I developed a conference-crush when I was in Vienna earlier this year. From the moment University of Texas’ Farhat Iftekharuddin began delivering his paper, Micronarratives, Flash Fiction, Liminal Stories: Austerity of Design, I was hooked. That night, in my hotel room, Google told me he had a new book coming out, but for now I’d have to be content with The Postmodern Short Story: Forms and Issues, co-edited by Iftekharuddin in 2003. Back in Sydney, this book would become my bedside companion—the fictional pleasures of George Saunders, Ceridwen Dovey and Moya Costello tossed aside for a bottle-green hardback with silver lettering on the cover and filled with academic essays.

As a publisher of short Australian stories, most of my reading time is consumed by our submissions, as well as by keeping abreast of short fiction published elsewhere. My everyday work is talking and thinking short stories: beginnings, middles and ends, how to edit them, how to order them in a collection or anthology, titles (of individual stories and of collections) and about achieving cohesion and/or diversity across a volume. This work, while interesting and engaging, does not allow for detailed literary analysis of a short story and broad and deep study of the form. That’s what was on offer at the International Conference for the Short Story in English in Vienna. At the conference, there were both practitioners and academics, or as Robert Olen Butler says, ‘both birds and ornithologists’. Ryan O’Neill told me I’d be in short story heaven there. He was dead right.