A Small, Good Thing

A Small, Good Thing
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"A Small, Good Thing" is a podcast about short fiction. In every episode, I get to discuss the short story form with writers, academics, publishers, and anyone who shares a passion for short stories.

  1. 4d ago

    The Short Story in Midcentury America (with Sam Reese)

    Around 1950, the short story genre in America was at the highest and at the same time most delicate moment of its history. While the number of magazines publishing short fiction and of short story collections reached its apex, political and ideological pressures sought to undermine the prestige of the short story in order to promote other literary forms. In this episode, Sam Reese tells the fascinating story of four writers who in those years used the short story as an outlet for countercultural expression. Sam Reese is Senior Lecturer at York St. John University, a short story writer and a jazz music critic.      Works cited:  Sam Reese, The Short Story in Midcentury America: Countercultural Form in the Work of Bowles, McCarthy, Welty, and Williams (Louisiana State University Press, 2017).  Sam Reese, ‘Only anecdotal: Diane Williams, loneliness and short story form.’ Short Fiction in Theory & Practice, 12.1 (2022), pp. 19-30.  Sam Reese, ‘Eleven Kinds? Loneliness and Reading for Type with Richard Yates.’ American Literature, 94.2 (2022), pp. 357-380.  Sam Reese, Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness (LSU Press, 2019).  Sam Reese (ed.), The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins (NYRB, 2024).  Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Random House, 1952).  William Burroughs, The Naked Lunch (Grove Press, 1959).  Mary McCarthy, The Group (Harcourt, Brace, 1963).  Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps (Simon & Schuster, 1942).  Tennessee Williams, One Arm and Other Stories (New Directions Publishers, 1948).  James Salter, Last Night: Stories (Vintage, 2006). 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.

    32 min

  2. May 21

    David Foster Wallace's Short Fiction (with Marshall Boswell)

    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.

    34 min

  3. Apr 30

    The New Yorker Short Story (with Naomi Kanakia)

    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.

    30 min

  4. Apr 9

    Richard Brautigan's Short Fiction (with Chris Gair)

    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.

    32 min

  5. Mar 19

    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Short Fiction (with Chigozirim Nwaosu)

    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.

    34 min

  6. Feb 26

    Writing Through Writer's Block (With Aaron Colton)

    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.

    30 min

  7. Feb 5

    Women of Wonder: Women Short Story Writers in Science Fiction (With Paul March-Russell)

    Paul March-Russell is the outgoing editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, the co-founder of Gold SF, an intersectional feminist science fiction imprint of Goldsmiths Press, and the author of The Short Story: An Introduction for Edinburgh University Press. In this episode, Paul discusses the importance of women writers in science fiction and the legacy of the short story collection Women of Wonder (1974) edited by Pamela Sargent.    Works mentioned: Paul March-Russell, The Short Story: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2009).  ‘Definitions of SF’, in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. by John Clute and David Langford https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/definitions_of_sf. China Miéville, ‘Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory’, in Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, ed. by Mark Bould and China Miéville (Pluto Press, 2009), pp. 231-48. Pamela Sargent (ed.), Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women (Penguin, 1974). On Margaret Atwood’s ‘talking squid in outer space’, see David Barnett, ‘Science fiction: the genre that dare not speak its name’, The Guardian (28 Jan. 2009), https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/jan/28/science-fiction-genre  Joanna Russ, ‘Nobody’s Home’, in Women of Wonder, ed. by Pamela Sargeant (Penguin, 1974), pp. 242-58.  David Harvey, ‘Time–Space Compression and the Postmodern Condition’, in The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1990), pp. 284-307.  Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (Peter Lang, 2014). Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow’, in Women of Wonder, ed. by Pamela Sargeant (Penguin, 1974), pp. 191-224. Robert Heinlein, ‘Waldo’, in Waldo & Magic, Inc (Macmillan, 1969). [See also Anne McCaffrey, ‘The Ship Who Sang’, in Women of Wonder, ed. by Pamela Sargent (Penguin, 1974), pp. 82-107.] ‘Symposium: Women in Science Fiction’, Khatru 3/4 (1975), https://fanac.org/fanzines/Khatru/Khatru03.pdf.   Joanna Russ, ‘The Image of Women in Science Fiction’, in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. by Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), pp. 79-94. Joanna Russ, To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, ed. by Sarah Lefanu (Indiana University Press, 1995). Lisa Yaszek, Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (Ohio University Press, 2008). Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (Harper Voyager, 2013). Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (Arno Press, 1975). Martin Scofield, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story (CUP, 2006). Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (Touchstone, 1997). Pamela Zoline, ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’, in The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories (McPherson & Company, 1988), pp. 13-28. [Published in the UK as Busy about the Tree of Life (The Women’s Press, 1988).]  E. J. Swift, When There Are Wolves Again (Quercus Publishing, 2025).  Vonda L. McIntyre, Little Sisters and Other Stories (Gold SF, 2024). James Tiptree Jr., Warm Worlds and Otherwise (Penguin Classics Science Fiction, 2021). James Tiptree Jr. ‘The Women Men Don’t See’, in Warm Worlds and Otherwise (Penguin Classics Science Fiction), pp. 156-98. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters & The Compass Rose (Gollancz, 2015).  Kit Reed, The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (Wesleyan University Press, 2013). Other references: Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction (Journal) https://www.sf-foundation.org/  Gold SF https://mitpress.mit.edu/series/goldsmiths-press-gold-sf/ 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.

    34 min

  8. Jan 15

    The Best of the Best: Literary Institutions and the American Short Story Canon (With Alexander Manshel)

    Alexander Manshel is Associate Professor of English at McGill University in Montreal (Canada). His research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, multi-ethnic American fiction, and the cultural institutions that organize the contemporary literary field. How is contemporary short fiction in America influenced by the people and institutions that contribute to its production, circulation, and reception? Listen to find out! Works mentioned:    Alexander Manshel, ‘The Best of the Best: Anthologies, Prizes, and the Short Story Canon’, in The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story, ed. by Michael Collins and Gavin Jones (Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 62-79. Charles E. May, ‘The American Short Story in the Twenty-First Century’ in Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective, ed. by Viorica Patea (Rodopi, 2012), pp. 299-324. Perspective (Rodopi). Alexander Manshel, Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon (Columbia University Press, 2023). 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.

    35 min
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"A Small, Good Thing" is a podcast about short fiction. In every episode, I get to discuss the short story form with writers, academics, publishers, and anyone who shares a passion for short stories.

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  • Creator
    A Small, Good Thing
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    23
  • Rating
    Clean
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    © Copyright A Small, Good Thing
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    A Small, Good Thing