Contact Zones (with Michael Collins)
Michael Collins is Reader in American Studies at King’s College, London and co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (2024). In this episode, I ask him why the short story is so popular in the US and yet relatively underrepresented in academic research.
Works cited:
Michael J. Collins, The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800-1865 (University of Michigan Press, 2016).
Michael J. Collins, “Introduction”, in The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Michael J. Collins and Gavin Jones (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Frank Norris, ‘An Opening for Novelists. Great Opportunities for Fiction-Writers in San Francisco’, in Novels and Essays, ed. by Donald Pizer (The Library of America, 1986), pp. 1112-14.
Bret Harte, ‘The Rise of the “Short Story”’, The Cornhill Magazine, 7.37 (1899), pp. 1-8.
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (Schocken Books, 1968).
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, in Poetry and Tales (Library of America, 1984).
Eric D. Walrond, Tropic Death (Liveright, 2013).
Studies in the American Short Story, (https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/sass)
Podcast intro and outro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
A Small, Good Thing
"A Small, Good Thing" is a podcast about short fiction. In every episode, I get to discuss the short story form with writers, academics, publishers, and anyone who shares a passion for short stories.
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