A Small, Good Thing

Richard Brautigan is most famous for his iconic novel Trout Fishing in America (1967), but he was also a prolific short story writer and poet. Whether you are a hardcore Brautigan fan, or you have never heard of him, this episode is for you! Chris Gair is the director of the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies, Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of Glasgow, and one of the greatest Brautigan experts! He is the author of The American Counterculture (Edinburgh University Press), of The Beat Generation: a Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld), and of numerous articles on American literature.
 
Works mentioned:

Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America (Four Seasons Foundation, 1967).
Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General from Big Sur (Grove Press, 1965).
Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar (Four Seasons Foundation, 1968).
Richard Brautigan, Revenge of the Lawn (Simon & Schuster, 1971).
Richard Brautigan, Tokyo-Montana Express (Delacorte Press, 1980).
Richard Brautigan, ‘The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon’ in Revenge of the Lawn (Simon & Schuster, 1971), pp. 72-79.
Richard Brautigan, ‘The Scarlatti Tilt’, in Revenge of the Lawn (Simon & Schuster, 1971), p. 37.
Lionel Trilling, ‘Huckleberry Finn’, in The Liberal Imagination (Secker and Warburg, 1951), pp. 104-117 (p. 106).
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (Boni & Liveright, 1925).
 
Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies (University of Glasgow) https://surreylearn.surrey.ac.uk/d2l/le/lessons/283532/topics/3511681

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.

Chigozirim Nwaosu is a PhD candidate in English Literature in the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Surrey (UK). Her research focuses on the intersectionality between race, gender and sexuality and how it affects contemporary societies. In this episode, Chigozirim discusses the representation of gender and sexuality in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 collection The Thing Around Your Neck. Listen to find out what role colonialism played in shaping the narrative surrounding Africa, African women and the African queer community. 
 
Works mentioned:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck (4th Estate, 2009). 
Devon W. Carbado, ‘Privilege’ in Johnson, Patrick E., and Henderson, MAE G. (eds.) Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 190-212.
Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (Zed, 1987).
Sylvia Tamale, African Sexualities: A Reader (Pambazuka Press, 2011).
Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender? (Allen Lane, 2024).
Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Pluto Press, 1986).
M. Epprecht ‘Africa and African Homosexualities: An Introduction’ in Murray, S. O. & Roscoe, W. (eds.) Boy-Wives and Female Husband: Studies in African Homosexualities (State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 1-16.
BBC Africa, Theresa May ‘deeply regrets’ UK’s colonial anti-gay laws (2018). Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-43795440.

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.

What can fictional representations of blocked short story writers teach us about writer’s block and what causes a writer to feel blocked? I discuss these questions with Aaron Colton, Associate Teaching Professor and Director of First-Year Writing in the Department of English at Emory University in Atlanta. Aaron is the author of the book Writing Through Writer’s Block: Lessons from Modern American Fiction, published by the University of Iowa Press in 2025.
 
Works mentioned: 
 
Aaron Colton, Writing Through Writer’s Block: Lessons from Modern American Fiction (University of Iowa Press, 2025).
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (Black Irish Entertainment LLC, 2002).
Elizabeth Tallent, Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism (Harper, 2020).
Mike Rose (ed.), When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies in Writer’s Block and Other Composing-Process Problems (Guilford Press, 1985).
Mike Rose, ‘Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Approach to Writer’s Block.’ College Composition and Communication 31, no. 4 (1980), pp. 389–401.
Tillie Olsen, Silences, 25th edition (Feminist Press at CUNY, 2003).
John W. Aldridge, Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly Line Fiction (Scribner’s, 1992).
Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard University Press, 2009).
Lucy Ives, Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World. A Novel. (Soft Skull Press, 2019).
Nam Le, ‘Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,’ in The Boat (Vintage, 2009), pp. 3-28.
Ian Afflerbach, ‘On the Literary History of Selling Out: Craft, Identity, and Commercial Recognition’, in PMLA 137, no. 2 (2022), pp. 238–54. 
Andrew Martin, Early Work: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018). 
Andrew Martin, ‘No Cops’, in Cool for America: Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020).

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.

Paul March-Russell is the outgoing editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, the co-founder of Gold SF, an intersectional feminist science fiction imprint of Goldsmiths Press, and the author of The Short Story: An Introduction for Edinburgh University Press. In this episode, Paul discusses the importance of women writers in science fiction and the legacy of the short story collection Women of Wonder (1974) edited by Pamela Sargent. 
 
Works mentioned:

Paul March-Russell, The Short Story: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). 
‘Definitions of SF’, in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. by John Clute and David Langford https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/definitions_of_sf.
China Miéville, ‘Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory’, in Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, ed. by Mark Bould and China Miéville (Pluto Press, 2009), pp. 231-48.
Pamela Sargent (ed.), Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women (Penguin, 1974).
On Margaret Atwood’s ‘talking squid in outer space’, see David Barnett, ‘Science fiction: the genre that dare not speak its name’, The Guardian (28 Jan. 2009), https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/jan/28/science-fiction-genre 
Joanna Russ, ‘Nobody’s Home’, in Women of Wonder, ed. by Pamela Sargeant (Penguin, 1974), pp. 242-58. 
David Harvey, ‘Time–Space Compression and the Postmodern Condition’, in The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1990), pp. 284-307. 
Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (Peter Lang, 2014).
Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow’, in Women of Wonder, ed. by Pamela Sargeant (Penguin, 1974), pp. 191-224.
Robert Heinlein, ‘Waldo’, in Waldo & Magic, Inc (Macmillan, 1969). [See also Anne McCaffrey, ‘The Ship Who Sang’, in Women of Wonder, ed. by Pamela Sargent (Penguin, 1974), pp. 82-107.]
‘Symposium: Women in Science Fiction’, Khatru 3/4 (1975), https://fanac.org/fanzines/Khatru/Khatru03.pdf.  
Joanna Russ, ‘The Image of Women in Science Fiction’, in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. by Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), pp. 79-94.
Joanna Russ, To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, ed. by Sarah Lefanu (Indiana University Press, 1995).
Lisa Yaszek, Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (Ohio University Press, 2008).
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (Harper Voyager, 2013).
Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (Arno Press, 1975).
Martin Scofield, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story (CUP, 2006).
Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (Touchstone, 1997).
Pamela Zoline, ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’, in The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories (McPherson & Company, 1988), pp. 13-28. [Published in the UK as Busy about the Tree of Life (The Women’s Press, 1988).] 
E. J. Swift, When There Are Wolves Again (Quercus Publishing, 2025). 
Vonda L. McIntyre, Little Sisters and Other Stories (Gold SF, 2024).
James Tiptree Jr., Warm Worlds and Otherwise (Penguin Classics Science Fiction, 2021).
James Tiptree Jr. ‘The Women Men Don’t See’, in Warm Worlds and Otherwise (Penguin Classics Science Fiction), pp. 156-98.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters & The Compass Rose (Gollancz, 2015). 
Kit Reed, The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (Wesleyan University Press, 2013).

Other references:

Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction (Journal) https://www.sf-foundation.org/ 
Gold SF https://mitpress.mit.edu/series/goldsmiths-press-gold-sf/

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.

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.