This Week in Short Fiction
The grief story: it’s sympathetic, moving, and even cathartic when done well. It’s also a trap for clichés, overwrought metaphors, sticky sentimentality, and hyperbole. Add that to the ubiquity of…
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Claire Burgess
179 posts
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_.
This Week in Short Fiction
One of this year’s highly anticipated new novels is Jesse Ball’s How to Set a Fire and Why, forthcoming from Pantheon in July, about an intelligent and troubled teenage girl…
This Week in Short Fiction
This is supposed to be a story. This is the first sentence of “The Alive Sister,” a powerful new work of flash fiction by Megan Giddings published at The Offing…
This Week in Short Fiction
A girl writing the alphabet on cement using a watering pot. The worn-through knee of a pair of jeans stitched up with pink, sequined thread. The ritual clipping of coupons,…
This Week in Short Fiction
Some fiction leaves you sad, some happy; some draws out a bittersweet tear or makes your heart pump faster with thrills. But the best stories are often the ones that…
This Week in Short Fiction
What’s a witch? Green skin, warts, and broomsticks? A hag bent over a foul, steaming cauldron? A cold-blooded queen in a wardrobe? One thing’s for certain: witches are feared and…
This Week in Short Fiction
There are moments when time slows, when awareness is heightened, when every sound and smell and shadow holds a painful kind of beauty. It happens when you know an irrevocable…
This Week in Short Fiction
Valentine’s Day, the annual celebration of romance, named after a martyred saint who doesn’t have anything to do with love, is almost here. In recognition of the holiday, The Cut…
This Week in Short Fiction
When you think of romance, you probably think Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, Gone With the Wind, Wuthering Heights—or anything by Nicholas Sparks if you’re into more modern fare.…
This Week in Short Fiction
This week, we have two stories of time machines and space stations, but mostly of people who clean up messes. Amber Sparks’s second collection of short stories, The Unfinished World,…
This Week in Short Fiction
On Tuesday, London-based journal The White Review dropped its third annual translation issue, which features a truly global range of voices from Israel to Indonesia, South Africa to Russia. Among…
This Week in Short Fiction
The first books of 2016 are rolling off the presses this week, and among them is Samantha Hunt’s third novel, Mr. Splitfoot, which is already earning buzz for its prize-winning…