to interrogate those commonalities. It interrogates two of his most celebrated, earlier stories, ‘Fish’ and ‘The Fahrenheit Twins’, then turns to two newer stories to explore Faber’s consistency of concern: ‘A Million Infant Breaths’ and ‘The Morning After’.

This article highlights the possible influence of pre-cinematographic spectacles from the first half of the nineteenth century on the writing of Pompeii in two fantastique short stories by Théophile Gautier: ‘Arria Marcella’, published in 1852, and ‘Jettatura’, published in 1856. In a similar style to the dioramas of Louis Daguerre (1787–1851) and the phantasmagorias of Étienne-Gaspard Robertson (1763–1837), the movements of light resuscitate the dead city and its inhabitants. The description of Pompeii could evoke the pre-cinematographic technique of dissolving views, in which the images are projected one on top of the other. The intensity of one image gradually diminishes until it disappears completely, thereby creating the opportunity for the subsequent image to emerge with greater intensity. These dissolving views of Pompeii disrupt the spatio-temporal framework of the story because they allow us to move from one time to another. Ancient Pompeii and its buried beliefs emerge in the present, contributing to the narrative’s shift towards the fantastique, as a hitherto invisible world – superimposed on the visible world – makes itself increasingly felt and becomes spectrally visible.

Clive Bloom once, somewhat disparagingly, referred to M. R. James’s ghost stories as belonging ‘to modernity and the age of the tourist’. James would have been flattered. As the author of two successful travel guides and an enthusiastic reader of many others, James wrote his ghost stories in the same style as his books for tourists and with the same feeling for landscape. In addition to his spooks and monsters, all the stories feature a place or places James loved and sought to share with his readers. The author provides extraordinarily vivid word pictures, enabling his readers to visualize the place concerned and frequently inciting them to visit it for themselves. The horrors he depicts, although profoundly disturbing, do not detract from the beauty and/or historical interest of the setting. It is therefore unsurprising that, even today, literary tourists may be found seeking traces of James not only in his native East Anglia but also as far afield as the Basque country and Scandinavia.

Beginning from a place of uncertainty and a feeling of imposture, this article proposes that creative writing is rooted in a sense of not knowing what to do or how to do it; that the creativity of creative writing essentially lies in a process of exploration, uncertainty, failure and experimentation. The article then goes on to propose that the teaching of creative writing should recognize this uncertainty and be willing to include students in an open process of exploration and experimentation.

This critical-creative article shows how writers use domestic objects to explore notions of temporality. Using two excerpts from my story ‘Safely Gathered In’ as the primary material, the critical element of this article considers three functions of household articles within short fiction from a practice research perspective. This is further evidenced and supported by three modern and contemporary writers. Through samples given of ‘Safely Gathered In’, I look at how short stories may utilize objects as tools for self-preservation, also referring to Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Doll’s House’. I consider how domestic objects may rupture chronology with further evidence from Vanessa Onwuemezi’s ‘Dark Neighbourhood’. Finally, I investigate how a writer can use odd curation of domestic objects to challenge preconceived notions of temporality with reference to Raymond Carver’s ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’. I also refer to the lived experience in Sam Johnson-Schlee’s essay collection Living Rooms which explores notions of how we relate to the articles we have within the domestic space.

Contemporary Hungarian women writers use the short form as a feminist intervention in current gender politics. Creating space in which to explore alternatives to patriarchal cultures and illiberal political movements, they deploy physical and imaginary landscapes to critique the past and present of embodied feminine experience. Our comparison of two short stories, ‘Moon and Palm’ (2016) by Anna T. Szabó (1972–present) and ‘Black Snowman’ (2006) by Krisztina Tóth (1967–present) intersects their complex temporalities with traditions of folklore and tale-telling to show how they turn a ‘feminine form’ into a feminist practice.

This article considers how Norma Dunning, a writer of Inuit descent, maps out Edmonton in Tainna: The Unseen Ones. It examines the role Dunning gives the Inuit spirits who descend from the north to help their descendants. The stories provide a crude evocation of contemporary Inuit lives on the streets of Edmonton. However, thanks to the spirits, a more humane vision of the southern city surfaces. Even though Dunning does not provide her readers with Inuit myths or an idealized vision of the north, her stories are infused with Inuit spirituality that destabilizes Euro-western visions of space and time.

Review of: The Short Story After Apartheid: Thinking with Form in South African Literature, Graham K. Riach (2023)

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 256 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-83764-470-4, h/bk, £95.00

Review of: Openings, Lucy Caldwell (2024)

London: Faber and Faber Limited, 238 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-57138-275-0, p/bk, £12.99