BAAS Paperbacks Series Editors: Simon Newman and Carol R. Smith Published in association with the British Association for American Studies, this innovative series has become an indispensable collection in American Studies. Each volume tackles an important area and is written by an accepted academic expert within the discipline. Books selected for the series are clearly written introductions designed to offer students definitive short surveys of key topics in the field. The American Short Story Since 1950 offers a reappraisal of a critically underrated genre during a particularly rich period in its history. It is a book about some of the greatest postwar American writers, who consistently found in the short story a form well adapted to their most fundamental preoccupations, and about the literary cultures within which they wrote: the magazines they published in; the prizes they did or did not win; the university courses which taught them how to write, or enabled them to teach others how to write, and their (more often than not disappointing) sales figures. The book includes new readings of important stories by key writers including Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, Tim O'Brien, Denis Johnson, Junot Díaz, Sherman Alexie, Jhumpa Lahiri, David Bezmozgis, Edward P. Jones, David Foster Wallace, Gish Jen and Lydia Davis. *explores a particularly rich period in the history of the short story * draws on previously unpublished interviews with many of these writers. *explores the contexts in which stories are written and published, including story-writing handbooks, mass market and 'little' magazines, creative writing workshops *considers the short story in relation to a variety of literary modes and trends such as realism, metafiction and minimalism, and to other forms, especially the novel and the lyric poem Kasia Boddy teaches in the English Department at University College L

Kasia Boddy teaches in the English Department at University College London. She is the author of Boxing: A Cultural History (2008) and numerous articles on American literature, and the co-editor of three anthologies.