A review of Collins’s short fiction both in journals and in collections

Whereas much scholarship still associates migrant fiction in Australia with social or documentary realism, this chapter emphasizes its playful, iconoclastic, and experimental qualities. It questions the conventional long form as a closed, stable narration that relies on summation and style. Instead it turns to short fiction, examining writers such as Tom Cho, Nicholas Jose, and Melanie Cheng who operate as transnational, experimental, and decolonial forces in Australian writing.

Although critics have tended to regard Hughes’s 1930s short fiction as less politically engaged than his poetry and drama of the same period, Hughes’s Great Depression–period short stories in fact engage in a form of literary radical activism. The stories expose racism as a form of nationalism that articulates interwar US imperialism and domestic fascism. With their understated and ironic tone, Hughes’s short stories are as stylistically effective as any of the most admired Harlem Renaissance–period short stories and as compelling as Black short fiction after the renaissance. Hughes’s short fiction is aesthetically forceful if one accepts the notion that Black fiction of the Great Depression through the civil rights period does not have to emulate modernist, canonical, universalist fiction, art that is allegedly free of ideological content. This chapter examines such stories as “Cora Unashamed” and “The Blues I’m Playing” for both their aesthetic and political distinction.

This chapter examines Korean translations of Langston Hughes’s short fiction in the 1930s to trace Hughes’s inspiration for the willful violation of social order. In the mid-1930s when Korea was under Japanese rule (1910–45), Jong-su Yi introduced Hughes’s leftist vision to a Korean audience by translating “Mother and Child” and “Cora Unashamed.” The medium of the magazine facilitated this global dissemination of Hughes. The act of translating pieces from contemporaneous non-Japanese-language periodicals was Korean intellectuals’ deliberate means to keep abreast of proletarian developments in other countries while redressing Korea’s reliance on the colonizer’s cultural resources. By focusing on Hughes’s depictions of African American workers and their interracial relationships, Yi encouraged Korean readers to imagine living otherwise when adhering to the system of oppression and exploitation was the normative condition. Yi’s subversive practice of translation expands Hughes’s radicalism as manifested in racial and sexual transgression.

The short story is not just a story that is short: the short story generally differs significantly from the novel in terms of scope, timeframe, number of characters and locations. How details acquire priority in short fiction. The relationships between the short story, flash fiction and poetry. The challenges and pleasures of short and very short fiction. The usefulness of short form writing to the developing novelist in the scope it offers for experimentation with narrative voice, characterisation and dialogue, as well as its value in its own right.

‘It is a complexity of afterthought, a psychological or emotional residue, that we seek to leave with the reader following the intense experience of consuming a short story.’

This chapter surveys Ellison’s early (pre-Invisible Man) writings, which fall into four categories: sketches for the Federal Writers Project; journalistic reviews and chapters, in venues ranging from the New Masses to Negro Quarterly; short fiction, mostly unpublished in Ellison’s lifetime; and short fiction and novelistic fragments that remain unpublished to this day.

The suburbs, which now contain the majority of the US population, have also become increasingly diverse, with more immigrants and people in poverty living there than in cities. Against this backdrop, the privileged, all-white enclaves conjured by New Yorker writers such as Cheever and Updike are outdated. This chapter focuses instead on New Yorker suburban fiction written by women contributors to demonstrate the magazine’s ongoing role in shaping the class consciousness and political sensibilities of its white female readers, who by 1954 accounted for 55 percent of its subscribers. Postwar, it became a symbol of its women readers’ education and refinement. Further, the liberal ideals advanced in the magazine’s essays consistently offered means for enhancing readers’ standing in their communities by championing social causes that would conveniently not raise taxes, lower property values, or compromise their children’s education. The female-authored New Yorker fiction discussed here offers a composite portrait and subtle critique of the white suburban woman voter whose current clout at the polls could be redirected to serve a larger purpose than self-aggrandizement.

Throughout his career, Mark Twain wrote short fiction, from short comic sketches to longer short stories. His first big national success came in 1865 with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which he revised several times over the next decade. His short fiction is most often humorous, often satiric, and often burlesques of established genres. But he also tackled serious topics like racism. He published his short fiction in magazines like The Atlantic, then collected most of them in books. In his later years, his short fiction took on a more bitter tone, such as “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” Twain was writing in a period when the short story became fully developed in American writing, and he was part of that trend.