Posts by author
Claire Burgess
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This Week in Short Fiction
In “Stevie Versus the Negative Space” by Bonnie Chau at The Offing this week, a young woman tries to define herself through a familiar and flawed lens: her relationships with men. In order to see the shape of Stevie, start…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, in a story by Akhil Sharma that will leave you devastated, an Indian woman in an arranged marriage wakes one day to discover that she loves her husband. “If You Sing Like That for Me,” originally published in…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, the latest issue of Gulf Coast has a new Carmen Maria Machado short story about body acceptance—or, rather, the opposite. In “Eight Bites,” a woman decides to undergo gastric bypass surgery after her three formerly fat sisters have…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, the online interdisciplinary project 7×7 has new work by Janice Lee, author of The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). 7×7’s unique format pairs a writer and a visual artist to engage in a two-week long collaboration…
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This Week in Short Fiction
We’re halfway through June, and though the first day of summer isn’t technically until June 21, I think we can all agree that we’re well into the sweltering season. This week’s story captures those quintessential staples of summer—swimming pools, soft serve,…
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This Week in Short Fiction
For the rest of this month, Granta will be publishing the winners of the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, awarded to five writers from five regions of the globe, with the mission to connect storytellers across cultures through the power…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, Oxford American has a stand-alone excerpt from Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, her first novel since 2011’s National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones. The excerpt, titled “Flayed,” follows a boy named Jojo in the rural Mississippi Gulf Coast…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, a story at Smokelong Quarterly instructs us on how to become a new person. The title of Rebecca Bernard’s story, “How to Be Another Person in Five Days,” plays humorously with the trope of familiar self-help programs and…
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This Week in Short Fiction
In the fallout from the 2016 presidential election, an election that revealed America as a country more viciously and zealously divided than many of us previously thought, it has become difficult to foster much (or any) compassion for those on…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, a short story in the new issue of Cosmonauts Avenue turns the flashlight onto a slumber party, and not the fantasy pillow-fight and popcorn kind, but the more true-to-life kind, complete with paranormal library books, urban legends, sneaking…
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This Week in Short Fiction
The PEN America World Voices Festival, a weeklong international literary festival that focuses on human rights, is ongoing in New York City this week, and this year’s theme of gender and power seems more pertinent and urgent than ever. While…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, Joyland posted the winner and runners-up of its 2017 Open Border Fiction Prize. The price was open to writing or translation in English from any country in the world and was judged this year by Amelia Gray (Gutshot, 2015).…