In this episode I get to interview Heuijung Hur on her collection Failed Summer Vacation, which has recently been published in English by Scratchbooks. Listen to Heuijung talk about her favourite stories in the collection and what it feels like to read her own work in translation.

Works cited:
Heuijung Hur, Failed Summer Vacation, trans. by Paige Aniya Morris (Scratchbooks, 2025).
George Saunders, Tenth of December (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Han Yujoo, The Impossible Fairy Tale, trans. by Janet Hong (Graywolf Press, 2017). 
Gu Byeong-mo, The Old Woman with a Knife, trans. by Chi-Young Kim (Canongate Books, 2022). 
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, trans. by Jamie Chang (Scribner, 2016). 
Ivan Turgenev, First Love, trans. by Isaiah Berlin (Penguin Classics, 2004).

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.

Michael Collins is Reader in American Studies at King’s College, London and co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (2024). In this episode, I ask him why the short story is so popular in the US and yet relatively underrepresented in academic research. 
 
Works cited:

Michael J. Collins, The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800-1865 (University of Michigan Press, 2016).
Michael J. Collins, “Introduction”, in The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2024). 
Michael J. Collins and Gavin Jones (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2024). 
Frank Norris, ‘An Opening for Novelists. Great Opportunities for Fiction-Writers in San Francisco’, in Novels and Essays, ed. by Donald Pizer (The Library of America, 1986), pp. 1112-14. 
Bret Harte, ‘The Rise of the “Short Story”’, The Cornhill Magazine, 7.37 (1899), pp. 1-8. 
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (Schocken Books, 1968). 
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, in Poetry and Tales (Library of America, 1984). 
Eric D. Walrond, Tropic Death (Liveright, 2013).

Studies in the American Short Story, (https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/sass)

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 two-part episode, I have the privilege of chatting about Lucia Berlin’s short fiction with writer (and Lucia Berlin’s personal friend) Elizabeth Geoghegan. In the first part, Elizabeth tells me how she met Lucia Berlin and what kind of teacher she was; we also discuss the story “Angel’s Laundromat”. In the second part of the episode, I ask Elizabeth about the stories “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” “So Long,” and “Carmen”. A very special thank you to David Berlin and the Lucia Berlin Estate for allowing me to include two clips of Lucia Berlin reading “Angel’s Laundromat”. You can listen to the whole reading on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/readlucia/lucia-berlin-angels-laundromat 
 
Works mentioned (in order of appearance): 
Elizabeth Geoghegan, eightball (SFWP, 2019) 
Elizabeth Geoghegan, Natural Disasters (She Writes Press, 2014) 
Elizabeth Geoghegan, The Marco Chronicles (SFWP, 2023) 
Lucia Berlin, Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters (Picador, 2018) 

Stories from Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women (Picador, 2015)  
- “Here It Is Saturday” 
- “Angel’s Laundromat” 
- “A Manual for Cleaning Women” 
- “So Long” 
- “Grief” 
- “Mama” 
- “Carmen” 
- “Unmanageable”

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 two-part episode, I have the privilege of chatting about Lucia Berlin’s short fiction with writer (and Lucia Berlin’s personal friend) Elizabeth Geoghegan. In the first part, Elizabeth tells me how she met Lucia Berlin and what kind of teacher she was; we also discuss the story “Angel’s Laundromat”. In the second part of the episode, I ask Elizabeth about the stories “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” “So Long,” and “Carmen”. A very special thank you to David Berlin and the Lucia Berlin Estate for allowing me to include two clips of Lucia Berlin reading “Angel’s Laundromat”. You can listen to the whole reading on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/readlucia/lucia-berlin-angels-laundromat 
 
Works mentioned (in order of appearance): 
Elizabeth Geoghegan, eightball (SFWP, 2019) 
Elizabeth Geoghegan, Natural Disasters (She Writes Press, 2014) 
Elizabeth Geoghegan, The Marco Chronicles (SFWP, 2023) 
Lucia Berlin, Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters (Picador, 2018) 

Stories from Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women (Picador, 2015)  
- “Here It Is Saturday” 
- “Angel’s Laundromat” 
- “A Manual for Cleaning Women” 
- “So Long” 
- “Grief” 
- “Mama” 
- “Carmen” 
- “Unmanageable”

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, Prof. Irwin Streight (Royal Military College of Canada) discusses the unexpected legacy of short story writer Flannery O'Connor on popular singers and songwriters such as Bruce Springsteen, U2, Lucinda Williams, and Nick Cave.


Works mentioned (in order of appearance): 
 
Lucinda Williams, “Get Right With God”, from Essence (Lost Highway, 2001). 
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, dir. by Andrew Douglas (UK, USA, 2003). 
Borat, dir. by Larry Charles (USA, 2006). 
Irwin Streight, Flannery at the Grammys (University Press of Mississippi, 2024). 
Bruce Springsteen, The River (Columbia, 1980). 
Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska (Columbia, 1982). 
Bruce Springsteen, Devils & Dust (Columbia, 2005). 
Bruce Springsteen, The Ghost of Tom Joad (Columbia, 1995). 
Bruce Springsteen, Western Stars (Columbia, 2019).
Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run (Simon & Schuster, 2016).
U2, The Joshua Tree (Island, 1987). 
Mary Gauthier, “Wheel Inside the Wheel”, from Mercy Now (UMG Recordings, 2005). 
Nick Cave, Carnage (Goliath, 2021). 
Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel (Harper Collins, 1989).
Warren Zanes, Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska (Crown, 2023).
Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard University Press, 2009). 
 
O'Connor’s stories mentioned:

From A Good Man is Hard to Find (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955): 
- “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” 
- “Good Country People”

From Everything That Rises Must Converge (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965): 
- “Greenleaf” 
- “Parker’s Back” 
- “Revelation” 
- “Judgement Day” 
- “Everything That Rises Must Converge”


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.

Meet Tom Conaghan, founder of Scratch Books! In this episode, I ask Tom what it takes and what it's like to run a publisher entirely dedicated to short fiction. Find out more about the origins of Scratch Books, their amazing publications and short story competition!

Works cited (in order of appearance):
John Cheever, “Reunion”, in A Vision of the World: Selected Stories, ed. by Julian Barnes (Vintage, 2021), pp. 199-203. 
Reverse Engineering, ed. by Tom Conaghan (Scratch Books, 2022). 
Reverse Engineering II, ed. by Tom Conaghan (Scratch Books, 2022). 
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans by. Maria Jolas (Beacon Press, 1969). 
Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. by Stephen J. Burn (University Press of Mississippi, 2012). 
Yiyun Li, Wednesday’s Child (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2023). 
Lydia Davis, “The Cornmeal”, in Can’t and Won’t (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2014), p.33.  
Louis MacNeice, “Snow”, in Collected Poems (Faber&Faber, 2015). 
Tessa Hadley, After the Funeral (Penguin, 2023). 
 
Organisations mentioned:
Scratch A4: https://www.scratch-books.co.uk/scratcha4competition 
The word factory: https://thewordfactory.tv/ 
City Lit: https://www.citylit.ac.uk/


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.

Intro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.