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Join NOW!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 here, with the shapes of the guys. Chau leads each of the story’s seven sections […]
...moreThis 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 the Atlantic in 1995, is available this week at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading in conjunction with […]
...moreThis 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 it done, drop the pounds, and claim ultimate happiness and freedom as a result. Using […]
...moreThis 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 in the mode of the exquisite corpse games of the Surrealists. In “A Disappearing Landscape,” […]
...moreWe’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, bike rides, frozen Capri Suns—but it’s no typical poolside read. “We Were the Drowners” by […]
...moreFor 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 of fiction. This week’s featured winner is “Drawing Lessons” by Anushka Jasraj, from the Asia […]
...moreThis 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 as he helps his grandfather kill and butcher a goat on his thirteenth birthday. Filled […]
...moreThis 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 fad diets that promise a “new you” in x amount of time, but the story […]
...moreIn 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 the opposite side of the divide. That’s what makes this week’s story, about an old […]
...moreThis 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 out, and scaring the crap out of each other. “Bunny Man” by Simone Person tells […]
...moreThe 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 over 150 writers from across the globe gather at the festival to bridge borders through […]
...moreThis 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). The first-place winner is Jenny Xie’s “Lucky Frank,” a short story about a young girl, […]
...moreThis week, Canadian-British author Alison MacLeod mixes fiction with fact and memoir with metaphysics in a short story about a visit to Sylvia Plath’s grave. At Lit Hub, “Sylvia Wears Pink in the Underworld” takes what could otherwise be an item on a tourist’s agenda or an assignment in a ninth grade English class and transmutes […]
...moreThis week, the art and literature magazine Paper Darts has a short story about the expectations and invasions of walking through the world in a female body. Not the obvious, more aggressive ones, the catcalling or man-spreading; instead, “Personal Space” by Susan Fedynak details the subtler, quieter transgressions, some perpetuated by other women, some perpetuated […]
...moreThis week’s story is one of breathtaking imagination and emotional depth, a tale of borders and visas, dreams and language, captivity and liberation. At The Offing, Sofia Samatar’s “An Account of the Land of the Witches” takes us from an ancient land of flying boats and towering headdresses, where a single word can transport a […]
...moreAt the PEN America awards ceremony on Monday evening, writer Amy Sauber received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers for her short story “State Facts for the New Age,” a Rumpus Original Fiction piece published in September 2016. This power of this remarkable story—Sauber’s first-ever fiction publication—is readily apparent in its strong […]
...moreThis week, a woman mysteriously becomes pregnant with a lizard egg in a short story at Guernica that is weird, funny, and surprisingly sweet. By Benjamin Schaefer, Prose Editor of Fairy Tale Review, “Lizard-Baby” explores themes of motherhood, difference, and community, and all through the fresh new lens of immaculate lizard-birth.
...moreAt Catapult, Arielle Robbins writes a powerful story of coping with the legacy of sexual abuse. “From the Abuse Survivor’s Workbook” delivers the story, as the title suggests, in segments from the guided-journaling workbook sometimes prescribed as part of therapy, offering glimpses into the memories, anxieties, and daily life of the story’s survivor, Brie. The workbook […]
...moreThis week, a short story collection written by an author in North Korea and smuggled across its borders is reaching readers in North America. The Accusation is the first known story collection written by an author still living inside the totalitarian state to have escaped its iron curtain, and it is now being published across […]
...moreThis week, the bimonthly magazine of international literature World Literature Today released its March 2017 issue, with the timely theme “Dystopian Visions.” The issue features thirteen writers’ dark speculations on the future, crossing the globe from Cuba to Japan. In this time in the United States when dystopian fiction isn’t seeming quite so fictional anymore, the […]
...moreThis week, Joyland has a new story from poet and fiction writer Joanna C. Valente about gender, sexual intercourse, and sexual violence. Their story, “You’re Gonna Scream When You Die,” opens with a scene that immediately backs up the dire tone of the title. From the outset, the story is direct, raw, and unflinching in […]
...moreThis week, C Pam Zhang has a flash fiction story at The Offing that is maybe about vampires but probably about girls, Chinese girls in particular. “Are They Vampires, or Are They Just Chinese?” is written in five brief paragraphs of atmospheric prose that is beautiful and barbed at the same time, like cotton candy […]
...moreWell, it’s been one week under the Trump administration, and already we are living in a land of “alternative facts.” After Kellyanne Conway used the term to defend Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s falsehoods regarding the inauguration crowd size on Sunday, the American people were, understandably, reminded of George Orwell’s 1984, and sales of the book […]
...moreThis week, a new Maggie Shipstead story at Virginia Quarterly Review explores love, infidelity, and the ways life can slip from under your feet like an avalanche. Bonus: there is also a literal avalanche. The story, “Backcountry,” follows a twenty-five-year-old ski instructor named Ingrid (#1 baby name for future ski instructors) who meets a fifty-plus-year-old […]
...moreThis week, rising voice Emma Horwitz writes about teenage girls looking for some under-the-pants action (if you know what I mean (I’m talking about fingering)) at Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Horwitz’s story, appropriately titled “Fingering,” is a welcome and refreshing addition to the small range of narratives that show teenage girls as the single-minded, sex-mad creatures […]
...moreIf you recall your Greek mythology, you’ll remember Cassandra, princess of Troy, priestess of Apollo, seer of prophecies, and patron saint of women everywhere screaming themselves blue but never being heard. Cassandra’s prophecies unfailingly proved to be true, but still she was seen as insane by her family and the Trojan people and, in some […]
...moreTomorrow night, we denizens of planet Earth will gather with friends and family, or with complete strangers at a bar somewhere, or with a mob of people in an over-crowded and freezing square, or we will stay home alone, taking a bubble bath and with a bottle of wine (or two), and enjoy our solitude because […]
...moreThis week at Guernica’s newly re-designed website, author Jean McGarry has a short story, “Come to Me,” about an abusive relationship and the tangled dynamics of power and devotion that can hold its victims in place. That was day four; on day one, I found underwear, not my own, in my underwear drawer. Are you […]
...moreIn a political climate in which undocumented immigrants are painted as criminals and rapists and half the country is crying for deportation, this week’s story reminds us that immigrants are fathers who love their daughters, who work hard and send money home to dying mothers, who will go to the ends of the Earth for […]
...moreThis week, VICE’s 2016 Fiction Issue is out, with work from exciting voices like Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, Roxane Gay, and more. This year’s fiction issue, like the magazine itself, is an engaging, diverse, and sometimes in-your-face read with topics ranging from smart cars to campus rape, love triangles to the meaning of life. One […]
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