A Small, Good Thing

2026 marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of Infinite Jest, arguably David Foster Wallace’s most famous and celebrated book. In this episode, Professor Marshall Boswell, one of the leading scholars in the field of David Foster Wallace’s studies, discusses Wallace’s three brilliant short story collections: Girl with Curious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), and Oblivion (2004). 
 
Works cited: 
Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace. Revised and Expanded Edition (University of South Carolina Press, 2020). 
Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (eds.), A Companion to David Foster Wallace’s Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 
Marshall Boswell, David Foster Wallace and the Long Thing (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 
Marshall Boswell, The Wallace Effect: David Foster Wallace and the Contemporary Literary Imagination (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). 
David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair (Norton, 1989). 
David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Little, Brown, 1999). 
David Foster Wallace, Oblivion: Stories (Little, Brown, 2004). 
David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (Viking, 1987). 
D. T. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (Granta, 2013). 
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Little, Brown, 1996). 
David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Little, Brown, 1997), pp. 21-82. 
John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (Doubleday, 1968). 
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1973). 
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (Vintage, 1991). 
David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (Little, Brown, 2005). 
John Updike, Problems and Other Stories (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). 
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (Little, Brown, 2011). 
John Updike, Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (Alfred A. Knopf, 1962). 
Lauren Groff, Florida (Penguin, 2018).

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.

In this episode, Naomi Kanakia (a.k.a Woman of Letters on Substack) tells the fascinating tale of the New Yorker Short Story. Since the times of Harold Ross and editor Katharine White, the New Yorker has been the most renowned literary magazine publishing short fiction in the US. Does a “New Yorker short story” really exists? And if it does, what does it look like?
Naomi Kanakia is the author of a hugely popular blog on Substack (link below), has an upcoming non-fiction book with Princeton University Press (What’s so Great about the Great Books?) and is working on a collection of short stories to be released by Random House in 2028. 
 
Works cited:
Naomi Kanakia, What’s so Great about the Great Books? (Princeton University Press, 2026). 
John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever (Random House, 1981). 
Amy Reading, The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker (Mariner Books, 2024). 
Sally Benson, ‘Lady with a Lamp’, New Yorker, January 18, 1947. 
The New Yorker, 55 Short Stories from the New Yorker (Simon & Schuster, 1949). 
Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). 
John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra (Harcourt Brace, 1934). 
Irwin Shaw, The Young Lions (Random House, 1948). 
Mavis Gallants, Collected Short Stories (Everyman’s Library, 2016). 
 
Naomi’s Substack blog: https://www.woman-of-letters.com/ 
You can read Naomi’s Substack post about the New Yorker short story here: https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/money-and-prestige.

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.

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.