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From Stephen Elliott
“She had big brown eyes, long eyelashes, and a light brown mane and tail. It may not seem possible but I saw a shy smile on her lips. She tried to make believe that she didn’t notice me.”
At BOMB, an illustrated short story about a man falling in love with a horse, by artist Myron Kaufman. The story, Horse Scents, and its author, are introduced by filmmaker Charlie Kaufman, Myron Kaufman’s son.
...moreThe Commonwealth Short Story Prize has announced its five regional winners.
Granta will publish each of the winning pieces online this week. Today, they share the winning piece from India, “Radio Story” by Anushka Jasraj, along with an accompanying author interview.
...more“Lucy comes home from work. Lucy undresses in the foyer. Lucy gets on her hands and knees and crawls to her cage. Lucy listens. Lucy waits.”
Check out our own essays editor Roxane Gay’s new story “Lucy Lives in a World of Infinite Possibility” over at Two Serious Ladies.
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Winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, Josh Rolnick’s debut collection, Pulp and Paper reveals the crisp details that line the crises of our daily lives.The art world is a rough place, which is the practical thought behind art schools offering courses on grant-writing and portfolio building.
Still, even with the presence of these utilitarian courses, when embarking on your formative artistic education, how can you conceive of the difficulties ahead?
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The brief unresolved narratives of Adam Ross’s new short story collection, Ladies and Gentlemen, show regular people with compelling problems.Ray Bradbury conjures up for me images of sun-drenched Nebraska meadows, autumn landscapes beset upon by Buick-sized ravens and dusty towns overrun by sinister carnivals. He reminds me of the childhood I never quite had except in my head.
He’s the writer I remember enjoying the earliest and now he’s ninety-years old and still working.
...more“I do believe that literature and storytelling has a safe future. The medium is still being negotiated, but I believe that we evolutionarily developed to speak and use language, and as an extension of that I think there is an inherent need for human beings to tell stories and also to hear stories or perceive stories.
...moreMy relationship with the book blogs has hit a snag. Today, we got in a throw-down fight, and I came pretty close to breaking some china.
It’s just that the blogs whine and worry and complain a lot, and they always seem to want to cheat on me with famous writers, like Martin Amis or David Foster Wallace or Marquis de Sade, and then it rubs off on me, and I end up whining and worrying and complaining more than they do, and then I stop liking myself.
...more“For me, if there’s a piece of writing that I care about, I want to have the physical object,” says Brigid Hughes, editor of the literary journal A Public Space. “There’s a permanence to it, a different kind of permanence than if you find it on a website.
...moreJohn Barry has a piece up at The Baltimore City Paper in which he argues that too many American short story writers are taught to try to mimic that famous last paragraph in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” And this just might be why no one reads short stories anymore.
...moreTim O’Brien has a really brilliant article in The Atlantic in which he argues that the biggest problem with “unsuccessful stories” is, to put it quite simply, that “they are boring.” I couldn’t agree more.
O’Brien worries about the focus in writing workshops on believability and “verisimilitude.” For him, believability isn’t usually the problem. “The failure,” he says, “almost always, is one of imagination.”
Here’s a few of his ideas on what authors should strive for, some of which seem obvious, but all of which hearken back to some long lost idea of “storytelling” that focuses on keeping people’s attention and doing something with it:
“(I)nformational detail must function actively within the dynamic of a story.”
“(A) well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.”
“Inventing a nifty, extraordinary set of behaviors for our characters is not enough.
...moreA few weeks ago, I argued that the Internet age was uniquely well suited to selling short story collections. A few commenters did not agree with what seemed to be implicit in my argument: the idea that the “short attention span” or “ADD” culture is in fact better for short stories.
...moreIn a post last week titled More Crappy News for Short Story Writers, I lamented what I considered to be a lost opportunity for the big publishing houses. They could, I suggested, use similarities between good short story writing and good web copy to sell short story collections rather than deeming them a lost cause and refusing to publish them at all.
...moreMark Trainer publishes an excerpt of a note he received from a “thoughtful, well-respected agent” on his blog.
“I have no confidence in being able to place a collection at this time in the world of publishing. Publishers don’t like to publish short story collections in general unless they are VERY high concept or by someone very strange or very famous or Indian.
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Some stories cut so close you can only tell them in shards. Try getting at it directly and the thing – call it some kind of unspeakable personal tragedy – breaks apart on the page.
There are reasons why parents tell their kids not to talk to strangers. One might be reading “Hurt People” by Cote Smith, a debut story in Issue 118 of One Story. Set in a town “with more prisons than restaurants,” the story begins when two fatherless boys meet a stranger swimming in their apartment’s pool.
It could be said there are two types of stories. The first are those told by people inside the conflict, ie. children raised in group homes writing about state welfare, soldiers writing about war, Palestinians writing about demolished homes. These insider narratives, fiction or non-fiction, are told from the perspective of someone who knows one side of a situation intimately but is often unaware of the trials and tribulations of the other side.
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The Millions breaks down a year’s worth of New Yorker short stories, including brief synopses and a list of favorites.
Jacket Copy links to all of the publications containing the stories that were runners up for this year’s Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Best of the Small Presses anthologies.
