Short Story

Ailsa Cox is the author of Writing Short Stories (Routledge) and Alice Munro (Northcote House Writers and Their Work). She has also published her own short fiction in magazines and anthologies in the UK. Ailsa Cox is Reader in English and Writing at Edge Hill University.

"I am delighted to write in support of this publication. The Short Story opens with a brilliant discussion by the writer A.L. Kennedy of the particular qualities and strengths of the short story form. Her essay 'Small in a Way That a Bullet is Small' moves our thinking beyond the twentieth century linking of the short story with the transitory, as she emphasises instead the form's ability to capture moments of irrevocable change. As she writes, 'There is a moment when you weren't in love and then you are. There is a moment when your mother isn't dead and then she is….There are defining moments in anybody's life, which mark them forever, which don't actually take an awful long time: that's what the short story is about.' (3) This powerful opening is complemented by a wide-ranging set of essays which explore topics as diverse as the (post)colonial stories of Frank Swettenham and those of Anita Desai, the 'Martian' stories of Ray Bradbury and 'female sadism' in the stories of the Japanese writers Junichiro Tanizaki and Hitomi Kanehara. Ailsa Cox's authoritative and engaging introduction draws out the connections between these diverse manifestations of the short form and the collection as a whole is a testament to the richness and vitality of contemporary work in and on the short story."- Professor Clare Hanson, Head of English, School of Humanities, University of Southampton'This [book] creates an assortment of writing covering a broad range of topics from artistic, practical and scholarly perspectives on writing and studying the short story and its subsidiaries...there is something here for everyone no matter how obscure your interests are. This book is stimulating for both reader and critic'Laura Tansley, University of Glasgow, The Kelvingrove Review, Issue 4, 2009