A Small, Good Thing

Alexander Manshel is Associate Professor of English at McGill University in Montreal (Canada). His research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, multi-ethnic American fiction, and the cultural institutions that organize the contemporary literary field. How is contemporary short fiction in America influenced by the people and institutions that contribute to its production, circulation, and reception? Listen to find out!

Works mentioned: 
 
Alexander Manshel, ‘The Best of the Best: Anthologies, Prizes, and the Short Story Canon’, in The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story, ed. by Michael Collins and Gavin Jones (Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 62-79.
Charles E. May, ‘The American Short Story in the Twenty-First Century’ in Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective, ed. by Viorica Patea (Rodopi, 2012), pp. 299-324. Perspective (Rodopi).
Alexander Manshel, Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon (Columbia University Press, 2023).

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.

(00:00:00) Intro

(00:02:00) The Place to Find a Body (Ailsa Cox)

(00:06:17) The Woman in the Tracksuit (Charlie Hill)

(00:07:05) The Sunshine Skyway (Lauren C. Johnson)

(00:13:53) New You (Shelley Roche-Jacques)

(00:16:05) The Whites of Her Eyes (Molly Treweek)

(00:21:58) Muguette (Elsa Court)

(00:30:22) bill (Timothy Fox)

(00:33:49) Spirits (Elizabeth Geoghegan)

(00:37:01) Curtain Call (Niamh Swain)

(00:43:24) A New Lease (Loghan Fellows)

(00:45:29) Unbecoming (Sonya Moor)

(00:50:09) She Will Sleep (Abi Millner)

(00:53:05) The Man Who Walks Backwards (Charlie Hill)

(00:54:12) Outro

Ailsa Cox has published fiction in numerous magazines and anthologies, and twice been longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. You can read her latest story, “Poltergeist”, in The Manchester Review. Precipitation, a mini-collection in collaboration with the artist Patricia Farrell, is available from Confingo. Other books include Writing Short Stories (Routledge 3rd edition 2025) and, as co-author, Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books (EUP 2024).“The Place to Find a Body” was first published in Suzanne Bray and Gérald Préher (eds.), Tomorrow’s World/ Le Monde de demain, Biennale Ecoposs, FLSH, Lille, 2022.

Elsa Court is a French-born writer and translator based in London. She holds a PhD in English Literature from UCL, and completed The Stinging Fly Advanced Fiction Workshop with Seán O'Reilly in 2019. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, American Short Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The TLS, and she has translated essays and interviews for publications including the Financial Times and Another Gaze. She teaches Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. “Muguette” originally appeared in Issue Four of Worms Magazine, a London-based publication championing new writing by women and nonbinary authors, in 2021.

Loghan Fellows is a Sheffield-based writer and performer who enjoys writing short-form fiction and spouting long-form balderdash. He is currently in his final year of a Creative Writing undergraduate degree at Sheffield Hallam University. He can be found on Instagram under the dashingly original moniker of @loghanfellowswriter.

Timothy Fox lives and writes in London. His chapbook every house needs a ghost was recently published by The Braag. It was a finalist for the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. His writing has appeared in, among others, The Molotov Cocktail, The Ghastling, Funicular Magazine and New Writing Scotland. In 2023, he was named a London Library Emerging Writer.

Elizabeth Geoghegan was born in New York, grew up in the Midwest, and lives in Rome. She is the author of two short story collections eightball and Natural Disasters, and the bestselling memoir The Marco Chronicles. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Best Travel Writing, TIME, El Pais, Words Without Borders, BOMB, and elsewhere. “Spirits” is forthcoming in an anthology of writing about Naples in conjunction with the Giancarlo DiTrapano foundation.

Charlie Hill is a writer from Birmingham. His work has appeared in publications such as Ambit, Stand, The Lonely Crowd, Confingo, Riptide and the Manchester Review, featured in songs and been taught in South Australian schools. “The Man Who Walked Backwards” first appeared in a pamphlet and “The Woman at the Bustop” in the online magazine Spelk. They were later included in Charlie’s second collection Encounters With Everyday Madness, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Edge Hill Prize.

Lauren C. Johnson attributes her upbringing in Florida, America’s weirdest state, to her interest in the ecological and surreal. She lives in San Francisco, where she co-hosts Babylon Salon, a quarterly Bay Area reading series, and Club Chicxulub, a speculative reading and performance series. Her debut novel, The West Façade, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project on March 3, 2026. “The Sunshine Skyway” was first published on April 20, 2025, in The Sunlight Press.

Abi Millner was born and raised in Dorset, England. She has completed a BA Hons degree and Masters degree in creative writing at Sheffield Hallam university, during which she discovered a love for short and flash fiction. She was shortlisted for the Bridport flash fiction prize in 2024 and her short story “Joy” was recently published in the Linen Press anthology Skeins. She lives in the Peak District with her husband and children.

Sonya Moor is a French and British author and translator of short fiction. Her translation of Albertine Sarrazin’s The Crib and Other Stories is published by Cōnfingō, as is her collection The Comet and Other Stories. Her stories are widely published in literary reviews and anthologies, including Best British Short Stories 2024 and Best British Short Stories 2022, and recognised for awards such as the Cinnamon Literature Award, Seán O’Faoláin International Short Story Competition and Bridport Short Story Prize.

Shelley Roche-Jacques’ work has appeared in magazines and journals such as The Boston Review, Litro, The Rialto and Brevity. Her poetry pamphlet Ripening Dark was published in 2015, followed by a collection of dramatic monologues, Risk the Pier, in 2017. Her work has been highly commended for the Bridport Prize for flash fiction and shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and Wigleaf Top 50. Her current research is on flash fiction as a distinct literary form. She teaches Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, where she is Course Leader for the BA Creative Writing programme. “New You” was first published in the Bridport Prize Anthology 2021 (Redciffe Press).

Niamh Swain was born in Derbyshire and is currently in her second year of a BA Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, which has sparked her love for short stories and flash fiction. She is an enthusiast of storytelling in all its forms, from novels to film to video games. The short story “Curtain Call”, like most of her work, is inspired by her love of the British comedy she was raised on. Part of her writerly mission is to inject that essence into as many genres as possible.

Molly Treweek is a Leeds-based Creative who will be receiving her BA Hons Creative Writing degree from Sheffield Hallam University in June. She writes literary fiction and short stories exploring obsession and identity. Her poem “Just Nipping Out” was featured in The Flock Literary Magazine. You can find the rest of her short story “The Whites of Her Eyes” on her Instagram (Instagram) and Substack.

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.

Shelley Roche-Jacques is a poet, flash fiction writer and Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). In this episode, Shelley will be our guide into the world of Flash Fiction. How can a writer mobilise the story world and create three-dimensional stories when all they have at their disposal is a few hundred words? Listen and find out!

Works cited:
Shelley Roche-Jacques, ‘Flash fiction as a distinct literary form: some thoughts on time, space, and context’, in New Writing 21:2 (2024), pp. 171-89.
Kim Chinquee, 'Flash fiction, prose poetry and men jumping out of windows: searching for plot and finding definitions', in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, ed. by Tara L. Masih (Rose Metal Press, 2009), pp. 111-12.
Tania Hersham, ‘Flash Fiction 2014 Judge’s Report’. The Birdport Prize, https://bridportprize.org.uk/.
Ron Wallace, ‘Ron Wallace – Writers Try Short-Shorts', University of Wisconsin – English Department. https://dept.english.wisc.edu/wallace/?page_id=63. Accessed 26/10/2025. 
Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (Melville House, 2011).
Tony Williams, ‘Flash Fiction’, in The Handbook of Creative Writing, ed. by Steven Earnshaw (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 315-23. 
Amelia Gray, The Swan as Metaphor for Love, in Joyland (December 2012), https://joylandpublishing.com/uncategorized/swan-metaphor-love/. Accessed 26/10/2025. 
Tony Williams, ‘Gareth’, in All the Banans I’ve Never Eaten (Salt, 2012).
Tania Hersham (editor), Fuel: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Flash Fictions Raising Funds to Fight Fuel Poverty (Tania Hersham Books, 2025). 
Robert Shapard and James Thomas (editors), Sudden Fiction (Gibbs M. Smith, 1986). 
James Thomas and Robert Scotellaro (editors), New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton, 2018). 

Websites:
SmokeLong Quarterly: https://www.smokelong.com. 
Wigleaf: https://wigleaf.com. 
Bath Flash Fiction Award Archive, https://www.bathflashfictionaward.com/tag/flash-fiction/. 
Bath Flash Fiction Award Anthologies, https://www.bathflashfictionaward.com/tag/flash-fiction-anthologies/.

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.

Nicholas Royle is a short story writer, a novel writer, the editor of the Best British Short Stories series. In this episode, I get to chat with him about his latest collection of short stories, Paris Fantastique (Confingo), and about his passion for second-hand books. Nicholas is also the founder of Nighjar Press, which publishes individual short stories as limited-edition chapbooks. Listen to find out more!

Works mentioned:
Nicholas Royle, Paris Fantastique (Confingo Publishing, 2025). 
Nicholas Royle, Manchester Uncanny (Confingo Publishing, 2022). 
Nicholas Royle, London Gothic (Confingo Publishing, 2020). 
Nicholas Royle, Antwerp (Serpent’s Tail, 2005).
Nicholas Royle (editor), The Best British Short Stories 2025 (Salt, 2025).
Nicholas Royle, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector (Salt, 2021).
Nicholas Royle, Shadow Lines: Searching for the Book beyond the Shelf (Salt, 2024).
C. D. Rose, ‘I’m in Love with a German Film Star’, in Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, (Melville House, 2024). 
Joel Lane, The Foggy, Foggy Dew (1986). 
Alberto Manguel (editor), Black Water: An Anthology of Fantastic Literature (Picador, 1983). 
Shelley Jackson, The Melancholy of Anatomy (Anchor Books, 2002). 
Jamaica Kincaid, ‘Blackness’, in At the Bottom of the River (Picador, 1984).

Confingo publishing: PARIS FANTASTIQUE by Nicholas Royle | confingo

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.

Scott Setrakian is the president of the William Saroyan Foundation. At the time we recorded this interview, he had just come back from Armenia, where he had taken part in a seven-day event called Saroyan Days. In this episode, he tells me about the life and works of Armenian American short story writer William Saroyan. Saroyan’s is a story of determination, perseverance, Pulitzer Prices, Academy Awards, and (above all) of superb writing! 
 
Work mentioned: 
 
William Saroyan, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (Faber and Faber, 2024). 
William Saroyan, ‘The Pomegranate Trees’, in The Atlantic (February 1938). 
William Saroyan, Letters from 74 rue Taitbout (World Publishing Company, 1969). 
William Saroyan, The Human Comedy (Harcourt, Brace, 1943) 
William Saroyan, The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills (Scribner, 1952) 
William Saroyan, Places Where I’ve Done Time (Davis-Poynter, 1973) 
William Saroyan, Where the Bones Go (Pr at California st, 2002) 
 
William Saroyan Foundation website: William Saroyan Foundation

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.