Morphologies : Short Story Writers on Short Story Writers. This item is unavailable.Morphologies : Short Story Writers on Short Story Writers

Being short, you might think the story's structure would yield an answer to this question more readily than, say, the novel. But for as long as the short story has been around, arguments have raged as to what it should and shouldn't be made up of, what it should and shouldn't do. Here, 15 leading contemporary practitioners offer structural appreciations of past masters of the form as well as their own perspectives on what the short story does so well. The best short stories don't have closure, argues one contributor, 'because life doesn't have closure'; 'plot must be written with the denouement constantly in view,' quotes another. Covering a century of writing that arguably saw all the major short forms emerge, from Hawthorne's 'Twice Told Tales' to Kafka's modernist nightmares, these essays offer new and unique inroads into classic texts, both for the literature student and aspiring writer.

Frank Cottrell Boyce is an award-winning screenwriter and children's novelist. His film credits include Welcome to Sarajevo, Hilary and Jackie, Code 46, 24 Hour Party People, A Cock and Bull Story, and most recently The Railway Man. In 2004, his debut novel, Millions, won the Carnegie Medal and was shortlisted for The Guardian Children's Fiction Award, and was followed by Framed (later adapted into a film by the BBC), The Unforgotten Coat, and three installments of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang series. Frank also writes for the theatre and was the author of the highly acclaimed BBC film God on Trial. He has previously contributed stories to Comma s anthologies Phobic, The Book of Liverpool, The New Uncanny, When It Changed, and Litmus and is currently working on a full collection for Comma, Triple Word Score. He also wrote the script for the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. Her first book, Free Love, won the Saltire First Book Award. She is also the author of Like (1997); Other Stories and Other Stories (1999); Hotel World (2001), which was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize in 2001 and won the Encore Award, the East England Arts Award of the Year, and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002; The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003); The Accidental (2005), which won the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize; and The First Person and Other Stories (2008). She was also a recipient of the Arts Foundation Fellowship for the Short Story.