Published during the debates around the role of the author in response to the Cuban Revolution, at the height of the Latin American literary Boom, Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966) emerges not only as a culmination of Julio Cortázar’s short fiction but also as a volume in dialogue with the literary, social, and political concerns of the time. Constant throughout this collection is the representation of characters who are displaced from familiar surroundings either physically, psychologically, or even fantastically. Characters are forced to share an uncomfortable space in “Autopista del Sur,” a story situated on the highway south of Paris that presents an allegory of human relations. Through the textual transposition of Che Guevara’s diaristic rendition of his trajectory through the Sierra Maestra Mountains in Cuba, “Reunión” also records the historical meeting of revolutionaries. Meanings produced through displacements develop also in the closing story of the volume, “El otro cielo,” in which Paris and Buenos Aires are seamlessly intertwined in the character’s experience. Displacement functions as an organizing thread through Todos los fuegos el fuego; transfers and reverberations in the stories generate disquieting tensions that reflect contemporary sociopolitical realities and the human condition.

A review of Collins’s short fiction both in journals and in collections

The coincidence between the events on 9/11 in Santiago in 1973 and New York in 2001, earlier observed by Ariel Dorfman, lends itself to an analysis of the spiral of Bolaño’s oeuvre from the trauma of the 1970s Chilean dictatorship to the neo-globalizing moment that overlapped with the world dissemination of Bolaño’s work. Bolaño is nostalgic for the Allende era in Chile when meaningful social change seemed possible. Yet he is conscious that it was the authoritarian force and neoliberal economics of the Pinochet regime that was truly prophetic of the future. The nostalgic and the counterfactual, the elegiac and recursive, intertwine as Bolaño looks back on his generation’s odyssey and sees analogies for its trauma in the femicides of 2666. A nodal point of this intertwining is the tenth anniversary of the coup on September 11, 1983, where a group of “masochistic Chileans” meet in Paris in The Savage Detectives, poised between a past they never knew and a future they can scarcely envision. Bolaño knows he has to face the necropolitics of the then-present and not the nostalgia of the deferred past; yet the dream of the Allende era is never entirely renounced in his oeuvre.

While Don DeLillo is an Italian American and son of immigrants, his fiction often has an ambivalent relationship with his biographical detail. He does not claim to be, and is seldom interpreted as, an ethnic writer.

The short story is not just a story that is short: the short story generally differs significantly from the novel in terms of scope, timeframe, number of characters and locations. How details acquire priority in short fiction. The relationships between the short story, flash fiction and poetry. The challenges and pleasures of short and very short fiction. The usefulness of short form writing to the developing novelist in the scope it offers for experimentation with narrative voice, characterisation and dialogue, as well as its value in its own right.

‘It is a complexity of afterthought, a psychological or emotional residue, that we seek to leave with the reader following the intense experience of consuming a short story.’

This first chapter on thel contexts of Roth’s work provides an overview of these responses in Roth’s early years as a published writer, addressing the accolades for works such as Goodbye, Columbus, as well as the pushback early works received from members of the Jewish community, who deemed elements of his early short stories to be anti-Semitic. The chapter also briefly addresses Roth’s output after the largely positive reception of Goodbye, Columbus – namely, Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967) – providing an overview of the more mixed reviews received by these works, and Roth’s own struggle to find his voice as a young author.

Making the most of her good fortune to be writing in one of the most dynamic chapters in the history of the American periodical, Edith Wharton sold her stories to the genteel monthlies, slicks and pulps, where her short fiction garnered a readership of millions by the end of her career. Re-placed in their original magazine frames, her short stories chart Wharton’s response to the different print cultures in which she wrote and this essay explores how, as the market developed, so, correspondingly, did Wharton’s narrative response to the stories’ ideological and physical publishing context. Here I argue that, when read in the very different magazines in which they were originally published, from the early genteel periodicals to the later mass magazines, distinct patterns in the stories emerge, both in terms of Wharton’s narrative poetics, and the techniques she uses in her increasingly crafted and wry assessment of the industry which she spent a lifetime courting and criticizing.