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"Grace Jones," Irenosen Okojie's 2020 Caine-Prize-winning short story, received praise for playing with logic, time, place, and literary conventions, making the story challenging to understand. To help clarify this text, our essay examines "Grace Jones" through a transcultural lens, using Arianna Dagnino's genre characterization as the fusion of multiple cultural and literary traditions that reshape our "national collective imaginaries." Our readings utilize traditional African time concepts, contemporary clinical understandings of trauma, Ulrich Beck's risk society theory, planetary symbolism, Milton's Paradise Lost , and Christological imagery to elucidate the text. These interpretive modes enable us to read "Grace Jones" as a transcultural trauma text and leads us to suggest cultural cross-pollination reflects a feature of black diasporic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores affective narratives of migrants in a recent Brexit fiction in the context of feanxiety – a critical concept that brings together literary representations of fear and anxiety. The essay focuses on Agnieszka Dale's short stories collection Fox Season and Other Short Stories (2017), which represents the social and affective experiences of Eastern European migrants living in post-Brexit Britain. Written after the 2016 referendum, the collection engages with issues of belonging and (un)belonging, national attachments, and postcolonial relations in the United Kingdom. Reading three short stories from the collection, 'A Polish Joke', 'Fox Season', and 'A Happy Nation', this article investigates how through comedy, humour, and distanced attitude Dale's fiction fights detrimental prejudices about 'fearsome foreigners', reclaiming the lost agency of the migrants. This article argues that in Fox Season feanxiety operates as an aesthetic and an ethical mode but also as a political measure that operates within the modern power structures. Examining the experiences of migration through the lens of fear and anxiety not only enables a nuanced reading of the collection's outlook on negative emotions surging in the UK but also facilitates a furthering of feanxiety as a productive critical framework within the merit of affect studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to investigate contemporary Spanish-American science- fiction short stories, focusing on the emblematic case of the Bolivian author Giovanna Rivero. She is part of a national context that is very prolific in this literary genre, which has been stimulating new studies, symposiums and specialized journals. Her themes, style and language will be investigated through the study of the short stories "Regreso" and "Pasó como un espíritu", in order to explore the dystopian universe created by the author. Combining Andean cultural heritage and dystopic projection, she manages to outline the current political and sociological context in Bolivia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alice Munro is a chronicler of women's lives in her contextual time and space, although her subtle and incisive psychological insight and understanding of womanhood render certain aspects of her characters' nature universal. Her short fiction describes and gives voice to a range of female identities and realities, often outlining sexual pleasure and desire with a sincerity and ingenuousness atypical for her time. This paper explores four Munro stories – "Memorial" (1974), "Accident" (1982), "Nettles" (2001), and "Trespasses" (2004) – included in her middle collections, which combine the female experience of an adulterous sexual act with a child's traffic-related death, focusing on the voice and sexual role of the protagonists to establish coherent links with the seemingly disengaged fatal accidents. My reading and interpretation of the stories attempt to signify the connection between the two themes in the author's corpus which, I argue, stems from her personal biography. The literary analysis is built on previous literature on the author and short story theory, and ultimately aims to understand, support, and extend the often-claimed autobiographical dimension of Munro's literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]