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This chapter explores the Heroides as short stories. It addresses aspects of brevity that involve more than Quellenforschung; brevity, as envisaged here, works as a catalyst that sets off a complex war of supremacy within the collection. The heroines' short stories reveal the heroines' daring protest against the mega-narratives of the past, but their fervent rhetoric also encompasses their creator.

Unbeknownst to most lovers of the horror genre in fiction, the famous and well-published Russell Kirk is also the same Russell Kirk who founded postwar conservatism. Beginning in the late 1940s, Kirk began to write a series of profitable short stories for periodicals. He published his first novel, Old House of Fear, in 1961 and continued to publish his fiction until the end of his life. Most of his stories deals with theological issues as well as issues of place and region.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the purpose of this book, which is to explore Balzac's short stories in the light of their genesis, as individual fictional entities, in relation to others, and in the context of his work's overall development. Short stories make up over half La Comédie humaine, in addition to the thirty published Contes drolatiques, and scores of other narratives and newspaper articles. Balzac's writing career began with short fiction — the first trace of narrative in his work is an anecdote — and ended with it, to all intents and purposes, in what are vastly expanded stories, Le Cousin Pons and La Cousine Bette.

This chapter considers the problem of literary ignorance using the perspective of the nature of narrative form. It studies the narrative form of Joseph Conrad's short stories, and suggests that a literary agnoiology would be partly able to account for the problem of Conrad's fiction and its relation to his life. The chapter notes that the inability to see – which is, in this sense, nescience – is natural not only to the thematics of Conrad's ‘short’ fiction and to his life, but also to the process of composition, the nature of short-story writing and to Conrad's poetics of the short and long story.

These three authors, although compulsively writing out of a distress engendered by their “mobilization wounds,” learned by the time of writing their twenties masterpieces to submerge and transfigure this pain so as not to embarrass themselves with the revelation of their sense of inadequacy. All three had produced previous texts that openly address Anglo characters' humiliations in the military and so come off as bitter. The high modernism of Gatsby, Sun, A Farewell to Arms, and Sound, with its symbolism and its sense of tragedy (as opposed to bitterness), is a result of these authors developing the devices that allow them to disguise their mobilization traumas and thus to continue to exorcise them, but now obliquely. In Hemingway's and Faulkner's novels, “objective” sexual obstacles (injury, incest taboo) stand in for the military rejection that emasculated these Anglo authors, disguising and transfiguring it. Hemingway and Faulkner dignified the suffering of their Anglo alter egos by making their true loves impossible; Fitzgerald's alternative strategy for dignifying his sense of rejection was to split himself between two alter egos — one Anglo American and one ethnic American — and to give the experience of social rejection to a tragic character based only minimally on himself, namely, Gatsby.

Of Satyajit Ray's thirty feature films, twenty-three were based on fiction written by well-known writers. This chapter examines Ray's film adaptations of short stories by Rabindranath Tagore and Premchand to identify a pattern in his changing relationship with the original literary texts. It looks at Ray's evolution as a director and his responses to criticisms of his early films in the pages of well-known periodicals such as Desh and Parichay. As a filmmaker who engaged in film adaptation, Ray always took liberties with the original story, claiming that these changes were inevitable, that they reflected a change in perspective due to the time lag between the published story and its film version, or that they had to be done in order to tighten and improve the narrative. This chapter presents a close reading of two of Ray's films, Charulata (1964) and Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977).

This book is not a complete study of Lu Xun, but only of his short stories, those which were written between 1918 and the end of 1925, which appeared first in magazines in Beijing and Shanghai. Reprinted in two books, translated in the standard version as A Call to Arms (1923) and Wandering (1926), they comprise an extraordinary addition to the production of knowledge about China, and, not least, to the short story form. The approach to these cannot be to take them simply as individual narratives, for they interlock, constructing an autobiography, reading a momentous period in the history of China, and influencing a discussion of the idea of a Chinese national character. The thesis of this book is that the short story in Lu Xun both reads and precipitates a shock and a crisis, which is primarily sexual in character, and which seems to be linked to traumatic perception.

This chapter discusses the development of the Philippine short story in English. English was firmly established both as a medium of education and literary expression during the 1920s. There seems to be general agreement among critics that it was in the field of the short story that Filipino writers in English excelled. Many have remarked on the speed with which Filipinos took to the genre, which was born only around fifteen years before the outbreak of the Pacific War. Jose Garcia Villa's collection of stories, Footnote to Youth, had earned from the American critic Edmond O'Brien the comment that Villa was “among the half-dozen short story writers in America who count.” Villa also undertook an annual collection of what he considered the best Filipino short stories in English, a project he was to sustain until 1940. The project played an important role in determining the way in which the short story in English was to develop.

The Introduction considers how community dynamics in Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana have been shaped by histories of colonialism, slavery, and migration. It goes on to examine unity in diversity models of community developed in Caribbean literary and cultural studies, and Caribbean anthropology, considering their applicability to Caribbean short stories. The Introduction then traces the Caribbean short story’s publishing history from small regional magazines and the BBC Caribbean Voices programme in the 1940s and 1950s, to the rise of anthologies, collections and short story cycles in the 1980s, illustrating the form’ps importance to the emergence of a Caribbean literary aesthetic. It then draws attention to various theories of the short story collection as a form concerned with imagining community, locating the book’s analysis of interconnected stories in relation to debates over the genre’s nature and function. Finally, the introduction outlines the book’s aims in reading Caribbean literature and anthropology in parallel.

Translation studies have addressed the inter-lingual and intra-lingual aspects of translation, but few have explored its inter-semiotic aspects. Certain practical problems have been raised regarding the plausibility of the very category of inter-semiotic translations as exchanges between one system of signs and another in the Jakobsonian framework. One problem relates to translation equivalence, in which there is a lack of exact correspondence between single units in the source system and those of the target one. This chapter examines some aspects of the process of inter-semiotic translation with particular reference to Satyajit Ray's interpretation of the short stories of Rabindranath Tagore along with a discussion of his distinctive style in Teen Kanya (1961) and Charulata (1964). It looks at two aspects of film language—the verbal and the iconic and how they influence the process of film adaptation.

Chapter 4 provides an overview and history of the modern Hindi short story as it developed in Sarasvatī from 1900 to 1920, under Dwivedi’s direction. Dwivedi did not explicitly articulate his vision for short fiction; however, as editor of a journal that pioneered the modern genre in Hindi, he exerted great control over its development. Drawing inspiration from Shakespeare, Poe, and Verne to Shriharsh and Tagore, among other influences, short story writers in Hindi experimented with adventure-romance, science fiction, horror, and historical fiction but eventually settled on subject matter that was more mundane than spectacular, as per Dwivedi’s agenda for language, literature, and nation.

This chapter discusses Mistry's first book, Tales from Firozsha Baag, a collection of linked short stories, noting that this book introduces symbols, themes and techniques which can be seen in his later writings. It describes the writing styles and techniques that Mistry used in this book, including his even and engaging tone, which has become characteristic of his writings, and takes a look at the short stories and the short-story cycle in the book, which has features such as the thematic and symbolic patterns of recurrence and development.

At first reading, Youth may strike one as the gloomy tale of its protagonist's failure to become a poet. But the book is uniformly legible as the story of his steady commitment to prose—of his growing understanding that, unlike the poet, the fiction writer is a located creature, perhaps even “a person unable to live without a country.” All the happy moments in Youth are ones in which we see him nearing his true passion. And all the new insights he stumbles on manifest something about the art of fiction and mold the work Coetzee was eventually to write. The most important of these insights arises from John's first venture into fiction: a short story about a young man who finds out that his love has been unfaithful to him.

The short story is unfairly named. Shortness is only a quality in relation to something else, and so this epithet ‘short’ epitomises the way in which the novel has been taken as the standard for modern fiction. Such bias was long ago lampooned by Ambrose Bierce in his 1911 satirical compendium The Devil’s Dictionary: ‘Novel: A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the panorama. Unity, totality of effect, is impossible; for besides the few pages last read all that is carried in mind is the mere plot of what has gone before.’ If Barthelme were familiar with this definition it might be argued that his story’s expanding balloon, which sacrifices unity for a sprawling quality, is a comment on the novel’s relation to the short story form that Barthelme specialised in and excelled at.

This chapter discusses two novels and two short stories that address the fragile border relations in Hispaniola: Frank Báez's ‘Ahora es nunca’(2007), Jacques Stephen Alexis's Les arbres musiciens (1957), Carlos Mieses's El día de todos (2008), and Junot Díaz's ‘Monstro’ (2012). The short stories denounce contemporary forms of vilification, mystification, and ‘erasure’ of the borderland which rely on the mobilisation of Gothic paraphernalia while also raising the possibility for renewal. El día de todos focuses on the ‘forever impending’ Haitian ‘invasion’ and anti-Haitian dominant discourses which continue to depict the borderland as the site where the dissolution of an essentialised ‘Dominicanness’ begins. Les arbres musiciens explores transnational local intensity and across-the-border cultural exchanges.