Claire Burgess’s short fiction has appeared in Third Coast, Hunger Mountain, and PANK online, among others. Her stories have received special mentions in the Pushcart Prize and Best American anthologies, but haven’t actually made it into one yet. She’s a graduate of the Vanderbilt University MFA program, where she co-founded Nashville Review. She lives in Pittsburgh by way of the deep South and says things on Twitter @Clairabou_.
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,”…
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…
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…
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…
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…