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This article reads Malika Moustadraf’s recently translated collection of short stories as an instance of a new generation of Moroccan female writing that subverts conventional expectations of female fiction and understanding of gender identities in Morocco. Following a narrative criticism approach, the article investigates how Moustadraf uses fiction to communicate an identity crisis when the experiences of the body toggle between desire and disgust, rot and purity, and ultimately, life and delusion. In Moroccan fiction, identity, the body, and sexuality have often been considered a male territory, mostly explored through male lenses. By tackling issues of gender fluidity, cybersex, and body relations in the Moroccan context as early as the beginning of the twenty-first century, Moustadraf’s short stories contribute to an avant-garde female literary tradition that would only gain ground about two decades later. While female writing has long been conditioned by social expectations for language and themes to be feminine, Moustadraf stands out by breaking through the boundaries of taboo identities and excessively polished writing. A close reading of Moustadraf’s long-lost works provides a fresh perspective on the development of Moroccan fiction and gender consciousness in contemporary Morocco. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El género de la novelización cinematográfica está presente en la cultura popular española desde los años diez del siglo XX hasta hoy. Durante los años veinte, igual que en el entorno internacional, la novelización vivió en España un primer momento de esplendor. Vamos a acercarnos al mismo a través del caso de dos novelizaciones que se publicaron a partir de la adaptación al cine de El cura de aldea (Florián Rey) en 1926, primera de las filmadas a partir de la obra literaria que Enrique Pérez Escrich escribió en más de un formato a mediados del siglo XIX. El estudio de ambos textos nos permitirá avanzar en la caracterización del fenómeno de la novelización durante los veinte en relación con el panorama nacional e internacional, el denso entramado comercial que la rodeaba, y la forma en cómo se construía desde el punto de vista literario, con el cine al fondo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conversation between Hong Kong author Wong Yi and literary translator Jennifer Feeley took place over email during the winter of 2023 and early 2024 and was conducted in English. It encompasses a range of topics, several of which are drawn from Feeley's own experiences and observations in translating Wong's work and from their joint participation in events during the fall of 2023. Wong recalls the origins of her literary career, highlighting significant milestones such as her four short story collections and her adaptation of Xi Xi's fiction into a Cantonese chamber opera libretto. She also explains how Hong Kong's rich history serves as a muse for her writing about the present day, discussing distinctive aspects of her work, including the importance of the Cantonese language. Finally, Wong reflects on her fall 2023 residency at the University of Iowa International Writing Program, noting the role that translation has played in her work reaching a wider readership, and shares the future directions of her writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of postwar Japanese and international fiction has seen an expanding corpus of texts revolving around kimono. Many works, while tapping into the intricacies of sartorial traditions, contain actualized narratives of young girls and women experiencing or remembering kimono in prewar, postwar, and contemporary Japan. In these stories, the kimono—ever persisting, at times resisting—helps the protagonist to discover self-confidence and agency as they deal with loss, social expectations, family, and national history. This article focuses on Hayashi Mariko's short story collection Stories about Kimono (Kimono o meguru monogatari, 1997) and her more recent novel The Imperial Visit to Ohara: The Story of an Obi-Making Family (Ohara gokō: Obi ni ikita kazoku no monogatari, 2014b). These two narratives work within all of these parameters and illustrate how authors can write consistently about the multiple meanings within kimono. Through analyzing how Hayashi describes kimono outfits and their implications, this article also explores how, as a literary device, the kimono connects with the concept of reality effect; emphasizes the power of the feminine gaze in Japanese literature; and reveals how the limits between fiction and reality can be broken down. When inspired by the specific mode of dress that is kimono, writers can prompt new inspirations for women to create their own stories with it, discarding the cliché of 'yamato nadeshiko' (lit: Japanese pink carnations, used to evoke Japanese demure, feminine beauty) to explore darker and/or more embodied experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a reconstruction of how British writer H.H. Munro, also known as Saki, created the short story collection "Beasts and Super-Beast." Topics discussed include the history of Munro's writing career, his focus on writing stories about the character Clovis Sangrail and his publisher's proposal to use "The Chronicles of Clovis" as the title of the collection.

The consistent presence of historical narratives within Mary Shelley's oeuvre is remarkable: she composed several short stories and two novels set in the Middle Ages, not to mention the biographical profiles of eminent literary figures of the past she penned for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia. Far from suggesting either the author's escapist intentions or her mere adherence to the literary fashion of the time (popularized by Walter Scott), this essay sets out to investigate the crucial role and the responsibility Mary Shelley attached to history. Alert to William Godwin's treatises − in particular, his short essay 'Of History and Romance' − Mary Shelley firmly believed that, through the knowledge of the past, one could develop 'a sagacity that can penetrate into the depths of futurity'. By focusing on Valperga, this article examines the writer's strategic employment of history as an effective instrument to reflect on current-day problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anchoring on the core notions spiraled out of a close reading of Hélène Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1975), this article intends to interpret four short stories of Vandana Singh from the anthology The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (2008) by using écriture feminine as a tool of analysis. The selected stories belonging to the genre of speculative fiction respectively oscillate around four women characters and leave us with an emerging pattern of searching for a lost "self." The ingenious story telling with elements of the imaginary addresses subtle yet complicated gender issues. Apropos to this, compartmentalized into three primary sections this work develops an argument toward recognizing an unconventional and original literary tradition in the making that might partially realize the intricate nuances of woman's writing within a South-Asian (Indian) context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walter Scott's shorter fictions come in different shapes and sizes, and live in different types of publications, whether the periodical, short story collection, anthology, gift book or multivolume novel. Even completed novels were augmented with snatches of new prose that ought to be treated as separate stories. This article examines what I am calling Scott's three main wandering tales: "The Fortunes of Martin Waldeck" (The Antiquary [1816]), "Wandering Willie's Tale" (Redgauntlet [1824]), and "Donnerhugel's Narrative" (Anne of Geierstein [1829]). A wandering tale is essentially a short story that can feasibly stand apart from the novel in which it first appeared but whose textual mobility depends on, and can have an impact upon, the host novel, however belatedly. Within the novels, Scott also surrounds his wandering tales with fictional audiences who comment on the meaning of the story delivered in real time, hijacking the conventions of improvisatory oral storytelling but also deploying print-based tricks that rely on the generic knowledge of readers. Reading Scott's inset fictions as wandering tales relies on a dual understanding of the original print setting and an appreciation of the story's resistance to the formal boundaries established within the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article investigates Primo Levi's anthropological readings in Scientific American between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. The fundamental importance of these anthropological publications in Levi's career has long been disregarded by scholars who have studied the influence of Scientific American on the author's work predominantly with regard to scientific and technological articles. After reading Scientific American's anthropological essays and book reviews, Levi's interests soon came to include actual books on folklore and anthropological studies. The present article retraces the path of his readings and provides a series of examples from the short stories collected in Vizio di forma and Lilít, as well as from the essays of L'altrui mestiere. The results of this survey of Levi's anthropological sources also provide new insights into his creative process and lead to a rethinking of the role of ethnography in his intellectual history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In I giorni dell'abbandono (2002), Elena Ferrante's protagonist, Olga, remembers the women of Simone de Beauvoir's short stories, La femme rompue [The Woman Destroyed] (1967), as 'sentimentalmente sciocche'. Critics have generally interpreted Ferrante's use of Beauvoir as a refutation of her representation of an abandoned woman found in 'The Woman Destroyed', the titular story of the collection. Conversely, this essay argues that Ferrante embraces Beauvoir's 'woman destroyed' as a model. Through an analysis of the works' intertextuality, it demonstrates that Beauvoir's existentialist feminism, as expressed in both 'The Woman Destroyed' and The Second Sex, is a key source for Ferrante's novel. In particular, it offers a new interpretation of Ferrante's ending, highlighting the ambiguous quality of the story's closing lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the global pandemic era, it becomes more worthwhile than ever for us to consider humanity as a community whose destiny is shared regardless of planetary inequality. Science fiction provides a good vehicle to speculate on the future, especially in the thought experiments regarding high technologization, setbacks of globalization, and ecological crises. This paper explores Han Song's Subway (Ditie) to understand what challenges high modernization—especially technologization and global capitalism—poses to human and nonhuman existence. The collection of short stories overarches its temporal setting from the Anthropocene to a post-Anthropocene era, where the planet is destroyed by an apocalypse. This article approaches Han Song's representation of cybernetic (post)human existence, a situation generated when human embodied experience is subjugated under technological manipulation. Drawing on concepts from new materialist ecocriticism such as ecosickness, it argues that Han Song's subway stories represent the dual crises of the posthuman era—both affective and ecological. These stories express deep concern about the potential apocalyptic impact of techno-utopianism, exploitative expansion of global capitalism, and historical teleology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"A Message" ("Yige kouxin") is one of eleven short stories in the collection 1966 by mainland poet, essayist, and professor emerita Wang Xiaoni. The book was published to great interest in 2014, but was quickly pulled from warehouses for its controversial subject matter, namely the first year of the Cultural Revolution. All of the stories are set in the snowy, Russian-influenced, far northeastern province of Jilin, where Wang Xiaoni herself was born and raised. In 1966, Wang was eleven years old, just on the cusp between childhood and a semi-adult understanding of the world. The stories in the collection are told from the perspective of younger characters, ranging from a little boy barely old enough to left on his own, to young adults trying to make their way in a newly violent and chaotic society. None of the characters are given names, but instead identified by a role or profession or some other relative term like "sister" or "coworker," emphasizing not only the universality of the lives depicted, but also the interconnected nature of the communities she explores in minute detail. In "A Message," a male worker wants to deliver a warning to a teenaged girl who works at the same factory. Her parents have been accused of working as spies for the Americans—a crime for which the punishment could be death—and he wants to alert her of the terrible danger that she and her young brother are in. In an atmosphere in which paranoia is both ubiquitous and reasonable, the worker is worried that he will also be implicated in the parents' crime if he is seen to be aiding the family. Wang Xiaoni brings in many elements specific to that political era, including the frequent political radio broadcasts that the population were required to listen to, whether or not they happened suddenly in the middle of the night. Her characters are subject to the whims of work units, which controlled everything from where one lived to whom one married, and of the dreaded neighborhood committees, which kept watch over the lives of regular citizens and harshly punished any perceived infractions against the revolutionary cause. Wang brilliantly captures the omnipresent and stifling fear, as well as how ordinary good intentions could go terribly awry, or simply be crushed under the deadly onslaught of the communal, interpersonal, and social upheavals wrought by the Cultural Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[novel] 11 Fischer, Tibor. FARKAS: Nobody, nobody looks at Brexit, nobody looks at the Northern Irish problem these days ... FISCHER: No, no, no, it's not true that people don't look at it ... FARKAS: Or the COVID ... scandal. Fischer, the son of Hungarian émigré parents who fled Hungary in 1956 and settled down in Britain seeking to live out their lives in a free western country, has acquired working knowledge of his parents' native tongue but has written all of his seven novels and two volumes of short stories in English. This is a lightly edited transcript of an interview with Tibor Fischer made when the British novelist of Hungarian descent and writer of Under the Frog, a novel short-listed for the Man-Booker Prize, delivered a lecture on his work at the English studies programme of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores representations of mothering practices in Songs of the Suitcase (1998) by second-generation Italian Australian writer Anna Maria Dell'oso. This collection of short stories devotes special attention to the interlinks between mothering and mediation among culturally diverse groups in modern Australian society. Theoretical frameworks provided by scholars in translation, interpreting and child language brokering are used to shed light on how Dell'oso succeeds in voicing Italian Australian women migrants' abilities to negotiate and mediate between various cultural groups, ethnicities and generations, especially when it comes to mothering and maternal care. How does Dell'oso configure mothering as the most invaluable caregiving practice, vis-à-vis global mobility and circulation of values? How does she represent and problematize the role of mothers and daughters in modern Australia? How does she challenge families' views on how to mother? How does she interpret the role of the mediator of cultural memories and family beliefs? By displaying the author's fictional alter egos as the most privileged sites of exploration, Dell'oso reflects on the impact of migration upon mothering practices and the mother-daughter dyad. Finally, she offers thought-provoking views on how Italian Australian mothering practices, as social values, are confronted with and fashioned by ever-changing communities of migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written in 2020 and compiled into Wong Yi's 2021 short story collection Ways to Love in a Crowded City, "Overseas Bride" delves into the emotional and cultural complexities of emigration, particularly what is left behind. Set against the backdrop of a mass exodus from a city that is presumably Hong Kong, the story unfolds from the perspective of a narrator grappling with a loved one's proposal to marry as a means of escape, contemplating the profound sacrifices involved in leaving one's homeland, including the loss of cultural identity and one's mother tongue. The story vividly portrays the challenges of assimilating into a new environment, where familiar comforts and linguistic nuances are absent, and the struggle to find a sense of belonging in a minority community. Themes of love, cultural identity, language, and belonging are intricately woven throughout the story, which ponders the bittersweet reality of emigration, not as a process of simple physical relocation but as a complex emotional journey. Showcasing a vibrant array of Cantonese idioms, the story serves as an homage to the many facets of the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christos Tsiolkas is regularly acknowledged as one of the most important writers working in Australia - indeed, the world - today. Ultimately, he says, "I love him."[15] Tsiolkas's study of White signifies a powerfully unsettling mateship between two authors I would argue are as significant as each other, as vocal in their support and criticism of Australia and as intensely disruptive in the field of Australian literature. Both are identities that likewise define Tsiolkas, and it is this very position as both insider and outsider that is central to Tsiolkas's extended interpretation of White's significance for his own rereading. [Extracted from the article]

This article focuses on representations of the city in 20th- and twenty-first-century Moroccan literature. In particular, this work concerns itself with the different social, historical, and political forces that together contribute to the construction of urban spaces, and it draws on a number of critical and theoretical fields, including cultural memory studies and literary studies, while at the same time considering different contemporary Moroccan urban structures from a spatio-temporal perspective. More precisely, this article addresses the city in Medieval, colonial, and postcolonial Morocco as a territory of individual and collective memory in Fās ... Law cĀdat Ilayh (2003) (If Fez Returned to Him), a novel by Aḥmad al-Madīnī, and Le griot de Marrakech (2005), (The Griot of Marrakesh), a collection of short stories by Mahi Binebine. This study examines various cultural monuments, including the imperial city gates, the Mellah (Jewish quarter), texts both North African and Andalusi, and historical personalities, insofar as they function as lieuxdemémoire according to Pierre Nora's usage of the term. These components of Moroccan cultural heritage function as manifestations of history through memory, rooted both in material and immaterial figures, and constitute national identity: an interfaith, multiethnic, and pluri-linguistic Morocco. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I seek to demonstrate the extent to which meaningful truth(s) can be extracted from a work of memorable literary fiction. This evocative autoethnography employs elements of Creative Analytical Practice (CAP) within a trilogy of short stories (episodes) each inspired by 'Shoeless Joe', the fictional novel that provided the inspiration for the fantasy baseball movie 'Field of Dreams'. Whether consumed individually or altogether, the three-part production offers the opportunity to experience the power and potential of producing personal narratives. Episodes One, Two and Three are piece of creative non-fiction that incorporate the aspects of personal narrative, ethnodrama and autobiography. The principles and practices of occupational devotion and heritage sports tourism are explored and exploited throughout, providing a platform for new learning and a potentially a new way of seeing the world(s) we inhabit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a ghost story originally published in 1861 and then incorporated into a memoir published in 1887–9 by the Hungarian woman writer and editor Mária Csapó (1828–96), better known as Mrs Vachott. With the examination of the ghost story's changing publications, the paper clarifies the process during which this apparently independent ghost story became a powerful metaphor for Mrs Vachott's strenuous life with haunting memories, as recorded in her published memoir. It appears that this same ghost story had been influenced by a Hungarian translation of Walter Scott's "The Tapestried Chamber" (1829) that Mrs Vachott read in a collection of short stories issued in 1836. Thus, the successful combination of the two narratives, the ghost story and the memoir, not only makes Mrs Vachott's experiment truly remarkable, but also gives valuable insights into Scott's influence on nineteenth-century Hungarian women's writing, and into the changing possibilities of the ever hybrid form of the Gothic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to discuss three representative works by Dalit writers—Bama's Karukku (2014), the first autobiography by a Dalit woman, Baby Kamble's memoir, The Prisons We Broke (2015), and Baburao Bagul's collection of short stories, When I Hid My Caste (2018)—that reveal how, despite some improvements in their condition, the Dalit community continues to be subjected to various, at times, subtle, forms of discrimination in present-day India. The analysis of these works suggests that, while India is the most populous democracy in the world (1.3 billion), its democracy is tainted by a remnant of the past: its caste system. Although the practice of untouchability was legally abolished after India's independence in 1947, and the overall living conditions of the lowest caste, the Dalits (25% of the population) have slowly improved over the years, the legal measures undertaken by the government have failed to guarantee their equality and inclusion in all social spheres. The three literary works reveal that casteist discrimination has not ceased but rather has changed its appearance, which is why, in the words of Urvashi Butalia, "there is still a long road to be travelled" before India overcomes its democratic deficit, its inherited casteism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Julieanne Lamond's book, "Lohrey," explores the career of Australian author Amanda Lohrey and her seven novels, as well as her collection of short stories. Lamond discusses Lohrey's diverse writing style and how it has made her difficult to market and promote. The book delves into the themes and contradictions present in Lohrey's work, such as the search for truth and the impact of gender structures. It also examines the implications of the pastoral narrative in Australian history and the effects of British Imperialism. Lamond's book offers a balanced blend of author biography and thematic exploration, providing readers with an engaging and insightful perspective on Lohrey's writing. [Extracted from the article]

Here, we see L'Official identify an insider-out perspective that embraces the "spatial limits" of the Bronx but also gives agency to a South Bronx imagination that is not limited to the geography of its neighbourhood. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter added a tour of the South Bronx to his New York City trip in order to avoid criticism of insensitivity to "inner-city problems" (p. 4). [Extracted from the article]