Guardian Short Storie

James Salter, the veteran American novelist and short story writer, reads a story by Lydia Davis, winner of the 2013 Man Booker International prize

Explore the surreal world of maps that replicate the very territories they depict, as Borges challenges traditional cartography. Discover how maps intertwine with literature, shaping our perceptions of reality through the lens of Borges and Carroll. The discussion also dives into the influence of humor and philosophy in modernist literature, revealing themes of time, reality, and madness that resonate in contemporary writing. It's a captivating look at how narratives and maps transform our understanding of existence.

Nathan Englander finds Jewish history, corruption and man’s inhumanity to man and pigeons in Isaac Babel’s ‘The Story Of My Dovecote’

Forty years after he first read it, Sebastian Barry returns to James Joyce’s short story Eveline

Rabindranath Tagore returned again and again to the voiceless women of Bengal, as in his short story The Postmaster, says Anita Desai

Lucy Wood builds a story from glimpses and suggestions in ‘Notes from the House Spirits’, says Jon McGregor

Yiyun Li reads William Trevor’s ‘Three People’, a short story which moved her to write a story in reply, ‘Gold Boy, Emerald Girl’

Penelope Fitzgerald looks at the world anew in her short story ‘At Hiruharama’, says AS Byatt

Franz Kafka’s story of a man who starves himself for entertainment, The Hunger Artist, is ‘absurb, moving and timely’, says Hanif Kureishi

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie admires the ‘old-fashioned social realism’ of Ama Ata Aidoo’s ‘No Sweetness Here’