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Since her debut in 2012, Fukazawa Ushio has become a critical voice in the Japanese literary scene, writing about social issues including hate speech against Zainichi Koreans, abuse of migrant workers, gender inequality, and misogyny. One of the significant aesthetic features of her work is the use of food and foodways to explore these issues. This article examines the short story collection The Matchmaker and the five-part food essay "When Yi Tongae Eats," focusing on their sensorial elaboration of Zainichi Koreans' experiences of discrimination and desire to belong, sitting both at the intersection of gender and ethnicity. Fukazawa's sensorial contemplation of the affective values associated with cooking, eating, and drinking, I argue, generates a sense of intimacy among characters and between text and reader that ultimately enables us to expand our understanding of the complexities of Zainichi Korean identity and their place in contemporary Japan. [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 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 aim of the present study is as follows: The first part consists of a study of Kattan's transcontinental trilogy, highlighting its leitmotifs, narrative style, and especially the socio-historical conditions it reflects, with Adieu, Babylone (1975) receiving particular attention. I will then study one of Kattan's latest novels Le gardien de mon frère (2003), followed by two collections of short stories, an earlier one, La Reprise (1985), then a recent title, Je regarde les femmes (2005), none of which have been translated to date. Having done so, this article will move on to tie the themes of exile and expatriation as reflected in Naïm Kattan's fiction, notably in the trilogy, to the writer's own professed views pertaining to the passage of his multiple being across various nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deconstructing meanings and their accepted interpretations are the primary goals of stylistics. Feminist stylistics is mainly based on feminist theories, which are particularly interested in patriarchal norms that marginalize and degrade women. This study examines the feminist discourse in Ahdaf Soueif's short story collection Aisha, which is one of the significant works portraying Arab women in a patriarchal culture. Asian women's difficulties are covered in the feminist book Aisha. By putting gender issues at the center of the textual analysis, feminist stylistics exposes the untenable assumptions of traditional stylistics. This feminist approach highlights gender discourses in various texts, including linguistic and thematic disparities. In light of this, the study will explain feminist stylistics, provide a brief overview of Ahdaf Soueif's biography, and use a feminist stylistic approach to Soueif's stories. The author hopes to demonstrate how language's treatment of gender reflects patriarchal culture. In order to evaluate sexism and patriarchal issues in the stories and how point of view, agency, metaphor, or transitivity are tied explicitly to gender by separating women's writing habits from men's writing, this study will use feminist stylistics to analyse the stories at word/phrase, sentence, and discourse level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel" by Troy J. Bassett is a comprehensive study that challenges existing knowledge about multivolume fiction in the Victorian era. Bassett's research database, At the Circulating Library (ATCL), provides extensive bibliographic data on Victorian fiction, including information on novels, authors, and publishers. The book analyzes publishing data on 7,272 multivolume works of fiction published between 1837 and 1898, revealing a gradual increase in the number of novels published in this format until its decline in the late 19th century. The study also explores the economic structures and publishing systems that made multivolume fiction profitable for publishers, libraries, and authors. Overall, this book offers valuable insights into the Victorian novel and its relationship to publishing structures and formats. [Extracted from the article]

Voices That Sing Behind The Veil: Anthology of Short Stories from Africa and the Diaspora, edited by Ivor Agyeman-Duah, is a comprehensive collection of 56 short stories from various African countries and beyond. The anthology includes stories from Anglophone and Francophone writers, as well as contributions from the Caribbean and the African American heritage. The editor emphasizes the importance of including diverse voices and perspectives in global conversations. The book offers a valuable resource for readers interested in African literature, cultural and social engineering, and storytelling. [Extracted from the article]

Jamaica Kincaid's first book and first short story collection At the Bottom of the River (1983) is a work which offers the reader a pithy and lyrical style by which the author reflects the merging of the real and imaginary world of a young Antiguan girl growing into adulthood. The curt stories in the collection are inter-related since they relate to some slices of the life of an unnamed female narrator who is the main character in all the stories. The aim of this article is to depict the most significant features which are believed to prove that the work can bear the epithet 'prose poem'. During the study on this research paper, it has been observed that the work can also be considered to be a type of 'poetic prose'. Yet, considering that both 'prose poem' and 'poetic prose' are close to each other in the sense that both of them are the genres "jumping the fence" -- a phrase used, here, metaphorically and in the context of genres free from the restraints of poetry and prose--; in other words, both genres exceed the boundaries of both poetry and prose, they are hybrid genres and therefore, it has been seen no drawbacks of analyzing Kincaid's collection in the perspective of 'prose poem'. Briefly, the aim of this study is to reveal the poetic features in the work written in prose, through which one would be able to define it as a 'prose poem'. When the images, metaphors, similes and symbols are explored in the stories in the collection, it has been observed that although these figures of speech have different functions, they mainly serve to illustrate the main character's quest for identity and her depiction of her self which she gains at the end. For this reason, the study concurrently highlights the theme of search for an identity which is revealed in Kincaid's book by means of the use of the figures of speech such as images and symbols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diction, Short Story, Essays The aim of the research was to find out the diction used by students in composing short stories. The research method used is descriptive qualitative method. The data source for this research was short stories written by students of class XI at SMA Negeri 10 Depok in the 2021/2022 academic year. The results of the study obtained 10 requirements for the accuracy of the use of diction using the percentage technique. Based on the research conducted by the researcher, 81 data were obtained from 42 students' short story essays. Of the 10 types of diction accuracy requirements analyzed, the results of inaccurate use of diction were as follows: use of general and special words 11.11%, use of connotative and denotative words 27.16%, use of almost synonymous words 35.81%, use of idioms 4.93%, continuity of word choice 11.11 %, and the use of the word senses 9.87%. From the results obtained, it can be concluded that class XI students used a lot of synonymous diction in the short story essays they made and only a few found inaccuracies, most of them were correct and appropriate for their use in short story essays. [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]

This essay argues that Glenway Wescott — an American author widely read in the early twentieth century but virtually unknown to literary scholars today — poses a problem for many of the narratives we tell ourselves about both queer identity and modernist literary history. On the one hand, the wandering, nonlinear plots of much of his fiction run counter to the narratives of urban migration, rural stasis, and ex‐urban return that shape most scholarship on sexual geography. On the other, Wescott's tendency to borrow aesthetic practices from a wide range of literary schools and movements makes it difficult to locate him within the narrative of American literary history. Reading Wescott's writings — particularly those in his short story collection Good‐Bye Wisconsin (1928) — as examples of what the essay terms queer drift, the author argues that Wescott's life and corpus destabilize the narratives we often use to make sense of both modern sexual identity and modernist literary aesthetics. In fact, this is why his work warrants more critical attention than it has traditionally received: it provides us with new ways of thinking about the relationship between queerness, geography, and narrative form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes “Cadáver,” a short story in the collection Barrio bonito (2015), by Venezuelan author Luis Freites. It argues that, rather than creating an afterlife for the dead characterized by processes of mourning, commemoration, and memorialization, the story captures the body’s afterdeath: the slow decomposition and transformation of the corpse from organic matter to bones and dust. Through the staging of an aesthetic gesture described by Maikel—the story’s protagonist—as “mirar pa’ dentro” (to look inside or to look into one’s insides), a temporality determined by the tempo of decay, and the multisensory attack of leaky dead matter dripping from the corpse, the afterdeath that materializes in “Cadáver” creates what I, following the work of Michael Rothberg and Venezuelan poet Igor Barreto, call “networks of implication.” These networks build connections between bodies both human and nonhuman based not on empathy, compassion, or familiarity but on contact, contagion, and unsettling moments of intersection and recognition. I propose that, in doing so, they introduce a form of relationality that is not mediated or circumscribed by grief, and that demands a radical renewal of political vocabularies and a reorganization of social life that has, as its core, the collectivization of death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to study a selection of short stories by the contemporary Canadian writer Alice Munro (1931–) focusing on the theme of childhood. It examines the representation of childhood as remembered by adult narrators. The research approaches the stories through the theories of narratology and psychoanalysis. The concepts of the narrator in addition to Freud's theorisation about childhood memories are especially utilised to explore the childhood memories of the adult narrators. The stories selected for this study are 'The Ottawa Valley' (1974), 'Chaddeleys and Flemings' (1979), 'The Progress of Love' (1985) and 'The Eye' (2012) with adult narrators. [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]

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 article discusses the life and work of Kerstin Söderholm, a Finnish writer who was active in the early 20th century. Söderholm's diaries and poems have recently been published online, shedding light on her contributions to Finnish literature. The article explores Söderholm's writing style, her exploration of themes such as modernity and spirituality, and her close relationship with nature. Despite her talent and involvement in the Swedish Writers' Union, Söderholm has been largely forgotten in the 21st century. The article highlights the importance of preserving and studying her work as a valuable part of Finnish literary history. [Extracted from the article]

The writer Mary O’Donnell (County Monaghan, 1954) is one of Ireland’s most prominent authors. She has published eight collections of poetry including Unlegendary Heroes (1998), The Ark Builders (2009), Those April Fevers (2015) and most recently Massacre of the Birds (2020), four novels, among them The Light-Makers (1992), The Elysium Testament (1999) and Where They Lie (2014), and three collections of short stories: Strong Pagans (1991), Storm over Belfast (2008) and Empire (2018). She has also published a dozen essays and hundreds of reviews of both theatre and books. Besides, she is a frequent contributor to RTE Radio. Her voice and presence in Irish letters has been closely connected to the culture of her country. Her literature reflects the spirit of the age in which it is produced and revolves around phenomena that deeply affect the world today. Her range of subjects includes gender identity crises, mental instability, marriage in relation to female experience, sexuality, domestic and gender violence, child abuse, the artist in crisis, infertility, dysfunctional families, ecology and the natural world and the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Her works, written with immense talent, vivacity, skill, cleverness and humor, have been translated into several languages. In this interview, Mary O’Donnell discusses her most recent works in poetry and narrative: her collection of poems Massacre of the Birds (2020), her collection of short stories Empire (2018) and the novel Where They Lie (2014). [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]

I have seen the face of Eddie "the Bronko" Bronkowski, about whom the Blondes say, "Part of his face should be here, part there. Wondering if Slinker indeed was "real", I Googled him and landed on a recent interview of Bukoski in a Duluth weekly called I The Reader i . Thanks to Anthony Bukoski, I know Mr. Slinker. Surely, the sure-bet-to-lose boxer Eddie "the Bronko" Bronkowski illustrates that reality, assisted by the puzzle pieces of three generations of family and dozens of locals who assure that, no matter her age, a reader can find footing and perspective and riches here. [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]

Based on an analysis of six texts from three anthologies of Guatemalan short stories, I endeavor to understand some of the representative features of the poetics of 20th and 21st century writers in relation to the concerns they reveal, in keeping with the times in which they were written. In this sense, I also try to encourage dialogue between the diachronic vision of the first anthology with the regionalism of the second, while recognizing the newest writers of the third anthology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Franco-Prussian War was not only a watershed in the history of Europe, it also inspired a watershed moment in French literary history: the publication of Les Soirées de Médan in 1880. The short story collection was a central text in framing a Naturalist group identity, but each of its six stories is also a scathing attack on the Franco-Prussian War and on the catastrophic French defeat. It has been argued that the myth surrounding the volume quickly eclipsed the stories themselves, but the volume's publication history shows that some of the contributors wrote their stories before a collective volume was proposed, suggesting that the critique of the war was initially as important as forming literary allegiances. This article examines the book from both angles, as a literary-historical event and as an anti-war tract. The uncomfortable relationship between the two is underscored by the many paratextual and textual absences in Les Soirées de Médan, which simultaneously conceal and draw attention to the war. It will show that the critique of the war of 1870–1871 is a necessary aspect of the public fashioning of Naturalist group identity, but that this public position-taking complicates our understanding of Naturalism as a cohesive literary movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on correcting the historical perception that Marie Corelli's short fiction was not initially published in periodicals. Topics include the discovery of her works in publications like the Theatre and London Society, the fictional elements in overlooked pieces, and the reassessment of Corelli's engagement with the periodical press, highlighting her strategic use of the European publishing market and the experimentation with form in her short story collections.