In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Amy Elias discuss Lemony Snicket’s 2004 short story, “The Lump of Coal.” Amy Elias teaches and writes at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she holds the title of UT Chancellor’s Professor and Distinguished Professor of English. Elias is also the director of UT’s Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts. Elias’s areas of expertise include narrative theory, contemporary literature and culture studies, and humanities advocacy, as well as the arts of the present. Elias founded the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, or ASAP. Elias is the author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction, which won the Perkins Prize in 2002. Elias has also edited or co-edited several books, including Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin; The Planetary Turn: Relationality, and Geoaesthetics in the 21st Century; and Time: A Vocabulary of the Present.