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The Art of the Short Story

The Art of the Short Story: Leslie Kirk Campbell on The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs with Sidik Fofana

March 8, 2022

Leslie Kirk Campbell was joined by fellow short story author Sidik Fofana (Stories from the Tenants Downstairs), a 2018 Emerging Writer Fellow, for a discussion and reading of her masterful debut collection: The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs. In eight gorgeously crafted stories, Campbell explores the ways our bodies are marked by memory, often literally, and the risky decisions we make when pushed to the extreme. Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, the collection of “marvelous, stirring stories” is “both timeless and timely” (Anthony Doerr).

Photos by Kelsie Lynn Bennett

In Conversation

  • Leslie Kirk Campbell (1) - Eliana Cohen-Orth

    Leslie Kirk Campbell

    Leslie Kirk Campbell

    Leslie Kirk Campbell’s debut short story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs (Sarabande Books) won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction. Her award-winning stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Arts & Letters, Briar Cliff Review, Southern Indian Review, and The Thomas Wolfe Review. She is the author of Journey into Motherhood (Riverhead) and has received fellowships at Playa and Ucross. She teaches at Ripe Fruit Writing, a creative writing program she founded in San Francisco in 1991.

    Photo Credit: Thomas Schenkel

  • 47849_crop2 (1) (1) (1) - Eliana Cohen-Orth

    Sidik Fofana

    Sidik Fofana

    Sidik Fofana is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program and a high school English teacher in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He was also named an Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction in 2018. Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, his debut short story collection composed of eight narratives about residents of a fictional building in Harlem, will be published by Scribner in August 2022.

    Photo Credit: Roque Nonini